Strategy

by Lawrence Freedman

  Though he did not fully follow this through, Clausewitz recognized that the critical point might be a capital city or the coherence of an alliance. With respect to alliances, which had been central to the ebb and flow of the Napoleonic Wars, Clausewitz understood that individual members would always have their own interests at the fore and that joining an alliance could carry risks (for example, by attracting force away from a partner or by having to aid a much weaker partner). If the alliance was to prosper, it needed a unity of political purpose or at least “the interests and forces of most of the allies” must be “subordinate to those of the leader.” This offered a center of gravity that an opponent could challenge, disrupting the alliance by encouraging disunity.28 Not all peacetime alliances even turned into a joint enterprise against a common foe, as the matter became akin to a “business deal” and actions were “clogged with diplomatic reservations.”29

  From this it can be seen that the identity of a center of gravity was not obvious. The concept only made any sense if it was assumed that the enemy could be viewed holistically, as a unity, so that an attack on the point where it came together could throw it off balance or cause collapse. But there might be no obvious single focal point, if the enemy did not present itself in that way. On this basis, a loose coalition might be harder to disrupt than a tight alliance, although it might fight less effectively for the same reason.30 If the enemy was not totally committed—for example, in a limited war—there might be even less reason to expect that a blow against its army would have an impact much beyond the area in which it was committed. Yet it was this concept, as much as any other of Clausewitz’s, that came to be embedded in Western military thought, although often as a source of confusion rather than clarity.

  The Sources of Victory

  As Clausewitz described the nature of war, strategy became a sustained act of will, required in order to master its terrible uncertainties and resulting from human frailties and the capricious impact of chance. Since the enemy faced the same problems, it was still possible to prevail by bringing superior force to bear against the enemy’s center of gravity. Clausewitz was of the view, almost taken for granted in his time, that once the enemy army was defeated in battle, the route to victory was clear. Without an army a state was helpless. It could either be eliminated, gobbled up in its entirety, or forced to accept whatever terms the victor might impose. Because of this, states would do everything possible to avoid defeat and carry on the fight in some way. In the new post-1789 era, this was as much a matter of popular enthusiasm as governmental judgment.

  Clausewitz understood how policy linked the statesman and the general: policy gave the general his objectives and the resources available to meet them. As for these objectives, Strachan refers to a creed of 1815, “For me the chief rules of politics [or policy] are: never be helpless; expect nothing from the generosity of another; do not give up an objective before it becomes impossible; hold sacred the honor of the state.”31 In giving direction to strategy, therefore, policy was essentially an expression of national interests in relations with other states. Clausewitz acknowledged, but did not really explore, the impact of the internal politics of the state on strategy, as a particular form of friction. It was important that the commander-in-chief be part of government, in order to be able to explain the strategy being followed and help assess its relationship with policy. Clausewitz could not but be aware of how strong, popular national feelings created their own pressures for war and a determination to fight to the bitter end. It was, however, largely through a growing sense of the limits of what could be achieved through war that he began to consider the possibility of war pursued for limited ends, as it had been in the eighteenth century.

  Though a state that had lost its army was effectively beaten, “victory consists not only in the occupation of the battlefield, but in the destruction of the enemy’s physical and psychic forces, which is usually not attained until the enemy is pursued after a victorious battle.”32 If enemy armed forces were destroyed, whatever was wanted from the enemy could be seized and its public opinion would be cowed. Yet, as at Borodino, total destruction of the enemy army might not be possible. Even if achieved, the result might only be temporary. A defeated enemy might rise again. It would harbor thoughts of revenge, of reversing the setback. As victory might be temporary rather than durable in its effects, it might be prudent to negotiate a settlement under the most favorable terms when the optimum position has been reached.

