course to seize and exploit the initiative and bring about a decision in a one-sided
reading of Clausewitz’s assessment of the legacy of Napoleon. 11 The object of
destruction was the enemy force in the field. But the transformation of states,
societies, and economies in the nineteenth century had created the capacity for
mobilization for total war, where the defeated army could be replaced by new
levees and new equipment. Svechin warned: ‘The task of strategy is greatly
simplified if we or the enemy...try to end a war with a destructive strike.
Treatises on strategy that have been exclusively concerned with a strategy of
destruction in essence turn into tracts on operational art....’ 12
Instead, Svechin offered a strategy of attrition as an alternative to destruction.
But, in this case, attrition was a strategy that was not limited to operational art but
was politically and economically informed. While destruction is driven by its own
logic to seek an immediate decision in a campaign, attrition, depending on the
intensity of armed conflict, can range from close to destruction to the absence of
combat operations. The level of intensity of combat actions in a given situation
depends upon a thorough and careful study of economic and political conditions.
‘A very broad range is open for politics, and strategy should be flexible.’ A strategy
of attrition allows for the shaping of a conflict and for continued political engage-
ment to redefine the conflict to one’s advantage in both domestic and international
terms. 13 Under such a strategy, the guidance of operations is under the direction of
the ‘integral military command’, and the conduct of operations in a particular
theatre depends upon the general staff, which Svechin’s colleague and another
voenspets, Boris Mikhailovich Shaposhnikov, defined as the ‘brain of the army’. 14
Svechin understood military art in the age of imperialism to refer to ‘modern
war’. It was the war that he had himself fought in Manchuria, on the Eastern Front
and during the Russian Civil War. This was war conducted by multiple armies
and then by army groups and fronts. In the age of Moltke, the logistical support
came from the army’s rear. By the First World War, logistics transcended the
‘front rear’ (frontovoi tyl) and became a matter of the state rear (gosudarstvennyi
tyl). The more developed the capitalist society and state, the stronger this state
rear became. 15 This was the fundamental assumption behind his concept of the
‘integral military command’, which brought the political, military, and economic
leadership into a collective body to prepare and conduct warfare. Only in this
fashion would the general staff, as the military part of that leadership, be able to
understand the political goals and economic constraints to provide sound strate-
gic leadership for the conduct of operations. Conversely, it was failure in this area
that had made tsarist Russia vulnerable to economic crisis, social disintegration,
and political revolution.
Svechin admitted that when he attended the tsarist General Staff Academy before
the Russo-Japanese War, the faculty taught war on the model of Napoleon. Moltke’s
insights reached Russia only after the Russo-Japanese War, when a younger genera-
tion of officers sought to understand the campaigns that they had fought in
Manchuria and translated German studies of Moltke’s military art into Russian. 16
The First World War had buried Moltke’s model of short, decisive wars among
major powers. But the Russo-Japanese War had been a harbinger of this trend. In
The Tsarist and Soviet Operational Art, 1853–1991 67