Strategy

by Lawrence Freedman

  13. Cited by Foley, “The Real Schlieffen Plan,” 109.

  14. Hew Strachan, “Strategy and Contingency,” International Affairs 87, no. 6 (2011): 1290.

  15. He did not start seriously publishing until he was 50, after which he published almost twenty books and numerous essays. The most important works are The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1890) and The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1892).

  16. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire, 400–402.

  17. Jon Tetsuro Sumida, Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command: The Classic Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan Reconsidered (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1999).

  18. Robert Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Man and His Letters (Annapolis: U. S. Naval Institute Press, 1977). See also Dirk Böker, Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States Before World War I (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 103–104.

  19. Alfred Mahan, Naval Strategy Compared and Contrasted with the Principles and Practice of Military Operations on Land: Lectures Delivered at U.S. Naval War College, Newport, R.I., Between the Years 1887 and 1911 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1911), 6–8.

  20. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution, v–vi.

  21. Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 546. This was referring to Naval Strategy Compared and Contrasted.

  22. Böker, Militarism in a Global Age, 104–107.

  23. Cited in Liam Cleaver, “The Pen Behind the Fleet: The Influence of Sir Julian Stafford Corbett on British Naval Development, 1898–1918,” Comparative Strategy 14 (January 1995), 52–53.

  24. Barry M. Gough, “Maritime Strategy: The Legacies of Mahan and Corbett as Philosophers of Sea Power,” The RUSI Journ al 133, no. 4 (December 1988): 55–62.

  25. Donald M. Schurman, Julian S. Corbett, 1854–1922 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1981), 54. See also Eric Grove, “Introduction,” in Julian Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1988). This book was first published in 1911. The annotated 1988 publication also contains “The Green Pamphlet” of 1909. See also Azar Gat, The Development of Military Thought: The Nineteenth Century.

  26. On the relationship between Corbett and Clausewitz, see Chapter 18 of Michael Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought (London: Frank Cass, 2001).

  27. Corbett, Some Principles, 62–63.

  28. Ibid., 16, 91, 25, 152, 160.

  29. H. J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” The Geographical Journal 23 (1904): 421–444.

  30. H. J. Mackinder, “Manpower as a Measure of National and Imperial Strength,” National and English Review 45 (1905): 136–143, cited in Lucian Ashworth, “Realism and the Spirit of 1919: Halford Mackinder, Geopolitics and the Reality of the League of Nations,” European Journal of International Relations 17, no. 2 (June 2011): 279–301. Also on Mackinder, see B. W. Blouet, Halford Mackinder: A Biography (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987).

  31. H. J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (Suffolk: Penguin Books, 1919), 86; Geoffrey Sloan, “Sir Halford J. Mackinder: The Heartland Theory Then and Now,” Journal of Strategic Studies 22, 2–3 (1999): 15–38.

  32. Ibid., 194.

  33. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot,” 437.

  34. Ola Tunander, “Swedish-German Geopolitics for a New Century—Rudolf Kjellén’s ‘The State as a Living Organism,’” Review of International Studies 27, 3 (2001): 451–463.

  35. The consequential discrediting of an approach that encouraged consideration of the strategic implications of the physical environment has been regretted by, among others, Colin Gray, The Geopolitics of Super Power (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988). See also Colin Gray, “In Defence of the Heartland: Sir Halford Mackinder and His Critics a Hundred Years On,” Comparative Strategy 23, no. 1 (2004): 9–25.

  10 Brain and Brawn

  1. Isabel Hull argues that this behavior was the result of a reckless and insensitive military culture that had developed during the course of colonial wars. Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

  2. Craig, “Delbrück: The Military Historian,” 348 (see chap. 9, n. 1).

  3. See Mark Clodfelter, Beneficial Bombing: The Progressive Foundations of American Air Power 1917–1945 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010).

  4. Curiously, given his later role as an enthusiastic proponent of mass bombing, his first thoughts were to deplore even thinking about attacks on defenseless cities and to argue for an international convention to ban such a thing. See Thomas Hippler, “Democracy and War in the Strategic Thought of Guilio Douhet,” in Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers, eds., The Changing Character of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 170.

  5. Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, translated by Dino Ferrari (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1983). Reprint of 1942 original. This was published by the War Department in Italy. Though judged a troublemaker during the war, he was now celebrated as something of a seer and became briefly commissioner of aviation under the Fascists. Mitchell’s major statement is found in William Mitchell, Winged Defense: The Development and Possibilities of Modern Air Power—Economic and Military (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925). Caproni’s views were captured by a journalist Nino Salvaneschi who wrote a pamphlet in 1917 entitled Let Us Kill the War, Let Us Aim at the Heart of the Enemy, which advocated attacking manufacturing capacity. David MacIsaac, “Voices from the Central Blue: The Airpower Theorists,” in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy, 624–647 (see chap. 6, n. 2).

