Strategy (22 page)

An intense debate has developed among military historians as to whether there really was ever a Schlieffen Plan, prepared just before von Moltke's nephew (known as the Younger) took over as chief of the general staff in 1906. The German records are incomplete and whatever was bequeathed undoubtedly was amended as circumstances changed.
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At times the general staff looked to the east rather than the west and adjusted force levels. The thinking in 1914, nevertheless, did follow an ingrained strategic concept, using envelopment to remove one enemy from the war at maximum speed with minimum losses. This strategy was outlined by von Moltke the Younger in December 1911, when he recommended that in all circumstances, Germany should open the campaign by directing all available resources against France.

In the battle against France lies the decision in the war. The Republic is our most dangerous enemy, but we can hope to bring about a rapid decision here. If France is beaten in the first great battle, this country, which possesses no great manpower reserves, will hardly be in a position to conduct a long-lasting war. Russia, on the other hand, can shift her forces into the interior of her immeasurable land and can protract the war for an immeasurable time. Therefore, Germany's entire effort
must be focused on ending the war, at least on one front, with a single great blow as soon as possible.
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The German offensive of August 1914 was the culmination of a century of developments in military thought and practice, updating the received wisdom of the Napoleonic period for recent developments in communications and logistics. It broke from the Clausewitzian model by assuming, without evidence, that the offense could be the stronger form of warfare. As Strachan notes, the war plans of all European armies in 1914 were Jominian: “operational plans for single campaigns, designed to achieve decisive success through maneuver according to certain principles.”
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The enemy defenses would be circumvented and then engaged with a strength and momentum that would leave them reeling. This assumed high levels of commitment, skill, élan, and willpower; and an enemy that would fail to rise to the challenge.

This was a strategy that had been decided upon well in advance and to which all planning had been geared. To ensure that the plan was properly executed, troops who could follow commands obediently and precisely were required. Instead of a Tolstoyan army of individuals shaping outcomes through numerous individual choices, this was a group turned by discipline and drill into instruments of the commander's will. Where latitude was required for local initiatives in the face of unforeseeable developments, these would still reflect the commanders' intent, conveyed not only through direct communications but indirectly through a shared institutional culture and agreed doctrine. The systems of hierarchy and control, of specialized functions and their coordination, appeared as the highest stage of modern bureaucratic development. The general staff had the pick of the brightest military brains. It set the standards for comprehensive planning and preparation of individuals to follow straightforward commands in trying conditions.

But none of this could guarantee success. Ensuring victory required that military imperatives take precedence over any diplomatic considerations. Most seriously this entailed violating Belgian neutrality, which made it more likely that Great Britain would enter the war and crush any actual or potential civilian resistance. Even then, promises of success depended on the assumed superiority of the army, whose resolute will would crush weaker nations that had inferior plans, poorer tactical grasp, and less-disciplined troops. Besides, there was no obvious alternative: there was neither the appetite nor the resources for a prolonged war of exhaustion, and there could be no other way of executing a war of annihilation. Other than the one most feared by the military, a progressive demilitarization and softening of the state, the only alternative was to use threats of war to get a better diplomatic
settlement. As so much depended on getting in an effective first blow, once mobilization began the political situation was soon out of control.

After Napoleon's fall, the presumption that the great issues that divided states could be resolved through force of arms was taken for granted yet only tested on a few occasions. Though these occasions left the presumption reinforced they also pointed to reasons for caution: the huge developments in transportation, in particular the railroads, which facilitated complex movements to encircle opponents and catch them unawares also made it possible to get fresh reserves to the front; industrialization had led to improvements in the weight, range, and accuracy of both artillery and small arms, making it possible to blast holes in defensive lines but also to make defending fire against an onrushing army quite murderous. The basic lesson from the Napoleonic Wars, that there was only so much one country's army, whatever the brilliance of its operations, could do against a much stronger alliance, remained in place. So was the lesson of 1871 that the stresses of war on a country could lead to popular anger and revolutionary surges. War was a radical instrument. It threatened to upturn the international order and unleash wild political forces at home. It was one thing to have a strategy for swift military action that would deal the enemy a knockout blow. But if the enemy survived then there were no compelling strategies for what came next.

While these debates about land offensives and decisive victories preoccupied continental powers, Great Britain, was content to rely upon its maritime strength. Naval strategy was a minority interest and was largely concerned with whatever Britain had done and was still doing to maintain its sprawling empire and its intercontinental trade. The dominant concept was command of the sea, which could be traced back to Thucydides. This essentially meant being able to move men and materiel wherever you wished without interference while being able to prevent the enemy's attempt to do the same. In the nineteenth century, Great Britain enjoyed the command of the sea. It had managed to extract the maximum benefit out of its naval assets, creating an aura of irresistible strength, despatching warships to remind lesser powers of the country's interests, conveying menace, providing assurance, and creating a bargaining position or inflicting blows on an upstart, all the while ensuring that the imperial lines of communication could be sustained and reinforced.

This had not required consideration of how to beat an equivalent power in battle, the main preoccupation of land warfare, because for much of the nineteenth century, Britain did not face such a power. The French might once have mounted a challenge, but British naval superiority had been reasserted at Trafalgar in 1805. Since then, there had been no shortage of naval actions but also no serious challenge to Britain's naval predominance. To maintain this happy state, the British concluded that they must always have a navy twice the size of any other. Only at the turn of the century, with the conversion to steam underway and Germany growing in industrial strength, was this standard threatened. Prior to the Great War, Britain maintained its top position, but only with a considerable effort.

