Tactics Are From Newton. Strategy Is From Heisenberg.
Kenneth Payne of Kings of War linked to this lecture by his overlord Lawrence Freedman. Freedman focuses on a theme reflected in two of the Elder Moltke’s formulas. Per Wikipedia:
Moltke’s main thesis was that military strategy had to be understood as a system of options since only the beginning of a military operation was plannable. As a result, he considered the main task of military leaders to consist in the extensive preparation of all possible outcomes. His thesis can be summed up by two statements, one famous and one less so, translated into English as No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength (no plan survives contact with the enemy) and Strategy is a system of expedients.
Going into the Franco-Prussian War, Prussia was dominated by the almost Clausewitzian trinity of King Wilhelm of Prussia (primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force), Moltke (the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam), and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck ([war's] element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason). In fact, Old Wilhelm (more the people), Old Moltke (more the commander and his army), and the young whippersnapper Bismarck (more the government) are almost a 1 to 1 translation of the secondary trinity as well. Moltke’s philosophy of strategy reflected a role assigned by Clausewitz where the play of courage and talent enjoyed in the realm of probability and chance depended upon his particular character and the particular collective character of Prussian army. As such his strategy was a system of expedients that he systematically shifted as his carefully laid prewar plans collided with the French.
Bismarck had a similar notion of the role of chance in the realm of international politics even without the addition of other (usually violent means):
- “Politics is the art of the possible.”
- “Politics is not an exact science.”
But perhaps his most famous remark in this spirit was his statement that “A statesman…must wait until he hears the steps of God sounding through events, then leap up and grasp the hem of His garment.” Bismarck’s problem was that Moltke was also listening for the footsteps of God through history and Moltke thought those footsteps were heading towards Paris.
Moltke’s rapid preëmption of French mobilization in 1870 triggered such an unexpected collapse of the formal structure of French military power that the plans of Bismarck were thrown into disarray. It turned out that Bismarck’s earlier tacit applications of Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other (generally violent) means and his strict subordination of Moltke’s purely military goals to his political goals had sown the seeds of future disaster:
- Swift military victories in the 1864 German-Danish War and the 1866 Six Days War had bestowed such unprecedented military prestige on Moltke that Moltke’s political influence with King Wilhelm overshadowed that of Bismarck during wartime.
- Moltke resented Bismarck’s meddling during the 1864 and 1866 wars in areas Moltke considered purely the parochial concerns of the Prussian Army. Some of these interventions had dealt with, in Moltke’s defense, purely technical military issues. Moltke resolved to severely restrict Bismarck’s input into military decisions in any future war, even when such inputs clearly fell under Bismarck’s political mandate. Unfortunately, that future war turned out to be the war against France.
Bismarck’s prewarr plans had envisioned a limited war with France with the limited political aims of taking German-speaking Alsace, forcing French recognition of Prussia’s dominance over the other Huns, imposing reparations, and leaving the Corsican Usurper’s idiot nephew in charge of France. Unfortunately, the idiot nephew managed to get both of his field armies surrounded, as Bismarck related to the visiting American Lt. Gen. Phillip H. Sheridan:
[Bismarck] graciously took time to explain that the sudden movement northward from Bar-le- Duc was…the result of information that Marshal MacMahon was endeavoring to relieve Metz by marching along the Belgian frontier; “a blundering manoeuvre,” remarked the Chancellor, “which cannot be accounted for, unless it has been brought about by the political situation of the French.”
[...]
[T]hat evening I again had the pleasure of dining with the King. The conversation at table was almost wholly devoted to the situation, of course, everybody expressing surprise at the maneuver of the French at this time, their march along the Belgian frontier being credited entirely to Napoleon.
The Farce’s subordination of his military instrument to his political purposes left Bismarck’s political aspirations in disarray. The Buonapartist pretender’s example of the dangers of political meddling in military matters didn’t help Bismarck’s cause with Molke or the other Prussian generals. It probably made them worse:
Before [Bismarck, Sheridan, and retainers] set out, however, a number of officers of the King’s suite arrived at the weaver’s cottage, and from them I gathered that there were differences at the royal headquarters as to whether peace should be made then at Sedan, or the war continued till the French capital was taken. I further heard that the military advisers of the King strongly advocated an immediate move on Paris, while the Chancellor thought it best to make peace now, holding Alsace and Lorraine, and compelling the payment of an enormous levy of money; and these rumors were most likely correct, for I had often heard Bismarck say that France being the richest country in Europe, nothing could keep her quiet but effectually to empty her pockets; and besides this, he impressed me as holding that it would be better policy to preserve the Empire.