  6. Azar Gat, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and Other Modernists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

  7. Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 4 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1961), Vol. 4, pp. 2, 74.

  8. Sir Hugh Dowding, “Employment of the Fighter Command in Home Defence,” Naval War College Review 45 (Spring 1992): 36. Reprint of 1937 lecture to the RAF Staff College.

  9. David S. Fadok, “John Boyd and John Warden: Airpower’s Quest for Strategic Paralysis,” in Col. Phillip S. Meilinger, ed., Paths of Heaven (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1997), 382.

  10. Douhet, Command of the Air.

  11. Phillip S. Meilinger, “Giulio Douhet and the Origins of Airpower Theory,” in Phillip S. Meilinger, ed., Paths of Heaven, 27; Bernard Brodie, “The Heritage of Douhet,” Air University Quarterly Review 6 (Summer 1963): 120–126.

  12. Wells’s scenario involved a preemptive German attack on the United States using dirigibles before the Americans had a chance to take full advantage of the Wright Brothers’ new invention.

  13. Brian Holden Reid, J. F. C. Fuller: Military Thinker (London: Macmillan, 1987), 55, 51, 73.

  14. Ibid.; Anthony Trythell, ‘Boney’ Fuller: The Intellectual General (London: Cassell, 1977); Gat, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War.

  15. Gat, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War, 40–41.

  16. J. F. C. Fuller, The Foundations of the Science of War (London: Hutchinson, 1925), 47.

  17. Ibid., 35.

  18. Ibid., 141.

  11 The Indirect Approach

  1. On the influence of the Somme on Liddell Hart, see Hew Strachan, “‘The Real War’: Liddell Hart, Crutwell, and Falls,” in Brian Bond, ed., The First World War and British Military History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

  2. John Mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (London: Brassey’s, 1988). Gat, without denying Liddell Hart’s vanity and self-aggrandizement, has challenged Mearsheimer’s critique. Azar Gat, “Liddell Hart’s Theory of Armoured Warfare: Revising the Revisionis
ts,” Journal of Strategic Studies 19 (1996): 1–30.

  3. Gat, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War, 146–160 (see chap. 7, n. 5).

  4. Basil Liddell Hart, The Ghost of Napoleon (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), 125–126.

  5. Christopher Bassford, Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), Chapter 15.

  6. Griffiths, Sun Tzu, vii (see chap. 4, n. 5).

  7. Alex Danchev, Alchemist of War: The Life of Basil Liddell Hart (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998).

  8. Reid, J. F. C. Fuller, 159 (see chap. 10, n. 13).

  9. Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 335, 339, 341, 344.

  10. Brian Bond, Liddell Hart: A Study of his Military Thought. (London: Cassell, 1977), 56.

  11. Basil Liddell Hart, Paris, or the Future of War (London: Kegan Paul, 1925), 12. Liddell Hart, like Fuller, was impressed by the impact of German bombing attacks on Britain in World War I: “Witnesses of the earlier air attacks before our defence was organized, will not be disposed to underestimate the panic and disturbance that would result from a concentrated blow dealt by a superior air fleet. Who that saw it will ever forget the nightly sight of the population of a great industrial and shipping town, such as Hull, streaming out into the fields on the first sound of the alarm signals? Women, children, babies in arms, spending night after night huddled in sodden fields, shivering under a bitter winter sky.” Basil Liddell Hart, Paris, or the Future of War (New York: Dutton, 1925), 39.

  12. Richard K. Betts, “Is Strategy an Illusion?” International Security 25, 2 (Autumn 2000): 11.

  13. Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World: 1940–1941 (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 47.

  14. Churchill’s memoir of the war, written in its aftermath, denied that there was any consideration of whether or not to fight on. Resistance was “taken for granted and as a matter of course.” It would have been a waste of time to worry about “such unreal, academic issues” as a negotiated settlement. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Their Finest Hour, vol. 2 (London: Penguin, 1949), 157. Reynolds explains the cover-up by a desire to protect Halifax, who was still a colleague in the higher ranks of the Conservative Party when the book was written in 1948, yet who later acquired the mantle of a would-be appeaser held back by Churchill’s bellicosity. The record, however, shows that Churchill was aware that negotiations with Germany might at some point be necessary. He knew that the next stage might turn out very badly, and that a settlement that compromised British independence might have to be accepted, but his task was to make invasion as hard as possible for the Germans, and his vivid language and steely demeanor (“We shall fight on the beaches … We shall never surrender”) were in that respect vital parts of his weaponry. The story he told in 1940 was of inevitable victory and he had no desire to correct it when he got the chance to rewrite it in 1948. David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2005), 172–173.

