They were masters of multitasking. Caesar dictated letters on horseback, with a secretary mounted on either side, each taking down a different piece. They were Herculean workaholics who managed time with the deftness of a prizefighter. Only the need for sleep and sex, said Alexander, reminded him that he was human.
But agility had its limits. Alexander was nearly stymied by the Persian fleet. Hannibal paid dearly for his inability to conduct sieges in Italy. Caesar nearly starved his army during the poorly conceived siege of Dyrrachium.
Nor do agile warriors necessarily make good politicians. War is clarity; politics is frustration. Alexander conquered the Persian empire with gusto but he quickly lost interest in managing its affairs. Hannibal discovered that winning allies in Italy was easier than bending them to his will. Caesar found the battlefield less challenging than the Forum; his downfall came not from senatorial armies but from daggers in the Senate Chamber.
6. Infrastructure
To win a war takes certain material things: arms and armor, ships, food, money, money, and more money. With enough money, you can buy the rest. You can even acquire manpower—even disciplined and veteran manpower—that is, mercenaries.
The one thing that money can’t buy is synergy. It can’t buy a combined-arms force (light and heavy infantry and cavalry as well as engineers) that is trained to fight together as a coherent whole—and welded to its leader. You have to build that on your own.
And build it our three generals did. They each inherited a dazzling instrument and then honed it into something even sharper and more deadly.
Philip II built the Macedonian army and Alexander added the crowning touch by leading the cavalry to victory in Philip’s greatest battle—Chaeronea. Then, after Philip’s death, Alexander rode at the army’s head in its years of glory in Asia. Hannibal inherited the men who had carved out a new Carthaginian empire in Spain for his father, Hamilcar. Caesar took the Roman legions and made them his own. Fired in the crucible of the Gallic wars, they were the finest army in the Roman world.
7. Strategy
In its original, ancient Greek sense, strategy refers to generalship overall, from battle tactics to the art of operations (weaving battles together in pursuit of a larger goal) to war strategy (how to win a war). Add to these what we now call grand strategy—the broader political goal that a war serves. Great commanders must master them all.
Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar all had an instinctive grasp of operations. However, Caesar’s mastery of tactics did not match Alexander’s or Hannibal’s.
Hannibal, in particular, was the master of surprise. His march over the Alps left the enemy breathless. He ran circles around the Romans with an array of unheard-of tricks, managed to pry open the gates of a strong city, unleashed a cavalry charge from a hiding place in the enemy’s rear, and shuttled his army to freedom one night right under the Romans’ noses.
Neither Alexander nor Caesar was in Hannibal’s league but they had a few cons of their own. When the Persians blocked a mountain pass into the heart of Iran, Alexander successfully rode through the hills and surprised them from the rear. When Caesar faced Pompey in a do-or-die battle, Caesar hid his best troops until the enemy cavalry charged—then he pulled out his men and broke the cavalry’s momentum.
But when it came to war strategy, Alexander and Caesar turned the tables on Hannibal. They thought ahead and they were dogged. Knowing that he could not beat Persia at sea, Alexander stooped to conquer Persia’s Mediterranean seaports—while putting off the big battle that he craved. Thinking ahead to a showdown with Pompey, Caesar shipped the loot he won in Gaul back home to the ordinary people of Italy—in effect, he bought their votes. Hannibal was less painstaking. He loved speed and sorcery but he had no interest in grinding down Rome’s allies one by one.
For all his success, Hannibal failed at long-term thinking. His battlefield triumphs stunned but did not slay Rome. When the enemy bounced back, Hannibal had no Plan B. We don’t know who was more to blame, Hannibal or his home government, but we do know who had the last laugh—Rome.
All three commanders had a grand strategy. Alexander wanted to conquer the Persian empire, Hannibal to break Rome’s power for good, and Caesar to achieve political supremacy. But those goals left many, many details to work out.
8. Terror
They were willing to kill innocents and everyone knew it. That too was a secret of their success.
Scene from a civil war: when a young public official tried to stop Caesar from breaking into the treasury in Rome, Caesar raised his voice and threatened to kill him if he didn’t get out of the way. “And young man,” he said, “you have to know that it was harder for me to say this than it would be to do it.” The terrified official left.
But threatening a government official’s life was nothing compared to massacring entire cities, as the great commanders did. Caesar sacked the small Greek city of Gomphi as punishment for its betraying him. Alexander destroyed the great Greek metropolis of Thebes just to show what he did to rebels. Even worse would come later in Central and South Asia, where the angry Macedonians massacred town after town.
Caesar did the same in Gaul, where the ancient biographer Plutarch says he killed a million people and enslaved a million more. Exaggerations—but close enough to the truth that most Italians were quick to surrender when he crossed the Rubicon. Caesar then cleverly played against type and pardoned his enemies, which won the applause of a relieved public.
The first thing Hannibal did when he reached Italy in 218 was to massacre the people of Turin—a small place in those days—in order to break resistance in the surrounding area. When he finally left Italy fifteen years later, in 203, Hannibal slaughtered those Italians who refused to go with him—and he didn’t hesitate to follow them into the grounds of a temple to do so. Or so the Romans claimed.
