Napoleon withdrew from a strong position to draw his opponent forward and tempt him into a flank attack, weakening his center. This allowed the French army to split the allied army and gain victory. Napoleon used two primary strategies for the approach to battle. This forced the opponent to either march to battle with Napoleon or attempt to find an escape route around the army. By placing his army into the rear, his opponent's supplies and communications would be cut. This had a negative effect on enemy morale.
Fourth-generation warfare
Once joined, the battle would be one in which his opponent could not afford defeat. This also allowed Napoleon to select multiple battle angles into a battle site. Initially, the lack of force concentration helped with foraging for food and sought to confuse the enemy as to his real location and intentions. The "indirect" approach into battle also allowed Napoleon to disrupt the linear formations used by the allied armies. As the battle progressed, the enemy committed their reserves to stabilize the situation, Napoleon would suddenly release the flanking formation to attack the enemy.
His opponents, being suddenly confronted with a new threat and with little reserves, had no choice but to weaken the area closest to the flanking formation and draw up a battle line at a right angle in an attempt to stop this new threat. Once this had occurred, Napoleon would mass his reserves at the hinge of that right angle and launch a heavy attack to break the lines.
The rupture in the enemy lines allowed Napoleon's cavalry to flank both lines and roll them up leaving his opponent no choice but to surrender or flee. The second strategy used by Napoleon I of France when confronted with two or more enemy armies was the use of the central position. This allowed Napoleon to drive a wedge to separate the enemy armies. He would then use part of his force to mask one army while the larger portion overwhelmed and defeated the second army quickly. He would then march on the second army leaving a portion to pursue the first army and repeat the operations. This was designed to achieve the highest concentration of men into the primary battle while limiting the enemy's ability to reinforce the critical battle.
The central position had a weakness in that the full power of the pursuit of the enemy could not be achieved because the second army needed attention. So overall the preferred method of attack was the flank march to cross the enemy's logistics.
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Napoleon used the central position strategy during the Battle of Waterloo. His subordinate was unable to mask the defeated Prussian army, who reinforced the Waterloo battle in time to defeat Napoleon and end his domination of Europe. Napoleon's practical strategic triumphs, repeatedly leading smaller forces to defeat larger ones, inspired a whole new field of study into military strategy. In particular, his opponents were keen to develop a body of knowledge in this area to allow them to counteract a masterful individual with a highly competent group of officers, a General Staff.
The two most significant students of his work were Carl von Clausewitz , a Prussian with a background in philosophy , and Antoine-Henri Jomini , who had been one of Napoleon's staff officers. One notable exception to Napoleon's strategy of annihilation and a precursor to trench warfare were the Lines of Torres Vedras during the Peninsular War. French Armies lived off the land and when they were confronted by a line of fortifications which they could not out flank, they were unable to continue the advance and were forced to retreat once they had consumed all the provisions of the region in front of the lines.
The Peninsular campaign was notable for the development of another method of warfare which went largely unnoticed at the time, but would become far more common in the 20th century. That was the aid and encouragement the British gave to the Spanish to harass the French behind their lines which led them to squander most of the assets of their Iberian army in protecting the army's line of communications.
This was a very cost effective move for the British, because it cost far less to aid Spanish insurgents than it did to equip and pay regular British army units to engage the same number of French troops. As the British army could be correspondingly smaller it was able to supply its troops by sea and land without having to live off the land as was the norm at the time.
Fourth-generation warfare - Wikipedia
Further, because they did not have to forage they did not antagonise the locals and so did not have to garrison their lines of communications to the same extent as the French did. So the strategy of aiding their Spanish civilian allies in their guerrilla or 'small war' benefited the British in many ways, not all of which were immediately obvious.
Clausewitz's On War has become the respected reference for strategy, dealing with political, as well as military, leadership. His most famous assertion being:. For Clausewitz , war was first and foremost a political act, and thus the purpose of all strategy was to achieve the political goal that the state was seeking to accomplish.
As such, Clausewitz famously argued that war was the "continuation of politics by other means", and as such, argued that the amount of force used by the state would and should be proportional to whatever the political aim that the state was seeking to achieve via war. Clausewitz further dismissed "geometry" as an insignificant factor in strategy, believing instead that ideally all wars should follow the Napoleonic concept of victory through a decisive battle of annihilation and destruction of the opposing force, at any cost.
