On War

"On War" by Clausewitz is one of the two great classics on the subject that pretty much everyone has heard of.  The other one is "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu.  The latter is more a collection of aphorisms than it is what is now called a book.  But "On War" runs several hundred pages and is a serious study of the business of conducting military campaigns.

In this post I am not going to Armchair General the subject.  Instead I want to take a much broader look at how war and military campaigns have evolved and what the present and near future looks like to me.

And "On War" represents the middle of the story.  Then and now the Prussians (people who live in a district of what is now Germany) have prided themselves on having a deep understanding of how to organize and prosecute military campaigns.  They believe that they have taken a longer and harder look at the subject than anyone else.  This gives them a special expertise.  As just one example, they invented the concept of a "general staff".  So when Napoleon started getting frisky in the time period just before and after 1800 they pegged him for an ignorant upstart and figured he would be fairly easy to deal with.

They turned out to be terribly wrong about this.  He spanked them badly.  It turned out that it was not the Prussians but the British who, in the form of Wellington, finally cracked the code for how to beat him.  After the fact Clausewitz set out to codify what the Prussians learned the hard way and put it into a single book.  He spent more than a decade on the project.  He was still revising and enhancing when he died in 1831.  His wife was forced to publish his work "as is".  She did so a year after his death.  So that's the middle.  Let's start at the beginning.

Hunter gatherers engage in a very low level form of warfare.  Human populations can grow quickly so it doesn't take long for a population to reach the carrying capacity of the land it occupies.  When all the lands are occupied by one group or another some degree of conflict is nearly inevitable.

But in this environment it consists primarily of small parties launching probes and raiding parties.  If a particular tribe can expand its territory it can afford to grow its population.  But one tribe's expansion is another tribe's diminution.  Tribes tend to fight or be wiped out.  The populations involved are small and the weapons involved are primitive.  And the larger the area controlled by one tribe the harder it becomes for that tribe to defend all of it successfully.  So a rough balance of power is the long term norm.

And this has an effect on tactics.  It is hard to kill an opposing warrior.  And there is a good chance that both attacking and defending warriors will be killed or seriously injured.  And this interferes with defense and with hunting.  So cost has to be carefully weighed against benefit.  The result is that instead of trying to kill or grievously injure an opponent a warrior often merely attempts to touch an opponent and get away without being touched in return.  This is considered sufficient proof to justify calling him a "brave".

And, of course, "wives" may be "stolen" instead.  Once stolen, a wife becomes a full fledged member of the tribe as if she had been born to it in the first place.  And it is not done to try to steal a wife back.  This means that marriage happens across a much larger population than would be the case if wives always came from within the tribe.  The routine stealing of wives from other tribes has the advantage of widening the gene pool and avoiding problems caused by too high a level of inbreeding.  So wars, if we can even call them that, are just another hardship that must be endured and not even the worst.

The rise of cities led to the rise of states and this changed warfare drastically.  The size of the army that could be supported grew from a few to hundreds and later thousands.  This led to the rise of the professional soldier.  This led to the serious study of how to conduct a war.  And that led to many innovations.  General purpose hunting equipment evolved into militarized versions.  And new specialized weapons and devices were developed.  And the study of strategy and tactics began.

This was well advanced by the time someone like Alexander the Great came along.  He was successful for two main reasons.  First, he was a charismatic leader.  He could by force of personality convince people to fight for him and to fight hard for him.  All other things being equal, if one side fights harder it will win.  But all things are rarely equal.  And the other thing Alexander did was to come up with new and improved tactics.  So not only did his armies out fight his opponents they out smarted them.  And Alexander was wildly successful.  But everything fell apart after he died.  None of his subordinates could match his charisma or his creativity.  So he left things little changed.

The Romans were able to come up with a number of great generals over the years.  None of them was as good as Alexander but they were pretty good.  And Rome was a good example of the bureaucratization of war.  The Romans were able to come up with innovations and then hang on to them.  One of them was the "Roman Square".  This was a formation, tactics, equipment, training, etc. for a group of soldiers.  It allowed them to operate very effectively as a unit.  A Roman Square could defeat pretty much everything except similar units or an overwhelmingly larger opposing army.

