War Guide III
Aug. 15th, 2006 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynBecause ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
silverjackal seems to keep reading these (I don't know why), here's another commentary by me about war, trying to explain the concepts of strategy and tactics. I don't think it went very well.
There are two fundamentals to the study of war, one being strategy and the other being tactics. Strategy is the study of winning wars, tactics that of winning battles. Except when they're not. This is like defining science fiction as something involving spaceships and fantasy as something involving elves. Of course, you can't get much better because these two concepts are very badly defined, they tend to bleed into each other in the most inconvenient of ways.
Tactics is what dominates at the small end. A lieutenant who leads his platoon of thirty men does not often care about how his movements are going to effect the grand sweep of the war. He cares about how he's going to survive the next couple of hours. He worries about how he is going to accomplish his objectives and then get home safe, whether the route he is on is mined, whether the enemy is watching the ravine he will have to ascend through, and whether the bush he is hiding behind is thick enough to hide him from any sniper who might be watching. His worries deal with whether or not the rocky hillside of Hill 782 is firm enough for his men to get good footholds, or whether the clattering of rocks will give them away, or how far out he should try and place his scouts. His is a world of immediate consequences to his actions, of dirt and dust in the mouth, of dry heat and biting cold.
On the other end of the extreme is the General. The General is sitting in an air conditioned trailer somewhere far away with a mug of coffee and a muffin. He neither knows, nor cares, about the lieutenant's pre-dawn attack on Hill 782. His map may not even contain Hill 782. All he knows is that three days ago he asked the 19th Division to put some pressure on the enemy's flank around the southern hillmass, and to pin the hostile 41st armored on the southern side of the river. And this may not even be uppermost on his mind; his main objective may be to sweep behind the enemy right and seize their industrial facilities in the mountains.
The two live in entirely different worlds, ruled by entirely different sets of realities, but they are intimately connected. The General wishes to end the war swiftly, and with as little loss as possible, by seizing the industries that allow his enemies to produce the weapons that will allow them to invade his country. To do so, he plans to strike through a weak point in the enemy lines, formed by a confluence of geography and political boundaries. This will require the enemy to be unable to reinforce or cut off his strike, which means that other units must act as a diversion to keep him busy. One of them is the 19th Infantry Division, whose commanding general has decided to force enemy action by threatening a critical supply center in an attack up a river valley with one of his brigades. The brigade commander has ordered one of his battalions to sweep around and try and encircle the enemy across a flat plateau running near the hills. The battalion's lieutenant colonel fears an enemy counterattack and has ordered his third company to secure their vulnerable flank. To do this, the company commander plans to occupy the highest points in the region, which has resulted in a lieutenant, cold and scared, currently hiding behind a bush two kilometers downhill of the summit of Hill 782.
Strategic goals, capturing the enemy's economic resources and ending the war, dominate the General's thoughts. The lieutenant is dominated by the necessity of achieving his immediate goals, occupying the top of the hill to prevent an enemy attack, and surviving the affair, both of which are tactical matters. Every stage in between has a balance between the two. To threaten an enemy to engage at a time and place of your choosing by threatening a vital center is a matter of strategy, but the manner in which you do it is tactics. The battalion commander, ordered to take a particular route around an enemy's rear, is thinking mostly in tactical terms, where specific threats will come from, but is not managing the operation directly. That dubious honor is left to the poor sorry bastards who have to go up the hill.
Each level has different responsibilities. A general is in a position to get hundreds of men killed every time he makes a mistake. He also stands to lose the entire war. The lieutenant does not, his failure often ends up being mostly meaningless in the strategic picture, but the consequences are often eternal. A tactical failure can be redeemed by a successful strategy because successful strategies often can accept such problems. A strategic failure, as America is discovering in Iraq, is much harder to deal with.
And here we enter one of the most common misconceptions of war, that winning battles and destroying the enemy form the key to victory. The truth is that winning battles is often inconsequential; the important thing is not to lose them.
