The Soldier and the State

by Samuel P Huntington

  In Great Britain higher institutions of military education lagged behind those of France. In 1799 the Duke of York had opened a special school to educate officers for the staff. In 1802 this was reorganized as the Royal Military College, the staff course becoming the Senior Department of the College. The Senior Department played a relatively small role in British military life, however, until 1857 when it was detached and set up as a separate Staff College. Even then it was still not on a par with the Prussian Academy, and it was not until many years later that the British Army had a really high-level advanced military school. The beginnings of naval higher education occurred in 1837 when the Royal Naval College at Portsmouth was reorganized as an advanced school. In 1873 this college was moved to Greenwich and became the center for high-level instruction in the British Navy with the purpose of educating officers above midshipman “in all branches of theoretical and scientific study bearing on their profession.”28

  STAFFS. The primacy of Prussia was most obvious in the development of a professional staff. The Prussian general staff properly dates from November 25, 1803 when the king ordered the reorganization of the previously existing Quartermaster General’s supply staff into a true general staff. Earlier, in 1800, General von Lecoq had carried through some preliminary reforms, but the basic outline of a general staff in modern, professional terms is first found in the memoranda drafted by Colonel von Massenbach in 1802–1803 which served as the basis for the royal directive of the latter year. Under this order officers were appointed to the staff only after passing a special examination, and they were subsequently rotated between staff positions and regimental duties. The duties of the General Staff were divided into two categories: permanent duties involving the development of the fundamental principles of military operations, and special duties involving current military problems and the preparation of war plans.

  The General Staff never had the opportunity to function effectively prior to the defeat of Prussia by Napoleon. In 1808, however, Scharnhorst reorganized the staff, redefined more precisely its duties, inaugurated the division between the Great General Staff in Berlin and the Field Forces General Staff, linked the achievement of staff positions to the Kriegsakademie, and instituted the beginnings of the system of dual command whereby general staff officers shared in the responsibility of commanders. After the downfall of Napoleon the General Staff continued to exercise in peacetime the functions which it had previously exercised in war. Throughout the nineteenth century the General Staff tended to be the organizational stronghold of Prussian professionalism. In the early decades it had to struggle for position and recognition against both the War Ministry and the Military Cabinet which tended to be the center of aristocratic reaction. Under the leadership of von Moltke, however, who became its chief in 1857, the General Staff rapidly acquired preëminence. The scientific and rational expertise of Moltke became the dominant ideal of the German officer corps. From the 1860’s on, service in the General Staff was the most coveted duty in the German Army. The wine-red trouser stripe of the General Staff officers became the symbol of a new elite within the officer corps, the cream of the profession, signifying the highest standards of knowledge, competence, and devotion to duty. For the General Staff officer, far more than for any other member of the officer corps, all else was subordinated to the requirements of professional service. “Always be more than you seem,” was Moltke’s injunction to his staff officers. Half a century later von Seeckt summed up the tradition in crisp phrases:

  The form changes, but the spirit remains as of old. It is the spirit of silent, selfless devotion to duty in the service of the Army. General Staff officers remain anonymous.29

  Probably the most revolutionary aspect of the Prussian system was its assumption that genius was superfluous, and even dangerous, and that reliance must be placed upon average men succeeding by superior education, organization, and experience. This approach, on the one hand, subordinated the individual to the collective will and intelligence of the whole, and yet guaranteed to the individual wide freedom of action so long as he remained upon his proper level and within his sphere of responsibility. It was the antithesis of the eighteenth-century theory of the military genius. English observers of the Prussian system were impressed by the absence of the slavish and mechanical obedience to superiors characteristic of other armies and the extent to which each officer performed his particular function without intervening in the duties of others.30

  In France, in 1800 General Paul Thiebault published the first staff manual of the modern period. In actual practice Berthier, Napoleon’s chief of staff, developed a rudimentary general staff organization, although its entire structure and functioning were colored by Napoleon’s ability and genius and by Berthier’s smallness and jealousy. During the Restoration, St. Cyr established both a staff corps and a school to train officers for it, but not a general staff itself. Members of this corps were employed with troop commands, at the War Ministry and other administrative headquarters, as military attachés in foreign countries, and as instructors in the higher military schools. There was, however, no such thing as a “Great General Staff” with an autonomous existence in the War Ministry, nor was there a chief of staff. Consequently, the education and work of staff officers lacked purpose and focus. After 1831 the staff corps increasingly became a narrowly technical service concerned with drawing and topography. French staff development was also handicapped by the continuation of the eighteenth-century concept, reinforced by the Napoleonic and African wars, that the superior officer was one who relied upon his inherent natural gifts rather than expert advice and assistance. In general, the level of competence of the staff corps and its ability to grapple successfully with the problems which should have concerned a professional staff declined steadily during the forty years from 1830 to 1870. By the Franco-Prussian War the French staff had reached such a low point that it was hardly surprising that it proved no equal of its German counterpart.31