  Napoleon’s career warned of the consequences of relying on military victory as the sole means of achieving political objectives. He wanted complete hegemony in Europe. There was a notion, still to be found among some international relations theorists, that this was an entirely natural goal for a great power. In practice, because victory could never be complete, it was a recipe for continuing war and eventually a friendless defeat. Napoleon’s stunning victories over the Austrians and Russians in 1805, and then the Prussians the next year, did not take them out of the picture. Having supinely accepted the result of battle, they re-entered the fight, this time understanding France’s methods better. As Napoleon discovered, the obvious counters to a regular army seeking a decisive battle were guerrilla warfare or reconstituted armies combining in a formidable coalition to ensure numerical superiority. He had relied on battle to achieve his objectives but did not have a clear notion of how these objectives could result in a new European political order with any sort of stability. It was hard to dominate the continent on the basis of methods that others could copy. Undoubtedly a genius in battle, Napoleon lacked political subtlety. He inclined toward punitive peace terms and was poor at forging coalitions.

  If the aim of war was a favorable peace, then military operations were a means to this end. War that was “a complete untrammeled, absolute manifestation of violence (as the pure concept would require)” would “usurp the place of policy the moment policy had brought it into being.” Policy would be driven away and war would rule by its own laws “very much like a mine that can explode only in the manner or direction predetermined by the setting.”33 In accepting that war could be fought for limited objectives and was not inevitably absolute in means or ends, there were still perplexing problems. The more ambitious the objectives, the more a state would commit to war and the more violent it would become. But the corollary could not be guaranteed. A war begun with limited objectives might not be fought by correspondingly limited means. Combat might be infused with the purposes of war but was shaped by armies in opposition. This created a reciprocal effect that could generate explosive forces from within, whatever the attempts to establish controls from without. We now tend to call this process “escalation.” Popular engagement could aggravate the effect. “Between two peoples and states such tensions, such a mass of hostile feeling, may exist,” Clausewitz observed, “that the slightest quarrel can produce a wholly disproportionate effect—a real explosion.”34

  In this tension we find the clue to Clausewitz’s enduring influence. He understood that rational policy could impose itself on war, but it was always competing with the blind natural forces of “violence, hatred and enmity,” as well as probability and chance. He linked policy, chance, and hatred to government, the army, and the people, respectively, although the link perhaps gave a restrictive, institutional form to these attributes. Each state had its own trinity, in tension within itself as well as with that of the opposing side. “Where policy is pitted against passion, where hostility ousts rationality, the characteristics of war itself can subordinate and usurp those of the ‘trinity.’ ”35 This broader political context underlined the basic point. Clausewitz accepted that the military task should be set by the politicians. Once that had been accomplished, the military could expect the politicians to use a military victory to best advantage. At the time, the normal assumption was that a political victory would naturally follow a military victory. If the assumption was wrong, then strategy’s focus on military affairs was insufficient. It was about the clash of
opposing forces when the real issue concerned the clash of opposing states.

  The Roman origins of the word victory located it firmly in the military sphere. Jomini and Clausewitz understood that the objective of war came from outside the military sphere. Their basic instinct, however, was that with the “retirement of the enemy from the field of battle,” terms could be imposed. There was some proportion between ends and means. But the problem remained that while a military victory was measurable, a political victory was not necessarily so. The forms of resistance and disaffection a defeated people might show could soon compromise the apparent achievements on the battlefield. If the broader political consequences of war were difficult to anticipate, then the military was likely to be left exploring its own tangible goals without regard to the broader context. Moreover, as Napoleon’s career demonstrated, simply taking the same approach to military strategy in a series of repeat performances was unlikely to sustain a high level of results. Opponents would see the pattern and work out the counters. Brian Bond noted how this raised a fundamental problem: “If strategy was a science whose principles could be learnt what was to prevent all the belligerents learning them? In that case stalemate or attrition must result.”36

  CHAPTER 8 The False Science

  Tell me how the Germans have trained you to fight Bonaparte by this new science you call ‘strategy.’

