Strategy: A History

by Lawrence Freedman

Industrialization was expanding the numbers of men who could be organized for war, while steam and electricity were making it easier to mobilize and transport them.

The politics of war was also changing. Because it drew on whole societies and national sentiments it was much harder to separate the military from the civilian spheres.

The fact that individual battles in the American Civil War were not decisive and that the French continued to resist even after the apparently decisive battle of Sedan in 1870 warned of the limits to the established view of how to achieve victory in war. Yet so ingrained was the idea of a decisive battle that the urge was still to find ways to force a satisfactory conclusion.

The key text was that of Ardant du Picq, who argued that everything depended on the emotional and moral state of the individual soldier.

Du Picq insisted that the physical impulse was nothing, the “moral impulse” everything.

The key premise accepted by all German strategists was that if the country was subjected to attack from both east and west it could soon be squeezed, unless one of the belligerents could be removed from the fight early on.

In the most probable contingencies for Germany, facing France from the west and Russia from the east, one enemy must be destroyed before the other was engaged.

The whole campaign was choreographed from mobilization to victory. The enemy would have no choice but to follow the German script rather than its own. Contrary to the precepts of von Moltke, this allowed little scope for individual initiative or for much going wrong.

This strategy was outlined by von Moltke the Younger in December 1911, when he recommended that in all circumstances, Germany should open the campaign by directing all available resources against France.

If France is beaten in the first great battle, this country, which possesses no great manpower reserves, will hardly be in a position to conduct a long-lasting war. Russia, on the other hand, can shift her forces into the interior of her immeasurable land and can protract the war for an immeasurable time.

It broke from the Clausewitzian model by assuming, without evidence, that the offense could be the stronger form of warfare. As Strachan notes, the war plans of all European armies in 1914 were Jominian: “operational plans for single campaigns, designed to achieve decisive success through maneuver according to certain principles.”

Instead of a Tolstoyan army of individuals shaping outcomes through numerous individual choices, this was a group turned by discipline and drill into instruments of the commander’s will.

Other than the one most feared by the military, a progressive demilitarization and softening of the state, the only alternative was to use threats of war to get a better diplomatic settlement. As so much depended on getting in an effective first blow, once mobilization began the political situation was soon out of control.

The basic lesson from the Napoleonic Wars, that there was only so much one country’s army, whatever the brilliance of its operations, could do against a much stronger alliance, remained in place. So was the lesson of 1871 that the stresses of war on a country could lead to popular anger and revolutionary surges. War was a radical instrument. It threatened to upturn the international order and unleash wild political forces at home.

While these debates about land offensives and decisive victories preoccupied continental powers, Great Britain, was content to rely upon its maritime strength.

The dominant concept was command of the sea, which could be traced back to Thucydides.

The French might once have mounted a challenge, but British naval superiority had been reasserted at Trafalgar in 1805.

To maintain this happy state, the British concluded that they must always have a navy twice the size of any other.

It was late in the nineteenth century when naval power gained a theorist with a compelling thesis. Alfred Thayer Mahan, after an unhappy and indifferent naval career, found himself unexpectedly in charge of the new U.S. Naval War College in 1886.

His focus was not so much on principles of strategy but on the relationship between naval and economic power, particularly how Britain’s ascent as a great power had depended not “by attempting great military operations on land, but by controlling the sea, and through the sea the world outside Europe.”

While it has been argued that Mahan’s historical and geopolitical judgments deserve serious consideration, his views on the actual deployment of naval power were far less developed.

He was, however, primarily a historian. When he tried to pull together his ideas on naval strategy into a single volume he confessed that it was the worst book he had written.

Very similar ideas were being developed in Germany by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who was responsible in the late nineteenth century for turning the navy of the recently unified Germany from a second-rate force into a serious challenger to British naval supremacy. His vision was both ambitious and unimaginative. It was similar to Mahan’s except that while Mahan took his inspiration from Jomini, Tirpitz took his from Clausewitz.

While Mahan and Tirpitz sought to promote their countries as rising naval powers using remarkably similar concepts of the likely objectives and methods of war at sea, Britain lacked a naval strategist of note. As Winston Churchill observed after the Great War, the Royal Navy had made “no important contribution to naval literature.”

The best that Britain had to offer was written by a civilian.23 The civilian in question was Sir Julian Corbett.

He was on the side of the reformers, trying to modernize the attitudes and culture of the Royal Navy.

