Strategy: A History

by Lawrence Freedman

Third, in contrast to surface warfare, in the air the offense would be stronger than the defense.

Fourth, these potentially decisive effects would be achieved less by the actual destruction of people and property than by the consequences of this destruction on the ability of governments to function and prosecute a war.

Fifth, the advantage would go to the side that attacked first.

In 1908, the British author H. G. Wells, who was well aware of Le Bon’s work, wrote War in the Air. His assumption was that the crowd (in this case, New Yorkers) would not so much panic as turn extremely belligerent.

With the head “conquered and stunned,” the body was “released” from its rule. New York had become a headless monster, no longer capable of collective submission. Everywhere it lifted itself rebelliously; everywhere authorities and officials left to their own initiative were joining in the arming and flag-hoisting and excitement of that afternoon.

There were always a variety of possible scenarios short of a panicked surrender. As the Second World War demonstrated, a population might be stunned into fatalism with no options other than resigned stoicism, adjusting to the new conditions, turning anger against the enemy.

Once convinced that tanks offered much more than support to the infantry, Fuller began to describe what might be achieved when tanks could be deployed in larger numbers, at greater speeds, and over longer ranges. Mechanical warfare, he observed, was about to replace muscular warfare.

Fuller became an advocate of “brain warfare,” that is, attacks aimed at disorganizing the enemy’s mental processes and ensuring the collapse of the enemy’s will to resist. There was no need to target the enemy army; better to target the command structure. In his plan, the German army headquarters was the major objective.

It was the case that the German collapse in 1918 was accelerated when the divisional headquarters was overrun by tanks, but this was at the end of a long and exhausting war, when morale on both sides was fragile.

Again we can see the similarities with the early air power theorists, with whom Fuller had an affinity.

Fuller dabbled in mysticism and the occult, had an enthusiasm for modernism and a contempt for democracy, and eventually developed a commitment to fascism. His readiness to challenge conventional religion led naturally, he judged, to a readiness to challenge conventional military thinking.

His theories depended on a dim view of humanity. His first major book, The Reformation of War, made a crude elitist distinction between the masters (super-men) and the slaves (super-monkeys), with the latter mentally challenged, naturally fearful, and tending to the feminine (a common reference of the time to emotional, hysterical personalities).

In battle, an army shocked and bereft of leadership could lose its discipline and readiness to go forward. In civilian life, there was no real contest. The emotional, impulsive crowd was doomed to panic.

A strategist should think in terms of paralyzing, not of killing. —Basil Liddell Hart

Fuller was the more original and powerful thinker, but not always the most accessible. His friend Liddell Hart had a crisper style, and despite some poor calls in the run-up to the Second World War, his reputation grew after that war.

Initially Liddell Hart’s work was wholly derivative. Before he sought to claim a remarkable parallel development between Fuller’s ideas and his own, he had pronounced The Reformation of War to be “the book of the century.”

Fuller did not care about the plagiarism, although his wife did. Following Fuller, Liddell Hart adopted the analogy of the brain controlling the body to call for attacks on the enemy’s communications and command centers.

Liddell Hart blamed Clausewitz, or at least his followers, for their conviction that everything must be geared to decisive battles with the sole aim of destroying the enemy army through frontal assaults.

Eventually Liddell Hart acknowledged that the differences between Clausewitz’s view of war and his own were not large—they both understood that it was an extension of politics and influenced by psychology as much as brute force.

The view that Clausewitz’s disciples extracted simplistic slogans and applied them crudely was clearly expressed late in his career when Liddell Hart wrote the introduction to Samuel Griffith’s popular translation of The Art of War.

Instead, he defined strategy as “the art of distributing and employing military means to fulfill the ends of policy.”

In an age of total war, Liddell Hart was seeking limitation, a search that became even more urgent after the invention of nuclear weapons.

The art of strategy required not only finding means to achieve a fixed end but also identifying realistic and desirable ends.

The link with Sun Tzu was clear: “The perfection of strategy would be, therefore, to produce a decision without any serious fighting.”

Moving directly against an opponent would not throw him off balance. At most it would impose a strain, but even if successful, the enemy would retreat to his “reserves, supplies, and reinforcements.” The aim was therefore to find “the line of least resistance,” which translated in the psychological sphere into “the line of least expectation.”