  —Tolstoy, War and Peace

  THE MISERIES AND privations associated with the Napoleonic Wars led to the development of an international peace movement. Over the course of the nineteenth century, this movement encouraged the formation of “peace societies” and the convening of humanitarian conferences. War was denounced as not only uncivilized, wasteful, and destructive, but also fundamentally irrational. In particular, it was an offense against economics. This was put most succinctly by John Stuart Mill in 1848: “It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which act in natural opposition to it.” The eager proponents of free trade saw how this could create forms of international intercourse that would render resort to war self-evidently foolish as well as awful, producing a formidable combination of morality and utilitarianism.1

  The British proponents of free trade might have thought this a far more efficient way of managing international affairs than one based on nationalism and war, with peace dependent on a tenuous balance of power. From the perspective of those less well placed, this appeared as a self-serving claim. The Prussian economist Friedrich List observed, in an argument that many still find compelling, that free trade would result in “a universal subjection of the less advanced nations to the supremacy of the predominant manufacturing, commercial, and naval power.”2 A far greater problem was to ignore the factor that had so stunned Clausewitz during his early military career, a force that “beggared all imagination.” The French Revolution had brought the people, with all their passion and fervor, to the fore. Napoleon had turned this into a source of his power, using it to develop his own personality cult and draw on popular enthusiasm to create an army with high morale and commitment, convinced of an inextricable, patriotic link between their own well-being and the success of the state. Clausewitz’s grasp of the significance of this new factor, which led him to make it part of his trinity, helped make his theory so durable. He understood the impact of popular passion on how wars were fought, by undermining attempts at restraint, and he recognized nationalism as a source of war. As France became seen as a threat, people elsewhere rallied behind their own flags. The people identified not with each other but with the nation. “Between two peoples,” Clausewitz observed, “there can be such tensions, such a mass of inflammable material.”3

  This went against notions of progressive civility in international affairs and added a cautionary note to demands for greater democracy. It undermined the claims of liberal reformers that war was an elite conspiracy. The speed and ease with which a belligerent nationalism could be tapped could therefore come as a rude shock to the radical, anti-war free-marketeers. The Crimean War that began just after the century’s midway point demonstrated the strength of popular enthusiasm (even in Britain) for war-making. Not for the last time would liberal reformers find themselves caught between dispassionate utilitarianism and passionate democracy. This chapter discusses how this issue of war and politics was considered by two very distinctive personalities, neither of whom were liberals: the Russian writer Count Leo Tolstoy, who disputed that mass armies were ever truly controlled by their generals, and the German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, who explored to the full the possibilities and limitations of command.

  Tolstoy and History

  The experience of Crimea had a very personal impact on Leo Tolstoy, a young, aristocratic Russian officer posted to Sebastapol during the war. Tolstoy was attracted to the good life but preoccupied with religion. He began to acquire fame as a writer by sending commentaries back from the front. They were filled with his sharp observations of how individuals were caught up in the arbitrariness of conflict. Tolstoy witnessed Russian soldiers cut down by enemy fire and their bodies left behind as the army retreated. He became increasingly annoyed at the insensitivity and incompetence of Russia’s elite and explored how literature could express the experiences of the peasantry as well as the nobility. In 1863, he began six years of work that would lead to his masterpiece, War and Peace. Though a diligent researcher who studied documents, interviewed survivors, and walked around the battlegrounds of 1812, his approach was antipathetic to that of professional historians, just as it broke with conventions of fiction in its approach to plot. The book was, he explained, “what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed.” Part of the mixture, introduced during the book’s later revisions, included short essays challenging conventional views of history and, by extension, a Clausewitzian view of strategy.

  Clausewitz represented much of what Tolstoy opposed. He even made a minor appearance in War and Peace. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (assumed to be representing Tolstoy’s views) overheard a conversation between two Germans, Adjutant General Wolzogen and Clausewitz. One said, “The war must be extended widely,” and the other agreed that “the only aim is to weaken the enemy, so of course one cannot take into account the loss of private individuals.” This left Andrei cross. The extension would be in an area where his father, son, and sister were staying. His judgment was scornful. Prussia had “yielded up all Europe to him [Napoleon], and have now come to teach us. Fine teachers!”4 Their theories were “not worth an empty eggshell.”

