A History of Strategy (14 page)

Compared to Douhet, Fuller, and Liddell Hart, Erich Ludendorff was a towering figure. Much more than the former two he understood what modern war was like at the top. Unlike the last-named he did not regard it as some kind of field game. As he wrote, having lost two sons, “the war has spared me nothing,” including the loss of two sons. On the other hand, and again unlike Liddell Hart in particular, neither did he shrink from its horrors. Ludendorff’s post-war dabbling with anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-freemasonry (he could never make up his mind which of the three international forces posed the greater danger to Germany) bordered on the paranoid and has been rightly condemned. However, this should not be allowed to obscure the fact that his vision of future armed conflict was awesome and, which is more important, more nearly correct than any of the rest.

Having spent over two years in charge of the war effort of the most powerful belligerent in history until then, Ludendorff did not believe that a first class modern state could be brought to its knees rapidly and cheaply by aircraft dropping bombs on its civilian population. Nor could this be achieved by fleets of tanks engaging in mobile operations, however indirect and however brilliant. In part, Ludendorff merely continued the work of some pre-1914 militarist writers, such as Colmar von der Goltz and Theodor von Bernhardi, who had advocated total mobilization and mass armies. Up to a point, too,
Der Totale Krieg
(
The Nation at War
) both recounted his own experience and, by attacking many of his less cooperative colleagues, sought to explain why Germany, with himself at its head, had lost the war. Whatever the book’s precise origins and purpose, Ludendorff’s main thesis was that the developing technologies of production, transportation and communication made modern war into much more than merely a question of armed forces maneuvering against each other for mastery of some battlefield. Instead it was “total”—the title of his book—basing itself on all the forces of the nation, and requiring that the latter be mobilized to the last person and the last screw.

To be sure, the next war would make use of all available modern weapons, including poison gas. Civilians as well as the armed forces would be targeted, and the resulting number of casualties, destruction, and suffering would be immense. Even more important than the mobilization of material resources was the spiritual mobilization of the people; a point concerning which Ludendorff felt Imperial Germany, with its old-fashioned authoritarian system of government and its neglect of the working classes, had been sadly deficient. The implication of such mobilization was an end to democracy and the liberties it entailed, including not only freedom of the press but of capitalist enterprise as well. For either industrialists or union leaders (during the War Ludendorff had had his troubles with both) to insist on their own privilege was intolerable. They, as well as the entire financial apparatus available to the state, were to be subjected to a military dictatorship. Nor was Ludendorff was under any illusion that the nation’s spiritual and material mobilization could be quickly improvised. Hence the dictatorship which he demanded, and for which he no doubt regarded himself as the most suitable candidate, was to be set up in peacetime and made permanent.

The next war would not be a gentlemanly fight for limited stakes to be won by the side with the swiftest and sharpest sword. Instead it would be a life and death struggle to be won by the belligerent with the greatest resources and the strongest willpower—which incidentally disposed of any childish illusions concerning small, professional and highly mobile, let alone chivalrous, armed forces. Anything not serving the war effort would have to be ruthlessly discarded, and this specifically included playing at politics. The latter would, in effect, be swallowed by the war; they would become identical with it. “All the theories of Clausewitz should be thrown overboard…. Both war and policy serve the existence of the nation. However, war is the highest expression of the people’s will to live. Therefore politics must be made subordinate to war.” Or, to the extent that they were not, they were superfluous and, indeed, treasonable.

After 1945 Ludendorff’s military thought was often attacked by featherweight commentators. In addition to taking a justified dislike to his racism and his early support for Hitler, they mistook their world, in which nuclear weapons had made total warfare as he understood it impossible, for his. During these years it was Liddell Hart and Fuller who, whether rightly or not, were celebrated as the fathers of the
Blitzkrieg
. Nevertheless the fact remains that it was not their vision of World War II but Ludendorff’s which turned out to be only too horribly true.