“A plan, like a tree, must have branches—if it is to bear fruit. A plan with a single aim is apt to prove a barren pole.”9

But also like Sun Tzu’s, it raised the questions of how matters would be resolved if both sides were following an indirect approach, the practical problems of coordination, and the impact of chance and friction.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Liddell Hart advocated both types of warfare during his career, although his enthusiasm for both naval blockades and air raids waxed and waned. The difficulty was that unless territory was taken the enemy could continue to resist.

Societies and their armies could prove to be extremely resilient. Getting in a position to mount sustained pressure in a resolute manner requires effective military dominance—whether at sea, in the air, or on land.

The maneuver which brings an ally into the field is as serviceable as that which wins a great battle. The maneuver which gains an important strategic point may be less valuable than that which placates or overawes a dangerous neutral. —Winston Churchill, The World Crisis

There is no doubt that the Wehrmacht’s mastery of armored warfare gained Germany some great victories in the early stages of the Second World War that led to virtual domination of Europe. But the domination was never complete and in the end Germany lost.

Germany was consistently superior in the field but in the end could not cope with the combined weight of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Empire. That this would be the eventual outcome was hardly apparent in the spring of 1940, when only one of the “big three” was actually at war, and its situation appeared to be parlous.

The British government’s decision to continue to fight was one of the most “epochal” decisions of the last century, yet at the time it made little strategic sense.12 For it to make sense, Betts argued, Churchill would have had to know in advance and with confidence that the Germans would be unable to cross the English Channel, lose the Battle of Britain, and eventually lose the Battle of the Atlantic. Most importantly, Churchill would have had to assume that by the end of 1941 Britain would be fighting alongside the Soviet Union and the United States.

This is, however, the wrong way to look at the decision in terms of strategy. A

His own reputation as a war leader had yet to be made: he was still viewed with suspicion for a career marred by regular lapses of judgment.

There appeared to be an option using Italy, who had yet to join the war, as a mediator. Churchill convinced his colleagues that this was not worth pursuing.

The choice they faced was not about alternative means of winning but about how best to avoid defeat and humiliating terms.

The option of a negotiated outcome was not rejected because of Churchill’s pugnacity but because the arguments in favor of it were unpersuasive.

According to Eliot Cohen, Churchill did not think of strategy as a blueprint for victory. He knew that the course of a war could not be predicted and that steps to victory might not be discerned until they were about to be taken. He distrusted “cut and dried calculations” on how wars would be won. For him, strategy was very much an art and not a science—indeed so art-like as to be close to painting.

While Churchill’s approach to purely military affairs could be impetuous, he had a natural grasp of coalition warfare.

Almost immediately after taking office, Churchill saw that the only way to a satisfactory conclusion of the war was “to drag the United States in,” and this was thereafter at the center of his strategy. His predecessor Neville Chamberlain had not attempted to develop any rapport with President Franklin Roosevelt. Churchill began at once what turned into a regular and intense correspondence with Roosevelt, although so long as Britain’s position looked so parlous and American opinion remained so anti-war, little could be expected from Washington.

Mussolini, for example, used German victories to move a reluctant country into war. He then demonstrated his independence from Hitler by launching a foolhardy invasion of Greece. This left him weakened and Hitler furious.

A quick defeat of Russia would achieve Hitler’s essential objective and leave Britain truly isolated. But Hitler also had a view about how the war was likely to develop. Britain, he assumed, only resisted out of a hope that the Russians would join the war. Of course, without a quick win, Hitler faced the dreaded prospect of a war on two fronts—something good strategists were supposed to avoid—as

Unlike Tsar Alexander in 1812, Stalin compounded the problem by having his armies deployed on the border, making it easier for the German army to plot a course that would cut them off before they could properly engage. The result was a military disaster from which the Soviet Union barely escaped.

Once defeat was avoided, industrial strength slowly but surely revived and the vast size of the Russian territory was too much for the invaders.

The stunning German victories of the spring 1940 and the bombing of British cities that began in the autumn approximated the possibilities imagined by Fuller, Liddell Hart, and the airpower theorists, but they were not decisive. They moved the war from one stage to another, and the next stage was more vicious and protracted. The tank battles became large scale and attritional, culminating in the 1943 Battle of Kursk.

When it came to victory, what mattered most was how coalitions were formed, came together, and were disrupted.

We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life. —J. Robert Oppenheimer

The possibility of a third world war became apparent almost immediately as the underlying antagonism between Britain and the United States on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other surfaced over the fate of the territories liberated from German occupation.

Soon there was talk of a “cold war,” a term popularized in 1947 by Walter Lippmann in a book with that title.