All right, you say, so I've managed to play a rather clever word trick (clever in the scale of one to brain-dead zombie), but we already knew that you can win wars by not losing battles. But most leaders in war forget these crucial facts; just as a defeat is not the end of the war, a victory is not success. Only a decisive victory can win the war, and these require either great tactical skill, strategic planning, or luck.
To give one example, consider the case of George Washington. Washington, commanding the American Continental Army, was the key military figure of the American Revolution. Yet, despite his stature, and the height of his reputation, he can be said to have never won a battle on the field against the British Army. He raided small forces at Trenton and Princeton, and at the end outlasted his enemy in a siege at Yorktown. But every full engagement between those two forces turned into, at best, a stalemate. The Americans lost on Long Island, at Brooklyn Heights, at Harlem Heights and at White Plains, losing all of New York. They tried to stop the British from marching across America and seizing the capital at Philadelphia, in the process losing a major battle at the Brandywine, getting rained out at the Battle of the Clouds, and losing several skirmishes, such as the one at Paoli. The only offensive American operations of that campaign, the attacks at Germantown and Monmouth, both ended in what was, at best, considered a draw. Despite hype, propaganda, equipment, training, and preparation, it can be said that George Washington never performed in the field.
He still won the war.
He understood that, although his army would lose battles, the only way he could lose the war is if the British destroyed the American ability to fight, to force them to keep troops in the field. If the British could have eliminated the Continental Army, they would have probably achieved their goal. Washington entered battle cautiously in most cases, and never put himself in a position where a defeat would have destroyed his army. Even though he lost battles over and over again, he never lost by such a margin that he was destroyed as a fighting force. The British never really had the opportunity to crush the Continentals. They could bloody them, and force them to withdraw, but they could not destroy the army that eventually forced their surrender. Tactical failure was redeemed by strategic success, and by the fact that, even if Washington lost battles, he never allowed the destruction of his army.
On the other hand, tactics can trump strategy. In 1815, Napoleon was forced, through no fault of his own, to fight one of the few decisive battles of his career at Waterloo. He could have broken off the engagement early at the sight of the British position, but he choose to force a decisive battle at Waterloo. It was part of a strategy that might have worked, to divide his enemies and conquer them separately. But it didn't, because Napoleon was forced to offer a decisive battle on Wellington's field, under Wellington's terms, and not only did he fail to win, he lost. His loss was so complete that his strategy simply fell apart. One cannot lose a battle in that manner and hope to win the war.
Now that I've rambled about strategy and tactics for a while, I'll give some brief observations that I've noticed. These may be false, what I know about strategy and tactics could probably fit on a page or two, and I'm critiquing professionals. But then again, I just might be right:
First, western nations tend not to produce grand strategists
Grand strategy is the management of a campaign at the highest level, marshalling military, diplomatic, economic, and social factors to achieve the goals of a nation or other group. I suspect that there is a good reason for this, very few western nations tend to produce generals with experience in all these areas.
In the old days, a warlord not only commanded an army in the field, he also ruled the surrounding countryside, made deals with the merchants and with other nations, and was almost his own entity. Even as little as two hundred years ago, generals often ran colonies, had tremendous political influence at home, and were much more accustomed to political leadership. How many generals from western nations today have ruled countries or governed nations? The occupation of Iraq might have gone more smoothly had the US been able to send a general to run operations with experience in running a fledgling nation and in creating political consensus in the Arab world, but there were none available. There's not much you can do about that.
Second, western nations tend to send tacticians to become strategists
This is a rather more disturbing trend, although it's perfectly understandable. Many of the failings in US military operations in Vietnam can be blamed for having a strategy that looked like it came out of the tactical manual. A tactician tends to think in terms of eliminating enemy forces, safeguarding a region by eliminating hostiles. Harkins, and later Westmoreland, adopted a similar policy of attrition, concentrating on finding and destroying enemy units. This is a decent tactical policy, pacifying an area by hunting down and defeating all opposing forces. Unfortunately it is not a good strategy, because an enemy can oftentimes replenish their forces.
