Strategy (14 page)

The word
plot
also acquired negative connotations during the seventeenth century. Its association with dangerous mischief or malevolent scheming was sealed once the failed attempt by Catholic conspirators (including Guy Fawkes) to blow up the House of Commons while King James visited on November 5, 1605, became known as the Gunpowder Plot.
Plot
has thereafter implied treachery and conspiracy—a perverted plan, hatched by a few, dependent on secrecy, geared to overthrowing the established order. Yet, the etymology of
plot
resembles that of
plan
. Both originally referred to a flat area of ground, then to a drawing of an area of land or a building, then to a drawing to guide the construction of a building, and eventually to a set of measures adopted to accomplish something. A plan became a detailed proposal setting out how a goal would be attained. The military had their “plan of attack” or “plan of campaign,” and these moved from their literal meanings to become metaphors for going on the offensive or embarking on a challenging mission in any context. When matters progress smoothly, they were going “according to plan.” Eventually, a plan implied much more than a sensible way of thinking through how to complete some difficult or complicated task.
Plot
morphed into something similar but less wholesome. The fine distinction between the two was found in Dr. Johnson's 1755 dictionary. A plan was a “scheme,” while a plot was also a “scheme” but a “conspiracy, stratagem, contrivance” as well.
²³

There was always a double standard when it came to cunning, trickery, deception, and stratagem. Against your own people—with whom deception should be much easier because you understood them and they were more likely to trust you—it was generally reprehensible, but against enemies, it could be acceptable and even admirable if the trick was a good one. The closer the social bond, the more distasteful were attempts to exploit the bond through deception; the weaker the bond, the more difficult it was to deceive successfully. Either way, reliance on cunning was subject to a law of diminishing returns. Once the reputation was acquired, then others would be watching out for tricks. Such tricks were therefore vulnerable to problems in execution or exposure when an opponent had good intelligence. For all these reasons, the influence of cunning and trickery tended to be most evident when small scale and personal. It was possible to trick governments and armies, but this was always a gamble and might not gain more than a temporary and limited advantage. Once warfare moved to mass armies with complex organizations, there would be limits to what could be achieved by means of guile. The emphasis would be on force.

When I have learnt what progress has been made in modern gunnery
,
When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery—
In short, when I've a smattering of elemental strategy
You'll say a better Major-General has never sat a-gee
.
For my military knowledge, though I'm plucky and adventury
,
Has only been brought down to the beginning of the century
.

—Gilbert and Sullivan,
The Pirates of Penzance

I
N THE FAMOUS
patter song from their light opera of 1879, Gilbert and Sullivan have their “modern major general” parading his knowledge of all things historical, classical, artistic, and scientific. Only at the end does he admit that the gaps in his knowledge are those exactly relevant to his trade. When he admits that his military knowledge has yet to reach the start of the nineteenth century, he is saying that it is pre-Napoleonic, therefore belonging to a quite different age and unfit for contemporary purposes.

Martin van Creveld has asked whether strategy existed before 1800.
¹
From the perspective of this book, of course, it existed from the moment primates formed social groupings. Van Creveld accepted that there were always some informed notions of the conduct of war and how to achieve victory. Commanders had to work out their approach to battle and organize
their forces accordingly. What van Creveld had in mind was a step change that occurred around this time. Before 1800, intelligence-gathering and communication systems were slow and unreliable. For that reason, generals had to be on the front line—or at least not too far behind—in order to adjust quickly to the changing fortunes of battle. They dared not develop plans of any complexity. Adopting measures such as splitting forces in order to attack the enemy from different directions or holding back reserves to reinforce success was likely to lead to command and logistical nightmares. Roads were poor and movement was bound to be slow. Although it was no longer necessary to live off the land, logistical support required that magazines be moved along supply lines. This entailed a serious vulnerability if the enemy managed to cut the lines. Modest maneuvers or nighttime marches were the best options for catching an enemy by surprise. Armies that lacked passion and commitment, whose soldiers were easily tempted to desert if food was in short supply or conditions too harsh, did not encourage confidence in sustainable campaigns. Prudence suggested concentrating on pushing enemies into positions where they would feel vulnerable or struggle to stay supplied. All this limited the impact of wars on the apparently stable European balance of power. Then, as transport systems were improving and lands were becoming properly mapped, along came Napoleon Bonaparte, self-proclaimed emperor of France. Napoleon embodied a new way of fighting wars: a combination of individual genius and mass organization, and objectives far more ambitious than those of his predecessors.

The French Revolution of 1789 was a source of great energy, innovation, and destruction. It unleashed political and social forces that could not be contained in their time and whose repercussions continued to be felt in the succeeding centuries. In military affairs, the Revolution led to large, popular armies whose impact was enhanced by the developing means of transporting them over long distances. There was a move away from limited wars of position, bound up with quarrels between individual rulers and shaped by logistical constraints and unreliable armies, to total wars engaging whole nations.
²
With Napoleon, wars became means by which one state could challenge the very existence of another. No longer were they an elaborate form of bargaining. The high stakes removed incentives to compromise and encouraged a fight to a bloody conclusion. Military maneuvers were no longer ritualistic—their impact reinforced by the occasional battle—but preludes to great confrontations that could see whole armies effectively eliminated and states subjugated.

This section opens with the introduction of the modern concept of strategy and then describes the views of its two key exponents, Baron Henri de
Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz. They developed their ideas at a time of great political turbulence, a time when individual battles redrew the maps of Europe and new challenges were thrown up by the need to mobilize, motivate, move, and direct mass armies. The focus was on battle and the possibility of inflicting such a defeat that the enemy would be left in a politically hopeless position. This was when the idea of the battle of annihilation was firmly implanted in military minds. Lost in this process was a view of battle as the “chance of arms” which until then had been accepted by the belligerents as an appropriate form of dispute resolution.

