Israeli army, why the American military and its imitators have produced many
competent managers but very few ‘great captains’.
German military doctrine, as Professor Showalter explains in his chapter,
was also ‘battle-oriented’, but their battles, unlike those of the Americans,
could not be ones of attrition. Faced with enemies on all sides, Helmuth von
Moltke and his successors had to secure a decisive victory against one
adversary before turning against another, and that decision had to be pre-
determined by skilful operational combinations before the hazards of the
tactical encounter. Moltke achieved this in 1866 at Ko ̈niggra ̈tz and in 1870 at
Sedan. It disastrously failed to deliver von Schlieffen’sSchlacht ohne Morgenin
1914 but worked brilliantly in 1940, when German strategy, operations, and
tactics combined seamlessly to produce a victory that astounded the world.
But operations not only need effective tactics to be successful: they have to
be guided by an effective strategy. Dennis Showalter shows us how, in spite of
brilliant tactics, Ludendorff’s great offensive in March 1918 led nowhere and
brought no strategic results. The same applied on the Eastern Front in the
Second World War, when German operational art and tactical expertise
delivered millions of prisoners and conquered half a continent, but produced
no decisive victory. The strategy it served was flawed by faulty political
judgement that neither the operational efficiency nor the tactical skill of the
Wehrmachtcould correct.
‘Operational art’ flourished in the era between Napoleon and Eisenhower;
generals who had to move, supply, and command armies numbering
hundreds of thousands in campaigns covering entire continents and their
adjacent oceans and ultimately the air above both: campaigns that could and
did result in ‘decisive’ battles that owed their success rather to logistical
superiority than to tactical skill. But after that, things became more compli-
cated. In the 1950s, it became clear that a decisive victory in a ‘conventional’
campaign, whether in Europe or in Asia, could always be trumped by the use
of nuclear weapons. So could operational art be used to avoid both defeat and
nuclear Armageddon? Paradoxically, as Hew Strachan shows us, it was the
British, who had barely begun to think about, let alone practise, operational
art before the Second World War, who pioneered thinking on how to solve
this problem, before the collapse of the Soviet Union ended—at least, for the
time being—any need to do so.
Simultaneously, the Americans were confronting another kind of problem
in Vietnam. There their conduct of ‘operations’ was, as ever, masterly. Vast
quantities of men and equipment were ferried across the Pacific and delivered
to the fighting zone. It enabled them to win all their battles. Nonetheless, they
lost the war.
x Prologue