The army does spend a lot more time trying to make tacticians than it does making strategists. You need a lot more lieutenants than you need Major Generals, and Major Generals are where you actually have to start dealing with strategy. An army with good tactics and an average strategy can certainly perform on the field, counting on the ability of its NCOs and lower-ranking officers to achieve objectives and motivate soldiers. An army with a superb general and inferior tactics tends to have to rely upon the bluff. Moreover, strategy changes based upon the opponent, where tactics can be taught based solely upon your own capabilities. Not only is it easier to teach tactics, it's more useful, more essential, and much less likely to become obsolete in the face of changing realities.
The bad part, of course, is that one day your tacticians get promoted to strategist. Unless you can re-teach them the principles of war, you tend to get into trouble.
Third, This Is Very Bad
I've suspected for some time, although I cannot prove, that many of the problems we currently have in our various adventures around the globe are due to this mindset. The US has a lot of generals and other officers who are very good at thinking tactically, at accomplishing set objectives, and at closing with and eliminating enemy forces. However, few of them are very well-trained or experienced at pacifying a hostile population, or building a political consensus. For reasons of our own (and they are damned good reasons) we don't give those officers much practice at that. There's also never been much of a tradition in the US of doing those sorts of things either. As a result the men we send out to Afghanistan and Iraq are superb at protecting the lives of their men and at demolishing the enemy, but they cannot win the war. That task belongs with the strategists.
US generals have an excuse. In the United States (and most other western nations) strategy at that level is dictated from the Executive branch of the government. However, the executive branch appears to have decided that it does not want to interfere with military operations. The result has been a boondoogle, made palatable only by the fact that if the White House were allowed to micromanage operations, we would probably be in an even worse state than we are now.
I suspect that in time to come, the recent Israeli adventure into Lebanon will come to be seen in the same light, an operation where the political consequences were not fully examined by the experts. I suspect that you once again saw the generals in action, thinking of the fastest way to overcome an enemy on the ground with minimal losses. And I suspect Israel will be paying for that for twenty years. When the political leadership fails to provide a political strategy, you leave it to the generals. And whenever you give someone a job outside their area of expertise, you cannot expect great things out of them.
So now that I've told you all about them, how do they work? Have to wait for next time on that...
You have now successfully wasted several minutes of your life.
silverjackal seems to keep reading these (I don't know why), here's another commentary by me about war, trying to explain the concepts of strategy and tactics. I don't think it went very well.There are two fundamentals to the study of war, one being strategy and the other being tactics. Strategy is the study of winning wars, tactics that of winning battles. Except when they're not. This is like defining science fiction as something involving spaceships and fantasy as something involving elves. Of course, you can't get much better because these two concepts are very badly defined, they tend to bleed into each other in the most inconvenient of ways.
Tactics is what dominates at the small end. A lieutenant who leads his platoon of thirty men does not often care about how his movements are going to effect the grand sweep of the war. He cares about how he's going to survive the next couple of hours. He worries about how he is going to accomplish his objectives and then get home safe, whether the route he is on is mined, whether the enemy is watching the ravine he will have to ascend through, and whether the bush he is hiding behind is thick enough to hide him from any sniper who might be watching. His worries deal with whether or not the rocky hillside of Hill 782 is firm enough for his men to get good footholds, or whether the clattering of rocks will give them away, or how far out he should try and place his scouts. His is a world of immediate consequences to his actions, of dirt and dust in the mouth, of dry heat and biting cold.
On the other end of the extreme is the General. The General is sitting in an air conditioned trailer somewhere far away with a mug of coffee and a muffin. He neither knows, nor cares, about the lieutenant's pre-dawn attack on Hill 782. His map may not even contain Hill 782. All he knows is that three days ago he asked the 19th Division to put some pressure on the enemy's flank around the southern hillmass, and to pin the hostile 41st armored on the southern side of the river. And this may not even be uppermost on his mind; his main objective may be to sweep behind the enemy right and seize their industrial facilities in the mountains.