This view survived well into the nineteenth century, and arguably only collapsed in that century's second half. It was, however, always tenuous and its days were numbered. It was the product of a monarchical system in which the causes and outcomes of war were bound up with matters of most interest to rulers, such as dynastic succession or sovereignty over particular pieces of territory, and so it was vulnerable to the rise of nationalism and republicanism. It was part of a normative framework that was always subject to interpretation at its edges. In the most restrained version, victory was the agreed outcome of a day's fighting, which would leave one army triumphant on the field of battle, looking for booty and stripping enemy corpses. It still depended on the enemy accepting the result. Certain victories appeared to have more legitimacy than others, for example, those achieved without recourse to gross deceptions. But the notionally defeated sovereign could challenge his predicament by observing that while retreat might have been necessary, the other side took more casualties; or the retreat was in sufficiently good order so another battle could be fought. The victor had to calculate whether sufficient damage had been done to convince the enemy to now negotiate sensibly. This depended in part on what was at stake, as well as on whether the enemy had any capacity to fight back or else might be coerced through sieges and rampages through the countryside, which he was helpless to prevent.

Even a badly bruised opponent might find a way to continue resistance, regroup, or acquire an external ally. Given the uncertainties and explosive tendencies connected with war, was it wise to assume that this was no more than a form of violent diplomacy? If it was bound to end with a compromise, why not settle the matter with diplomacy before blood was shed, or look for alternative—possibly economic—forms of coercion? Forming alliances and undermining those of the enemy—evidently a matter of statecraft—could be of as much or even greater importance to a war's outcome than a display of brilliant generalship.

The starting point for nineteenth-century strategic discourse, however, was the expectation of a decisive battle, from which exceptions might be
found, rather than the demands of statecraft, for which battle might be the exception. Military circles encouraged the characterization of the international system as extensions of the battlefield, as constant struggles for survival and domination.

If we consider strategy to be a particular sort of practical problem-solving, it has existed since the start of time. Even if the word was not always in use, we can now look back and observe how personalities engaged in activities that would later be called strategy. Did the arrival of a word to capture this activity make an important difference to the actual practice? Even after its introduction,
strategy
was not universally employed as a descriptor even by those who might now be considered accomplished strategists. What was different was the idea of strategy as a general body of knowledge from which leaders could draw. The strategist came to be a distinctive professional offering specialist advice to elites, and strategy became a distinctive product reflecting the complexity of situations in which states and organizations found themselves.

We noted earlier the role of the
strat
ē
gos
in 5th-century Athens. According to Edward Luttwak, the ancient Greek and Byzantine equivalent to our
strategy
would have been
strat
ē
gike episteme
(generals' knowledge) or
strat
ē
g
ō
n sophia
(generals' wisdom).
³
This knowledge took the form of compilations of stratagems, as in the
Strategematon
, the Greek title of the Latin work by Frontinus. The Greeks would have described what was known about the conduct of war as
taktike techne
, which included what we call tactics as well as rhetoric and diplomacy.

The word
strategy
only came into general use at the start of the nineteenth century. Its origins predated Napoleon and reflected the Enlightenment's growing confidence in empirical science and the application of reason. Even war, the most unruly of human activities, might be studied and conducted in the same spirit. This field of study at first was known as
tactics
, a word that had for some time referred to the orderly organization and maneuver of troops.
Tactics
defined as “the science of military movements” could, according to Beatrice Heuser, be traced back to the fourth century BCE. There was no corresponding definition of
strategy
until an anonymous sixth-century work linked it explicitly with the general's art. “Strategy is the means by which a commander may defend his own lands and defeat his enemies.” In 900, the Byzantine emperor Leo VI wrote of
strategía
to provide an overall term for the business of the
strategos
. A few centuries later there was some
knowledge of Leo's work, but when in 1554 a Cambridge professor translated the text into Latin, which lacks a word for strategy, he used “the art of the general” or “the art of command.”
⁴

In 1770, Jacques Antoine Hippolyte, Comte de Guibert, published his
Essai général de tactique
. Then only 27, Guibert was a precocious and extravagant French intellectual who had already acquired extensive military experience. He produced a systematic treatise on military science that captured the spirit of the Enlightenment and gained enormous influence. At issue was whether it was possible to overcome the indecisiveness of contemporary war. Guibert's view was that achieving a decisive result with a mass army required an ability to maneuver. He distinguished “elementary tactics,” which became “tactics,” from “grand tactics,” which became “strategy.” Guibert wanted a unified theory, raising tactics to “the science of all times, all places and all arms.” His key distinction was between raising and training armies, and then using them in war.
⁵
By 1779, he was writing of “la stratégique.”
⁶

The sudden introduction of the word is attributed by Heuser to Paul Gédéon Joly de Maizeroy's translation of Leo's book into French in 1771. Joly de Maizeroy identified Leo's “science of the general” as being separate from the subordinate spheres of tactics. In a footnote, he observed: “
La stratégique
is thus properly said to be the art of the commander, to wield and employ appropriately and with adroitness all the means of the general in his hand, to move all the parts that are subordinate to him, and to apply them successfully.” By 1777, a German translation of the work used the term
Strategie
. Joly de Maizeroy described strategy as “sublime” (a word also used by Guibert) and involving reason more than rules. There was much to consider: “In order to formulate plans, strategy studies the relationships between time, positions, means and different interests, and takes every factor into account … which is the province of dialectics, that is to say, of reasoning, which is the highest faculty of the mind.”
⁷
The term now began to achieve a wide currency, offering a way of inserting deliberate, calculating thought into an arena previously remarkable for its absence.