Luttwak encouraged the view that attrition based on firepower and maneuver based on movement were almost polar opposites. Attrition was presented as not so much a regrettable response to a challenging predicament but a deliberate choice reflecting a particular mindset. For Luttwak it involved an “exaggerated dependence on firepower as such to the detriment of maneuver and flexibility.” This style, he acknowledged, had the “great attractions of predictability and functional simplicity.” All military effort could be geared to attacking sets of targets in a systematic fashion. Under its misleading aura, war would be “governed by a logic analogous to that of microeconomics.” The “conduct of warfare at all levels” would be “analogous to the management of a profit-maximizing industrial enterprise.” In the end, superior resources should win, even though applied with routine and repetitive tactics and procedures. The greater the input, the greater the output. The costs would lie in absorbing the enemy’s reciprocal attrition and the calculation could be upended should the enemy attract an ally to achieve a superior balance of power. Against this dull, methodical, bureaucratic linearity Luttwak promoted imaginative flair and operational paradox. Against attritional science he sought a maneuverist art.28 Relational-maneuver warfare sought to avoid enemy strength in order to attack enemy weakness. It was, Luttwak suggested, an almost compulsory approach for the resource-weak side.
In posing the issue in these terms, Boyd, Luttwak, and their contemporaries were urging a return to the military classics of the modern era, but with a postmodern twist resulting from their heightened sensitivity to cognitive processes. On the critical issues of military strategy, the classics offered less clarity than was often supposed, and so the net result was often to update for a new audience the muddle of earlier times. The starting point was inevitably Clausewitz. But as was well known, On War was not a finished work and Clausewitz was in the process of revising his ideas at the time of his death. The resultant ambiguity had affected all those who had taken this work as their starting point, and further distortions had arisen in the responses of key figures such as Delbrück and then Liddell Hart to what they believed Clausewitz had said. Complications of language and translation easily added to the confusion, which meant that the return to the classics led to some intense debates about what they really meant—as if that could help sort out the conceptual confusion that was developing around the attempted application of their ideas to contemporary problems. While these debates were gathering steam, an important new English translation of Clausewitz by Peter Paret and Michael Howard was published and an English edition of Delbrück became available for the first time.29
Behind all of this there was one large issue, which was whether there was an alternative to large-scale battle as a route to victory. There was a further and more difficult issue about the meaning (and possibility) of victory itself. Limited war had been prominent in the eighteenth century and there were examples of it from the nineteenth. If a war was to end without one state subjugating another, there was going to have to be some sort of negotiation. The bargain struck could be assumed to have some relationship to the balance of power at the conclusion of hostilities. Clausewitz had recognized this possibility, but he had not explored it fully. His main focus was the use of battle to eliminate the enemy army as a fighting force and thus render the enemy state helpless.
This became known as the strategy of annihilation, a term used by von Moltke and then compared by Delbrück with a strategy of exhaustion. Delbrück saw exhaustion as persuading the enemy to abandon the fight even though its army had not been annihilated. Exhaustion suggested that the enemy had been worn down to the point that it could not face further war. This was most likely to occur if its survival was not at issue and the stakes were limited and susceptible to compromise. Confusion then entered with regard to method, because there was no reason why exhaustion could not result from a series of inconclusive battles. Delbrück also used the term “bipolar strategy” to capture the idea of a commander deciding from moment to moment whether to achieve a goal by battle or maneuver.
The choice between annihilation and exhaustion could not just be a matter of strategic preference but had to reflect the material situation. If battle was unavoidable, there must be sufficient strength to prevail but also, even after a decisive battle, enough residual capability to go on and occupy enemy territory. It might be possible to gain an initial advantage through maneuver, but this might not be sufficient if despite the loss of one army the enemy could field another. Unless one was confident of possessing ultimate military superiority, a push for annihilation was unwise. If force had to be conserved for a long haul, set-piece battles were best avoided other than in the most favorable circumstances. For this reason an association developed between exhaustion and maneuver, as ways of avoiding direct battle.30
It was Liddell Hart who took the idea of maneuver and developed it to a new stage by contrasting it much more sharply with major battle. To further add to the confusion, frontal assaults had now become associated with attrition since the Great War, although not as Delbrück understood the term (to the extent that was the term he had in mind). Battle of this scale and intensity went well beyond anything envisaged by Clausewitz, however much he might have recognized the underlying strategic principles in play. Liddell Hart kept open the possibility of defeating an opponent by leaving them confused and disoriented, caught by surprise rather than buckling under heavy casualties. What was less clear was whether something that could work well when one army caught another off guard could work with whole states. Even after stunning setbacks in the field, some states might be able to play for time to bring in reserves or move to civil resistance. There was therefore one issue about whether it was possible to defeat opponents in the field by means other than frontal assault, and another about how military victories could be translated into substantial political gains.