  During his continental wars Wellington developed an efficient staff for the British Army. With the conclusion of peace, however, the British staff more or less disintegrated, and throughout the nineteenth century Great Britain did not have a general staff in the modern sense of the word. The inept performance of the army in the Crimean War resulted in some steps toward the reconstruction of a staff, but the only lasting result was the creation of the Staff College in 1857. The only staff in the British Army was in the adjutant general and quartermaster departments: there was no real staff concerned with military operations and military intelligence — the domain of strategy and tactics as contrasted with administration and supply. This deficiency was not overcome until the first decade of the twentieth century when the work of enthusiasts such as Spenser Wilkinson combined with the lessons of the Boer War to produce a reorganization of the army. In 1904 an Army Council was created and the position of Chief of the General Staff came into existence. A few years later this was extended to provide for military cooperation with the dominions through the Imperial General Staff.32

  COMPETENCE AND ESPRIT. The appearance of professional competence and esprit among the officers inevitably reflected the extent to which professional institutions were introduced. England remained the most backward of the three major powers. The expertise of her military leaders was severely affected by the aristocratic and social considerations which continued important in her officer corps until the twentieth century. As one of its generals reported, the English Army in 1890 was still split between those who adhered to the tradition of Wellington and those who wished “to make the army a profession.”33 In France before the Franco-Prussian War professional and intellectually inclined officers were viewed with suspicion. Individualism was rampant: the ideal of the army of the Second Empire was the aristocratic “beau sabreur, a man of boundless courage and audacity but no reflection.”34 The rejection of intellectual activity and the narrow, rigid confines of the educational and staff systems were the decisive elements in the defeat at the hands
of the Germans. After the reforms of the 1870’s the professional spirit became dominant within the French forces although it was still hampered by the ideological controversy over the nature of the French state.

  Professional competence and the professional spirit reached their fullest development in Prussia. The smooth functioning efficiency of the Prussian armies of 1866 and 1870 stands out in sharp contrast to the bumbling confusion of the English Army of 1856, the American armies of the Civil War, and the Austrian and French armies which Prussia defeated. The central importance of the military schools and the key role of the General Staff gave the Prussian Army an intellectual overcurrent absent from other forces. As one English observer commented sadly in 1859:

  The fact that education is the be-all and end-all of the Prussian officer, is a potent lever in causing him to perfect himself in his profession; and the certainty of promotion through merit and not from caprice, sets the whole of the Prussian officers far above those whom we find in the English army.35

  Despite the opposition of conservatives like Wrangel and Manteuffel, the spirit of the Prussian officer corps had been slowly transformed from an aristocratic class spirit into a military caste spirit. After the middle of the century the emphasis was increasingly upon the close unity and comradeship of all officers regardless of their social origins. The line was drawn between military and civilian rather than between bourgeois and noble. The aristocracy of birth had been replaced by the aristocracy of education and achievement. The Prussian officer was poor, expert, disciplined, and devoted, an integral part of a tightly knit professional community. The result was a corporate esprit unique in Europe. In the words of the British Military Education Commission:

  The whole of the officers of the Prussian army look upon themselves as forming a single corps — the Offizier-corps — united by common ties and sympathies; admission to this body is regarded at once as conferring distinctive privileges, and as imposing peculiar duties.36

  EUROPEAN PROFESSIONALISM: GENERAL UPTON’S SUMMARY, 1875

  Despite the lingering tenacity of aristocratic elements, by 1875 the basic institutions of professionalism had become securely established in the armed services of the major European powers. One indication of this fact is the summary description of the European armies made by the American general, Emory Upton, in that year. Upton had been despatched by General Sherman and Secretary Belknap to study the organization, tactics, discipline, and education of the armies of Europe and Asia, with particular attention to the German military system. In his report Upton stressed the professional institutions which he found to be prevalent throughout Europe and urged their immediate introduction into the American army:

  1. Entry into the officer corps was only by graduation from a military school or by promotion from the ranks after pursuing a course of professional study and passing a qualifying exam.

  2. A war academy educated officers in the advanced science of war, preparing them for staff positions and high command posts.

  3. The general staff demanded officers with “the highest professional training.” Officers rotated between staff and line positions.

  4. “To enable the Government to profit by the best talent in the army, rapid promotion, either by entering the staff corps or by selection, is provided for all officers who manifest decided zeal and professional ability.”

  5. So that the government will know the qualifications of its officers, annual or biennial reports were required from commanding officers, showing “the zeal, aptitude, special qualifications, and personal character” of their subordinates.