However, he also recognized that his ideal of how war should be fought was not always practical in reality and that limited warfare could influence policy by wearing down the opposition through a " strategy of attrition ". In contrast to Clausewitz, Antoine-Henri Jomini dealt mainly with operational strategy, planning and intelligence , the conduct of the campaign, and "generalship" rather than "statesmanship". He proposed that victory could be achieved by occupying the enemy's territory rather than destroying his army.
As such, geometric considerations were prominent in his theory of strategy. Jomini's two basic principles of strategy were to concentrate against fractions of the enemy force at a time and to strike at the most decisive objective. Clausewitz and Jomini are required reading for today's military professional officer. The evolution of military strategy continued in the American Civil War — The practice of strategy was advanced by generals such as Robert E. Lee , Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman , all of whom had been influenced by the feats of Napoleon Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson was said to have carried a book of Napoleon's maxims with him.
However, the adherence to the Napoleonic principles in the face of technological advances such as the long-range infantry breechloader rifles and minie ball guns generally led to disastrous consequences for both the Union and Confederate forces and populace. The time and space in which war was waged changed as well. Railroads enabled swift movement of large forces but the manoeuvring was constrained to narrow, vulnerable corridors. Steam power and ironclads changed transport and combat at sea.
Newly invented telegraph enabled more rapid communication between armies and their headquarters capitals. Combat was still usually waged by opposing divisions with skirmish lines on rural battlefields, violent naval engagements by cannon-armed sailing or steam-powered vessels, and assault on military forces defending a town.
There was still room for triumphs for the strategy of manoeuvre such as Sherman's March to the Sea in , but these depended upon an enemy's unwillingness to entrench. Towards the end of the war, especially in defense of static targets as in the battles of Cold Harbor and Vicksburg , trench networks foreshadowed World War I. Under Moltke the Prussian army achieved victory in the Austro-Prussian War and the Franco-Prussian War —71 , the latter campaign being widely regarded as a classic example of the conception and execution of military strategy.
In addition to exploiting railroads and highways for manoeuvre, Moltke also exploited the telegraph for control of large armies. He recognised the need to delegate control to subordinate commanders and to issue directives rather than specific orders. Moltke is most remembered as a strategist for his belief in the need for flexibility and that no plan, however well prepared, can be guaranteed to survive beyond the first encounter with the enemy. He advocated the "strategy of annihilation" but was faced by a war on two fronts against numerically superior opposition.
The strategy he formulated was the Schlieffen Plan , defending in the east while concentrating for a decisive victory in the west, after which the Germans would go on to the offensive in the east. Influenced by Hannibal's success at the Battle of Cannae , Schlieffen planned for a single great battle of encirclement, thereby annihilating his enemy. His theory defied popular military thinking of the time, which was strongly in favour of victory in battle, yet World War I would soon demonstrate the flaws of a mindless "strategy of annihilation".
At a time when industrialisation was rapidly changing naval technology, one American strategist, Alfred Thayer Mahan , almost single-handedly brought the field of naval strategy up to date. Influenced by Jomini's principles of strategy, he saw that in the coming wars, where economic strategy could be as important as military strategy, control of the sea granted the power to control the trade and resources needed to wage war.
Mahan pushed the concept of the "big navy" and an expansionist view where defence was achieved by controlling the sea approaches rather than fortifying the coast. His theories contributed to the naval arms race between and At the start of World War I strategy was dominated by the offensive thinking that had been in vogue since , despite the more recent experiences of the Second Boer War — and Russo-Japanese War —05 , where the machine gun demonstrated its defensive capabilities.
By the end of , the Western Front was a stalemate and all ability to maneuver strategically was lost. The combatants resorted to a " strategy of attrition ".
The German battle at Verdun , the British on the Somme and at Passchendaele were among the first wide-scale battles intended to wear down the enemy. Attrition was time-consuming so the duration of World War I battles often stretched to weeks and months. The problem with attrition was that the use of fortified defenses in depth generally required a ratio of ten attackers to one defender, or a level of artillery support which was simply not feasible until late , for any reasonable chance of victory.