Which brings us back to Clausewitz, because these two issues—which go to the heart of his unfulfilled interest in deviations from the strategy of annihilation—were captured but not resolved in one of his enduring but most unsatisfactory concepts: the center of gravity or Schwerpunkt. This was a concept which came to be adopted by Western military establishments, although in ways that aggravated its inherent problems. So familiar did the concept become that it started to be referred to by its acronym COG. Clausewitz’s focus was on the enemy army, but as the center of gravity was identified as the source of the opponent’s power and strength, it could also refer to an alliance or national will.
By the late 1980s, these various strands had come together to form a distinct doctrinal form embedded in Western military establishment. There should be a military focus on the operational level of warfare. Here forces should be directed against the opponent’s center of gravity. This would be that point or set of points where the application of military force would be most likely to result in the enemy’s surrender. The new thinking encouraged the belief that the most important centers of gravity would be those that led to the enemy’s brain, using shock and disorder to produce mental dislocation and therefore paralysis rather than blasting away at the enemy’s physical strength.
This distinction between the two forms of warfare was sharpened, almost to the point of caricature. The maneuverists presented attritionists in an unflattering light, seeing the “enemy as targets to be engaged and destroyed systematically. Thus the focus is on efficiency, leading to a methodical almost scientific approach to war.” Everything depended on the efficiency with which firepower was employed, encouraging centralized control rather than local initiative. Progress would be defined in quantitative terms, with battle damage assessments, “body counts,” and terrain captured. Relying on inflicting punishing attrition meant being prepared to accept it in return. Victory would not “depend so much on military competence as on sheer superiority of numbers in men and equipment.” The implication was that lives were being sacrificed because of a lack of imagination and skill. Here the maneuverist, relying
on intelligence, scored. The maneuverist would
circumvent a problem and attack it from a position of advantage rather than meet it straight on. The goal is the application of strength against selected enemy weakness. By definition, maneuver relies on speed and surprise, for without either we cannot concentrate strength against enemy weakness.
The objective was “not so much to destroy physically as it [was] to shatter the enemy’s cohesion, organization, command and psychological balance.”31 To do this required superior skill and judgment. Who would not want to be associated with such a strategy?
The key elements of this approach were all problematic, however. The idea of distinct levels of strategy was rooted in established hierarchies. The underlying principle was that at each level the objectives would be passed down from the higher. At the level of grand strategy, a conflict was anticipated, alliances forged, economies geared, people braced, resources allocated, and military roles defined. At the level of strategy, the political objectives were turned into military goals; priorities and specific objectives were agreed upon and allocations of men and equipment made accordingly. At the level of grand tactics or operations, judgments were made as to the most appropriate form of warfare to achieve the goals of that particular campaign in the light of the prevailing conditions. At the level of tactics, military units attempted to push forward the goals of the campaign in the specific circumstances in which they found themselves.
These levels reflected hierarchical command structures geared to regular warfare between great powers as much as sharp distinctions in contemporary practice. What was striking, given the contemporary fascination with systems theory and information flows, was that these were generally considered to challenge such structures. Under the influence of similar ideas, business practice was moving to flatter hierarchies. Too many chains in the command structure were likely to lead to unresponsive organizations. Information up the chain about what was going on at ground level would be slow and subject to distortion, while initiative could be dampened if new orders always had to come down the chain.
This assumption continued to be reflected in discussions of tactical issues as short term, immediate, and not necessarily of lasting importance; while strategic issues were the big ones, long term and fateful, potentially existential in their implications. Yet in limited wars, single engagements could be decisive and so local tactical factors would become matters of grand strategy and subject to the highest political control. During the 1990s, as local factors became more important, the Americans began to talk of a “strategic corporal,” able to “make well-reasoned and independent decisions under extreme stress—decisions that will likely be subject to the harsh scrutiny of both the media and the court of public opinion.” The strategic corporal would be aware that his actions would “potentially influence not only the immediate tactical situation, but the operational and strategic levels as well,” and thus the “outcome of the larger operation.”32
There was also an operational dimension at work at the strategic and tactical levels. British historian Michael Howard identified three other dimensions of strategy in addition to the operational. These were the logistical, social, and technological. He warned of the danger of a preoccupation with operations in isolation from the logistical effort which made them possible, the social context in which they were being conducted, and the forms of technology which they exploited.33 The attraction of the focus on an operational level where all the critical decisions on the employment of forces took place was that they would be taken away from the civilian-military interface. That was at the notionally more important strategic level. In practice, limiting the focus to a distinct operational level had the effect of keeping actual combat under professional military purview and away from interfering civilian amateurs. In this it reflected one of the military’s explanations for failure in the Vietnam War: civilian “micromanagement.”