Unfortunately for Bismarck there was two Clausewitzi roaming about the battlefield. Following Beatrice Heuser’s formulation from Reading Clausewitz, there is Realist Carl:
Realist Carl
and Idealist Carl:
Idealist Carl
Realist Carl believed that war could be limited by the scope of limited political goals to something modest like seizing a piece of enemy territory as a bargaining chip in bantering for peace. Idealist Carl was transfixed by the example of Buonaparte, the so-called “god of war”, and believed that war could be reduced to winning a decisive battle and occupying the enemy capital. Bismarck, though he may not have realized it, was a disciple of Realist Carl. Molkte, a student of the flesh and blood Clausewitz, was a disciple of Idealist Carl. Realist Otto’s earlier string of successfully realized limited goals had opened the path to Idealist Helmuth’s unlimited desires to occupy Paris as the only fitting dénouement for his victories in two decisive battles. Molke’s system of expedients, drawing on chance and probability, had overwhelmed Bismarck’s system based on pure reason.
Then there was primordial enmity, hiding behind the kind and polite façade of King Wilhelm. The shadow of Buonaparte was possibly overshadowed by the shadow of old Gebhard von Blucher. Old King Wilhelm had once been young Prince Wilhelm and served under Blucher at Ligny and Waterloo. He’d acquired that special taste you only get after marching down the Champs Elysees as a conquering royal youth. Like many old men, he wanted to revisit the places of his own personal springtime. For him, marching on Paris was just the thing you did if you happened to find yourself invading France. The sentiment, according to Sheridan, was shared by his officers and men. The passionate spirit of 1815, emanating from the people through their nostalgic sovereign, joined with the expedients made possible by Moltke’s play with chance and probability, overwhelmed Bismarck’s best laid plans:
Bismarck did not approve of the German army’s moving on Paris after the battle of Sedan. Indeed, I think he foresaw and dreaded the establishment of a Republic, his idea being that if peace was made then, the Empire could be continued in the person of the Prince Imperial who–, coming to the throne under German influences, would be pliable in his hands. These views found frequent expression in private, and in public too; I myself particularly remember the Chancellor’s speaking thus most unguardedly at a dinner in Rheims. But he could not prevent the march to Paris; it was impossible to stop the Germans, flushed with success. “On to Paris” was written by the soldiers on every door, and every fence- board along the route to the capital, and the thought of a triumphant march down the Champs Elysees was uppermost with every German, from the highest to the lowest grade.
[...]
For three or four days all sorts of rumors were rife as to what was doing in Paris, but nothing definite was learned till about the 9th; then Count Bismarck informed me that the Regency had been overthrown on the 4th, and that the Empress Eugenie had escaped to Belgium. The King of Prussia offered her an asylum with the Emperor at Wilhelmshohe, “where she ought to go,” said the Chancellor, “for her proper place is with her husband,” but he feared she would not. On the same occasion he also told me that Jules Favre–the head of the Provisional Government–had sent him the suggestion that, the Empire being gone, peace should be made and the Germans withdrawn, but that he (Bismarck) was now compelled to recognize the impossibility of doing this till Paris was taken, for although immediately after the surrender of Sedan he desired peace, the past few days had made it plain that the troops would not be satisfied with anything short of Paris, no matter what form of Government the French should ultimately adopt.
So it was that war in 1864 and 1866, because of its exemplary subordination as an instrument of policy to Bismarck’s pure reason, had unwittingly allowed the ascent of a system of expedients formed by the unfortuitous conjunction of one old man’s placidly hidden primordial violence, hatred, and enmity of the French with another old man’s play of chance and probability within which his creative spirit was free to roam all the way to Paris. The road to revanche, Verdun, the Somme, Passchendaele, Versailles, Bolshevism, the Reichstag Fire, Five Year Plans, kristallnacht, Auschwitz, and the Iron Curtain was opened by one old man’s nostalgia tour and another old man’s sense of professional propriety.
This points out the dilemma of approaching strategy as only a matter of design. Strategy rests on Clausewitz’s three-legged stool of the tacit, the contingent, and the explicit. Design, an explicit process, is only one leg of the stool but for all the attention it gets you would think that strategy was a one-legged balance stool.
As a kindergartener, I had manual dexterity issues. One therapeutic mechanism they used to treat my clumsy physique was a one-legged stool. It helped teach balance and it certainly helped. My Dad was able to build a couple of one-legged stools of curious workmanship that worked quite well, covered with ugly yellow 70′s shag carpeting and a solid metal leg. The one-legged stools kicked around the basement for a while, getting used now and again, but as I grew older, taller, and fatter I had less and less use for them. The childish crutch of Jomini passes away:
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
1 Corinthians 13:11 (KJV)
Freedman argues for a more adult version of strategy:
Freedman sees strategy not as a plan – an a,b,c connecting goals and ends. That is the conventional understanding of strategy. How do I get from where I am to where I want to be, using military force. This traditional view falls down because it makes insufficient allowance for ambiguity and unknowns. What will our power be able to achieve? Against whom?