Another thing the bureaucratic Romans came up with were good roads.  Good roads made it easier to move Roman Square units around quickly.  So a relatively small number of units could defend a relatively large border because units could be shifted to where they were needed.

What eventually brought the Roman empire down was the fact that it was all expensive.  When the empire was healthy the cost could be handled.  But when internal problems beset the empire its ability to support roads and armies diminished.  And eventually Rome did not have sufficient well trained and equipped forces to defend all fronts.  And the whole thing fell apart.

The fall of Rome caused Europe to fall into what used to be called the dark ages.  It was an apt name because large amounts of knowledge and the ability to organize was lost for centuries.  Infrastructure like roads, schools, and libraries, were allowed to fall apart.  It became very difficult to travel long distances in any significant numbers so Europe became a very insular place.  The dark ages only affected Europe but a lot of the impetus behind rapid change in the art of war had been concentrated in Europe so the rate of change in military matters slowed markedly on a world wide basis.

It took at least tens of thousands of years to go from a hunter gatherer level of warfare to a city state level of warfare.  But the time it took to go from Alexander the Great to Rome at its peak was hundreds of years.  The dark ages lasted hundreds of years but it was followed by a period of rapid military innovation.

Metal working got better and European insularity were the perfect conditions for the development of the "knights in shining armor" era.  Single soldiers were equipped very elaborately and expensively.  It was within the capability of a town of fairly modest size to support one or a few knights.  And a knight was the Roman Square of this period, at least in Europe.  Conditions were different elsewhere in the world so the heavy armor employed by knights was not developed anywhere else.

But there was a tactic whose origins predated even Alexander that was in universal use.  That was the siege.  Control of cities yielded effective control of the surrounding countryside.  So a lot of thought went into figuring out how to besiege a city.  This resulted in an arms race that lasted more than a millennium.

The local populace would flee to the city when an army was approaching.  Walls were built around the city to make it hard to get in.  So an arms race developed between "wall" technology and "wall breaching" technology.  As the race went on walls were built taller and stronger.  This resulted in the development of more and more sophisticated "siege engines", as wall breaching technology was called.

The "battering ram" was used to attack the gates.  So gates became elaborate and heavily reinforced.  So the attack shifted to the walls.  Both trebuchets (gravity powered super-slingshots) and a catapults (spring powered super-slingshots) were used to try and knock holes in the wall.  "Siege towers" (tall fortified ladders on wheels) tried to put soldiers on the top of the wall.  There were other devices and other tactics used to get over, under, around, or through the wall.  Or the army just sat and tried to starve the inhabitants of the city out.  And, of course, each round of the arms race drove the cost up.

The big innovation that changed everything was gunpowder.  Before the advent of cannons the design and construction of walled fortresses changed slowly.  A properly constructed fortress was impervious to siege but it was also extremely expensive to build and maintain.  But it was possible.

Once developed, cannons quickly improved enough so they had little trouble knocking the even best old style fortresses apart.  Fortress design and the tactics used by the besieged had to evolve to remain effective.  Also once developed, hand held gunpowder weapons quickly evolved to the point where they could easily penetrate old style armor.  Advanced armor was developed but this only delayed the inevitable by about a century.  Gunpowder weapons eventually spelled the end of the knight and castles.  Purpose built fortifications  and body armor continue to have a place so they are still in at least limited use today.

Let's return to Napoleon and his innovations for a moment.  One of them had to do with supply.  Until Napoleon all armies lived off the land.  They gathered the food they needed (and often lots else) from the countryside in which they were operating.  This limited their speed.  They had to go slow enough for "foraging parties" to be able to gather sufficient supplies.  And large armies couldn't go where (and when) foraging was likely to be poor.  This resulted in a lot of campaigns in late summer and early fall when the weather was good and the pickings were plentiful.

Napoleon developed canning and other techniques so that his armies could be remotely supplied.  This meant they could move faster and perhaps be places where the foraging was poor.  That's the way all modern armies operate.  And "logistics", a fancy word for the process of keeping an army supplied, is now a key consideration in the planning of a campaign.

