Liddell Hart introduces the term ‘dislocation’ which is created in the physical sphere by a combination of compelling the enemy to change his front, separating his forces, endangering his supplies and menacing his routes of retreat. In the psychological sphere, dislocation is the result of the impression on the commander’s mind of these physical effects. The impression is stronger if the enemy’s realization of being at a disadvantage is sudden, and if he is unable to counter his opponent’s move. ‘Psychological dislocation’, he argues, ‘fundamentally springs from this sense of being trapped’.6 For Liddell Hart, only when physical and psychological aspects are combined is the strategy truly an indirect approach, calculated to dislocate the enemy’s balance.
Carl von Clausewitz7
The strategic thought of Sun Tzu and Liddell Hart can be contrasted with that of Carl von Clausewitz. Whereas Sun Tzu and Liddell Hart advocate an indirect conventional strategy, Clausewitz is associated with a direct conventional strategy. He opens his work by arguing that violence is the essence of war. War is an act of force, it involves bloodshed and brutality, and the impulse to destroy the enemy is central to its very idea. ‘Kindhearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds it is a fallacy that must be exposed.’
Warfare’s nature involves some important intangible, or subjective, factors. Chance and luck, for example, are a big part of war. Whereas Sun Tzu talks about calculation, Clausewitz argues that in ‘the whole range of human activities war most closely resembles a game of cards’. So too are the inaccuracies of intelligence. ‘Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory’, Clausewitz notes, ‘even more are false, and most are uncertain’. Although Clausewitz did not use the term, the inadequacies and inaccuracies of intelligence are today referred to as the ‘fog’ of war. To this must be added Clausewitz’s famous concept of ‘friction’ in war. The conduct of war, he argues, resembles the workings of an intricate machine with many parts, each everywhere in contact with one another, leading to friction and chance. As a result, outcomes cannot be predicted or measured, and combinations that are easily planned on paper can be executed only with great effort. ‘Friction’, he argues, ‘is the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult … [It] more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from the war on paper.’
For Clausewitz, war demands the maximum use of force to work directly against the powers of the enemy’s resistance and ultimately disarm him. But later on he introduces the idea of proportionality in warfare, arguing the scale of the political demands on either side should determine the degree of force to be used. Belligerents should ‘act on the principle of using no greater force, and setting himself no greater military aim, than would be sufficient for the achievement of his political purpose’. It follows, therefore, that ‘[n]o one starts a war – or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so – without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war’. In his view ‘the political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from purpose’. The logic leads directly to Clausewitz’s best-known phrase, that war is simply a continuation of politics, with the addition of other means.
Also at the strategic level, Clausewitz talks about warfare as comprising a ‘trinity’ of interacting forces made up of the people, the commander and his army, and the government. He explains them as follows. First, there is the primordial violence, hatred and enmity among the people. These are the blind natural forces that must already be inherent in the people. Second, there is the courage and talent of the commander of the army, his creative spirit, and the chance and probability that surrounds him. Third, there is the subordination of war to the government’s political aims and the use of war as a political instrument. These three elements exist in a shifting relationship with one another and they affect the progress of war.
When it comes to the actual conduct of war, Clausewitz identifies ‘two basic principles that underlie all strategic planning’: utmost concentration and utmost speed. For Clausewitz, secondary and subsidiary theatres do not matter. The main decision always comes on the main battlefield and any unnecessary expenditure of time, every unnecessary detour, is a waste of strength. ‘Endless discussions about moving left or right, about doing this or that’ – in short, about manoeuvre – ‘serve no practical purpose’. As for the objective of this concentration and speed, Clausewitz calls attention to the ‘centre of gravity’ in warfare – the enemy’s ‘hub of all power and movement, on which all depends’. In order to be successful in battle one must identify and direct all energies against the enemy’s centre of gravity. Based on his experience, Clausewitz believed the centre of gravity was most often the enemy’s army, then his capital and then his allies. In modern times we can find the centre of gravity in other areas. For example, during the Vietnam War America’s centre of gravity was found in the domestic population and on university campuses.
Finally, Clausewitz developed the concept of ‘military genius’. By this he meant qualities of mind and temperament that are necessary in a military leader, and that must be held in combination. They include courage in the face of personal danger, a determination that can overcome doubt, and a certain presence of mind. In contrast to Sun Tzu, Clausewitz’s overall emphasis is on simplicity and directness, rather than manoeuvre and calculation.
Antoine Henri Jomini8
Against the largely philosophical approach of Clausewitz, Antoine Henri Jomini’s strategic thought is more scientific, almost mathematical, in nature. Influenced by the eighteenth century’s age of Enlightenment, where science and reason were predominant, Jomini sought to identify certain principles that, if followed, would most likely lead to success in war. Although he looked at many campaigns, his most important case study was the Napoleonic Wars, which he witnessed firsthand and which indicated to him some important maxims. In several theoretical works over the years, culminating in The Art of War published in 1838 (a few years after Clausewitz’s On War), Jomini analyzed and effectively codified the Napoleonic way of war.
