My Military Philosophy, 2024

A New Annual Halloween Offering

After a lifetime of reading military history, studying, and participating in wargames and simulations, walking battlefields, time spent in various uniforms in the Army National Guard and as a living historian, and a career working in political-military affairs in both the State and Defense Departments, I do have a military philosophy. It draws principally upon Clausewitz mixed with a bit of Sun Tzu, a pinch of Suvorov, a dash of Liddell Hart and the indirect approach, JFC Fuller’s and DeGaulle’s mobile warfare, and odd ideas here and there from many others. What I propose to do here is to hit some of the highlights rather than attempt to replicate On War or The Art of War.

Let us begin by defining some terms. War is the organized threat of violence and/or actual use of violence in conflict between two or more states (or proto-states). Warfare is how humans go about conducting a war. War is universal and immutable, unchanging - while warfare is where we see the changing impact of culture, history, social organization, technology, personality, inspiration, etc. War and warfare exist upon one extreme of a spectrum that runs from there to the other – peace.  Peace is not the absence of disagreement or conflict; it is simply the absence of violence in pursuance of disagreement or conflict.  This spectrum presents the range of activities of states and proto-states as they interact with each other.

The hard truth is that war means killing and killing means people on all sides of the conflict dying including in the classic phrase, non-combatants.  Michael Shaara gave a great speech to Robert E. Lee as the latter speaks to General Longstreet in the novel Killer Angels, “General, soldiering has one great trap; to be a good soldier you must love the army.  To be a good commander, you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love.”

An important strategic observation for National Leaders at this point, as they decide and direct their nation’s international affairs: Never make enemies accidentally. That’s not bad advice for your domestic political efforts either. By expansion, this also means that you do not allow yourself to be drawn into open conflict with potential or perceived rival before you are prepared for such a conflict - don’t let the Mickey Mouse stuff that comes up keep you from focusing on the longer-term goals and desired end-state.

Finally, never accept a potential conflict as inevitable.  I agree with the Romans that the best way to avoid a war is to be demonstrably prepared to win it or at least promise a very expensive war for a possible aggressor.  But do everything to prevent the self-fulfilling prophecy too often inherent in the preparations being confounded by the efforts of the nattering classes to generate click-throughs and public outrage.

My first take away from reading Clausewitz at the Naval War College was what I read as his insistence in the introductory chapters of On War that war is absolutely, definitively the dumbest possible way to resolve a dispute.  To expand on that point, history (with some help from economics and behavioral psychology) shows us that war is an irrational and unprofitable expenditure of lives and treasure apart from a defensive war in which you either fight or surrender (and as, for example, the Czechs demonstrated in 1968, sometimes surrender is a wiser choice).  Clausewitz also recognized that every war carries with it the seeds for the next war.  The rest of the book is for the benefit of those who ignore that advice and read on as Clausewitz explains what war is, what warfare is, and how to be successful in waging war.  The folly of war is even greater in our times as every life, dollar, and resource expended on warfare leaves us that much less with which to confront the far more serious and ongoing threat of climate change.

The Principles of War are a checklist, a reminder, not a straitjacket. The commander needs to mentally run down the list in planning or executing military operations to determine which ones are relevant, but there is no need to churn out reams of explanation of how each one does or does not apply. I’m not fixated on any one version of the many lists of principles that have been put out, primarily because there is a lot of overlap from one list to the next and usually the variations reflect a particular technological period and are adjusted as technology changes.

· · Speed is I think the most important of the principles of war – but in the sense given it by Suvorov when he said, “Speed is essential, haste harmful.” Speed is critically important for seizing and maintaining the Initiative as John Boyd famously captured the thought in his OODA Loop – observe, orient, decide, act – in order to get inside your opponent’s own OODA cycle and put him into a purely reactive posture.

· · Surprise means doing anything that your opponent did not expect, i.e., attacking him in a place, or at a time, or demonstrating a capability that he didn’t expect. Surprise is one of the very earliest ‘force multipliers.’  The critical effect of surprise is to give the side deploying it the Initiative.

· · Mass and/or Unity of Effort are aspects of the same challenge for the commander, i.e., making sure that enough friendly force is concentrated at the right place and at the right time to ensure victory and that few if any friendly forces are needlessly left out of the fight.  An old axiom of warfare says that “victory doesn’t always go to the big battalions, but that’s the way to bet.”  In war and warfare, numbers matter.  But we have learned again in Ukraine that it is a matter of numbers of what and where that really makes the difference.  Is it in a specific situation where numbers of men, tanks, ships, or aircraft matter? Or is it the number of shells, bombs, missiles, or bullets?  The Russian/Soviet artillery long demonstrated a conviction that nothing succeeded like excess.  And then what if the number is multiplied by quality?  Are my troops, tanks, airplanes, etc., sufficiently better than my opponent’s that one of mine is equal to three, five, or more of the enemy’s?  You never want to pit your strength directly against your opponent’s strength. You want to commit it against his weakness.  All properly executed warfare is Asymmetric Warfare – never fight fair.