The second set of problems occurred with the notion of the center of gravity. Even as the concept was adopted there was little agreement about what commanders should be looking for and the methodology required to find it. It all might have been simpler if they had adopted Jomini’s concept of the decisive point, against which the greatest possible force should be directed. This at least would have avoided the burdens of inappropriate metaphor.34
The army, for example, with access to a large force of its own, took the view that this was not about pitting “strength against strength” as originally supposed but more about an indirect approach, applying “combat power against a series of decisive points that avoided enemy strengths.”35 The Marine Corps, with a smaller capability, initially also took the view that it was best to attack not the enemy’s strengths but its critical vulnerabilities. The Corps even observed dangers in speaking of a center of gravity, because Clausewitz was about “daring all to win all” in a climactic test of strength.36 Critical vulnerabilities appeared to be no easier to identify than centers of gravity. The recommendation was to exploit “any and all vulnerabilities” until uncovering a decisive opportunity. This somewhat random process led Joe Strange of the Marine Corps War College to focus on critical capabilities and requirements leading to a process opening with the exploitation of critical vulnerabilities, which would have the cumulative effect of undermining the enemy’s center of gravity.37
One influential version was developed by John Warden for the air force. He accepted Clausewitz’s basic proposition but sought to relate it to air power. The enemy’s center of gravity was “that point where the enemy is most vulnerable and where an attack will have the best chance of being decisive.” The evidence of decisiveness would be that the enemy leadership could then be convinced “to do what one wants to do.” Warden presented the enemy (any enemy) as a system made up of a several interrelated parts held together by a number of nodes and links, some of which were critical. The centers of gravity could be found in each of the five component parts (or rings)—leadership, organic essentials, infrastructure, population, and fielded forces—that described any strategic entity. The point of this was that air power was uniquely qualified to strike at these points simultaneously through parallel, as opposed to sequential or serial, attacks in order to overwhelm and thereby paralyze an opponent. The effect, he argued, would be decisive.38 The presumption was that the centers were founded on physical structures and their loss would lead the enemy to accept that the game was up. Warden thus sought to demonstrate how employing the sort of firepower that might be associated with attrition could, with careful analysis of targets, be used to achieve the sort of disorientation sought by the maneuverists.
There was, therefore, no consensus on what these concepts meant. After two decades of various formulations it was observed that “the lack of doctrinal guidance on developing and employing COGs wastes planners’ time and provides few tangible benefits.” It was reported that planning teams could “take hours—if not days—arguing over what is and is not the enemy’s COG,” with the outcome often decided by the strongest personality rather than the best analysis.39 This was, however, written in the belief that with a better methodology the task would be manageable and the results worthwhile. The real problem was that concept of a center of gravity had been expanded to the point of meaninglessness. It could refer to a target or a number of targets. The center might be identified because it constituted a source of enemy strength and/or a critical vulnerability. It could be found in the physical, psychological, or political spheres. If all went well once the center was attacked, the result would be decisive or else have consequences with potentially decisive effects, though this might depend on being combined with other significant events. It had become totally detached from the original metaphor, yet the terminology encouraged the expectation that there could be a very specific set of operational objectives that would produce the desired political effect if attacked properly. This reflected Clausewitz’s original notion that the key to victory lay in the defeat of the enemy’s military system, but if the
sources of the enemy’s political resilience lay somewhere else, attacks on this supposed center would be bound to disappoint. If it was not a physical location or set of capabilities, but instead a political ideology or an alliance, it would be harder to work out what was supposed to be targeted.
The third set of problems was that military history gave little support to the dichotomous view of attrition and maneuver, or that maneuver could serve as an overall doctrine rather than an occasional opportunity. Carter Malkasian complained that “no commander or theorist who has purposefully implemented attrition or developed the concept was ever cited by advocates of maneuver warfare.”40 Though attrition was presented as a bloody slogging match with troops being sacrificed in mindless exchanges of firepower, Malkasian demonstrated that it could include “in-depth withdrawals, limited ground offensive, frontal assaults, patrolling, careful defensive, scorched-earth tactics, guerrilla warfare, air strikes, artillery firepower, or raids.” There had been many examples of successful attritional campaigns, of which Russia’s defense against Napoleon in 1812 was “perhaps the grandest.”41 The key characteristic of attrition was that it was about wearing down the enemy, which meant the process was likely to be protracted, gradual, and piecemeal. While it could end with a decisive battle, it could also lead to a negotiation when both sides had decided that they had had enough. This meant that it suited coercive strategies with moderate aims. The danger was that attrition could turn into a contest of endurance, and it was hard to know in advance when the enemy would be worn down.
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