Jomini believed that the practice of warfare could be reduced to a general set of rules, more or less applicable to all battles. ‘There exists a small number of fundamental principles of war’, he argued in the Summary, ‘which [can] not be deviated from without danger, and the application of which, on the contrary, has been in almost all time crowned with success’. First, like Clausewitz, Jomini stressed the principle of the concentration of force. This idea he elaborated with the subordinate maxim that for success in war it was important to throw the mass of one’s forces on the successively decisive points of the battlefield in the theatre of war and to do so ‘at the proper time and with ample energy’. Jomini is silent on civil wars, where ‘the enemy is everywhere and yet nowhere to be seen’, making it difficult to identify ‘decisive points’.9
Second, for an army to be in a position to mass forces at the decisive points it must position itself along the ‘interior lines of operations’. Jomini argued a friendly force should seek to separate an enemy army into two sides, rendering it weaker than if it were united. Situated in the middle – that is, operating along the ‘interior’ lines – the friendly force can then strike at the heart of first one enemy component and then the other, defeating each in turn. This he had observed as being Napoleon’s approach in the 1790s. ‘If the art of war consists in bringing into action upon the decisive point of the theatre of operations the greatest possible force’, Jomini sums up, ‘the choice of the line of operations (as the primary means of attaining this end) may be fundamental in devising a good plan for a campaign’.
Unlike Clausewitz, Jomini was able to step outside his predominate area of experience, land warfare, also contributing strategic thought on the maritime dimension of warfare. He argues, for example, that control of the sea is im
portant in determining the outcome of war. ‘If the people posses a long stretch of coast and are masters of the sea, or in alliance with a power which controls it, their power of resistance is quintupled.’ In his own work, Alfred Thayer Mahan was influenced by Jomini’s strategic thought, including the principle of ‘interior lines’ and the importance of lines of communication, as well as the concentration of naval force as a maritime counterpart to Jomini’s concentration of land force. Finally, the Swiss made a notable contribution to amphibious warfare theory. Jomini’s general rules for the conduct of amphibious operations, including such things as deception and the ‘expeditious seizure of necessary points’, remained relevant into the post-World War Two period.10
Conventional strategic thought during the Cold War
Strategic thought on the use of conventional landpower during the Cold War centred in the early years on how land warfare would operate in conjunction with nuclear weapons, and later as a first step in an escalation of warfare which would hopefully stop short of all-out nuclear war, a strategy known as Flexible Response. There was also significant strategic thinking about counterinsurgency, low-intensity conflict and wars of liberation, notably by Mao Tse-tung, founder of the People’s Republic of China, and French scholar David Galula (see Chapter 5). What is of interest here are new ideas with respect to conventional landpower that emerged toward the end of the Cold War period. The notion of ‘AirLand Battle’, especially, was a forerunner to contemporary strategic thought on the employment of conventional landpower.
In their 1993 book War and Anti-War, Alvin and Heidi Toffler document the genesis, promotion and eventual institutionalization of AirLand Battle, a concept that can be seen as a precursor to post-Cold War strategic thought encompassing long-range precision strike and jointness in warfare. Struggling to address the problem of NATO’s vastly outnumbered ground forces as compared to the Soviet Union, and having previously been sent to investigate Israel’s dramatic victory over Syria’s much larger forces on the Golan Heights in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, US General Donn Starry, commander of the US Army in Germany in the mid-1970s and later commander of US Training and Doctrine Command, set out to promote – even force – a complete rethink of the role of mass in US Army doctrine. To address the waves of Soviet forces that were expected to form in echelons and march through the Fulda Gap in Germany, Starry emphasized moving away from combat at the ‘front’ as it had existed since Napoleon, and instead striking over the heads of the first wave, far into the battle zone. Deep strikes would be used to ‘knock out the adversary’s command centers, logistic lines, communications links, and air defenses’ and prevent ‘subsequent echelons from reaching the scene of the battle’, an approach that would ‘require the closest integration of air and ground forces’.11 AirLand Battle, later updated as AirLand Operations to reflect a new emphasis on preventing rear echelons from even forming, became official US Army doctrine in August 1991, just months before the Soviet Union disintegrated.
More recent theoretical work on AirLand Battle has been done by the air force, with new concepts for AirLand Battle placing greater emphasis on the air component than the original as expressed by Starry. The US Army has been restructured into more numerous, smaller units called Brigade Combat Teams, many of which – because they rely on precision airpower – are built around platforms that are lighter and more mobile, but offer less protection than the heavy tanks of yesterday. Similar patterns are underway in all Western nations. In a future conventional war ground forces could therefore find themselves facing a numerically superior and possibly heavier foe. In this new environment, contemporary AirLand theorists argue, ‘the innovative application of airpower will be central to success’.12 The case is made that airpower should be used not just in close air support of ground forces and air interdiction against enemy lines of supply and communication, but also to strike enemy ground forces directly. The use of airpower in these scenarios is discussed in Chapter 3.