· · Simplicity – as in “Keep it Simple, Stupid.” Combat is a multiple body problem and as physicists/ astrophysicists know the more bodies you have in motion the harder it is to know who’s doing what, much less control them as they do it.  Modern communications are affecting this (when they work) as a force linked by modern comms can cooperate and coordinate while being more widely dispersed across a battle space that might even be global.  The war in Ukraine is showing us how vulnerable our hi-tech comms can be.  This means that our plans need to be simpler in execution and we need all levels to understand and stay focused upon the mission.  As an Army Major at an exercise confirmed to me, ‘we have plans so that we know what we are deviating from.”

The Combined Arms approach to combat is essential – infantry, armor, artillery, air, sea and now space and cyber power. An element of this must be what was called Fire and Maneuver, one or more elements of the forces available to you lay down fire while others maneuver close enough to the objective to finally overrun and control it. No single arm wins wars without the support and aid of the other forms of combat power.  And again, the war in Ukraine (and our island-hopping Pacific campaign in WW2) show that you don’t need to attack everything when you can negate the power of enemy units by other means including isolation.

While never denying the delight in having superior air power (effective close air support among other things), nothing says victory like a foot parade through the streets of the enemy capital (though the political decision-makers may conclude that it’s better to trade that pleasure for a sustainable peace after the war). When everything inevitably breaks down, “when the gatling is jammed and the colonel is dead,” everyone in uniform is an infantry soldier. When all else fails, you should still have your personal weapon(s) and the knowledge of how to use them effectively.

Doctrine - all military/naval/air/cyber and eventually space forces have doctrine. Doctrine is what you are supposed to do with the weapons and capabilities you have in the various circumstances that might confront your forces. Your SOP or Battle Drills are supposed to be heavily rehearsed responses to predictable combat situations that can save lives and buy your commanders time to think of something really smart to do next as they try to get ahead of the opposition’s OODA Loop.  Like the Principles of War, Doctrine provides guidelines and perhaps a checklist, not a straitjacket. When you allow your doctrine to become dogma, you are in deep trouble as your opponents will be able to predict your actions and get ahead of your decision cycle. When dogma is further reduced to Schlagworte - buzzwords - you are in even deeper trouble.

As for commanders, I have seen at least two senior German Generals, General Kurt von Hammerstein and Field Marshal von Manstein, quoted as offering a formula which must have been taught at one of the German training schools (or learned in the corridors, so to speak). I prefer the version attributed to von Hammerstein, but both say essentially the same thing:

“There are four kinds of officer: the lazy, stupid type who do no harm; the intelligent, hard-working type who make good staff officers; the lazy, intelligent type are the best strategic leaders; and, finally, the stupid, hardworking type who must be dismissed immediately as they will lead to disaster.”

Thomas Kuhn argued that his concept of scientific revolution was not applicable to the social sciences, but I disagree.  What Kuhn missed is that his concept was not about physics but about how human beings receive and process information.  I am a believer in the concept of The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), though RMA is still not correctly or widely understood.  I do not buy in to all of the touted RMAs cited over recent decades. For example, many people do not realize that there can be more than one RMA at work simultaneously and that they are usually more easily recognized after the fact. It is also overlooked that the real revolution is in the application of a “new” technology – often something that has in fact been around for a decade or two before its optimal application is understood, recognized, and acted upon. It is important also to remember that there is no such thing as an obsolete weapon or military technology; it retains value as a niche or situational tool.

Holding the Moral High Ground in conducting combat operations is critically important. This is true for the individual soldier, sailor, marine, or air crew as well as for the armed forces to which they belong, and for the nation that sent them out to do so. We have to give individuals all of the tools – physical, mental, spiritual – that will enable them to identify and secure that moral high ground in every tactical, operational, strategic, and political situation. They need to begin building this from their first day of training because done correctly this will also equip them for the transition back into the civilian world upon the completion of their service.

Having invented warfare in order to better harness war and bend it to ‘benefit’ humanity, history amply demonstrates that after millennia we generally are not very good at it. The expenditure of treasure and blood is usually greater than whatever material benefits (barring simple survival) have been gained by that expenditure. The master of war in the modern era remains Napoleon Bonaparte. He’s generally considered to have won 48 battles, drawn 5, and lost 7; but he still ended his life in exile from both his native and adopted homelands. It is also conceded that a Napoleon (or an Alexander the Great) is a rare individual, while most commanders were lucky to break even (remember that for every winner there was also a loser to fill out the league tables).  But your commander on the field doesn't actually need to be one of these great captains from history, most of the time he/she merely needs to be less incompetent - and perhaps a bit luckier - than their opposing commander.