  15. Eliot Cohen, “Churchill and Coalition Strategy,” in Paul Kennedy, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 66.

  16. Max Hastings, Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45 (London: Harper-Collins, 2010), Chapter 1.

  17. The estimated 35,000 purged represented half the officer corps, 90 percent of all generals, and 80 percent of all colonels.

  18. Winston Churchill, The Second World War, The Grand Alliance, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1949), 607–608.

  12 Nuclear Games

  1. Walter Lippmann, The Cold War (Boston: Little Brown, 1947).

  2. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (London: Bodley Head, 1980), 445. In a subsequent correspondence, another journalist, Herbert Swope, claimed paternity in a speech he wrote for Bernard Baruch, a high-profile financier. He also claimed to have been thinking back to the late 1930s when he had been asked whether America would get involved in a “shooting war” in Europe. He was struck by the oddity of the phrase: “It was like saying a death murder—rather tautological, verbose, and redundant.” He thought the opposite of a “hot war” was a “cold war” and he began to use the phrase. William Safire, Safire’s New Political Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 134–135.

  3. Lippmann’s analysis came in response to an article in Foreign Affairs written from Moscow by the American diplomat George Kennan, under the pseudonym “X,” warning of Soviet ambitions and urging the new doctrine of containment. X, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 7 (1947): 566–582.

  4. George Orwell, “You and the Atomic Bomb,” Tribune, October 19, 1945. Reprinted in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The Collected Essays; Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 8–10.

  5. Barry Scott Zellen, State of Doom: Bernard Brodie, the Bomb and the Birth of the Bipolar World (New York: Continuum, 2012), 27.

  6. Bernard Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon (New York: Harcourt, 1946), 52.

  7. Bernard Brodie, “Strategy as a Science,” World Politics 1, no. 4 (July 1949): 476.

  8. Patrick Blackett, Studies of War, Nuclear and Conventional (New York: Hill & Wang, 1962), 177.

  9. Paul Kennedy, Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2013).

  10. Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, “Simulating the Unthinkable: Gaming Future War in the 1950s and 1960s,” Social Studies of Science 30, no. 2 (April 2000): 169, 170.

  11. Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12–17.

  12. Hedley Bull, The Control of the Arms Race (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961), 48.

  13. Hedley Bull, “Strategic Studies and Its Critics,” World Politics 20, no. 4 (July 1968): 593–605.

  14. Charles Hitch and Roland N. McKean, The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).

  15. Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1993), 102–103.

  16. Thomas D. White, “Strategy and the Defense Intellectuals,” The Saturday Evening Post, May 4, 1963, cited by Alain Enthoven and Wayne Smith, How Much Is Enough? (New York; London: Harper & Row, 1971), 78. For a critique of the role of systems analysis, see Stephen Rosen, “Systems Analysis and the Quest for Rational Defense,” The Public Interest 76 (Summer 1984): 121–159.

  17. Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (London: Cassell, 1974), 474–475.

  18. Cited in William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 6.

  19. Oskar Morgenstern, “The Collaboration between Oskar Morgenstern and John von Neumann,” Journal of Economic Literature 14, no. 3 (September 1976): 805–816. E. Roy Weintraub, Toward a History of Game Theory (London: Duke University Press, 1992); R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions; Introduction and Critical Survey (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1957).

  20. Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 8.

  21. Philip Mirowski, “Mid-Century Cyborg Agonistes: Economics Meets Operations Research,” Social Studies of Science 29 (1999): 694.

  22. John McDonald, Strategy in Poker, Business & War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), 14, 69, 126.

  23. Jessie Bernard, “The Theory of Games of Strategy as a Modern Sociology of Conflict,” American Journal of Sociology 59 (1954): 411–424.

  13 The Rationality of Irrationality

  1. This is discussed in Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 3rd ed. (London: Palgrave, 2005).

  2. Colin Gray, Strategic Studies: A Critical Assessment (New York: The Greenwood Press, 1982).

  3. R. J. Overy, “Air Power and the Origins of Deterrence Theory Before 1939,” Journal of Strategic Studies 15, no. 1 (March 1992): 73–101. See also George Quester, Deterre
nce Before Hiroshima (New York: Wiley, 1966).

  4. Stanley Hoffmann, “The Acceptability of Military Force,” in Francois Duchene, ed., Force in Modern Societies: Its Place in International Politics (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1973), 6.