9. Branding
Men with imperial ambitions don’t go to war over little things like border disputes. They need grand causes and clear symbols.
All three were chameleons. None was a man of the people but all played the populist.
Alexander began as an avenger and a liberator and he ended up as a demigod. He promised payback for Persia’s invasion of Greece 150 years earlier, proclaimed the liberation of the Greek cities that he conquered, and made them democracies, whether they liked it or not. Once he reached Iran, he put on selected items of Persian dress and insisted that his men now salaam in his presence, Persian style, in a nod to his new, Eastern subjects. Meanwhile, he told his Greek allies to worship him as the son of the god Zeus.
Hannibal too stood for vengeance and liberation and he walked his own pathway to the gods. To Carthage, he promised vengeance for its earlier defeat by Rome; to Italians, he promised freedom from Roman domination. He claimed the support of the Carthaginian god Melqart—or Hercules. And he encouraged his Celtic followers to consider him a hero out of their myths.
Caesar went to great pains to show that he was no mere provincial governor in revolt against the lawful government of Rome. He said that he was fighting for the rights of the Roman people and for his own good name—the latter a principle dear to Roman hearts. Caesar also drew a bright line between himself and earlier generals who had marched on Rome. They had sealed their wars with reigns of terror, but his policy was mercy.
As far as the gods, Caesar’s family traced its ancestry back to Venus. Caesar received divine honors from the Senate while still alive and was deified after his death. But Caesar acquired something else that was worth still more—celebrity. His Commentaries on the Gallic War made him a symbol of military prowess. By the time he crossed the Rubicon two years later, Caesar’s reputation served as a force multiplier.
10. Divine Providence
Napoleon asked for generals who were not only good but also lucky. He would have had many occasions to be pleased with Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar. But only Divine Providence, and not mere luck, can explain the guidance and protection needed to reach the heig
hts they did. Although the previous nine factors were necessary, Divine Providence was essential.
Divine Providence guided the steps of young men born to be conquerors, like Alexander and Hannibal, and also the steps of a middle-aged politician who went to war and turned out to be the greatest general of all—Caesar. Only Divine Providence can lead a man’s foes off the cliff. Without having to lift a finger, for example, Alexander saw his worst enemy die suddenly.
The Romans played into Hannibal’s hands by launching their biggest army against him. He was waiting at Cannae. There, Hannibal achieved one of the world’s greatest battlefield victories, but he failed to follow up Cannae with a march on Rome—and that cost him the war.
As the saying goes, man plans, God laughs.
THE FIVE STAGES OF WAR
A great leader knows the rhythm of war. That is critical because in war, as in most things, timing is everything. Success is not only a matter of the ten qualities just discussed, but of knowing when to deploy them. That goes especially for the kind of war that Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar all had in mind.
Their three wars all followed a similar pattern. Each began with a combination of attack and defense, in keeping with a basic rule of combat: every time you throw a punch, you create an opening for your opponent to attack, so you need to protect yourself. Accordingly, our generals invaded the enemy’s country while anticipating an enemy counterattack. Each ran into trouble early on, because in war things never go as planned, but then quickly regrouped. Next came a great victory in a pitched battle that shattered the enemy’s offensive capability. Then the three each tried to finish the job by depriving the enemy of his money and manpower—two of them succeeded. The last step was to reap the fruits of victory in a peace agreement for the postwar world, but none of the captains achieved this.
Their three wars followed a similar pattern but then, most wars do. In spite of many changes in technology, since ancient times the principles of war have changed as little as human nature has.
Each of these wars consisted of five phases. I call them the five stages of warfare: (1) attack, (2) resistance, (3) clash, (4) closing the net, and (5) knowing when to stop.
In the attack stage, the decision to go to war leads to the outbreak of fighting guided by a plan. The war plan is crucial—as the saying goes, failing to plan is planning to fail. But every plan runs into obstacles—call them resistance. In that stage, the attacker has to overcome those obstacles or fail. Our generals succeeded and forced their opponents to engage in a clash—the battle or battles that left the invading army supreme. But winning a battle is not enough. A successful general has to bring the enemy to his knees by using whatever it takes—pursuit, siege, blockade, counterinsurgency, or other tactics. He has to bring to bear political and financial as well as military resources. He needs to be ready for second-guessing at home and insurgency abroad. Closing the net is the most complex and challenging stage of all. Finally, a soldier-statesman has the advantage of knowing when to stop. He ends the fighting at a time and in a manner that does more than cease hostilities—it lays the groundwork for the postwar world.
Most people probably think of war as a three-stage process: attack, fight, win or lose. But that model is wrong because it simplifies and distorts the nature of war. We cannot understand war without allowing for its unpredictability and its fundamentally political nature.
The great commanders knew this. They didn’t just plan to win. They anticipated failure and they knew how to rebound from it. They put battlefield success into context. They knew that you could win a battle and still lose the war. They also understood that military victory does not equal political success.
