Hew Strachan trenchantly warned of the danger of the operational level as “a politics-free zone” speaking in a “self-regarding vocabulary about manoeuvre, and increasingly ‘manoeuverism,’ that is almost metaphysical and whose inwardness makes sense only to those initiated in its meanings.”42 He traced the preoccupation with the operational level back to General Erich Ludendorff. Prior to the First World War, the German army rigidly focused on the problems with its own military domain, excluding civilians from its deliberations and appearing largely indifferent to the political consequences of its actions, on the assumption that whatever was desired could be obtained politically following a successful war of annihilation. Ludendorff preferred to blame his country’s defeat in 1918 on a civilian “stab-in-the-back,” not his own battlefield failures. He became a proponent of total war by which the complete resources of society must be devoted to victory. Rather than war serving politics, politics should serve war. His view of strategy itself was therefore a continuation of von Moltke’s and reflected the sharp operational focus he had adopted during the past war. He would not accept that this perspective had let his country down. This view accounted for the lack of innovative strategic thought in interwar Germany. The initial success of the blitzkrieg in Western Europe in 1940 did not reflect a pre-war doctrine but the old doctrines of envelopment that had shaped the Schlieffen Plan. This time it succeeded through a combination of inspired improvisation and mistakes by the French High Command, which employed neither its strategic army reserve nor tactical air power to deal with the German threat before it gathered momentum.
The successes of 1940 did convince Hitler that blitzkrieg was the way to win wars, so he adopted it as the basis for the attack on the Soviet Union. Soviet mistakes again helped with early progress, but the offensive soon faltered and the economic demands of the campaign were inadequately addressed. While celebrating blitzkrieg as a doctrine, its proponents paid inadequate attention to this experience in the East—not only its failure but the objectives of conquest, plunder, and racial domination that shaped its course.43 In the end, the experience of the Second World War followed that of the First. The Germans found themselves fighting an attritional campaign after attempting to force a result with a winning maneuver. The blitzkrieg model was therefore flawed, taking little account of the historiography of the Second World War.
Moreover, in terms of NATO’s central front at the start of the 1980s, the possibilities of maneuver were oversold. The language of rapid and unexpected moves was appealing but also vague and, when applied to large and cumbersome modern armies, hard to envisage in practice. It reflected an essentially romantic and nostalgic view of strategy, unhampered by the normal constraints of politics and economics, over-impressed by both Soviet doctrine and its supposed vulnerability to maneuver warfare, as well as over-optimistic about the Western ability to implement it successfully.44 The maneuver strategies advocated were often impractical. They would be high-risk options in European conditions, with its urban sprawl and complex road and train networks, and place enormous strain on good intelligence and effective command and control. A faulty maneuver could lead to absolute disaster and leave the rear exposed. Furthermore, a new offensive doctrine could unsettle American allies in Europe, notably the Federal Republic of Germany, which was wary of association with anything that could be considered an aggressive strategy or a defensive strategy that involved turning its territory into a battleground. The failure to consider the geopolitical context illustrated the problem with considering operational art in isolation from a broader strategy in which holding together an alliance might be more important than developing clever moves for a hypothetical war.
Although an advocate for a maneuverist approach, Luttwak provided the theoretical reasons for caution. He had taken from Liddell Hart the indirect approach, the need to follow the line of least expectation. The obvious route, the most direct with the most favorable terrain, would be the one for which the enemy was best prepared. Taking the most complicated and uncomfortable route would therefore be the best way to catch an enemy out. Unfortunately, once a preference for an indirect approach was known, enemies would be alert for the unexpected, which meant that either an even more unlikely and difficult route had to be found, or perhaps there could be a double bluff, with the original, expected route being adopted as the last place the enemy would look. The test as to which way to go was one of surprise. Without surprise the extra effort required by an awkward route would be pointless and probably dangerous. Surprise made possible “the suspension, if only brief, if only partial, of the entire predicament of strategy, even as the struggle continues.”45 The advantage of surprise was that, for a moment, the enemy would be unable to react and so would be vulnerable. His decision-making cycle would be disrupted.
There were practical reasons why this logic did not lead to a totally confusing sequence of paradoxes. Movement might be restricted such that only necessary fuel and supplies could be carried and barely any space was available for weapons and ammunition. Unless the original engagement was extraordinarily successful there would be no capacity to continue a fight for any length of time. In addition, surprise depended on secrecy and deception. There was no point in embarking on elaborate maneuvers only to be spotted en route and then caught in an ambush. Therefore, an indirect strategy involved “self-weakening measures,” and thus costs and risks. To these could be added friction, so sharply identified by Clausewitz. This was the cumulative impact of all the grit that interfered with the smooth implementation of the basic plan: broken down vehicles, misunderstood orders, misdirected supplies, unseasonal weather, and impassable terrain. One aim of strategy would be to aggravate the enemy’s propensity to friction by forcing them to adopt an indirect strategy, making sure the direct routes were well protected, and then interdicting supply lines.