So warfare was different in significant ways at the end of the Napoleonic Wars than it was at the beginning.  And that has been true ever since.  The introduction of the rifled musket (about three times as accurate), "repeating" rifles, the Gatling machinegun, using hot air balloons for reconnaissance, trench warfare, the "ironclad" warship, and several other innovations all happened between the start and the end of the Civil War.  World War I saw the introduction of the airplane as a military weapon, poison gas, and the "tank" and the use of radio in war.  All were introduced during the War.

The aircraft carrier existed before World War II started.  But no one predicted it would completely obsolete the battleship.  The rocket was a toy until the V-2 came into existence.  The jet powered V-1 was what we would now call a drone.  Before the War the jet engine had never been used to power an airplane and a pilotless plane was a comic book fantasy.  As were RADAR and SONAR and, of course the Atomic Bomb.  And all of these wars lasted roughly five years each.  And yet military technology and tactics were radically different after each of these wars than they had been before.

The Atomic Bomb is widely seen as marking a radical and permanent change in how wars, or at least big wars, are fought.  We see a slow buildup of the cost and destructiveness of warfare when it is pushed to the limit.  We see it in the three wars I highlighted.  The Civil War was a big deal but it did not stand out from other wars of the period in terms of size and scope.  But World War I was much bigger than anything that had preceded it.  And World War II was much bigger than World War I.  Everybody assumes that a World War III would be much bigger and much more destructive than World War II.  And that's why we haven't had a World War III.  Or so says the conventional wisdom on the subject.

Both World Wars I and II are generally referred to as "total war".  This is to contrast them with other "limited" wars.  The key idea is escalation.  World War I was a classic example of escalation.  It started out with an idiotically small event, the assassination of a minor noble that no one really cared about by anarchists, a splinter group that no one really cared about.  But the thinking of the time was "escalation is not a problem".  All the major players figured they would benefit by escalating a nothing event into a big deal.  So they did.  Their calculations were tragically wrong and the result was World War I.  Everybody lost in World War I.  It's just that some groups lost more than others did.

World War II was kind of the logic that resulted in World War I being turned inside out.  As I lay out in my "Winds of War" post (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-winds-of-war.html) Hitler used the reluctance of his adversaries to escalate to his advantage  He felt that he could escalate without having to worry about his opponents escalating.  By the time his opponents matched him it was too late.  Whether anybody wanted it or not, World War II was on.

And it is important to understand that going to war always involves a cost/benefit calculation.  One of the reasons the Europeans were comfortable with escalation at the start of World War I was that it was preceded by several limited wars.  In each of these wars the various sides pursued limited goals and employed limited means.  And at least one side calculated that they had derived sufficient benefit from the war to more than offset the cost.

Everyone assumed that World War I would be the same.  At least some of the participants would end up with a net benefit.  But it didn't work out that way.  In the run up to World War II the big reason Hitler's opponents did not effectively counter him for so long was that World War I had taught them that in a big war everybody loses.  Hitler miscalculated in that he thought he could avoid a big war in which Germany would end up worse off.

As I said above, the conventional wisdom is that World War III (or anything approaching total war) will not happen because everybody believes that in a total war everybody will lose.  But everybody also believes (although they may not say it in public) that someone else will back down instead of continuing to escalate and save the day.  But is this really true?

Post-WW II history says yes.  The US could have escalated to Atomic Bombs in the Korean War but it didn't.  The Vietnam War was always characterized as "a limited war for limited objectives".  China entered the Korean War on the side of North Korea.  This prolonged the war and resulted in a stalemate that persists to this day.  Once they became involved the US worked hard to avoid further escalation.  In Vietnam one consideration was always to avoid the active participation of the Russians or Chinese on the other side.

There have been lots of other wars since.  But they have not involved large scale participation by major powers on both sides.  Instead major powers content themselves with supporting "proxies", much smaller players who participate directly.  That has made it relatively easy to keep them relatively small affairs.  In the three quarters of a century since World War II all wars have been limited wars.

My mother was a veteran of that war.  She passed away recently at the age of 95.  There are now very few people left with direct experience of what a total war is like.  An eighty year old was born two years before World War II started and was less than ten years old when it ended.  I am the child of the people of that time.  There are now children of children and children of children of children and even children of children of children of children of people of people of that time.