War is unpredictable. Many ancient soldiers worshiped Fortune or Luck, and not without reason. Their commanders made careful plans, but no planner knows every hill or what lies behind it; no forecaster can control the weather or predict what Providence has in store. And then, there is the enemy. War is not shadowboxing; war is a match against a moving target. The enemy has a way of doing fancy dancing and tripping up the best-laid plans.
For example, the Persians unleashed a counterattack by sea against Alexander’s base in Greece, and the Romans launched a strike against Hannibal’s stronghold in Spain. Both Alexander and Hannibal flubbed their responses, but Alexander was lucky. Hannibal took a hard hit. Pompey might have attacked Caesar’s base in Italy from Spain, but Caesar beat him to the punch by invading Spain first.
Politics constrains war in two ways. No general can carry out military acts unless he commands the support of his men on the battlefield and his backers at home. No military victory can bear fruit unless it forces the enemy to do your will. It is no use winning a battle if the enemy is able to fight on to victory. Peace negotiations can prove treacherous, and many a general has won the war but lost the peace. For example, the general Lysander (d. 395 B.C.) led Sparta to victory against Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.), but his postwar policies were so heavy-handed that his allies turned on him and Sparta threw him out of office. That gave Athens an opening to rise again as a military threat. In modern times, the French army defeated the rebels militarily in the Algerian War (1954–1962), but at so high a cost that the French government, with popular support, decided to give up. Algeria, after more than a century as a French colony, became an independent state.
When we look closely at the nature of war—its unpredictability and political nature—we understand why this five-stage model is so useful. The five-stage model fits not just the wars of Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar but war generally, including more recent wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan. It describes conventional warfare best, but it also fits guerrilla wars and wars of attrition, where the clash is not a set battle but a battle nonetheless, however long or amorphous.
Although Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar are known as masters of conventional warfare, they offer lessons for unconventional warfare as well, from Alexander’s retooling his army into a force flexible enough to defeat Afghanistan’s nomads and mountain fighters, to Hannibal’s tactical cunning in the Italian hills, to Caesar’s street-fighting in Alexandria, to the hearts-and-minds initiatives that all three generals used on enemy populations.
GREATNESS ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE
We historians are supposed to be objective but the three subjects of this book make that hard. They excite the passions from love to hate and often a little of each. Maybe the world still loves heroes. Biographers certainly do. They run the risk of falling in love with their subjects, and these subjects—especially Alexander and Caesar—have had many biographers. But ancient heroes serve many and various modern agendas.
Take Alexander. He was a conqueror but history records him as an icon. To liberals, he was a visionary; to conservatives, he was a champion of Western civilization; and to more than one religious tradition, he was nearly a saint. Jewish tradition records that Alexander visited the Temple in Jerusalem and showed it respect. Ever since, “Alexander” has been a common Jewish name—and remains so today, even among Orthodox Jews. Christians believe that Alexander was preparing the way of the Lord by bringing Greek civilization to the East and by laying the groundwork for the unification of humanity. Because he was the “son of a god,” because he claimed to make men free, and because he died young, Alexander appears to some to prefigure Christ. Islam too remembers Alexander, and possibly in its holiest text: many scholars believe that Dhul-Qarnain, a figure mentioned in the Quran, and considered by many to be a prophet, actually refers to Alexander.
But you don’t have to be religious to revere Alexander. Nationalists from Greece to India all claim him. Gay-rights activists see him as a protogay because he loved men as well as women. A female scholar, however, told me she looks down on Alexander as a male fantasy figure who represents the struggle between adventure and responsibility. Some brand Alexander as a butcher and a brute. Most historians, though, sing Alexander’s praises.
Caesar is no one’s idea of a saint
, but he casts a shadow over every scholar even so. Caesar is the gatekeeper of his own reputation, because his brilliant books The Gallic War and The Civil War dominate the ancient historical record. For a modern advocate, Caesar has the best—Shakespeare, who endowed the man with tragic dignity. Still, Caesar’s deeds speak for themselves and they don’t always win admirers. He invaded Gaul without just cause and made rivers of blood run there. Then he started a civil war in Rome, less for any principle than for his own selfish good. He ended up as a dictator who destroyed the freedom of the Roman republic. Caesarism still stands today for military or imperial dictatorship and for political absolutism.
With Hannibal we have the opposite problem. Because he failed to defeat Rome, Hannibal might appear a loser rather than the champion that he was. Hannibal wins the hearts of underdogs, which sometimes leads to strange bedfellows. As a boy Sigmund Freud idolized Hannibal as a “Semite” who took on Rome the way Freud resisted anti-Semitism in Catholic Vienna. African Americans have traditionally considered Hannibal a black hero. He was probably not dark-skinned, although many thousands of troops in his army were.
Still, Hannibal’s underdog appeal rests on solid ground. After taking on an arrogant empire and shaking it to its core, he lost everything. But he maintained his dignity. Hannibal in defeat reinvented himself as an administrator, restarted the struggle against Rome in the East, and refused to let the enemy humiliate him by marching in triumph. He died beaten but unbowed.
• • •
Great generals must be ready to die young, and many conquerors throughout history have. They also must face the ever-present possibility of failure. Conquest is not an easy job. Success requires a combination of military greatness and supreme political skill. Very few people excel at both.
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