Luttwak noted a further paradox, drawn from Clausewitz: the greater the success of the original strategy the greater the risk of friction as an army moved further away from home base. Supply lines became attenuated as the enemy fell back closer to its own home bases where it could replenish and bring forward fresh reserves as the advancing force moved into unfamiliar territory. Victorious armies were apt to overreach themselves, pushing their luck. If they went beyond the “culminating point,” the most advantageous position vis-à-vis the enemy, the balance of advantage would start to shift. An enemy in disarray would be unable to regroup, so the attacker would be well advised to press home the advantage. This raised the problem of the indecisive battle. Without full surrender terms, the enemy would look for ways to regroup and return to the fight, even as an insurgency if the country was occupied. Thus the ultimate test of strategy was not whether surprise was achieved. In the end this was a tactical matter. The test was whether the desired political outcome was reached. The basic point was that sticking with any formula allowed the enemy a chance to adjust and respond.
Lastly, there was behind all of this a presumption of cause and effect, that combinations of “ambiguity, deception, novelty, mobility, and actual or threatened violence” would generate sufficient surprise and shock to cause enemy confusion and disorder. The essence of moral conflict, Boyd insisted, was to
create, exploit, and magnify menace (impression of danger to one’s well-being and survival), uncertainty (impressions, or atmosphere, generated by events that appear erratic, contradictory, unfamiliar, chaotic, etc.), and mistrust (atmosphere of doubt and doubt and suspicion that loosens human bonds among members of an organic whole or between organic wholes).
The evidence that this would be working would be “surface fear, anxiety, and alienation in order to generate many non-cooperative centers of gravity.”46
While comparative morale and coherence undoubtedly made a difference, and confused commanders could watch helplessly as their armies fell apart, this story was told in excessively stark terms of headquarters tipping over in collective nervous breakdowns, organized troops turning into a disorderly rabble, and
apparently disciplined and intelligent individuals suddenly reduced to helpless fools thrashing around in the dark. Boyd saw “courage, confidence, and esprit” as constituting a form of “moral strength” that could counter such negative effects. If the enemy did indeed enjoy such moral strength, the imaginative physical effects designed to cause a moral breakdown would fail. Alternatively, individuals and groups would vary in their responses, with some being able to absorb the implications of events and adapt quickly. Their responses might be suboptimal, but sufficient to regroup and cope with the new situation.
One famous example of a commander thrown into mental confusion by a shock military move (although one about which he had been warned) was Stalin in June 1941 as the German offensive began and made rapid gains. For a few days the Soviet people heard nothing from Stalin as he struggled to make sense of the situation. While he was doing so, individuals at the front responded as best they could, some retreating and some throwing themselves into the fight with great bravery. Eventually Stalin rallied himself, broadcast a stirring message to his people, and took command of the fight. The size of his country and his population meant that a quick victory for the Germans was essential, and Hitler was sufficiently contemptuous of the Slav mentality to believe that a hard push by his forces would see the enemy crumble. When the moral collapse failed to materialize to the degree necessary, Hitler’s forces were stuck and eventually pushed back. The shock effect wore off as the Soviet leadership steadied itself.
It was one thing to argue that because minds controlled bodies, disrupting the workings of minds was preferable to eliminating their bodies, but quite another to assume that just as physical blows could shatter bodies, so mental blows could shatter minds. It was one thing to recognize the importance of the cognitive domain, but quite another to assume that it was susceptible to straightforward manipulation. Human minds could be capable of remarkable feats of denial, resistance, recovery, and adaption, even under extreme stress.
CHAPTER 16 The Revolution in Military Affairs
[T]he revolution in military affairs may bring a kind of tactical clarity to the battlefield, but at the price of strategic obscurity.
—Eliot Cohen
THIS “OPERATIONAL” APPROACH to war was never tested in the circumstances for which it was designed. At the end of the 1980s, Soviet communism imploded and the Warsaw Pact soon evaporated, taking with it the possibility of another great power war in the middle of Europe. The American military soon came to be preoccupied with a quite different set of problems. Because circumstances had changed so much this might have provided good reason to challenge the operational approach, but instead it became even more entrenched, now spoken of as a revolution in military affairs.
There was no need to worry about an extremely large and capable enemy. The efforts the Americans had put into new technologies had created a quality gap with all conceivable opponents, while the greater stress on operational doctrine made it possible to take advantage of superior intelligence and communications to work around opponents. Almost immediately, there was a demonstration of the new capabilities. Iraq occupied its neighbor Kuwait in August 1990; early the next year, a coalition led by the United States liberated Kuwait. Up to this point the impact of improvements in sensors, smart weapons, and systems integration were untested hypotheses. Skeptics (including Luttwak) warned of how in a war with Iraq the most conceptually brilliant systems could be undermined by their own complexity and traditional forms of military incompetence.1 Yet in Operation Desert Storm the equipment worked well: cruise missiles fired from a distance of some one thousand kilometers navigated their way through the streets of Baghdad, entered their target by the front door, and then exploded.
