The Gazala-Tobruk sequence was the greatest victory of Rommel’s career, not merely a triumph on the tactical level, but an operational level win, a victory that even General Halder could love. Call it Rommel’s Rule #1, which is still a recipe for success today: “Be sure to erupt into your opponent’s rear with an entire Panzer army in the opening moments of the battle.”
Even here, however, let us be honest. Smashing 8th Army at Gazala and taking tens of thousands of prisoners at Tobruk did little to solve the strategic problem. Unless the British were destroyed altogether, they would reinforce to a level the Axis could not match. Many later analysts argue that the Panzerarmee should have paused now, waited until some sort of combined airborne-naval operation had been launched against Malta to improve the logistics, and only then acted. Such arguments ignore the dynamic of the desert battle, however; they ignore the morale imperative of keeping a victorious army in motion; above all they ignore the personality of Rommel himself.
Pause? Halt? Wait? Anyone who expected Rommel to ease up on the throttle clearly hadn’t been paying attention. Instead, the Panzerarmee vaulted across the border into Egypt with virtually no preparation. To Rommel, to his men, and even to Hitler and Mussolini, it must have looked like a great victory lay just over the next horizon: Cairo, Alexandria, the Suez Canal, the British Empire itself.
In reality, it is possible today to see what the great Prussian philosopher of war Karl von Clausewitz once called the “culmination point” — that moment in every campaign when the offensive begins to lose steam, run down, and eventually stop altogether. The Panzerarmee was exhausted, its equipment was worn out and in desperate need of repair. Captured British stores and vehicles had become its life-blood, Canadian Ford trucks in particular. The manpower was breaking down. A chronic shortage of potable water had put thousands of soldiers on the sick rolls. Colonel Siegfried Westphal, the Panzerarmee‘s operations chief (the “Ia”, in German parlance), was yellow with jaundice. The army’s intelligence chief (the “Ic”), Colonel Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin, was wasting away with amoebic dysentery. Rommel had a little of both, as well as a serious blood-pressure problem (no doubt stress-induced) and a chronic and bothersome sinusitis condition. While it would be easy to view all these illnesses as simple bad luck, they were, in fact, the price Rommel and all the rest of them were paying for fighting an overseas expeditionary campaign with inadequate resources.
The same might be said for the rest of the campaign. The Panzerarmee made an ad hoc attempt to break thought the British bottleneck at El Alamein in July. It failed, coming to grief against British defenses on the Ruweisat ridge. There was a second, more deliberate, attempt in August. After an initial breakthrough, it crashed into strong British defenses at Alam Halfa ridge and it, too, failed. After yet another long pause, a “third battle of El Alamein” began in late October. This time, it was the well supplied British on the attack, however, and they managed to smash through the Panzerarmee and drive Rommel and company back, not hundreds of miles, but more than a thousand, out of the desert altogether and into Tunisia. There was still fighting to be done in Africa, but the “desert war” was over.
Robert Citino, “Drive to Nowhere: The Myth of the Afrika Korps, 1941-43″, The National WWII Museum, 2012. (Originally published in MHQ, Summer 2012).
April 28, 2023
QotD: The high-water mark of the Panzerarmee Afrika
April 14, 2023
QotD: The three great strategic sins
The second sin is the elevation of operational concerns over strategic ones, the usurpation of strategy with operations, which we have discussed before. This is, by the by, also an error in managing the relationship of the trinity, allowing the general’s role in managing friction to usurp the state’s role in managing politics.
Perhaps the greatest example of this is the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; an operational consideration (the destruction of the US Pacific Fleet) and even the tactics necessary to achieve that operational objective, were elevated above the strategic consideration of “should Japan, in the midst of an endless, probably unwinnable war against a third-rate power (the Republic of China) also go to war with a first-rate power (the United States) in order to free up oil-supplies for the first war”. Hara Tadaichi’s pithy summary is always worth quoting, “We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war.”
How does this error happen? It tends to come from two main sources. First, it usually occurs most dramatically in military systems where the military leadership – which has been trained for operations and tactics, not strategy, which you will recall is the province of kings, ministers and presidents – usurps the leadership of the state. Second, it tends to occur when those military leaders – influenced by their operational training – take the operational conditions of their planning as assumed constants. “What do we do if we go to war with the United States” becomes “What do we do when we go to war with the United States” which elides out the strategic question “should we go to war with the United States?” entirely – and catastrophically, as for Imperial Japan, the answer to that unasked question of should we do this was clearly Oh my, NO.
