The Worth of War (5 page)

Of course, even once they are learned, rational principles may be forgotten or ignored when a society succumbs to a wave of religious or ideological fervor that sweeps away reason. This is where Lamarckism falls short. Lessons learned can be forgotten The Germans knew a great deal about war and statecraft but, as we saw, even German Realpolitik could be overwhelmed by Nazism. Realistic thinking can eventually reassert itself though as in the German case, the cost of post-graduate studies in political realism can be quite steep.

Planning

The first element of the martial curriculum is planning. Societies that regularly engaged in war learned, as Sun Tzu said, not to trust soothsayers or look to the heavens for portents but turned, instead, to rational planning to predict and, perhaps, to control the future. In the broadest sense, military planning refers to the formulation of what is sometimes called “grand strategy,” that is, planning the ways in which resources should be coordinated and directed toward the general security goals of a society.
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In the Second World War, for example, Allied grand strategy called for the defeat of Germany as the primary American and British goal, with Japan and the Pacific as a secondary matter. In addition, Allied grand strategy affirmed at such meetings as the Yalta conference included planning for the post-war era.

Successful ancient empires and military powers also developed grand strategies. Grand strategies are seldom conceived quickly and are often the product of decades of thought, planning, and execution. Rome, for example, pursued a long-term strategy that historian Arthur Ferrill calls, “preclusive security.”
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Beginning during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian in the second century CE, this carefully crafted strategy entailed the construction of walls and fortresses at the perimeters of the Empire. These perimeter defenses were connected by an elaborate system of roads and sea transport so that troops and supplies might quickly be moved to a threatened frontier from other areas. The Emperor Constantine abandoned this strategy in favor of the less expensive expedient of maintaining one central, mobile army. Constantine's shift in strategies may have left the Empire more vulnerable to attack.
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China's “Great Wall,” a 5,000 mile long series of fortifications built in stages between the seventh and third centuries BCE is another example of a preclusive security strategy.

Below the level of grand strategy is strategic planning for particular wars, the design of appropriate tactics to implement that strategy, the organization of military forces, and the construction of the logistical systems needed to equip, transport, and supply those forces. Such plans
can themselves be very complex. Prior to the First World War, the German general staff raised planning to a high art. The Schliefen Plan, which detailed Germany's strategy for attacking France in World War I, was hundreds of pages long, providing detailed prescriptions for the mobilization, movement, and supply of millions of German troops. The Germans spent nine years devising the initial plan and several more years adding modifications. Military historians argue about whether Germany's defeat in World War I reflected shortcomings in the plan or the army's failure to properly execute the plan. In the years between the wars, the United States, for its part, developed a number of color-coded contingency plans for wars with possible and not-so-possible foes. War Plan Black was a plan for war with Germany and War Plan Orange was a plan for war with Japan. War Plan Crimson, improbably enough, dealt with war with Canada. While Orange and portions of Black actually were used, Canadian readers should be happy to learn that Crimson was never put into effect.

Successful ancient empires also engaged in extensive planning for their military campaigns. Sun Tzu discussed the importance of planning in the first of the thirteen chapters of
The Art of War
and said, “The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat: how much more no calculation at all! It is by attention to this point that I can see who is likely to win or lose.”
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Several centuries later, Machiavelli wrote, “Men who have any great undertaking in mind must first make all necessary preparations for it, so that, when an opportunity arises, they may be ready to put it in execution according to their design.”
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A wise prince, said Machiavelli, needs to know, “how to find the enemy, take up quarters, lead armies, plan battles and lay siege to towns.”
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Planning for war, of course, also includes economic planning. This principle has been understood since ancient times. Kautilya, for example, urged rulers to carefully examine their likely sources of revenue before going to war.
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Over time, a nation's military might is tied to its economic capabilities and level of economic development.
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One reason that Khrushchev's boast that he would bury the West rang hollow was that Soviet industrial capabilities were quite inferior to those of the United States and its allies. The difference in economic capacity proved telling when its futile effort to compete in an all-out arms race with the Americans in the 1980s led to the collapse of the Soviet State.

Economic capacity does not translate directly into military power. Productive potential must be harnessed and plans made for its conversion to military uses. Failure to make adequate economic plans for war can be as damaging as failure to make appropriate military plans. In the United States, preparation for World War II, for example, included the creation of an elaborate network of private defense contractors and subcontractors to build the weapons that America would need to prosecute the war.

A similar network remains the backbone of American military production today. Secretary of War Henry Stimson reportedly declared that in a capitalist society, if you wanted to go to war you needed to hire the industrialists. The Soviet Union by contrast established an enormous group of state-owned military industries to build weapons for the same war. Unfortunately, these were mainly located in the Western USSR where factories were quite vulnerable to German attack. After the German invasion, though, the USSR was able to disassemble and transport several thousand industrial plants to the distant Ural Mountains where they produced huge numbers of tanks, fighter planes, and artillery pieces for the remainder of the war. The Germans, for their part, felt assured by faith in Nazi racial ideology of an easy victory over the Slavic Untermenschen and the “mongrel” Americans. Accordingly, Germany did not put its economy on a full military footing until late in 1943.
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By this time, it was far too late for the Germans to produce sufficient quantities of military equipment to vie with the enormous productive capabilities of the Russians and Americans.

Organization

Closely related to planning is organization. A key difference between a military force and a mass of armed individuals, however fierce and heavily armed, is organization. Small numbers of well-organized and disciplined Roman troops usually had no difficulty defeating much larger numbers of barbarian tribesmen.
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Military forces are arrayed in groupings designed to maximize their effectiveness as well as the ability of officers to oversee and direct their troops. Military theorists and commanders spend a good deal of time considering the most effective organization of their forces. Kautilya, for example, taught that an army should be divided into four corps: the infantry, the cavalry, the chariot corps, and the elephant corps. Each required its own commander and each occupied a different place in the army's order of battle. The elephants, for example, were to march in front in order to crush the enemy's foot soldiers.