“Obviously history is written for schoolmasters and arm-chair strategists. Statesmen and warriors pick their way through the dark.”

While Mahan sought to apply Jomini, Corbett began with Clausewitz, but with greater subtlety than Tirpitz.

The vital question for strategy was not how to win a battle but how to exert pressure on the enemy’s society and government. This argued for consideration of blockade and attacks on commerce (“guerre de course”) as much as seeking out the enemy fleet.

The key to success on land was control of territory; at sea it was control of communications.

“The command is normally in dispute. It is this state of dispute with which naval strategy is most nearly concerned.”

Unlike Mahan, Corbett saw great advantages in dispersal, such as avoiding a stronger fleet, luring a weaker fleet into danger under the illusion that it enjoyed local strength, and producing a winning combination of ships.

Mahan introduced a concept that took hold among maritime enthusiasts. His thesis was vigorously championed by President Theodore Roosevelt,

Mackinder explained in 1905: “Half a continent may ultimately outbuild and outman an island.”

Despite Germany’s defeat in 1918, Mackinder saw the basic danger remaining of “ever-increasing strategical opportunities to land-power as against sea-power.” This resulted in the advice to keep “the German and the Slav” apart.

What Mackinder introduced was a way of thinking about the geographical dimension that showed how the land and sea could be understood as part of the same world system, and as a source of continuity even as political and technological change affected its relevance.

Mackinder never used the term “geopolitics.” It was coined by the Swede Rudolf Kjellén, who was a student of Friedrich Ratzel, the first geographer to focus on political geography.

So, while geopolitics appeared to move strategy to a higher plane than one which concentrated solely on the operational art, it suffered from the same defect of failing to attend to the wider political context.

Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air-fleets passing overhead—dripping death—dripping death! —H. G. Wells, The War in the Air, 1908

FEW EPISODES REVEALED the limitations of military planning more than the German offensive of August 1914. The general staff controlled what they could, but their plans had paid insufficient attention to what France might do to disrupt these plans—especially as logistics and communications lines became extended. The plan’s schedule soon proved impossible to meet, especially as Belgium put up some resistance.

Delbrück struggled to assess the relative economic impacts on the belligerents. He argued for a deal with Britain and France in order to concentrate on Russia. The uncompromising political and military stance led him to despair.

The Germans were early converts to the value of long-range bombardment and to the view that its success would lie less in the amount of physical injury caused and more in the enemy’s willingness to continue to prosecute the war.

The commander General Hugh Trenchard was trying to develop a vision of how best to use a still scarce resource as an independent force that could mount concentrated attacks against chosen targets in sufficient numbers and with sufficient continuity to make a decisive impact. Although he judged that bombers of greater range could eventually target Berlin, the only initial response to the attacks on England was some very limited and rather indiscriminate bombing of Germany.

Trenchard’s vision had a strong influence on the group of American airmen who arrived just after the German raids, as their country entered the war. Captain Nap Gorrell, one member of this team whose task was to set out requirements for American aircraft production, began to develop a plan for an air campaign. In line with Trenchard’s thinking, Gorrell argued that “a new policy of attacking the enemy” was needed. This he described as “strategical bombing” geared to impeding the flow of supplies from Germany to the front.

These included not only Trenchard but also the American General Billy Mitchell, whose campaigning for an independent air corps would lead to his court-martial, and Giulio Douhet, then struggling to get the Italian military to accept his futuristic views of air power.

Douhet reported for the Italian army on the first known combat use of aircraft, in

Libya in 1911, and published his landmark book Command in the Air in 1921.4 The ideas he expressed were by no means unique to him, but he provided the most systematic—and the most strident, especially by the time of the book’s second edition in 1927—presentation of the apparent strategic logic of air-power.5 This logic was really a continuation of Mahan’s, which was in turn a continuation of Jomini’s.

As Azar Gat has demonstrated, behind the enthusiasm for the new engines of war, whether on land or in the air, was a modernist fascination with the possibility of a rationalist, technocratic super-efficient society built around machines, linked to elitism in political theory and futurism in art, and feeding naturally into fascism.

With some variations, postwar airpower advocates relied on five core propositions. First and most important was the conviction that appropriately deployed airpower provided an independent route to victory.

Second, the defense was likely to remain dominant in land warfare, which meant that defeating the enemy army in battle—the classical route to victory—was now prohibitively expensive in terms of blood and treasure.