This very one-sided war displayed the potential of modern military systems in a most flattering light. The Iraqis had boasted of the size of their army, but much of its bulk was made up of poorly armed and trained conscripts facing professional, well-equipped forces with vastly superior firepower. It was as if they had kindly arranged their army to show off their opponent’s forces to best advantage. A battle plan unfolded that followed the essential principles of Western military practice against a totally outclassed and outgunned enemy who had conceded command of the air. A tentative frontal assault saw the Iraqis crumble, yet General Norman Schwarzkopf went ahead with a complex, enveloping maneuver to catch them as they retreated, but did not quite cut them off quickly enough. The Americans still announced a ceasefire, deliberately eschewing a war of annihilation. This reflected a determination to keep the war limited and not allow success in reaching the declared goal—liberation of Kuwait—to lead to overextension by attempting to occupy all of Iraq. This made good diplomatic and military sense, yet the consequence illustrated the arguments favoring decisive victories. Saddam Hussein was able to survive and the outcome of the war was declared at best incomplete.2
The idea that this campaign might set a pattern for the future, to the point of representing a revolution in military affairs, can be traced back to the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), led by Andrew Marshall, a redoubtable veteran of RAND. He was aware that during its last years there had been talk in the Soviet Union of a “military technical revolution” that might bring conventional forces up to new levels of effectiveness. Marshall became convinced that the new systems were not mere improvements but could change the character of war. After the 1991 Gulf War, he asked one of his analysts, Army Lieutenant Colonel Andrew F. Krepinevich, who had been working on what had become the non-issue of the military balance between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, to examine the combined impact of precision weapons and the new information and communication technologies.3
By the summer of 1993, Marshall was considering two plausible forms of change in warfare. One possibility was that the long-range precision strike would become “the dominant operational approach.” The other was the emergence of “what might be called information warfare.”4 At this point he began to encourage the use of the term “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) instead of “military-technical revolution” to stress the importance of operational and organizational changes as well as technological ones.5 Krepinevich described the RMA in 1994 as
what occurs when the application of new technologies into a significant number of military systems combines with innovative operational concepts and organizational adaptation in a way that fundamentally alters the character and conduct of conflict … by producing a dramatic increase—often an order of magnitude or greater—in the combat potential and military effectiveness of armed forces.6
Although the origins of the RMA lay in doctrine, the driver appeared technological, a consequence of the interaction between systems that collected, processed, and communicated information with those that applied military force. A so-called system of systems would make this interaction smooth and continuous.7 This concept was particularly appropriate in a maritime context. At sea, as in the air, it was possible to contemplate a battlespace empty of all but combatants. Even going back to the Second World War, air and sea warfare offered patterns susceptible to systematic analysis, which meant that the impact of technical innovations could be discerned.
By contrast, land warfare had always been more complex and fluid, subject to a greater range of influences. The promise of the RMA was to transform land warfare. The ability to strike with precision over great distances meant that time and space could decline as serious constraints. Enemy units would be engaged from without. Armies could stay agile and maneuverable, as they would not have to move with their own firepower, except for that required for self-defense. Instead, they could call in what was required from outside. Reliance on non-organic firepower would reduce dependence upon large, cumbersome, self-contained divisions, and the associated potential for high casualties.8 While enemy commanders were still attempting to mobilize their resources and develop their plans, they would be rudely interrupted by lethal blows inflicted by forces for whom time and space were no longer serious constraints.
The move away from the crude elimination of enemy forces could be completed by following the Boyd line of acting more quickly and moving more deftly, thus putting enemy commanders in a position where resistance would be futile. Enthusiasts hovered on the edge of pronouncing the “fog of war” lifted and the problem of friction answered.9 At the very least, warfare could move away from high-intensity combat to something more contained and discriminate, geared to disabling an enemy’s military establishment with the minimum force necessary. No more resources should be expended, assets ruined, or blood shed than absolutely necessary to achieve specified political goals.
All of this created the prospect of relatively civilized warfare, unsullied by either the destructiveness of nuclear war or the murky, subversive character of Vietnam-type engagements. It would be professional war conducted by professional armies, a vision, in Bacevich’s pointed words, “of the Persian Gulf War replayed over and over again.”10 The pure milk of the doctrine is found in a publication of the National Defense University of 1996 which introduced the notion of “shock and awe.” The basic message was that all efforts should be focused on overwhelming the enemy physically and mentally as quickly as possible before there was a chance to react. “Shock and awe” would mean that the enemy’s perceptions and grasp of events would be overloaded, leaving him paralyzed. The ultimate example of this effect were the nuclear strikes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which the authors refused to rule out as a theoretical possibility, though they were more intrigued by the possibility of disinformation, misinformation, and deception.11
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