To be sure, fleets of aircraft did fly over the fronts and bombed cities on a scale which, had he only been able to envisage it, might have made even Ludendorff blanch. Ground-support aircraft, cooperating more closely with the tanks, helped carry out spectacular mobile operations on the ground. The combination of armor, mobility, and wireless restored operational mobility, and laid the groundwork for smashing victories in which countries the size of Poland and France were conquered with previously unimaginable speed. It also did much to re-establish the balance between defense and offense, although events were to show that both tanks and aircraft (the latter, thanks to the introduction of radar) were as capable of operating on the defense, and preventing a breakthrough, as they were of helping it to take place.

Where Ludendorff proved most correct, however, was in insisting that the next major war would be broadly like the last. Like its predecessor, it would develop into a gigantic struggle and a prolonged one. It would both demand and make possible the mobilization of all resources under a regime which, even in democratic countries, came pretty close to doing away with politics while putting everyone and everything under its own control; in 1945 the British Ministry of Food alone had no fewer than 30,000 employees.

Ludendorff’s posthumous triumph may be seen in the fact that, by the time World War II was over, a continent had been devastated and between forty and sixty million people lay dead. As the coming decades were to prove, the history of conventional military theory had run its course.

The fact that World War II had effectively put an end to conventional military theory was not evident at first. During the decades that followed a great many attempts were made to continue the debate, sometimes by men (there appear to be few if any women in the field) who had already made their mark before 1939. Enormous numbers of publications were produced and, almost as rapidly, forgotten. Of their authors none attained the prominence of a Fuller, let alone a Liddell Hart.

The paucity of first-rate theory is not difficult to explain. When the Gulf War broke out in 1991, forty-six years after Hiroshima, by far the most important motive power was still the internal combustion engine including, of course, jets. By far the most important formations were still those old and trusted World War products, i.e. squadrons of fighter bombers, armored divisions, and, at sea, task-forces centering around aircraft carriers and intended to achieve command of the sea (although, as it turned out, there was no one with whom to dispute it). As both fighter bombers and armored divisions operated by dropping or firing massive quantities of steel into the air they were heavily dependent on lines of communications for that steel as well as fuel; with the result that the objective of strategy remained, as it had been from the days of von Bülow and Jomini on, to cut those lines. To be sure, the forces were festooned with a great many other weapons and, as fashionable modern parlance has it, weapon systems. Missiles and cruise missiles and remotely piloted vehicles and helicopters; computers and data-links and satellites and global positioning systems; all these and more were employed. When everything was said and done, however, none proved capable of making the campaign very different from what, say, the German invasion of Poland in 1939 had been.

Between 1945 and 1991, faced with what was usually understood as unprecedented technological progress many, perhaps the majority, of writers focused their efforts on the ways new weapons would be integrated into future war and influence its shape. Thus, in the fifties and sixties, it was often a question of coming to terms with the short and medium range missiles then coming into service (inter-continental missiles with their nuclear warheads are a different story and will be dealt with below). Later the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, which at the time was the most modern of its kind, led to a lively debate concerning the relative merits of armor and anti-tank missiles; airpower and anti-aircraft defenses; attack and defense; and quality versus quantity. Spurred by America’s failure in Vietnam, which was blamed on the strategy of attrition adopted by the US armed forces, the 1980s saw a revival of conventional warfare theory centering on such ideas as maneuver warfare and AirLand Battle. As their names imply, both focused on strategy and the operational art while all but ignoring grand strategy. The first took the German campaigns of World War II as its model, so much so that, for some ten years, “German” and “excellent” were considered synonymous and ex-Wehrmacht generals were treated to free lunches at the Pentagon. The second could barely be distinguished from, say, what Patton and his supporting XIXth Tactical Air Command had done to the Wehrmacht at Falaise in 1944.

