The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (11 page)

Part III

The Postmodern
Meets the Premodern

CHAPTER 8

The End of Decisive
Battle—For Now

Have the RPG and AK-47 trumped tanks and bombers?
*

Late, Great Battle

H
AVE WE SEEN
in our time the end of decisive battles between conventional armies and navies in the long tradition of Cunaxa, Lepanto, and Okinawa? Will any nation at war continue to marshal huge forces, determined to settle the issue head-to-head, in an overt contest of massed arms against like kind that has characterized Western warfare since Marathon?

John Keegan, in his classic
Face of Battle
(1976), suggested more than thirty years ago that it would be increasingly hard for the modern European state to engage in the slugfests on land that resulted in something like the infantry holocaust at the battle of the Somme. “The suspicion grows,” Keegan argued of a new cohort of affluent and leisured European youth—rebellious in spirit and reluctant to give over the good life to mass conscription—“that battle has already abolished itself.”

Two decades ago I concluded
The Western Way of War
with the suggestion that since Western decisive battle had become so lethal, and had raised the specter of nuclear escalation, I thought it doubtful that two Western states could any longer engage in large head-to-head conventional battles: “Have we not seen, then, in our lifetime the end of the Western way of war?”

Events of the past half century seem to have confirmed the notion that decisive battles between two large, highly trained Westernized armies clashing openly, with sophisticated arms, whether on land or sea, have become increasingly rare. War planners at the Pentagon now talk more about counterinsurgency training, winning the hearts and minds of civilian populations, and “smart” interrogation techniques—and less about old-fashion “blow ’em up” hardware like the Crusader artillery platform and the F-22 Raptor interceptor jet that has proven so advantageous to winning a conventional set battle.

While perhaps the most stunning manifestation of combat and the prominently mentioned events of military history, set-piece engagements, it should be said at the outset, were never quite the norm of war. More often, armed conflict was less dramatic, intermittent, and played out in landscapes not conducive to conventionally marshaled armies and navies, and it involved civilians. We associate the battles of Granicus, Issus, and Guagamela and the fight on the Hydaspes River with the military genius of Alexander the Great, but he spent far more time fighting irregular forces in counterinsurgency efforts throughout the Balkans, the Hindu Kush, and Bactria.

Nevertheless big battles—or so generals dreamed—could sometimes change entire conflicts in a matter of hours, which in turn might alter politics and the fate of millions for decades. It is with history’s rare battle, not the more common dirty war, insurgency, or street fighting, that we typically associate war poetry, commemoration, and, for good or evil, radical changes of fortune and the martial notions of glory and honor. Winston Churchill supposedly said Admiral John Jellicoe, commander of the British Grand Fleet in the First World War, who alone ensured the British expeditionary army could be supplied and the homeland kept alive with imports, was “the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.” Had Jellicoe lost the Battle of Jutland, Churchill might well have been proven right.

Had the Greeks lost their fleet in an afternoon at “Holy” Salamis (480
B.C.
), the history of the polis may well have come to an end, and with it a vulnerable Western civilization in its infancy. Had the Confederates broken the Union lines at the epic battle of Gettysburg, and swept behind Washington, D.C., Abraham Lincoln would have faced enormous pressures to settle the Civil War according to the recognized status quo ante bellum. If the “band of brothers” had been repulsed at Normandy Beach on the morning of June 6, 1944, it is difficult to envision them replaying an enormous amphibious invasion soon after—but easier to imagine the Red Army within a year or two at the Atlantic Coast.

So there is something dramatic, frightening even, about two opposing forces intent on dueling each other with a sizable percentage of their aggregate strength, determined to plow through an adversary and crush its will to resist—and, with such victory, often end the ability of an enemy culture at the rear to retain its independence. We forget that powerful nations, and even empires, so often depend, in both a real and a psychological sense, on their far-distant armies to keep them safe at home. Should such forces abroad fail in a day, then there may be no other ramparts or reserves to keep the oncoming enemy at bay. It is indeed no wonder that we do not have a genre of books with titles like “The 100 Great Insurgencies of All Time,” “History’s Landmark Urban Fights,” or “Fifteen Decisive Terrorist Acts of the World.”