(Bibliography note: It would hardly be fitting for me to declare these errors common and not provide examples. Two of the best case-studies I have read in this kind of strategic-thinking-failure-as-organizational-culture-failure are I. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (2005) and Parshall and Tully, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway (2005). Also worth checking out, Daddis, “Chasing the Austerlitz Ideal: The Enduring Quest for Decisive Battle” in Armed Forces Journal (2006): 38-41. The same themes naturally come up in Daddis, Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (2017)).
The third and final sin is easy to understand: a failure to update the strategy as conditions change. Quite often this happens in conjunction with the second sin, as once those operational concerns take over the place of strategy, it becomes difficult for leaders to consider new strategy as opposed to simply new operations in the pursuit of strategic goals which are often already lost beyond all retrieval. But this can happen without a subordination failure, due to sunk-costs and the different incentives faced by the state and its leaders. The classic example being functionally every major power in the First World War: by 1915 or 1916, it ought to have been obvious that no gains made as a result of the war could possibly be worth its continuance. Yet it was continued, both because having lost so much it seemed wrong to give up without “victory” and also because, for the politicians who had initially supported the war, to admit it was a useless waste was political suicide.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part VIII: The Mind of Saruman”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-06-19.
February 9, 2023
On Clausewitz
Bruce Gudmundsson’s Tactical Notebook Substack has covered a lot of WW1-era artillery unit organization since I started subscribing, but on Tuesday he offered some notes on how to approach the life and work of Carl von Clausewitz for the non-professional-soldier audience:
Carl von Clausewitz by Alexander Becker, circa 1867.
The beginning of wisdom where Clausewitz is concerned is to realize that he was the professional soldier with a great deal of trigger time under his belt. If you doubt this, crack open one of the two fine biographies that are readily available to English-speaking readers. Indeed, even if you need no convincing on the subject of the active service of the Philosopher of War, a biography is a good place to start your engagement with this extraordinarily interesting man.
For reasons of style and sentiment, I prefer the older of the two biographies. Composed by popular historian Roger Parkinson in the days before Clausewitz was cool, Clausewitz: A Biography devotes nine of its seventeen substantive chapters (the three-page epilogue doesn’t count) to tales of active service. It is, moreover, the sort of book that was written to be read, for edification and enjoyment, by intelligent members of the general public.
Clausewitz: His Life and Work, is the product of our own times, one in which a great deal of military history is written by people with doctoral degrees, and people with doctoral degrees teach at war colleges. Though afflicted with both of these aforementioned handicaps, author Donald J. Stoker has managed to produce a work as readable as that of Parkinson. Better yet, he has succeeded in devoting even more attention to periods when Clausewitz was more concerned with the immediate possibility of enfilade and defilade than the distinction between “nature” and “character”.
Once you have learned a bit about Clausewitz the soldier, you will be ready to embrace Carl the lover. For this stage of your journey, you will have but one companion, Vanya Eftimova Bellinger’s Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War.
Fear not, while this biography of the remarkable Frau von Clausewitz is a love story, it has little in common with what passes for romance these days. Neither is it, as the subtitle suggests, largely about the posthumous assembly of the various fragments of On War into the work that made its author famous. (Professor Bellinger tells that tale in less than five pages.) Rather, Marie von Clausewitz is largely a tale of the books, ideas, culture, and politics of the times and places in which the heroine and her husband lived.
If you wish to delve further into the aforementioned milieu, you should read all three of the books of Peter Paret that have “Clausewitz” in their titles. In sharp contrast to his partner in translation, Professor Paret was much more interested in the ideas that influenced Clausewitz than the way that people of subsequent generations reacted to the products of his pen. (While the greatest, by far, of all American Clausewitz scholars, Paret was, first and last, a student of the great reform movement that took place in Prussia after the disaster of Jena-Auerstadt.) If, however, you wish a more direct route into the military mind of the subject of this piece, then the next step in your journey should consist of a long visit with Gerhard von Scharnhorst.
January 27, 2023
QotD: What is Strategy?
(Attentive readers who know their Clausewitz (drink!) will recognize that I am being both broader and narrower than he in how I use the term strategy. Clausewitz terms strategy as “the employment of battles to gain the end of war” which is more nearly what we today mean as operations. In contrast, strategy as it is used today in a technical sense corresponds more nearly to what Clausewitz terms policy, the third element of his “marvelous trinity”. A full exegesis of Clausewitz’ trinity is beyond the scope of this essay, but I wanted to note the differing usages, because I’m going to quote Clausewitz below. And as always, every time Clausewitz gets quoted you must take a drink; it’s the eternal military history drinking game).