  6. “Officers are maintained for the sole benefit of the Government. If, therefore, an officer is ignorant or incompetent, the Government, by means of personal reports, and special examinations, can stop his promotion, and thus prevent injury to the service . . .'”37

  FORMULATION OF THE PROFESSIONAL ETHIC: THE AUTONOMY AND SUBORDINATION OF WAR IN CLAUSEWITZ’S VOM KRIEGE

  The objective emergence of a complicated science of war and of professional institutions devoted to that science rendered obsolete eighteenth-century conceptions of war as an ill-defined craft and of the general as a natural genius. The new conditions required a new theory which received its first comprehensive and explicit formulation in Vom Kriege by Karl von Clausewitz published posthumously in 1831. Significantly, Clausewitz had been an assistant to Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in the work of military reform. He wrote his book while director of the War Academy in the years after 1815. In effect, the book furnished the intellectual rationale for the reforms in which he had previously participated.

  The problem in discussing Clausewitz and his work is to explain the reputation of the former and the permanence of the latter. Military commentators have been virtually unanimous in hailing this red-nosed Prussian as the preeminent military thinker of western society — the Shakespeare or Goethe of military writers — and in describing his work as the Bible of military science.38 Most of these commentators have stressed Clausewitz’s contributions to the evolution of strategy and tactics, his understanding and formulation of the essence of the Napoleonic method. Clausewitz’s views on tactics, however, have long since been outdated, and his statement of the principles of strategy is no more distinguished than that of many other military thinkers. His significant contribution occurs at a higher level of analysis and concerns the inherent nature of war and the relation of war to other forms of human activity. Clausewitz was not, of course, isolated from the intellectual currents about him. Other military writers were groping in the same direction, and many of them anticipated points found in On War. They generally dealt, however, with only incidental aspects of the changes which were taking place in the nature of war. Clausewitz was alone in grasping and expressing the essence of this transformation. For this reason he deservedly occupies in military thought a place roughly comparable to that of Marx in the history of socialist theory: most of the writing which came before him was preliminary, fragmentary, and subsequently embodied in his work; most of that which came after him was exegetic and interpretative of the meaning of the master.

  The basic element in Clausewitz’s theory is his concept of the dual nature of war. War is at one and the same time an autonomous science with its own method and goals and yet a subordinate science in that its ultimate purposes come from outside itself. This concept of war is a true professional one, embodying as it does the essentials of any profession: the delimitation of a unique subject matter independent of other human thought and activity and the recognition of the limits of this subject matter within the total framework of human activity and purpose. Clausewitz expresses many other elements of the professional military ethic. But these are secondary. His seminal contribution is his concept of the dual nature of war and the role of the soldier. Given this, virtually all the other aspects of professionalism must necessarily follow.

  For Clausewitz the essence of war when considered as an independent science, as a thing in itself (Krieg an sich), is force. “War is thus an act of force to compel our adversary to do our will.” War in this sense permits of no limitation. The science of generalship is the science of disarming or overthrowing the enemy by force. In theory this is always necessary. Consequently battle and bloodshed cannot be avoided. “Let us not hear of generals who conquer without bloodshed.” Clausewitz’s stress on force without limit as the essence of war has led some commentators to assume that this is the only side of his thought, that he is exclusively a glorifier of bloody violence: Liddell Hart refers to Clausewitz as “the Mahdi of mass and mutual massacre” and “the source of the doctrine of ‘absolute war,’ the fight to the finish theory.”39 This, however, is a misinterpretation of Clausewitz. Only when considered abstractly, in theory, independent of all else, is war violence without limit. In practice, war is never an isolated act. Force is not an end in itself. It is only justified when it is rationally employed for public purposes. War is always subordinate to the external political ends which determine the extent and na
ture of the violence to be employed. The results of war are never absolute. “In this way the whole field of war ceases to be subject to the strict law of forces pushed to the extreme.” The costs of military action are balanced against the ends to be achieved. The political object of the war remains the guide throughout the struggle. Bullets merely take the place of diplomatic notes. In his most celebrated dictum: “war is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with an admixture of other means.” In short, war has “its own grammar, but not its own logic.”

  This concept of war as an autonomous and yet instrumental science implies a similar theory with respect to the role of the specialist in war. The fact that war has its own grammar requires that the military professionals be permitted to develop their expertise at this grammar without extraneous interference. The “military virtue of an army” is not found in the nature of the cause for which it fights any more than the skill of the lawyer is judged by the persons of his clients. The inherent quality of a military body can only be evaluated in terms of independent military standards. The ends for which the military body is employed, however, are outside its competence to judge: “the political object of war really lies outside of war’s province . . .” War does not have its own logic and purpose. The soldier must always be subordinate to the statesman. The conduct of war is the responsibility of the latter because it “requires a keen insight into state policy in its higher relations.”

  The subordination of the political point of view to the military would be unreasonable, for policy has created the war; policy is the intelligent faculty, war only the instrument, and not the reverse. The subordination of the military point of view to the political is, therefore, the only thing which is possible.