Wars Without Battle

T
HE RARE PERIODS
of big battles—such as the bloodletting years between 1799 and 1815, the carnage of 1861–65, the Great War of 1914–18, or the six-year nightmare of 1939 to 1945—seem long distant in our modern era. Except for the daring American landing at Incheon (September 1950) and the subsequent first liberation of Seoul, not many battles of the past seven decades were anything like Jutland and the Somme of the First World War or the Second World War’s Battle of the Bulge and Kursk.

Amid the murderous fighting between well-organized armies during the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese forces as a matter of practice did not attempt to engage Western forces in formal set engagements. The sieges at Khe Sahn and, earlier, against the French at Dien Bien Phu were the exceptions rather than the rule, and themselves not quite traditional collisions of infantry.

The Soviet army may have killed more than a million Afghans in its failed attempt in the 1980s to take over Afghanistan—without once engaging in a set collision with tens of thousands of jihadist insurgents. In two Chechen wars, the Russians all but leveled Grozny—and yet never met in pitched battle the forces of their Islamic enemy. We still do not know all the gory details of that horrific Iran-Iraq war (1980–89), in which more than a million combatants and civilians on both sides perished. And despite the brutality and bloodshed that characterized that existential struggle between Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini—especially in murderous confrontations over the Iraqi city of Basra—there were rarely set engagements between two massed armies across the battlefield. At least we know of no particular name associated with such a putative showdown of massed forces.

Even the “Mother of all Battles” in the 1991 Gulf War was largely a rout. The tank battle at Medina Ridge involved hundreds of armored vehicles but lasted little more than an hour—the Americans suffering neither casualties to enemy fire nor the loss of a single Abrams tank while obliterating 186 Iraqi tanks. Most of Saddam’s army disintegrated before advancing American armor rather than fought—as was commonly the case during the three-week war of 2003. Today only a handful of Americans even know what the Medina Ridge was.

Given the open terrain and conventional forces involved, there was some decisive fighting on the ground between British and Argentine units during the Falklands War of 1982, but on a minuscule scale in comparison to the twentieth-century’s other bloody engagements. Tank battles raged in the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. And for a few days the Israelis and the Egyptian Third Army fought quite openly in the desert expanse of the Sinai Peninsula—in contrast to the sixty years of terrorism, intifadas, bombings, and missile strikes that have characterized the inconclusive Israeli-Arab conflicts.

Far more common in the modern world are the insurgencies that characterize the present Afghan and Iraq wars, as well as rapid surprise takeovers, such as Grenada and Panama; bombing campaigns, such as those against Mu’ammar Gadhafi and the sustained air assault that forced Slobodan Milošević out of Serbia; and messy police actions, like those in Somalia or Haiti.

This is not to say that hundreds of thousands do not die violently in these often vicious insurgencies, air campaigns, civil strife, genocides, and shellings of our age. The spring 1994 bloodletting in Rwanda saw five hundred thousand Tutsis butchered, and three hundred thousand Chechnyans and Russians perished in their two wars of the 1990s. Nor is the return of set-piece battles impossible. The U.S. military still prepares for the possibility of all sorts of conventional challenges. We hold thousands of tanks and artillery pieces in constant readiness, along with close-ground support missiles and planes, in fear that Kim Song Il’s People’s Army of Korea might someday quite brazenly try to swarm across the demilitarized zone into Seoul, or that conventional forces of the Chinese Red Army might storm the beaches of Taiwan.

Conventional clashes can be a part of every war. But again, decisive, sustained collisions, involving thousands of like combatants in relatively open terrain, are not. Sometimes entire wars are decided in theaters outside decisive battle. The present absence of set battles is hardly novel in the cyclical course of military history. The twenty-seven-year-long Peloponnesian War saw only two major ground engagements, at Delium (424
B.C.
) and Mantinea (418
B.C.
), and a few smaller infantry clashes at Solygeia and outside Syracuse. In such an asymmetrical struggle between Athenian naval power and premier Spartan infantry, far more common were hit-and-run attacks, terrorism, sieges, a constant ravaging of agriculture, and amphibious assaults, along with some large sea battles off the coast of Asia Minor.