It was late in the nineteenth century when naval power gained a theorist with a compelling thesis. Alfred Thayer Mahan, after an unhappy and indifferent naval career, found himself unexpectedly in charge of the new U.S. Naval War College in 1886. There he developed a series of lectures on the influence of sea power in history. This turned into his two most important books, the first concluding with the French Revolution and the second in 1812. His writings were both prolix and—once retired from the Navy in 1896 until his death in 1914—prolific.
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His focus was not so much on principles of strategy but on the relationship between naval and economic power, particularly how Britain's ascent as a great power had depended not “by attempting great military operations on land, but by controlling the sea, and through the sea the world outside Europe.”
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As an American he was seeking to encourage his country to follow the British example, not to challenge Britain but to provide extra support so that the two countries could keep the seas open for trade.

His work was acclaimed in Britain. His central thesis, focusing on the failure of France to become a naval power while Britain succeeded, was congenial. Aspiring powers accepted the premise that the British experience told of the necessity for countries dependent on the sea to have large navies composed of large ships. While it has been argued that Mahan's historical and geopolitical judgments deserve serious consideration, his views on the actual deployment of naval power were far less developed.
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He repeatedly insisted that the principles of land and sea war were essentially the same, and for illumination of these principles he turned to Jomini, from whom he claimed to have “learned the few, very few, leading considerations in military combination.” His father, Dennis, had been instrumental in ensuring that Jomini had such a positive reception in the United States.
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This led to the stress on the decisive battle. The organized forces of the enemy must be the “chief objective.” This was “Jomini's dictum,” piercing “like a two-edged sword
to the joints and marrow of many specious propositions” and demanded a concentration of force (the “ABC” of any strategy) in preparation for battle. By following these principles, naval officers could achieve the same level of strategic maturity as their army counterparts.
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Unfortunately, the “development of the Art of War at sea has been slower, and is now less advanced, than on shore,” Mahan observed. In “the race for material and mechanical development, sea-officers as a class have allowed their attention to be unduly diverted from the systematic study of the Conduct of War, which is their peculiar and main concern.”
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He was, however, primarily a historian. When he tried to pull together his ideas on naval strategy into a single volume he confessed that it was the worst book he had written.
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While Mahan was a great booster for naval power and gained countless admirers among American and British naval circles for doing so, his lasting theoretical contributions were limited. As with others who believed that history offers timeless principles, he was unable to accommodate into his basic framework the massive changes in naval power resulting from the new technologies exemplified by steam power. As with others who sought to promote the virtues of one type of military power, he was nervous about it being seen as subordinate to another type, and so he dismissed the idea of using the navy to guard shore positions, to prevent it becoming a branch of the army. The role of navies was to compete with other navies for the command of the sea. As with others who were focused on decisive battles, Mahan showed little interest in more limited forms of engagement and was dismissive of engaging in commerce destruction until after the decisive naval battle, for victory would put enemy commerce at your mercy.

Very similar ideas were being developed in Germany by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who was responsible in the late nineteenth century for turning the navy of the recently unified Germany from a second-rate force into a serious challenger to British naval supremacy. His vision was both ambitious and unimaginative. It was similar to Mahan's except that while Mahan took his inspiration from Jomini, Tirpitz took his from Clausewitz. He was preparing for a future war at sea that would look very much like war on land, the “combat of fleets against fleets” to gain command of the sea. The model was explicitly derived from land warfare—he even wrote of the “battle of armies on water.” He argued that the navy's “natural mission” was a “strategic offensive,” to seek victory in an “arranged mass battle.” Other possibilities, such as coastal bombardments and blockades, were impossible so long as “the opposing fleet still exists and is ready for battle.” All this was despite the evident difficulty of imposing on an enemy a naval battle he wished to avoid.
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While Mahan and Tirpitz sought to promote their countries as rising naval powers using remarkably similar concepts of the likely objectives and methods of war at sea, Britain lacked a naval strategist of note. As Winston Churchill observed after the Great War, the Royal Navy had made “no important contribution to naval literature.” Its “thought and study” were devoted to the daily routine. “We had brilliant experts of every description, brave and devoted hearts; but at the outset of the conflict we had more captains of ships than captains of war.” The standard work on seapower had been written by an American admiral. The best that Britain had to offer was written by a civilian.
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The civilian in question was Sir Julian Corbett. Measured and moderate in his analysis and prose, he provided the most substantial critique of the dominant ethos of the time, asserting the possibilities of limited war, raising questions about the focus on concentrating forces for a decisive battle on land, and suggesting why this was an inadequate way to think about war at sea. An occasional novelist with a background in law, Corbett lacked practical naval experience. This was often held against him, along with his skepticism regarding decisive battles and naval offensives and his readiness to challenge the great myths of British naval history (for example, those surrounding the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar).

Yet despite all of this, he was given a central role in naval education as a lecturer at the staff college. He also played a role in policymaking as an Admiralty insider, even during the Great War. He was then given the responsibility for overseeing the official histories of the naval war. He was on the side of the reformers, trying to modernize the attitudes and culture of the Royal Navy. This made him a natural target for conservative elements in the maritime community. Although he was actively consulted during the war, the impact of his broad theories has been doubted.
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During the Great War, one senior figure commended Corbett for having written “one of the best books in our language upon political and military strategy” from which all sorts of lessons, “some of inestimable value, may be gleaned.” But no one had time to read it. “Obviously history is written for schoolmasters and arm-chair strategists. Statesmen and warriors pick their way through the dark.”
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