CIAO DATE: 02/2011
Volume: 13, Issue: 1
Fall 2010
Editorial (PDF)
Terry Terriff, James Keeley, John Ferris
In recent years, there have been many analyses of warfare from the perspective of the battlefield, a trend initiated by John Keegan in 1976 with his book, The Face of Battle. These studies have focused on the tactical level, with the soldier. However, the tactical approach alone is not enough to explain the results of war. This symposium was designed to remind both academic military historians and military analysts that strategy is the most important factor in determining the success or failure in war and operations other than war.
Military Strategy in War and Peace: Introduction (PDF)
David J. Bercuson
In July of 2010 a small group of historians from the University of Calgary, the United States, and the German Armed Forces gathered for a workshop at the University of Calgary. For a day and a half the participants struggled with the question “what is the impact of strategy on battlefield outcomes?” in a wide variety of historical circumstances from ancient Greece to the 21st Century. These deliberations follow below. The tone for this workshop was set by Dr. Bernd Wegener of Helmut Schmidt University in a paper delivered at the University of Calgary in September 2009 on the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. In that paper Dr. Wegener laid out a number of significant strategic factors connected to the Third Reich’s “cult of personality” that led directly to the Nazi defeat. The paper, in effect, made a case that no matter how competent the German armed forces had been in World War II, the greatest friction they had to overcome was the Nazi political system.
Strategy, Strategic Leadership and Strategic Control in Ancient Greece (PDF)
Burkhard Meissner
The purpose of the following paper is to describe the rôle of strategies and strategist in classical and hellenistic Greece: how political and military strategies were decided upon, how far such strategies, once they were conceived of, influenced or governed what actually happened on the battle field, if, how and to what extent strategic control was exercised in battles. In a paper like this describing the rôle of strategy can be achieved only partially, however: We will be looking at a selection of significant examples which show us how institutions for operative and strategic decisions and how strategic thinking developed in Greece.
The Battle of Tannenberg in 1410: Strategic Interests and Tactical Implementation (PDF)
LTC (GS) Dr. Martin Hofbauer
On July 15, 1410 the united Polish-Lithuanian Army destroyed the army of the Teutonic Order in the Battle of Tannenberg. Political and Strategic Framework Conditions The Teutonic Order1 dates back to the time of the Third Crusade (1189-1192). Around 1190, during the siege of Acre in the Holy Land an order of nurses was founded. This order was converted in 1198 into an order of knights, the so-called Teutonic Order. It was confirmed a year later by Pope Innocent III.2 The Order acquired its first properties in Palestine, Armenia and Cyprus, and from 1200 on also in Germany. Eventually it spread over large parts of Europe. The competition with older orders of knights in the Kingdom of Jerusalem as well as the failed crusades prompted the order to look for a new field of activity.3
Bismarck, Wilhelm II., and German Military Leadership (PDF)
Dr. Michael Epkenhans
At least twice in the history of Imperial Germany, December seems to have been a rather critical month: On 17 December 1887, the ageing German Emperor, Wilhelm I, convened his military entourage at his bed in the castle of Berlin to listen to the reports of his generals about the military situation of the Empire. Under normal circumstances, these reports by Germany’s highest-ranking generals, the Chief of Staff and his Quarter Master General, the Prussian Minister of War, and the chief of the Military Cabinet were by no means unusual. Against the background of a political situation which seemed to be deteriorating for several years now, this meeting, however, turned out to be a war-council. For many months the Quarter Master General of the Prussian Army, General v. Waldersee had been pleading for a preventive war against Russia. Germany’s eastern neighbour had been quarreling with the nation’s most reliable ally, Austria-Hungary, over the Balkans for more than two years now, and according to secret reports about the redeployment of troops on its western border seemed to prepare for a war against the powers of the dual alliance.
Offense, Defence or the Worst of Both Worlds? Soviet Strategy in May-June 1941 (PDF)
Dr. Alexander Hill
Getting the strategy right does not guarantee a successful outcome, but all other things being equal it certainly stacks the odds in favour of one. The Soviet Union was strategically prepared for war in June 1941, but poor operational-strategic deployment and operational and tactical failings allowed the Wehrmacht to achieve far more through operational and tactical competence than perhaps need have been the case. Nonetheless, despite poor operational-strategic deployment and operational and tactical inadequacies during Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army was able to survive the summer and autumn of 1941, after which a combination of improvements at the operational and tactical levels and superior resource mobilization stemming to a large extent from strategic planning made German victory increasingly improbable.