Strategic thought since the end of the Cold War
The Tofflers, although they are futurists, were two of the first thinkers to put forward ideas on the nature of conventional landpower in the post-Cold War era. In line with the increased precision of a knowledge-based economy, they argued, there would be a ‘de-massification’ of warfare – a reversal of the massed warfare trend that had started more than two centuries before with the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Against the divisional structure established by Napoleon there would be smaller-scale units, featuring more flexible formations armed with more firepower. ‘[T]he day is fast approaching’, the Tofflers argued in 1993, ‘when a capital-intensive Third Wave brigade of 4,000–5,000 troops may be able to do what it took a full-size division [of about 15,000 troops] to do in the past’.13 The troops themselves would have to be better educated and more technically expert than ever before as the changing nature of war placed a growing premium on intellectual capacity.
De-massification, along with increased jointness among services, were two of the key concepts pertaining to conventional land warfare that were put forward in the early post-Cold War period. Much of this thinking was done within the context of an overall conceptual framework known as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) (see Chapter 7). What is notable here are the land force characteristics identified by soldier-scholars like Andrew Krepinevich, President of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a former US Army Colonel. In a 1992 analysis for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), as well as other works over the next two decades, Krepinevich made a number of observations that were relevant to landpower.14
In the first instance, mobility would be central to combat effectiveness. Ground forces would be centred on highly mobile formations of extended line-of-sight systems – armoured forces and helicopters, rather than heavy tanks. These forces, in turn, would be less likely than in the past to ‘close with’ and destroy the enemy on a traditional front. Stand-off precision strike would also be important. In a conflict between peer competitors, extended-range strikes by air- and sea-based assets would become an increasingly decisive element in combat. At the same time there would be a progressive blurring of the distinction between, and increasing fusion of, air, land and maritime operations. In other words, operations would be increasingly ‘joint’ in nature – meaning involving all three (or, in America’s case, four) services – as airpower and seapower are brought to bear in support of landpower. Finally, there would be a continuing trend toward simultaneous, vice sequential, military operations, a concept that would later be characterized as ‘dispersed’ operations. The Army’s ability to develop distributed, networked forces would be critical to its future dominance.
The scholarly work of others reflects several of these ideas and also contributes new elements. Along the lines of ‘de-massification’, for example, another soldier-scholar, Douglas Macgregor, argued in the 1990s that in future smaller combined-arms formations with advanced indirect- and direct-fire weapons systems would dominate larger areas than in the past.15 Explicitly questioning whether the division structure was the right combat formation for the future warfighting environment, he detailed a vision of how ‘de-massified’ ground forces should be organized: rather than relying on the ‘cumbersome mobilization and massed firepower arrangements of the Cold War’, the US Army should be reorganized into mobile combat groups rendered more effective by working in conjunction with stand-off airpower.16 The effect, controversial at the time, would be to create a warfighting organization that was both smaller in size and more numerous in quantity than the existing division organizations but that – with the advantages of new technologies that allowed for sensing and engaging the enemy at long ranges – could dominate a much larger area.17 The units themselves should be made up of smaller self-contained units, specialized modules that could be integrated as necessary into joint forces. Moreover, not only would the traditional distinction between ground, sea and air campaigns appear increasingly anachronistic, bu
t so too would the familiar conceptual framework of the three levels of war – strategic, operational and tactical. In the future, technology would have the effect of altering time and space on the battlefield such that the three levels of war would effectively merge into one.18
US military visions
These themes and others could be found in several official United States military documents of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Indeed, taken together, the Pentagon’s Joint Vision 2010 of 1996, the US Army Vision of 1999 and the US Army’s subsequent white paper on Concepts for the Objective Force provide perhaps the most comprehensive elaboration of strategic thought on landpower during this period. Although Joint Vision 2010 gave guidance to all four US military services – Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps – many of its aspects were especially relevant to operations on land.
One characteristic of warfare identified in these documents was that ground force operations would shift from being linear to non-linear in nature, with units – much more mobile than in the past – being dispersed throughout the battlefield. ‘Increased dispersion and mobility will be possible offensively’, Joint Vision 2010 argued, ‘because each platform or individual warfighter carries higher lethality and greater reach’.19 Combining land with maritime and air forces would allow for still greater agility and a more dispersed footprint. The Army Vision, too, stressed that modern technologies, including inputs from manned and unmanned (satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)) sensors would enable combat organizations to synchronize highly lethal activity from dispersed locations. Concepts for the Objective Force speaks of non-linear operations as being distributed in time, space and purpose, and increasingly joint in nature.20 According to this document, operations would be decentralized and non-contiguous, with forces distributed across the battlefield and employed simultaneously. In contrast to the ‘phased, attrition-based, linear operations of the past’ which ‘rolled up’ enemy forces sequentially, the approach would be one of exposing the entire enemy force to air/ground attack at the same time.21
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