The two live in entirely different worlds, ruled by entirely different sets of realities, but they are intimately connected. The General wishes to end the war swiftly, and with as little loss as possible, by seizing the industries that allow his enemies to produce the weapons that will allow them to invade his country. To do so, he plans to strike through a weak point in the enemy lines, formed by a confluence of geography and political boundaries. This will require the enemy to be unable to reinforce or cut off his strike, which means that other units must act as a diversion to keep him busy. One of them is the 19th Infantry Division, whose commanding general has decided to force enemy action by threatening a critical supply center in an attack up a river valley with one of his brigades. The brigade commander has ordered one of his battalions to sweep around and try and encircle the enemy across a flat plateau running near the hills. The battalion's lieutenant colonel fears an enemy counterattack and has ordered his third company to secure their vulnerable flank. To do this, the company commander plans to occupy the highest points in the region, which has resulted in a lieutenant, cold and scared, currently hiding behind a bush two kilometers downhill of the summit of Hill 782.
Strategic goals, capturing the enemy's economic resources and ending the war, dominate the General's thoughts. The lieutenant is dominated by the necessity of achieving his immediate goals, occupying the top of the hill to prevent an enemy attack, and surviving the affair, both of which are tactical matters. Every stage in between has a balance between the two. To threaten an enemy to engage at a time and place of your choosing by threatening a vital center is a matter of strategy, but the manner in which you do it is tactics. The battalion commander, ordered to take a particular route around an enemy's rear, is thinking mostly in tactical terms, where specific threats will come from, but is not managing the operation directly. That dubious honor is left to the poor sorry bastards who have to go up the hill.
Each level has different responsibilities. A general is in a position to get hundreds of men killed every time he makes a mistake. He also stands to lose the entire war. The lieutenant does not, his failure often ends up being mostly meaningless in the strategic picture, but the consequences are often eternal. A tactical failure can be redeemed by a successful strategy because successful strategies often can accept such problems. A strategic failure, as America is discovering in Iraq, is much harder to deal with.
And here we enter one of the most common misconceptions of war, that winning battles and destroying the enemy form the key to victory. The truth is that winning battles is often inconsequential; the important thing is not to lose them.
All right, you say, so I've managed to play a rather clever word trick (clever in the scale of one to brain-dead zombie), but we already knew that you can win wars by not losing battles. But most leaders in war forget these crucial facts; just as a defeat is not the end of the war, a victory is not success. Only a decisive victory can win the war, and these require either great tactical skill, strategic planning, or luck.
To give one example, consider the case of George Washington. Washington, commanding the American Continental Army, was the key military figure of the American Revolution. Yet, despite his stature, and the height of his reputation, he can be said to have never won a battle on the field against the British Army. He raided small forces at Trenton and Princeton, and at the end outlasted his enemy in a siege at Yorktown. But every full engagement between those two forces turned into, at best, a stalemate. The Americans lost on Long Island, at Brooklyn Heights, at Harlem Heights and at White Plains, losing all of New York. They tried to stop the British from marching across America and seizing the capital at Philadelphia, in the process losing a major battle at the Brandywine, getting rained out at the Battle of the Clouds, and losing several skirmishes, such as the one at Paoli. The only offensive American operations of that campaign, the attacks at Germantown and Monmouth, both ended in what was, at best, considered a draw. Despite hype, propaganda, equipment, training, and preparation, it can be said that George Washington never performed in the field.
He still won the war.
He understood that, although his army would lose battles, the only way he could lose the war is if the British destroyed the American ability to fight, to force them to keep troops in the field. If the British could have eliminated the Continental Army, they would have probably achieved their goal. Washington entered battle cautiously in most cases, and never put himself in a position where a defeat would have destroyed his army. Even though he lost battles over and over again, he never lost by such a margin that he was destroyed as a fighting force. The British never really had the opportunity to crush the Continentals. They could bloody them, and force them to withdraw, but they could not destroy the army that eventually forced their surrender. Tactical failure was redeemed by strategic success, and by the fact that, even if Washington lost battles, he never allowed the destruction of his army.
On the other hand, tactics can trump strategy. In 1815, Napoleon was forced, through no fault of his own, to fight one of the few decisive battles of his career at Waterloo. He could have broken off the engagement early at the sight of the British position, but he choose to force a decisive battle at Waterloo. It was part of a strategy that might have worked, to divide his enemies and conquer them separately. But it didn't, because Napoleon was forced to offer a decisive battle on Wellington's field, under Wellington's terms, and not only did he fail to win, he lost. His loss was so complete that his strategy simply fell apart. One cannot lose a battle in that manner and hope to win the war.