Instead Freedman sees strategy as crafted in the moment, amidst great uncertainty: strategy for him is simply the creation of power. And power is not a material, but a psychological variable. The thin red line held an empire together by force of mind, as much as force of arms…
Seen as the construction of power, strategy is an acknowledgment of uncertainty – uncertainty about our own future goals, uncertainty about the effectiveness of our means of achieving them. And yes, uncertainty about threats. Making power in the moment, for the moment, is not a recipe for over-extension, but pragmatism balanced with great decisiveness.
This Committee has argued before that culture can be seen as the prioritization of purpose, politics as the division of power, and strategy as the reconciliation of purpose, power, and contingency. Freedman’s use of the term power tacitly divides it into potential power and applied power. Referring back to more traditional notions of strategic theory, Freedman points out that the assumption behind such notions was almost Newtonian, assuming that the conversion of potential power into applied power was as straightforwardly linear as Newton’s laws of motion, where for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Tactics, which, as Clausewitz points out in On War, was the focus of the first studies of war. Such studies emerged in the late seventeenth century in the writings of practitioners like Montecuccoli at the same time Newton was formulating his theories. Though, as Keynes remarked “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians”, the spirit of mechanism was in the air and Newton’s theories were easily portrayed as saying let there be light and a clockwork universe came to be. Tactics were amenable to the mechanistic and deterministic cast of mind in an age of savage reason and enlightenment. As military thinkers in the eighteenth century began to see the outlines of what they came to call strategy, it was natural to apply the same clockwork analogy to it as well as tactics. For thinkers of that era and even as late as the First World War, strategy was geometry and Jomini was Euclid.
Then there was the curious incident of Vom Krieg in the night. The curious incident being there was no On War in the night. Clausewitz, though he drew on the Newtonian models handed down to him by the Enlightenment, used those model in such a way that he evoked the nascent spirit of the Romantic Era where living bodies react in strange, irrational, and unpredictable ways. He anticipated the coming spirit of nonlinearity 150 years before it emerged. The quantum world, with its “spooky” uncertainty, has analogies in Clausewitz’s rejection of prescriptive principles in favor of cultivating a more tacit and intuitive coup d’oeil based on meditating over historical examples. Prescription favors a Jominian paint-by-numbers design of strategy that is prone to the travails of danger and uncertainty. Coup d’oeil is more robust since it encourages a more expansive frame of mind free of the shackles of hard and fast rules.
J.C. Wylie’s notion of strategy as acquiring a selected degree of control over the enemy is a useful supplement to Freedman’s idea that strategy is the creation of power. Following Wylie, culture is the prioritization of purpose, politics is the division of power, and strategy is the acquisition of control. Freedman emphasizes the sometimes yawning gap between the potential of power and its application. Wylie’s clear separation of power from control clarifies Freedman’s formulation: power is converted into control in pursuit of purpose, potential is converted into application in pursuit of realization, and politics is converted into strategy in pursuit of culture. Each stage, from power to control to purpose, is subject to varying degrees of friction as the tacit, the contingent, and the explicit grind against each other. At any point friction, which is what makes the apparently simple difficult, can frustrate and even reverse the path from power to control to purpose.
Freedman points out that history is replete with examples of powerful groups who failed to translate their power into control and failed to achieve their purpose. By definition, at least 50% of all strategies fail. One side will lose. Many hold on to what they’ve made explicit despite of shifts in what’s tacit and what’s contingent. They fall short. They think tactically. Fortune may favor one side in war over another in spite of, rather than because of, their strategy. Purposes available to be pursued, power available to pursue them, and control available to be acquired fluctuate uncertainly with shifts between tacit, contingent, and explicit. What was unavailable may suddenly become available and even more suddenly become unavailable again. What was once an asset may suddenly become a debit. What seemed under control may explode in an eruption of previously hidden violence, hatred, and enmity.
The footfalls of God as He moves over the face of the deep are mysterious to man. The sound of those footfalls may seem to lead in one way and not the other. Strategy is a constant reconciliation of purpose and power by acquiring control as circumstances change. Every purpose is a prediction or at least an aspiration to a prediction. However, acquiring control is anything but predictable: man can see the future as God gives him to see the future. The purposes of God are not the purposes of man and what is expedient to God vastly differs from what is expedient to man. His system of expedients leads in directions man can barely see as man hurdles blindly into the future. The outcome, when it comes, will confound the wise and amaze the prudent as they fail to pass through the straight gate in spite of (or because of) their designs. Until that day, as we stumble forward, we’ll always have Paris.
