Strategy

by Lawrence Freedman

  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.

  Strategy as Profession and Product

  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 stratēgos in 5th-century Athens. According to Edward Luttwak, the ancient Greek and Byzantine equivalent to our strategy would have been stratēgike episteme (generals’ knowledge) or stratēgōn 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 relati
onships 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.

  In Britain from the start of the nineteenth century, a plethora of words emerged: strategematic, strategematical, strategematist, strategemical. All sought to convey the idea of being versed in strategies and stratagems. Thus, a strategemitor would devise stratagems, while a stratarchy referred to the system of rule in an army, starting with the top commander. This word was once used by British prime minister William Gladstone to refer to how armies would go beyond hierarchy to require absolute obedience to superior officers. Then there was stratarithmetry, which was a way of estimating how many men you had by drawing up an army or body of men into a given geometrical figure. An alternative word for strategist was strategian, which goes neatly with tactician—though this did not catch on.

  The distinction between strategy and tactics was of acknowledged importance as a means of distinguishing between different levels of command and contact with the enemy. Thus strategy was the art of the commander-in-chief “projecting and directing the larger military movements and operations of a campaign,” while tactics was “the art of handling forces in battle or in the immediate presence of the enemy.”8 Soon the word migrated away from its military context and into such diverse areas as trade, politics, and theology.

  The speed with which the word strategy gained currency meant that it came to be used without a generally agreed upon definition. There was a consensus that strategy had something to do with the supreme commander and that it was about linking military means to the objects of war. It involved making connections between all that was going on in the military sphere beyond the more intimate and small-scale maneuvers and encounters handled at the lower levels of command. But the activities that came under the heading of strategy were also understood to be intensely practical, a consequence of the sheer size of the armies of the new age, the extraordinary demands posed by their movement and provisioning, and the factors that would govern how enemies should be approached. Much of this might be subject to forms of practical knowledge and principles that could be described in a systematic and instructive way, with checklists of considerations to be taken into account by the more forward-looking commanders. It is not surprising therefore that strategy became closely associated with planning. Questions of supply and transport limited what could be achieved, and calculations of firepower and fortification influenced decisions on the deployment of troops. Put this way, strategy covered all those aspects of a military campaign that might properly be determined in advance.

  Improved maps made an enormous difference to planning of this sort. Developments in cartography meant that it was possible to consider how a campaign might develop by plotting its likely course on sheets of paper, representing base camps and lines of supply, enemy positions, and opportunities for maneuvers. A start had been made on the reconceptualization of war in spatial terms by a Henry Lloyd, who had left Britain because of his participation in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and then fought with a variety of European armies. Having observed that those who embraced the profession of arms took “little or no pains to study it,” he claimed to have identified fixed principles of war that could vary only in their application.9 Lloyd is credited with inventing the term line of operations, which remains in use to this day and describes an army’s path from its starting point to its final destination. Lloyd influenced subsequent military theorists, including the Prussian Heinrich Dietrich von Bulow, who went to France in 1790 to experience the Revolution first hand. Having studied Napoleon’s methods, he wrote on military affairs, including a Practical Guide to Strategy in 1805. He got somewhat carried away by the possibilities of geometric representations of armies preparing for battle. His reliance on mathematical principles led to him to offer proofs on how armies might constitute themselves and move forward, according to distances from their starting base and enemy objective. The approach can be discerned from his definition of strategy as “all enemy movements out of the enemy’s cannon range or range of vision,” so that tactics covered what happened within that range.10 His observations on tactics were considered to have merit, but much to his chagrin his description of the “new war system” was ignored by Prussian generals.

  Whatever the scientific method might bring to the battlefield, when it came to deciding on the moment, form, and conduct of battle, much would depend on the general’s own judgment—perhaps more a matter of character, insight, and intuition than careful calculation and planning. When battle was joined, the theory could say little because of the many variables in play. At that point, war became an art form. Strategy could be considered a matter of science, in the sense of being systematic, empirically based, and logically developed, covering all those things that could be planned in advance and were subject to calculation. As art, strategy covered actions taken by bold generals who could achieve extraordinary results in unpromising situations.

  Napoleon’s Strategy

  Napoleon preferred to keep the critical ingredients behind his approach beyond explanation. The art of war, he insisted, was simple and commonsensical. It was “all in execution … nothing about it is theoretical.” The essence of the art was simple: “With a numerically inferior army” it was necessary to have “larger forces than the enemy at the point which is to be attacked or defended.” How best to achieve that was an art that could “be learned neither from books nor from practice.” This was matter for the military genius and therefore for intuition. Napoleon’s contribution to strategy was not so much in his theory but in his practice. Nobody could think of better ways of using great armies to win great wars.

  Napoleon was not creating new forms of warfare completely from scratch. He was building on the achievements of Frederick the Great, the most admired commander of his time. Frederick was king of Prussia from 1740 to 1786 and a reflective and prolific writer on war. His success was the result of turning his army into a responsive instrument, well trained and held together by tough discipline. Initially he preferred his wars to be “short and lively,” which required accepting battle. Long wars exhausted a state’s resources as well as its soldiers, and Frederick’s country was relatively poor. His seizure of Silesia early in his reign, during the War of Austrian Succession, made his reputation as a tactical genius. Whitman uses this campaign as a prime example of how a “law of victory” could ensure restraint, so long as both sides accepted battle as a form of wager. Frederick observed that battles “decide the fortune of states” and could “put an end to a dispute that otherwise might never be settled.” As kings were subject to “no superior tribunal,” combat could “decide their rights” and “judge the validity of their reasons.”11

  Over time, however, Frederick became more wary of battle due to its dependence upon chance. Success might need to come through the accumulation of small gains rather than a single decisive encounter. Unlike Napoleon, Frederick preferred to avoid fighting too far from his own borders, did not expect to destroy the opposing army in battle, and avoided frontal attacks. His signature tactic was the “oblique order,” an often complex maneuver requiring a disciplined force. It involved concentrating forces against the enemy’s strongest flank while avoiding engagement on his own weak flank. If the enemy did not succumb, an orderly retreat would still be possible; if the enemy flank was overrun, the next step was to wheel round and roll up his line. What Frederick shared with Napoleon—and what later theorists celebrated in both—was the ability to create strength on the battlefield, even without an overall numerical advantage, and direct it against an enemy’s vulnerabilities.

  As a young officer, Napoleon also read Guibert and took from him some basic ideas which he made his own. In particular, he noted the need to launch attacks at the key p
oints where superiority had been achieved, and to reach these points by moving quickly. Although Guibert had observed that “hegemony over Europe will fall to that nation which … becomes possessed of manly virtues and creates a national army,” he had not seen conscription as the means to this end. He assumed the duties of a citizen and a soldier to be opposed. At most, a militia might be raised as a defensive force. The actual creation of the mass army can be credited to Lazar Carnot, a key figure in the French Revolution, who had an uneasy relationship with Napoleon but served him until 1815. It was Carnot who as minister of war used conscription to create the levée en masse and turned it into a formidable, trained, and disciplined organization. Carnot also showed how a mass army could be used as an offensive instrument by separating it into independent units that could move faster than the enemy, enabling attacks against the flanks and creating opportunities to cut off communications. Most of Napoleon’s generals learned their trade under Carnot.