The memory fades.  Generations have now grown up experiencing only limited wars.  It is easy to understand why many people would believe that total war, or even war on a large scale, is no longer possible.  But that is wrong.  There is no "law" making it impossible.  There is only the assumption based on a long period of experience that it can no longer happen.

Another reason that we have not seen total war or even a large scale war for a long time is that it used to be really hard to get there.  The Europeans studied and planned and schemed for many years in order to get everything positioned so that World War I was possible.  It took a similar period of time for Hitler to push Britain and France to declare War and get World War II started.  Then it took nearly three years more to drag the US and Russia into it.  And in both cases it took a direct attack.

But war making technology has continued to evolve.  The amount of firepower single soldiers pack around today as compared to World War II puts the modern soldier into a whole different category of lethality.  In World War II there was something called "precision bombing".  It was anything but.  But modern smart bombs and drone fired missiles are more powerful because they are more precise.  It used to take thousand plane strikes to be confident of taking an objective out.  No more.  It no longer takes an armed force numbering in the millions to play with the big boys.  One suitcase nuclear weapon will now do the job.

This increase in lethality has been slow but steady.  It has been going on for seventy-five years since the last major war.  The lessons taught us by something so long ago completely mislead us.

Another thing that misleads us is the "rational actor" assumption.  The leaders that direct military forces are rational, right?  But the leaders of the European powers did not act rationally in the run up to World War I.  The reason for their irrational behavior can be found in the assumptions they made that turned out to be wrong.  It is now even easier for leaders to hold fundamentally wrong assumptions than it was back then.

Modern leaders need to take the time and invest the effort to understand what the world looks like to their adversaries and potential adversaries.  Only then can their actions and reactions be predicted with reasonable accuracy.  But this rarely happens.  And the level of discord we now live with makes it very difficult for the few that might be inclined to do so to actually do so.  The result is that leaders more often than not miscalculate how their adversaries or potential adversaries will react to an action or event.

And that makes it much easier for us to now to stumble into a "World War I", a catastrophic event that went unlike anybody expected.  And the cost of that miscalculation was horror, death, and destruction that was literally unimaginable before it happened.  Then, of course, until it actually did  happen.  But by then it was too late.  And for our time that time is lost to the mists of history.  It is safely tucked away in books that no one reads any more.  Even the greater and more recent horrors of World War II are ignored or denied or dismissed by far too many.

We can stumble into a major war in Korea or Iran or Syria or someplace that isn't even on anybody's list of hot spots.  A pipsqueak power like North Korea has rockets and nuclear weapons.  It is unlikely that right this minute they have the actual ability to effectively use them.  But that's just a semi-educated guess.  And the smart money says that they are only at most a few years away form having everything they need to hurl a nuclear weapon thousands of miles and then detonate it.  Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon.  But President Trump, without much thought, seems likely to take the actions that would change that.

Syria is very unstable.  A lot of people are fighting and dying there.  And major powers, the US and Russia, are involved supporting surrogates on opposite sides.  Medium sized powers like the UK, France, China, Turkey, various Middle Eastern powers, etc. are more or less directly involved.  There are ways beyond number for this to go badly wrong.  The Israel/Palestine conflict has been gridlocked for a long time.  So people naturally assume that the status quo will prevail indefinitely.  But maybe it won't.  Or maybe things will blow up between Israel and Egypt or between Japan and China or between whoever and whoever.

If we look at Syria, for the most part a "heavy weapon" is a 50 caliber machine gun mounted on a Toyota pickup truck.  But that's how it is, not how it could be.  There are a lot of countries that, if pressed, could field a military that could wreck havoc on a massive scale if they decided that they had to go all out.  It is a massive mistake to believe it can't happen because it hasn't happened for a very long time.

Yet the trend in politics pretty much around the world is to put leaders in place who are more likely rather than less to opt for the "all in" option.  And one reason is a total massive failure of imagination.  Far too many people literally can't imagine something like that happening.  And so they support leaders and ways of thinking that make what they can't imagine more likely rather than less.  We live in truly scary times.