Throughout this period, very great attention was naturally devoted to Soviet military theory and doctrine. As both they and their opponents in the Cold War never tired of pointing out, the Soviets had inherited from Karl Marx the idea that war was not only a military struggle. It was instead a socio-economic phenomenon to be considered “in its entirety”, though exactly what this meant when it came to working out the details was not always clear. During the twenties and thirties Soviet authors such as Tuchachevsky seem to have drawn on their own experience in the Civil War and Soviet-Polish War, in which there had been a considerable amount of operational movement carried out by cavalry corps. With Fuller acting as the stimulant, mobility was married to mechanization. The outcome was something known as “the battle in depth”: meaning a highly offensive campaign which would be launched not merely along the front but against the enemy’s communications, depots, and command centers as well. Moreover, as Marxists the Soviets professed to have as much faith in “the people” as Fuller and Douhet had been skeptical of them. If only for that reason, unlike their Western counterparts they never surrendered to the siren-song of small, elite, armed forces.

Shortly after the Battle of Moscow in 1941–42, i.e. at a time in which the Soviet Union had just collected itself from its initial defeats and begun to wage total war like no other country in history, Stalin promulgated the “five permanently operating factors.” Not surprisingly they bore a strong family resemblance to the picture painted by Ludendorff six years previously—even to the point where one commentator claimed that the German general’s doctrine was also capable of being summed up in five points. The most important factor was the political stability of the homeland, a phrase which, coming from under
that
particular moustache, might well make one shudder. This was followed by the morale of the armed forces, the quality and quantity of their divisions, armament, and the commanders’ capacity for organizing the resources at their disposal. From then until the end of the Cold War, it was claimed that the best way to annihilate the enemy was by means of massive armored offensives. Much like, say, the ones which the Red Army had mounted against the Germans in 1943–45, only deeper, more powerful, and better.

Over the decades, these debates provided a living for thousands if not tens of thousands of analysts in- and out of uniform. More important, on both sides of the Iron Curtain they fed vast “military-industrial complexes” which gave employment to millions and were not without influence both on the economies and on the political systems of the countries which they were supposed to serve. Overshadowing them all, however, was the question of nuclear weapons. The first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was some fifteen hundred times as powerful as the largest weapon in existence until then. With the advent of hydrogen bombs the gap widened still further; but even when much smaller tactical nuclear weapons appeared on the scene the discrepancy between the two kinds of arms remained immense. In any attempt to understand the nature of future war and the way in which it should be conducted, the altogether unprecedented challenges posed by nuclear weapons have to be addressed first. Failure to do so was like discussing the activities of toddlers throwing pebbles at each other while the adults, machine guns at the ready, stood by and watched.

In any case, the true significance of nuclear weapons was not understood at first. In part this was because there were not too many of them around. Nor was it certain that the relatively few and slow bombers capable of carrying them would necessarily arrive at their targets. Hence it was excusable that many, though not all, senior politicians and military men in the West believed that the next war would be much like the last one, give or take a number of cities turned into radioactive wastes. In 1947, Stalin’s above-mentioned picture of total war was re-issued specifically with this message in mind. In the face of the American nuclear monopoly of the time, it had to be shown that “adventurist” ideas could not succeed since other factors were even more decisive.

Previously, whenever some new and powerful weapon appeared on the scene it had only been a question of time before it became fully incorporated into military doctrine and, as had happened e.g. to the tank and the aircraft carrier, was turned into the latter’s mainstay. From the late forties on strenuous attempts were made to treat nuclear arms in the same manner, i.e. devise ways for using them in war. First it was the USAF which, with its own interests as the sole organization capable of delivering the bomb to target very much in mind, pressed for its adoption as the mainstay of American and Western defense. Doing so, it came up with such aptly-named operations as “Bushwhacker,” “Dropshot,” and “Broiler.” Later the idea of “Massive Retaliation” was adopted by the incoming Eisenhower Administration. As Secretary of State Alan Dulles declared in a famous speech, the US would not permit the other side to dictate the site and mode of the next war. Instead, any attempt by the Communists to engage in aggression anywhere in the world
might
be instantly met with means, and at a place, of America’s own choosing.