Now that I've rambled about strategy and tactics for a while, I'll give some brief observations that I've noticed. These may be false, what I know about strategy and tactics could probably fit on a page or two, and I'm critiquing professionals. But then again, I just might be right:
First, western nations tend not to produce grand strategists
Grand strategy is the management of a campaign at the highest level, marshalling military, diplomatic, economic, and social factors to achieve the goals of a nation or other group. I suspect that there is a good reason for this, very few western nations tend to produce generals with experience in all these areas.
In the old days, a warlord not only commanded an army in the field, he also ruled the surrounding countryside, made deals with the merchants and with other nations, and was almost his own entity. Even as little as two hundred years ago, generals often ran colonies, had tremendous political influence at home, and were much more accustomed to political leadership. How many generals from western nations today have ruled countries or governed nations? The occupation of Iraq might have gone more smoothly had the US been able to send a general to run operations with experience in running a fledgling nation and in creating political consensus in the Arab world, but there were none available. There's not much you can do about that.
Second, western nations tend to send tacticians to become strategists
This is a rather more disturbing trend, although it's perfectly understandable. Many of the failings in US military operations in Vietnam can be blamed for having a strategy that looked like it came out of the tactical manual. A tactician tends to think in terms of eliminating enemy forces, safeguarding a region by eliminating hostiles. Harkins, and later Westmoreland, adopted a similar policy of attrition, concentrating on finding and destroying enemy units. This is a decent tactical policy, pacifying an area by hunting down and defeating all opposing forces. Unfortunately it is not a good strategy, because an enemy can oftentimes replenish their forces.
The army does spend a lot more time trying to make tacticians than it does making strategists. You need a lot more lieutenants than you need Major Generals, and Major Generals are where you actually have to start dealing with strategy. An army with good tactics and an average strategy can certainly perform on the field, counting on the ability of its NCOs and lower-ranking officers to achieve objectives and motivate soldiers. An army with a superb general and inferior tactics tends to have to rely upon the bluff. Moreover, strategy changes based upon the opponent, where tactics can be taught based solely upon your own capabilities. Not only is it easier to teach tactics, it's more useful, more essential, and much less likely to become obsolete in the face of changing realities.
The bad part, of course, is that one day your tacticians get promoted to strategist. Unless you can re-teach them the principles of war, you tend to get into trouble.
Third, This Is Very Bad
I've suspected for some time, although I cannot prove, that many of the problems we currently have in our various adventures around the globe are due to this mindset. The US has a lot of generals and other officers who are very good at thinking tactically, at accomplishing set objectives, and at closing with and eliminating enemy forces. However, few of them are very well-trained or experienced at pacifying a hostile population, or building a political consensus. For reasons of our own (and they are damned good reasons) we don't give those officers much practice at that. There's also never been much of a tradition in the US of doing those sorts of things either. As a result the men we send out to Afghanistan and Iraq are superb at protecting the lives of their men and at demolishing the enemy, but they cannot win the war. That task belongs with the strategists.
US generals have an excuse. In the United States (and most other western nations) strategy at that level is dictated from the Executive branch of the government. However, the executive branch appears to have decided that it does not want to interfere with military operations. The result has been a boondoogle, made palatable only by the fact that if the White House were allowed to micromanage operations, we would probably be in an even worse state than we are now.
I suspect that in time to come, the recent Israeli adventure into Lebanon will come to be seen in the same light, an operation where the political consequences were not fully examined by the experts. I suspect that you once again saw the generals in action, thinking of the fastest way to overcome an enemy on the ground with minimal losses. And I suspect Israel will be paying for that for twenty years. When the political leadership fails to provide a political strategy, you leave it to the generals. And whenever you give someone a job outside their area of expertise, you cannot expect great things out of them.
So now that I've told you all about them, how do they work? Have to wait for next time on that...
You have now successfully wasted several minutes of your life.