At the strategic level of analysis, the first question is “what are your policy objectives?” (although I should note that grand strategy is sometimes conceived as an analytical level above strategy, in which case policy objectives may go there). There’s a compelling argument common in realist international relations theory that the basic policy of nearly all states is to survive, with the goal of survival then suggesting a policy of maximizing security, which in turn suggests a policy of maximizing the military power of the state (which ironically leads to lower the security of other states who then must further increase their military power, a reaction known as the “security dilemma” or, more colorfully, the “Red Queen effect”). I think it is also possible for states to have policy goals beyond this: ideological projects, good and bad. But survival comes first.
From there, strategy concerns itself with the best way to achieve those policy objectives. Is peace and alliances the best way to achieve security (for a small state, the answer is often “yes”)? Would security be enhanced by, say, gaining a key chunk of territory that could be fortified to forestall invasion? Those, of course, are ends, but strategy also concerns itself with means: how do you acquire that defensible land? Buy it? Take it by force? And then – and only then, finally – do you come to the question of “what sort of war – and what sort of conduct in war – will achieve that objective?”
You may note that this is not the same kind of thinking that animates tactics or operations. Military theorists have noticed that for quite some time, often suggesting a sharp separation between the fellows who do operations and tactics (generals) and those who do strategy (typically kings or politicians). As Clausewitz says (drink!), “The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose … war should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy [emphasis mine].” In short, Clausewitz stresses – and leaders have long ignored to their peril – that of all of the factors in war, policy ought to guide action (although no part of the trinity may be neglected).
This creates subordination between the three levels of analysis (to get technical, this is because operations and tactics are part of a side of the Clausewitzian trinity which ought to be subordinate to policy). Operations is subordinate to strategy; an operation which achieves something that isn’t a strategic goal accomplishes nothing. And tactics is likewise subordinate to operations. Thus the thinking pattern should always proceed from the highest questions of strategy down to the prioritization of ends (still strategy), to the means to accomplish those ends (still strategy); only then to the execution of those means (operations) and then to the on-the-ground details of that execution (tactics). Of course what this tripartite division is mean in part to signal is that all three of these stages are tremendously complex; just because tactics is the subordinate element does not mean it is simple!
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part VIII: The Mind of Saruman”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-06-19.
August 8, 2021
QotD: Clausewitz’s concept of “friction” in war
Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.
[Military theorist Carl von] Clausewitz’s most enduring and insightful idea in On War is friction.
Friction explains why a general can have a plan for battle that looks perfect on paper, but falls apart in real life. Friction torpedos morale and slows down action.
Friction isn’t just one thing. It’s the accumulation of a bunch of little things. Says Clausewitz:
Countless minor incidents — the kind you can never really foresee — combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls far short of the intended goal.
To help his readers understand friction in warfare, he gives an analogy from everyday life in the 19th century that we can still imagine parallels to today:
Imagine a traveler who late in the day decides to cover two more stages before nightfall. Only four or five hours more, on a paved highway with relays of horses: it should be an easy trip. But at the next station he finds no fresh horses, or only poor ones; the country grows hilly, the road bad, night falls, and finally after many difficulties he is only too glad to reach a resting place with any kind of primitive accommodation.
As the complexity in any endeavor increases, friction increases as well, because there are simply more opportunities for things to get mucked up. The bigger and more complicated the endeavor, the larger the amount of friction.
A factor that increases complexity, and thus friction, more than any other, is the inclusion of other human beings. Humans are the ultimate friction creators. Clausewitz notes that a battalion, by its very nature, will experience plenty of friction, because it’s made up of many different individuals who can interact with each other in a multiplicity of problem-producing ways. One soldier gets scared and runs, resulting in other soldiers catching the fear contagion and running. Before you know it, you’ve got an unplanned, chaotic retreat. Damn you, friction!
[…]
Thus, Clausewitz says, the first step to getting a handle on friction is to recognize its reality, and inevitability:
An understanding of friction is a large part of that much-admired sense of warfare which a good general is supposed to possess. … The good general must know friction in order to overcome it whenever possible, and in order not to expect a standard of achievement in his operations which this very friction makes impossible.
To keep friction from throwing you for a loop, you have to manage your expectations; you have to account for friction in assessing what you’re realistically going to be able to accomplish. Making this assessment, accurately gauging how much friction you’ll encounter, Clausewitz says, is a matter of instinct, honed over time and field-testing:
As with a man of the world instinct becomes almost habit so that he always acts, speaks, and moves appropriately, so only the experienced officer will make the right decision in major and minor matters — at every pulsebeat of war. Practice and experience dictate the answer: “this is possible, that is not”.
Even though it’s crucial to accept the inevitability of friction, this needn’t be a matter of resentful resignation. If friction is normal in any endeavor, then it is something to embrace, and even take a kind of pride in — a sign that you’re doing something, taking action, engaging in life’s heroic struggle.