The ability of the defender to move troops using interior lines prevented the possibility of fully exploiting any breakthrough with the level of technology then attainable. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of strategy in World War I was the difference among the British between the "Western" viewpoint held by Field Marshal Haig and the "Eastern"; the former being that all effort should be directed against the German Army, the latter that more useful work could be done by attacking Germany's allies. The term "Knocking away the props" was used, perhaps as an unfortunate consequence of the fact that all of Germany's allies lay south of i.
Apologists and defenders of the Western viewpoint make the valid point that Germany's allies were more than once rescued from disaster or rendered capable of holding their own or making substantial gains by the provision of German troops, arms or military advisers, whereas those allies did not at any time provide a similar function for Germany. That is, it was Germany which was the prop, and her allies particularly Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary did not suffer significant reverses until Germany's ability to come to their aid was grossly impaired.
On other fronts, there was still room for the use of strategy of maneuver. The Germans executed a perfect battle of annihilation against the Russians at the Battle of Tannenberg. In Britain and France launched the well-intentioned but poorly conceived and ultimately fruitless Dardanelles Campaign , combining naval power and an amphibious landing, in an effort to aid their Russian ally and knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war.
The Palestine campaign was dominated by cavalry , which flourished in the local terrain, and the British achieved two breakthrough victories at Gaza and Megiddo Lawrence and other British officers led Arab irregulars on a guerrilla campaign against the Ottomans, using strategy and tactics developed during the Boer Wars. World War I saw armies on a scale never before experienced.
The British, who had always relied on a strong navy and a small regular army, were forced to undertake a rapid expansion of the army. This outpaced the rate of training of generals and staff officers able to handle such a mammoth force, and overwhelmed the ability of British industry to equip it with the necessary weapons and adequate high-quality munitions until late in the war. Technological advances also had a huge influence on strategy: More so than in previous wars, military strategy in World War I was directed by the grand strategy of a coalition of nations; the Entente on one side and the Central Powers on the other.
Society and economy were mobilized for total war. Attacks on the enemy's economy included Britain's use of a naval blockade and Germany employing submarine warfare against merchant shipping. Unity of command became a question when the various nation states began coordinating assaults and defenses.
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Under the pressure of horrendously destructive German attacks beginning on March 21, , the Entente eventually settled under Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch. The Germans generally led the Central Powers, though German authority diminished and lines of command became confused at the end of the war.
World War I strategy was dominated by the "Spirit of the Offensive", where generals resorted almost to mysticism in terms of a soldier's personal "attitude" in order to break the stalemate; this led to nothing but bloody slaughter as troops in close ranks charged machine guns. Each side developed an alternate thesis. The British under Winston Churchill developed tank warfare, with which they eventually won the war. The Germans developed a "doctrine of autonomy", the forerunner of both blitzkrieg and modern infantry tactics , using groups of stormtroopers , who would advance in small mutually covering groups from cover to cover with "autonomy" to exploit any weakness they discovered in enemy defenses.
After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk , Germany launched and almost succeeded in a final offensive. However, the new tactics of autonomy revealed a weakness in terms of overall coordination and direction. The March offensive, intended to drive a wedge between the French and British armies, turn on the latter and destroy it, lost direction and became driven by its territorial gains, its original purpose neglected. World War I ended when the ability of the German army to fight became so diminished that Germany asked for peace conditions.
The German military, exhausted by the efforts of the March offensives and dispirited by their failure, was first seriously defeated during the Battle of Amiens 8—11 August and the German homefront entered general revolt over a lack of food and destruction of the economy. Victory for the Entente was almost assured by that point, and the fact of Germany's military impotence was driven home in the following hundred days. In this time, the Entente reversed the gains the Germans had made in the first part of the year, and the British Army spearheaded by the Canadians and Australians finally broke the Hindenburg defensive system.
Though his methods are questioned, Britain's Field Marshal Haig was ultimately proved correct in his grand strategic vision: Interior lines thus became meaningless as Germany had nothing more to offer its allies. The props eventually fell, but only because they were themselves no longer supported. The role of the tank in World War I strategy is often poorly understood.