The Prussian military reformers, during and following the wars of Napoleon, launched important changes that still inform the modern system of training officers in battlefield command in the armies of every modern major military power as well as our general understanding of warfare. Guardians of the legacy of Frederick the Great, the Prussians realized that the presence of a Napoleon, a Frederick, or an Alexander were the outliers, not to be depended upon. They looked for ways to train their battlefield commanders in order to improve the odds of at least having competent, professional military commanders. Examination will show that today, training of military officers is not about developing Napoleons – it is about trying to make sure that at the least they don’t suck on the battlefield.

Making war begins with a decision, and then another, and then another.  Soon you have a string of decisions linked each one to another.  Bring the strings together and you weave the fabric of war.  Two hundred years ago, a father and son in Prussia broke a barrier between abstract games of war like chess and actual warfare by introducing time and distance scale with kriegsspiel – the first modern wargame with pieces depicting actual army units in scale with a model battlefield and then modern maps.  The Prussian Army recognized that kriegsspiel was an excellent tool with which to train its officers in military decision-making.  Modern wargames offer a wide range of experiences of combat, war, and warfare with varying degrees of realism determined by the purpose of each particular game or scenario.  These can be used as training tools as well as analytical tools.

Game Theorists, National Security Analysts, and others will argue about “zero-sum games” and “win-win” solutions, but warfare comes with one certain ‘zero-sum,” fighting any war other than a war of survival will return ‘zero’ good results in comparison with expended resources and the many other legacies to be inherited from the last war. The crux of warfare today just might be how we manage human conflict until humanity outgrows war - or perishes.  Our biggest obstacle is the unreliability of human perceptions regarding the intentions of potential adversaries as well as friends versus assessing their capabilities.  This should give us all added reason to pause and think calmly about any decision regarding launching a war because war always includes renewed validation of the Law of Unintended Consequences.  (And, by the way, I have yet to find a war in which the pre-war estimates of ammunition consumption were not too low).

Modern electronic technology gave us both telecommunications and automated espionage.  Modern technical means for intelligence gathering in the world’s major states offer a fire hose’s worth of daily reporting.  What is lacking is timely analysis.  This is my preferred first arena for the use of cyber or AI capabilities, to screen that incoming flood for the key bits of data and highlight them for the human analyst and decision maker.  I am opposed to autonomous weapons or other weapons that remove humans from the decision cycle regarding the use of lethal force against humans. To take humankind out of the loop is to break war free from the limits that have made it a purely human activity across our entire history. Ultimately, it is suicidal for humanity to give our machines the ability to make war independent of human control.  Unfortunately, the conflict in Ukraine shows why this will happen anyway if we persist in fighting wars even as global population decline sets in and militaries around the world are reporting shortfalls in recruitment.

Finally (for the moment), the one constant in life is constant change. The geopolitical/national security situation of today is different from the one that existed yesterday and is different from the one that will exist tomorrow. Thus, any geopolitical/national security situation brought into being by military means is only a temporary one, possibly unsustainable absent further conflict.  There is no permanent military solution to any situation, problem, or challenge - like glory, it is fleeting.

Nuclear weapons are the classic “can’t do a thing with them, can’t do without them” conundrum.  I’m sorry CND, but these weapons have been out of Pandora’s Box so long that there’s no returning them.  They are absolutely useless on the battlefield, essentially because they destroy the battlefield for use by anyone else.  Think of the muddy Western Front of the First World War after a prolonged artillery barrage on steroids and then make it glow in the dark.

To date, they do appear useful as a deterrent, since no nuclear power has been invaded by another state (without nuclear weapons), but nuclear weapons haven’t prevented non-nuclear conflicts as our history since 1945 shows.  How many nuclear weapons are actually needed for deterrence is still up in the air as the nuclear states that have not been invaded range from states having a handful of weapons to states having hundreds to thousands.  The Russians have long been fond of telling Americans that the Soviet Union always knew that it really only needed one nuclear weapon to deter the United States.   No one has tested the bravado of that statement nor answered the question of whether one nuclear weapon was sufficient to deter the Soviet Union.

Modified versions of the basic nuclear weapon have been proposed with capabilities that could have increased the possibility of their use but have never been deployed as far as we know.  So called “tactical” nukes have reportedly been fielded (but again, not used so far).  These proposed weapons do often come with some challenges.  For example, the U.S. Army had its M28/M29 “Davy Crockett” infantry support nuke, the firing range of which pretty much guaranteed that its launch crew would probably feel the blast effects not to mention the radiation.

One interesting aspect of the Russian war in Ukraine is that the latest generation of precision guided munitions of various ranges have pushed the dispersion of troops on the battlefield, in an effort to not provide tempting targets.  This is very much an echo of military thinking in the Atomic Army of the 1950s which wanted to avoid giving a nuclear armed enemy too tempting a target.