Brett and Kate McKay, “Clausewitz on Overcoming the Annoying Slog of Life”, The Art of Manliness, 2021-04-27.
April 6, 2013
Emile Simpson hailed as “one of the greatest military historians of his generation”
In the Times Literary Supplement, Michael Howard is so impressed with Simpson’s book that he goes out on a limb to recommend it:
Some four decades ago, the TLS sent me a book to review by a young lecturer at Sandhurst entitled The Face of Battle. It impressed me so much that I described it as “one of the best half-dozen books on warfare to have appeared since the Second World War”. I wondered at the time if I had made a total fool of myself, but I need not have worried. The author, the late Sir John Keegan, proved to be one of the greatest military historians of his generation. It would be rash to put my money on such a dark horse again, but I shall. Emile Simpson’s War From the Ground Up is a work of such importance that it should be compulsory reading at every level in the military; from the most recently enlisted cadet to the Chief of the Defence Staff and, even more important, the members of the National Security Council who guide him.
Emile Simpson does not presume to show us how to conduct war, but he tells us how to think about it. He saw service in Afghanistan as a young officer in the Gurkhas, and his thinking is solidly rooted in that experience. Like Clausewitz 200 years earlier, Simpson found himself caught up in a campaign for whose conduct nothing in his training had prepared him; and like Clausewitz he realized that to understand why this was so he had to analyse the whole nature of war, from the top down as well as from the ground up. Afghanistan, he concluded, was only an extreme example of the transformation that war has undergone during his lifetime; and that itself is due to the transformation of the societies that fight it.
[. . .]
It is impossible to summarize Emile Simpson’s ideas without distorting them. His own style is so muscular and aphoristic that he can concentrate complex arguments into memorable sentences that will have a life of their own. His familiarity with the work of Aristotle and the history of the English Reformation enables him to explain the requirements of a strategic narrative as effectively as his experiences in Afghanistan illuminate his understanding of the relationship between operational requirements and political objectives. In short (and here I shall really go overboard) War From the Ground Up deserves to be seen as a coda to Clausewitz’s On War. But it has the advantage of being considerably shorter.
February 24, 2010
Make up your minds!
American soldiers have been accused of being too “egg-headed” in their approach to war, with much being made about the constant upgrading of equipment with newer electronic and computerized gizmos. But it’s not what it seems — now a New York Times Idea of the Day blogger says the US military has a “fetish” for Wilhelmine and Hitlerian Germany:
“Why do people have a fixation with the German military when they haven’t won a war since 1871?”
That’s the Tom Clancy quote William J. Astore uses to begin this essay on TomDispatch (picked up by Mother Jones), renewing a critique of what some see as a Clausewitz cult among American military strategists.
Mr. Astore, a former Air Force Academy history instructor (and Wehrmacht buff as a boy), says “the American military’s fascination with German military methods and modes of thinking” is reflected outwardly in busts of Clausewitz on display American military academies, and more tangibly in echoes of the Blitzkrieg in the first and second Iraq wars:
In retrospect, what disturbs me most is that the military swallowed the Clausewitzian/German notion of war as a dialectical or creative art, one in which well-trained and highly motivated leaders can impose their will on events. In this notional construct, war became not destructive, but constructive. It became not the last resort of kings, but the preferred recourse of “creative” warlords who demonstrated their mastery of it by cultivating such qualities as flexibility, adaptability and quickness. One aimed to get inside the enemy’s “decision cycle” . . . while at the same time cultivating a “warrior ethos” within a tight-knit professional army that was to stand above, and also separate from, ordinary citizens.
There were lots of things that western armies could profitably learn after 1945 from German tactical and operational models. There was no intrinsic reason why small German units fought better and more effectively than their allied opponents, in spite of Nazi propaganda, there was no “racial” strength that made German soldiers better at their trade than other nations. Remember that a lot of “German” soldiers were Austrians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and other allied or conquered peoples.
German soldiers were better trained, and had much greater tactical autonomy, which gave them more flexibility and encouraged improvisation at all levels. Western armies were much more hierarchical and didn’t delegate decision-making to lower ranks. That alone made German battalions, companies, and platoons far more dangerous: when things didn’t go according to the detailed plan, they adapted and still tried to accomplish their assigned mission. British, French, and (especially) Soviet units were not rewarded for departing from their (inevitably) more detailed orders.
Non-military critics may easily assume that trying to learn anything from the Kaiser’s army or Hitler’s army carries a moral taint, but paradoxically, those soldiers — fighting for an authoritarian or dictatorial government — had more tactical freedom than Allied soldiers who could vote (and whose votes actually mattered).