During the murderous Roman Civil War (49–31
B.C.
) frequent and savage battles at Dyrrhacium, Pharsalus, Utica, Ruspina, Thapsus, Munda, Mutina, Philippi, and Actium claimed more than a quarter-million Roman lives. Yet after the creation of the Principate by the new emperor Augustus—except for the occasional frontier disasters such at Teutoberg Wald (
A.D.
9) or Adrianople (
A.D.
378), or the periodic internecine battles for imperial succession—much of the Mediterranean world was relatively united, and thus relatively free of major battles for nearly half a millennium.

After the fall of Roman Empire, the more impoverished Middle Ages saw mostly sieges and low-intensity conflict, not larger campaigns like the famous engagements at Poitiers (732), Hattin (1187), or Crécy (1346). The eminent military historian Russell Weigley writes of an “Age of Battles.” He argues that there was a uniquely murderous two centuries of pitched battles—between Gustavus Adolphus’s victory at Breitenfeld (1631) and Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo (1815)—in which European armies of multifarious rivals sought, often in vain, to decide entire wars in a few hours of head-to-head fighting. Scholars as diverse as David Bell and Frederick W. Kagan have chronicled the new age of battle in which Napoleon fought more decisive engagements in his twenty-year career than would transpire in Europe over the subsequent century.

Indeed, the agreements following the Congress of Vienna and military deterrence kept a widespread peace in Europe for nearly a century, which might explain why something like Sedan (1870) was the exception rather than the rule. In general, set battles of the era, on land or sea, were more a colonial experience (Tel el-Kebir, Omdurman) and more common in Asia (Tsushima) and the Americas (the decisive battles of the Mexican-American, Spanish-American, and American Civil War).

The era from the beginning of the First World War to end of the Second saw the most destructive battles in the history of arms. The details of Iwo Jima, Kursk, Marne, Meuse-Argonne, Okinawa, Passchendale, the Somme, Stalingrad, and Verdun are still chilling. Most Westerners know little of the horror of the battles of the Huaihai campaign (late 1948 to early 1949), in which the Nationalist Chinese lost an entire army of six hundred thousand to the Communists in mostly conventional fighting.

Why—Why Not—Decisive Battle?

W
HY IN THE
long cycles of military history, does the frequency of decisive battles wax and wane? The political landscape certainly explains much. The establishment of empire of any sort can lessen the incidence of regional warring in general. Unified, central political control transmogrifies the usual ethnic, tribal, racial, and religious strife into more-internal and less-violent rivalries for state representation and influence.

Sometimes repression of nationalist chauvinism, which so often leads to war, is accomplished violently and in authoritarian fashion, as in the case of the unification of Russia and its surrounding republics into the Soviet Union. On other occasions, such unification is mostly consensual, such as the American frontier expansion of settler movements that turned Western territories of provincials into mostly brotherly states. Either way, the resulting enormous confederation makes major battles in the region less likely. The contemporary European Union for now lacks the interstate rivalry that plunged Europe into battles for much of the first half of the twentieth century. Once Philip unified Greece under a Macedonian hegemony after Chaeronea (338
B.C.
), engagements like the prior fourth-century
B.C.
set battles between the city-states—Coronea, Haliartos, Leuctra, Mantinea, Nemea, and Tegyra—became a rarity.

True, when the world is divided into such larger blocs that have sizable, competent conventional forces—such as the Soviet and American spheres during the Cold War—there is the risk that confrontation can turn catastrophic, given the vast resources available to each side. Yet there is also the likelihood that frequent battling along nationalist lines among a variety of state players will be less frequent. No nation of the Warsaw Pact fought a Soviet republic; and nominal American allies like Iran did not threaten American allies like Israel. Tito and Yugoslavian communism for a while kept Bosnians, Croats, Kosovars, Macedonians, and Serbs from killing each other. There were no more Punic Wars once the Romans established a “Roman peace” and Carthago Nova as the capital of the new Latin-speaking province of Africa. The constant tribal fighting so common in Caesar’s Gallic Wars largely quieted down once the Romans annexed the entire region as the Roman province of Gaul.