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Strategy as a Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Bernard Brodie
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Extract

THE recent resignations from posts of high civil authority or ceremonial rank of former military officers will no doubt allay somewhat the suspicions current a year or more ago that the military were “moving in” where they did not belong. Although the original appointment to civil posts of such men as Generals George C. Marshall and Walter B. Smith was hardly due to design on the part of the armed services, being quite easily and plausibly explained on other and quite innocuous grounds, the military departments unquestionably do have a greater influence upon high policy decisions than was true before the recent war. It is therefore time to express concern not so much that that military will move in where they do not belong, but rather that in the process of moving in where in part, at least, they do belong, their advice will reflect their imperfections not as diplomatists but as soldiers.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 1 , Issue 4 , July 1949 , pp. 467 - 488
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1949

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References

1 One of the more recent instances is contained in the illuminating book Operation Victory (New York, Scribner's, 194'7), by Major General Sir Francis de Guingand, former Chief of Staff to Marshal Montgomery. This author points out again and agains that the World War II experiences of the British Army reflected a lack of training in high strategy on the part of the British armed services, which have in fact devoted at least as much attention to the subject as their American counterparts.

2 Reprinted from an article in the Canadian Army Journal for December 1947 by Military Review, vol. 28, no. 7 (October, 1948), pp. 88f. The Canadian list of principles, which I am selecting only because it happens to be one of the most recent official pronouncements on the subject, appears to be a somewhat revised version of an article published under the title “Principles of Modern Warfare” in the Royal Air Force Quarterly (Great Britain), January, 1948.

3 To the purist it must be acknowledged that this interpretation and indeed the original Canadian statement quoted somewhat scramble at least two of the traditional principles.As usually stated, the principle of “Economy of Force” confines itself to the dictum that all forces available should be effectively utilized. The rest of the statement belongs to the doctrine usually called the “Principle of Concentration.” There is also more than a redolence of that fine old thought called the “Principle of the Aim.” In that connection it is noteworthy that the Canadian list cited does give place to the latter two principles, as Nos. 6 and 1 respectively, andthe authors seem to be unaware that in No. 7 they were largely repeating themselves. Allof which may conceivably reflect the barrenness of the concepts.

4 One of the best modern examples is Major-General SirMaurice's, FrederickPrinciples of Strategy, New York, R. R. Smith, 1930.Google Scholar On the naval side we have, besides the works of Mahan, the excellent volume by Corbett, Julian S., Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, London, 1911.Google Scholar Corbett, incidentally, was a civilian and a professional historian, and the chief works of Mahan likewise are essentially and predominantly histories with only occasional analytical interjections.

5 See my Sea Power in the Machine Age, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2nd ed., 1943, pp. 85–8, 237. This idea and its origin provide an interesting case study in the deriving of tactical “lessons” from the experience of battle.

6 Professor P. M. S. Blackett has demonstrated that even a person trained as a scientist may conspicuously fail to demonstrate proper discrimination in applying analogous experience to the military problem of the atomic bomb. See his Fear, War, and the Bomb, New York, Whittlesey, 1949. The only safeguard against such error, as in any field of scientific endeavor, lies in expanding the number of persons with similar competence. In this instance, Dean Louis Ridenour, among others, was able promptly to expose some of the fallacies in Blackett's analysis. See his review article in Scientific American, vol. 180, no. 3 (March, 1949), pp. 16–19 (reprinted in World Politics, vol. 1, no. 3, under the title of “The Bomb and Blackett”). In the military profession the problem of criticism is greatly compounded by the institution of rank, with its extravagant rigidities not only of obedience but also deference. Through the process of promotion the individual is accorded, by fiat, wisdom as well as authority, the stage of infallibility being attained at approximately the fourth star.

7 The Battle for Leyte Gulf furnishes some interesting illustrations of the rigidities to which I refer, of which I shall here mention only one. Because it had been so in every previous major action in the Pacific War, Admiral Halsey erroneously assumed that in this instance too the enemy's principal force had to be where his carriers were. His conviction that battleships could only play a supporting role caused him to confine his own battleships to such a role. By keeping them with the fleet which he threw against a decoy force he deprived them of any chance of affecting the outcome. If his six modern battleships had been left off the mouth of San Bernardino Strait they would almost certainly have sunk the major force of the Japanese Fleet. An interesting question poses itself: had that happened, what would have been the popular (and professional) attitude today on the value of the battleship type? It might not have been a wiser attitude than the presently prevailing one-Leyte Gulf was after all a special case-but it would surely have been different. Since I am making several references to Leyte Gulf, I might refer the reader to my review article on the subject, “The Battle for Leyte Gulf,” Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 23, No. 3 (Summer, 1947), pp. 455–60.