Its supporters saw it as the weapon of victory, and many observers since have accused the high commands especially the British of shortsightedness in this matter, particularly in view of what tanks have achieved since. Nevertheless, the World War I tank's limitations, imposed by the limits of contemporary engineering technology, have to be borne in mind.
They were slow men could run, and frequently walk, faster ; vulnerable to artillery due to their size, clumsiness and inability to carry armour against anything but rifle and machine gun ammunition; extremely uncomfortable conditions inside them often incapacitating crews with engine fumes and heat, and driving some mad with noise ; and often despicably unreliable frequently failing to make it to their targets due to engine or track failures. This was the factor behind the seemingly mindless retention of large bodies of cavalry, which even in , with armies incompletely mechanised, were still the only armed force capable of moving significantly faster than an infantryman on foot.
It was not until the relevant technology in engineering and communications matured between the wars that the tank and the airplane could be forged into the co-ordinated force needed to truly restore manoeuvre to warfare. In the years following World War I, two of the technologies that had been introduced during that conflict, the aircraft and the tank , became the subject of strategic study.
The leading theorist of air power was Italian general Giulio Douhet , who believed that future wars would be won or lost in the air.
The air force would carry the offensive, and the role of the ground forces would be defensive only. Douhet's doctrine of strategic bombing meant striking at the enemy's heartland—his cities, industry and communications. Air power would thereby reduce his willingness and capacity to fight. At this time the idea of the aircraft carrier and its capabilities also started to change thinking in those countries with large fleets, but nowhere as much as in Japan.
The UK and US seem to have seen the carrier as a defensive weapon, and their designs mirrored this; the Japanese Imperial Navy seem to have developed a new offensive strategy based on the power projection these made possible. Fuller , architect of the first great tank battle at Cambrai , and his contemporary, B.
Liddell Hart , were amongst the most prominent advocates of mechanization and motorization of the army in Britain. In Germany, study groups were set up by Hans von Seeckt , commander of the Reichswehr Truppenamt, for 57 areas of strategy and tactics to learn from World War I and to adapt strategy to avoid the stalemate and then defeat they had suffered. All seem to have seen the strategic shock value of mobility and the new possibilities made possible by motorised forces. Both saw that the armoured fighting vehicle demonstrated firepower, mobility and protection.
The Germans seem to have seen more clearly the need to make all branches of the Army as mobile as possible to maximise the results of this strategy. It would negate the static defences of the trench and machine gun and restore the strategic principles of manoeuvre and offense. Nevertheless, it was the British Army which was the only [ citation needed ] one truly mechanised at the beginning of the Second World War, the Germans still relying on horse traction for a large portion of their artillery. The innovative German Major later General Heinz Guderian developed the motorised part of this strategy as the head of one of the Truppenamt groups and may have incorporated Fuller's and Liddell Hart's ideas to amplify the groundbreaking Blitzkrieg effect that was seen used by Germany against Poland in and later against France in France, still committed to stationary World War I strategies, was completely surprised and summarily overwhelmed by Germany's mobile combined arms doctrine and Guderian's Panzer Corps.
Technological change had an enormous effect on strategy, but little effect on leadership. The use of telegraph and later radio, along with improved transport , enabled the rapid movement of large numbers of men. One of Germany's key enablers in mobile warfare was the use of radios, where these were put into every tank.
However, the number of men that one officer could effectively control had, if anything, declined. In his new book The Future of War: Rather, he warns policymakers to be wary of analysts and strategists who promise a fast track to victory though new technologies and tactics. He covers military theories about war among the major powers, humanitarian intervention and civil war, and counterterrorism.
As one might infer from the title, The Future of War: A History offers a short course on macro changes in thinking about war in the United States and the United Kingdom over the past years. Freedman is an accomplished military historian. He has published works on war and strategy for more than 30 years.
A History Oxford University Press , which comprehensively reviewed business, military, and political strategy and plumbed the depths of thinking about what strategy is and how it is executed. For The Future of War: G Wells and in movies. Freedman argues there is no dominant model for future war.