  Tolstoy was hostile to the conceits of political leaders who mistakenly considered themselves to be in control of events, as well as historians who believed that they understood them. As even sympathetic readers found it hard to get to grips with his views—which were never likely to find much favor with political, military, or intellectual elites—it is not surprising that his ideas had no influence on the actual practice of strategy in his time. But Tolstoy’s wider political influence spread during the rest of the century and affected attempts to develop nonviolent strategies. His general critique had its echoes over the next century.

  Making sense of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history is no easy task. Indeed the erudition deployed by Isaiah Berlin in his attempt to do so was considered a small masterpiece in itself.5 Tolstoy deplored the “great man theory of history,” the idea that events were best explained by references to the wishes and decisions of individuals who through their position and special qualities were able to push events in one direction rather than another. His objection went beyond the normal complaint about such theories, that they underplayed the importance of broader economic, social, and political trends. Tolstoy appeared to distrust all theories that attempted to put the study of human affairs on a quasi-scientific basis by imposing abstract categories and assuming an inner rationality. General Pfühl would have attributed success to his theory of “oblique movement deduced by him from the history of Freder
ick the Great’s wars” but blamed failure on imperfect implementation.

  Tolstoy stressed the “sum of men’s individual wills” rather than just those of the senior but ultimately deluded figures who believed that their decisions had significant effects. He saw a dualism in man, in whom could be found both an individual life—free in its own way—and a “swarm-life” by which he “inevitably obeys laws laid down for him,” living consciously for himself but also as an “unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historical, universal, aims of humanity.” Here Tolstoy joined those who sought to reconcile the ability of individuals to choose and act independently with a conviction that humanity as a whole was following a distinct path, whether set down by a divine hand, historical forces, collective emotions, or the logic of the marketplace. At some point in this reconciliation, Tolstoy supposed, individual possibilities would become submerged by the whole. The challenge in this philosophy was not to those low in the social structure but to those at the top, the elites who believed that they were making history.

  One clear difficulty with this thesis, even when Tolstoy was telling the story, was that the leading actors on the political stage did make a difference, and their decisions had consequences. It would be odd to assert that European history would have been exactly the same had Napoleon not been born. Accepting that history could not be a pseudo-science did not require denying the possibility of systematic thought and conceptualization. It was also odd to use Napoleon’s performance at Borodino to debunk the great man theory of history. This was, as Gallie notes, “one of the strangest, least typical, of campaigns known to history,” yet Tolstoy uses it to make points of universal validity to be applied to matters far less strange and atypical.6 Tolstoy showed the emperor pretending to be master of events over which in practice he had no control. He was all bustle and activity, beguiled by an “artificial phantasm of life,” issuing orders of great precision too far from the battlefield to make a real difference: “none of his orders were executed and during the battle he did not know what was going on.” Instead, he played out a role as “representative of authority.” According to Tolstoy, he did this rather well. “He did nothing harmful to the progress of the battle, as he inclined to the most reasonable opinions, made no confusion, did not contradict himself, did not get frightened or run away from the field of battle, but with great tact and military experience carried out his role of appearing to command calmly and with dignity.” The orders he sent out rarely made sense to those receiving them, and what he heard in return was often overtaken by events by the time it reached him. This was not, however, Napoleon’s problem that day: he was unwell and, unusually for him, uncertain about where to put his main effort. Then, when he had his opportunity to scatter the enemy, he lacked the reserve strength to take it. Tolstoy hardly chose this particular great man at the height of his power. When describing Napoleon at Austerlitz, Tolstoy recognized those qualities which made his contemporaries treat the emperor with awe and admiration, however grudging.