8 Knight, Frank H., Freedom and Reform, New York, Harper, 1947, p. 130.Google Scholar

9 I am trying desperately here to restrain the bias of the academician that the effort of writing is an almost indispensable catalyst to the production of original thoughts. On the other hand, too many people have found that it is so to enable us quite to reject the idea.

10 The temptation to use the finer-sounding phrase “grand strategy” must be suppressed in deference to historic usage, though that term has sometimes been used to cover what I mean by “security policy.” In traditional usage, “grand strategy” refers to the basic but all-embracing features of a plan of war, as distinct from either the details of a war plan or the strategy of a particular campaign.

11 All will agree that concerning military appropriations the soldier is not well situated to tell us what we can afford. But what is equally important, he lacks anyobjective criteria for telling us what he needs. Under pressure from Congress, he is accustomed to presenting his “minimum essential requirements” in quite precise terms; but if he were under equal pressure to be honest, he would admit the wholly illusory character of that precision. I am developing this point in another paper to be published shortly.

12 In a penetrating essay written during his imprisonment, Grand Admiral KarlDoenitz has analyzed Germany's failure on the seas in World War II. He argues convincingly that if Germany had concentrated her pre-war naval expenditures mainly or exclusively on the submarine arm-instead of dispersing her naval resources on a “symmetrically balanced” fleet-she would have been able to defeat Great Britain within a few months of the opening of hostilities. The error in judgment stemmed from Hitler's conviction that they would not have to fight the British and that a surface fleet would be useful for dominating the Baltic against the Soviet Union. Through Doenitz does notmake the point, what he is in effect arguing is that a balanced fleet for a war against the Soviet Union alone was a wholly unbalanced one for a war against Britain, and that proper balance for the latter task would have entailed almost exclusive reliance on the submarine.

13 Clearly applicable in this connection is an idea which an economist in a high policy-making post in the government has called “the principle of the least harm,” and which might be expressed as follows: Other things being equal, that policy should be selected which will do the least damage in case the prediction upon which itis based turns out to be wrong. Or, in other words, different sets of circumstances envisaged as possible for the future must be weighted for policy purposes not alone according to their presumed orders of probability but also according to the degree of risk inherent in the policy which each suggests. One can of course point to numerous instances in the military field where this principle has been more or less consciously followed. The only admonition necessary is that the “order of probability,” while it must be qualified by considerations of risk, should not be lost sight of. Otherwise, the “principle of the least harm” will no doubt serve to incur the most harm. For those interested in mathematical systematization of this and related problems, the work ofProfessors John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern on the theory of games would be illuminating. See their Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1947. However, for various reasons I do not share their conviction that their theory could be directly and profitably applied to problems of military strategy.

14 And exceedingly difficult to work out. The issue is confused by all sorts of differentials in related fixed and sunk capital, in rates of obsolescence, in multiple-use characteristics, and in operating as distinct from initial costs.

15 The explanation frequently offered by Navy spokesmen during and since the war, that our gross deficiencies in naval antiaircraft armament at the time in question was due chiefly to the unwillingness of Congress to appropriate sufficient funds to the purpose, seems not to withstand the test of the record. I can find little evidence that the Navy as a whole-and particularly the Bureau of Ships-came anywhere near predicting the needs of the war in that category of weapons, or that any concerted effort was made to persuade Congress of the urgency of the problem. Certainly one can find little to indicate that the Navy was eager to sacrifice other, less necessary things accorded it by Congress in order to remedy this glaring deficiency.

16 For example, his dogmatic insistence that the guerre de course (commerce raiding) could not be “by itself alone decisive of great issues” clearly contributed to the almost universal failure prior to World War I to anticipate the strategic significance of the submarine as a commerce destroyer. The submarine had become before Mahan's death in all essential respects the instrument it is today, but in any case his assertion was illogical on the face of it. Whether commerce destruction against a nation like Great Britain could be “decisive of great issues” dependedentirely on the scale on which it could be carried out. The submarine and later the airplane made it possible to carry it out on a large scale even under conditions of gross surface inferiority. See my Sea Power in the Machine Age, pp. 302–4, 328–32; also my Guide to Naval Strategy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 3rd ed., 1944, pp. 137–40. The point remains interesting today because comparable considerations apply to the current controversy on the decisiveness of strategic bombing, especially with the atomic bomb.

17 See Livezey, William E., Mahan on Sea Power, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1947Google Scholar, chap. 1. Mahan's elevation after retirement to Rear-Admiral had, it should be noticed, nothing to do with his services to his country and his profession as a thinker and writer. He was promoted along with every other captain on the retired list who had lived long enough to be a veteran of the Civil War.

18 Shakespeare, in introducing the dramatic contrast to Hamlet, uses the soldier, Fortin-bras.