Relatively few armies employ elephants today, but organization continues to be a major preoccupation of military strategists. Generally speaking, military organization is hierarchical, with high-ranking officers commanding large bodies of troops organized into subdivisions commanded by lower-ranking officers. Each subdivision is assigned a specific task and may have specialized training or equipment for that task. In the US military, an army consisting of several hundred thousand troops is commanded by a general. The army is divided in corps; corps are divided into divisions, and divisions are, in turn, divided into brigades of roughly 3,000 soldiers commanded by a brigadier general. Brigades are divided into regiments (commanded by colonels), which are further subdivided into companies, then platoons, then squads commanded by sergeants. Naval and air forces have their own organizational charts, and all are tied together through complex systems of command, control and coordination.

Though all military organizational is hierarchical, successful armies usually invest subordinate officers with a considerable quantity of actual authority so that their troops will respect them as authentic
leaders rather than view them as mere servants of higher commanders. Discretion also allows subordinate officers to take advantage of opportunities or deal with crises immediately instead of relying on higher authority that is usually far removed from the battlefield. The Roman legions trained centurions to exercise a good deal of discretion. The German Wehrmacht, under the rubric of
Auftragstaktic
, or “mission-oriented command,” gave its noncommissioned officers a great deal of authority.
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And, in the US Marine Corps, sergeants are given wide latitude to lead their troops in combat.

Recruitment, Training, and Discipline

A third element of the general martial curriculum is the recruitment, training, and discipline of military forces. Among primitive peoples, all members of the tribe or group were expected to fight to protect or expand the group's territory, population, and food supply.
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With the development of states and the emergence of the military as a recognized occupational group, rulers recruited military forces in a variety of different ways depending upon costs, needs, the skills deemed necessary for successful military efforts, the likely loyalty of the troops, and a host of other factors. The proper characteristics of soldiers and officers has been among the central concerns of military theorists, princes, and, more recently, presidents. Kautilya said the best troops were professionals, recruited from among, “natives of the country, dependent upon the king, sharing his interests, constantly trained.”
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Other types of forces were inferior to these in terms of effectiveness and reliability.

Vegetius, for his part, was concerned with the physical and other standards that should be met by military recruits asserting that legionaries should be at least five feet ten inches tall and with a broad chest and muscular shoulders. He also favored recruits from the country rather than the city and suggested that individuals who had pursued “masculine” trades—smiths, carpenters, butchers, and huntsmen—were to be preferred.
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Writing in the late imperial period, Vegetius also recommended a return to what he believed to have been the successful
training methods used by the legions in an earlier era. These included years of drill, exercise, swimming lessons, and extensive training in the use of the chief weapons of the era: the sword, bow, sling, and javelin. Machiavelli agreed with this recommendation, saying that soldiers should train by running, wrestling, leaping, carrying heavy arms, using weapons, and swimming.
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In early modern Europe, changes in the international system and technology made the recruitment of troops a pressing issue. During the medieval period, kings had relied upon the feudal host, composed of nobles and their retainers. The nobles, usually organized as a heavy cavalry, were responsible for their own training and equipment. Commoners, brought into battle by their lords, were armed with light infantry weapons, including bows, and usually had little training. The introduction of new weapons and tactics in the fifteenth century sharply diminished the military effectiveness of heavy cavalry and compelled princes to give a good deal of thought to the recruitment and training of troops. Some princes relied upon private military contractors to provide trained troops when needed. The problem with mercenary forces was, of courses, the issue of loyalty. Mercenary troops, often not members of the same nationality group as their employer, were not inclined to risk their lives and might, for a fee, be induced to change sides during the war. Machiavelli was one of many who advocated the recruitment and training of native forces and abjured the use of mercenaries. He called the latter, “useless and dangerous.”

In recent decades, most discussions have focused on the relative merits of professional armies composed mainly of volunteers versus armies composed mainly of conscripted “citizen soldiers.” For much of its history, the United States relied primarily upon citizen militias and conscripts. Since 1972, the United States has built a professional military composed mainly, albeit not exclusively, of American citizens hired to fill military positions. These individuals receive several months of general military training as well as additional weeks or months of specialized training. Officers may receive several years of training in combat operations, planning, logistics, and, in some cases, engineering.

However recruited and trained, troops must be ranked and graded by aptitude and performance and they must be disciplined. That is, they must obey instructions even when asked to perform tasks that may involve great danger to themselves. Some authorities advocate harsh methods of discipline while others advocate exhortation and indoctrination to win the loyalty of the troops. Machiavelli was an advocate of harsh discipline. “But it is not sufficient just to give out good orders for this purpose, if their observance is not enforced with the utmost severity; for there is no case whatsoever in which the most exact and implicit obedience is as necessary as in the government of an army.” Machiavelli continues with an approving description of an extraordinarily harsh method of execution used by the commander of a legion to punish disobedience.
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Kautilya, on the other hand, believed that soldiers should be taught loyalty and exhorted to obey orders bravely. “Bards and praise-singers shall describe the heaven that awaits the brave and the hell that shall be the lot of cowards. They shall extol the clan, group, family, deeds, and conduct of the warriors.”
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Of course, most armies rely upon a mix of exhortation and punishment. During the Second World War, for example, Soviet troops received a steady diet of propaganda, exhortation, and political indoctrination. At the same time, special NKVD (security service) “blocking units” were positioned behind the front lines to shoot shirkers and deserters.