In his view, from about the middle of the 19th century to the end of the Cold War, theories of war rested on an idealized model of decisive battles. Surprise and overwhelming force were the hallmarks of this thinking and drove a focus on first-strike planning and operations that would deliver a knock-out punch to the enemy. Freedman naturally starts with classic military theorists, such as Clausewitz and Jomini, and also weaves in work by futurists of the time.
The development and prospective use of nuclear weapons fits within this first-strike, overwhelming force model, and Freedman points out that these weapons had the greatest effect on thinking about war because they had a chilling effect on the willingness of major powers to consider direct war with each other. Western states, particularly the United States, stumbled into a range of conflicts following the Cold War. Freedman argues theories about military intervention—humanitarian, peacekeeping, nation-building, and counterterrorism—were underdeveloped, creating difficulties for pursuing goals in such conflicts.
Oddly, Freedman does not focus much on US strategic thinking about counterinsurgency warfare, such as that of retired US Army general David Petraeus or oft-published counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen. Freedman harshly criticizes US political science approaches to studying war. He takes to task the Correlates of War project and the democratic peace theory, focusing on the flaws in quantifying war based on battle deaths and applying quantitative methods to assess the potential for war.
It is surprising that Freedman does not touch on the role of intelligence in his review of thinking on war. Obviously, the major support was American, but it was plausibly not official American and it could be excluded from diplomatic intercourse and international legal complication. The goal of the radios was to present the truth to suppressed peoples behind the Iron Curtain "to aid in rebuilding a lively and diversified intellectual life in Europe which could In addition, Voice of America VOA started broadcasting to the Soviet citizens in under the pretext of countering "more harmful instances of Soviet propaganda directed against American leaders and policies" on the part of the internal Soviet Russian-language media.
In the fall of a group of scholars including physicists, historians and psychologists from Harvard University , the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and RAND Corporation undertook a research study of psychological warfare for the Department of State. An overt, non-governmental form of political warfare during the Cold War emerged after President Ronald Reagan's 8 June speech to the British Parliament. In his speech, Reagan appealed for a "global crusade for democracy" [46] and as a result, the National Endowment for Democracy NED was created in December The NED "funded programs in support of candidates acceptable to the US in elections in Grenada, Panama, El Salvador, and Guatemala throughout and in order to prevent communist victories, and create stable pro-US governments".
- Political warfare.
- Truth, dont deny me.
- Guidance in Esoteric Training: From the Esoteric School.
- Military strategy.
- Sun and Candlelight (Mills & Boon M&B) (Betty Neels Collection, Book 43).
Other notable efforts included anti-Sandinista propaganda and opposition efforts in Nicaragua as well as anti-Communist propaganda and opposition efforts in support of the Solidarity movement in Poland between and Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union was committed to political warfare on classic totalitarian lines and continued to utilize propaganda towards internal and external audiences.
Soviet efforts took many forms, ranging from propaganda, forgeries, and general disinformation to assassinations. The measures aimed to damage the enemy's image, create confusion, mould public opinion, and to exploit existing strains in international relations. Soviet campaigns fed disinformation that was psychologically consistent with the audience. Communist strategy and tactics continually focused on revolutionary objectives, "for them the real war is the political warfare waged daily under the guise of peace". China's political leaders during this century have had to first create a nation before they could proceed to contend with other national actors in the international arena.
Consequently, insofar as both the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang subscribed to a political warfare concept during their formative years of struggle, the concept was as much concerned with creating national identity and defeating domestic adversaries as it was with China's ability to compete in the world. The Republic of China government in Taiwan recognized that its Communist adversary astutely employed political warfare to capitalize upon Kuomintang weaknesses over the years since Sun Yat-sen first mounted his revolution in the s, and Chiang Kai-shek 's regime had come to embrace a political warfare philosophy as both a defensive necessity and as the best foundation for consolidating its power in hope of their optimistic goal of "retaking the mainland".
Both the Nationalist and Communist Chinese political warfare doctrines stem from the same historical antecedents at the Whampoa Military Academy in under Soviet tutelage. The Nationalist Chinese experience with political warfare can be treated in a much more tangible way than merely tracing doctrinal development. In Taiwan today, the concept is virtually synonymous with the General Political Warfare Department of the Ministry of National Defense, which has authored political doctrine and is the culmination of a series of organizational manifestations of its application.
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