Thoughts on Grand Strategy and the United States in the Twenty-first Century (PDF)
Dr. Williamson Murray
One might begin an examination of the issues involved in grand strategy with an effort to describe what we mean by the term. Over the centuries, some governments and leaders have attempted to chart a course for their nations that has involved something more than simply reacting to the course of events. In most cases they have confronted sudden and major changes in the international environment, often resulting from the outbreak of great conflicts, but at times involving economic, strategic, or political alterations that threaten the stability or even existence of their polities. Yet, grand strategy is a matter of great states and great states alone. No small states, and few medium size states, possess the possibility of crafting a grand strategy. For the most part their circumstances condemn them to suffer what Athens negotiators suggested to their Melian counterparts in 416 BC about the nature of international relations: "The standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept."1
Strategic Thinking: The French Case in 1914 (& 1940) (PDF)
Dr. Eugenia Kiesling
A common military history examination question at West Point is ‚Discuss the proposition that good strategy always beats good tactics.‛ I tell my cadets that if they cannot answer an examination question, they should modify it they can. Behind our eight stimulating ‚Workshop Questions‛ lies a world view which I would summarize as follows. Strategy is literally crucial—the crux of war. Military failures, failures of what my friend Wick Murray calls ‚military effectiveness,‛ usually being at the strategic level—or stem from a failure to integrate strategy with sound policy. Strategic effectiveness requires not only clear and achievable goals but good policy, sound institutions, and political will. This is the way that I have been taught to think about strategy since my first military history course, taught by Wick Murray, at Yale University in the spring of 1975. With regularly references to Clausewitz, he taught his students to admire historical cases of good strategy and, more frequently, to disparage strategic errors. Indeed, we paid so much attention to strategic failure — ‚incompetent‛ was one of Wick’s favorite adjectives – that his courses constituted a crusade to identify strategic mistakes.
The Significance of the Balkans as a Strategic-Operational Area for the Bundeswehr (PDF)
Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Josef Rudolf Schlaffer
I have said: I will not advise Germany to take an active part of any kind in these efforts as long as I cannot see that Germany has any interest in the whole matter that – please excuse the coarseness of expression – would be worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian musketeer. What I wanted to express was that we should use the blood of our countrymen more sparingly instead of expending it for an arbitrary policy which no interest forces us to pursue.1 This is how the German Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1876 judged the conflict on the Balkans at that time. Almost 120 years later, more than 3,000 Bundeswehr servicemen and women have been permanently deployed in the region since 1995.2. Unlike Bismarck at the time, the Federal Republic of Germany considers that its interests are affected on the Balkans. This development began in 1990 with the lengthy and cruel process of disintegration in Yugoslavia.3
Military Strategy in War and Peace: Some Conclusions (PDF)
Holger H. Herwig
“Everything in war is very simple,” Prussia’s premier military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, famously stated, “but the simplest thing is difficult.”1 Strategy falls into that description. Almost no other term in military terminology has been so much and so often abused. Even the most fleeting scanning of major journals and newspapers, the briefest listening to national news casts, reveals a horrendous application of the term: the “strategy” of crossing a desert, the “strategy of storming a hill, the “strategy” of pacifying a village, the “strategy of securing a road, the “strategy” of winning the hearts and minds of indigenous populations—these are but a few of the misapplications of the term with which we are constantly bombarded by both reporters and so-called experts in the field. Not that the military has been much better in applying the term: two well-known modern commanders, Erich Ludendorff in World War I and Bernard Montgomery in World War II, never quite understood it either; the former thought of strategy as the act of merely punching a hole in the enemy’s lines, while the latter cautioned his staff that strategy was strategy only if and when he, Montgomery, said it was.
Matt Bucholtz
Germany’s Western Front, 1915, translated and edited by Mark Osborne Humphries and John Maker, is the second volume in a series of translations of Der VOLUME 12, ISSUE 3, SPRING 2010 133 | P a g e Weltkrieg, the official German history of the First World War. Mark Osborne Humphries teaches Canadian and military history at Mount Royal College in Calgary, Alberta and has published several works on the First World War in both Canadian and international journals. John Maker is a PhD Candidate at the University of Ottawa, working on a dissertation entitled ‚Shiner, Shindigs, and Shenanigans: Canadian Soldiers in Britain during the Second World War.‛ Composed of selections from volumes VII, VIII and IX of Der Weltkrieg, Germany’s Western Front, 1915 dutifully presents one of the last triumphs of German Wilhelmine era operational level military history. Originally published from 1925 to 1944, Der Weltkrieg stands as the culmination of the von Rankean tradition of ‚wie es eigentlich gewesen” or ‘how it actually happened’ in the Great German General Staff. Humphries and Maker produced this translated work in an attempt to provide a German counterpart to the narrative of the Great War in English, which has been traditionally, and understandably, dominated by sources from England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States of America. In an ironic post-modern twist, the editors have sought to end the ‚othering‛ of German interpretations by translating the official (one might be tempted to say master narrative) German history of the war into English, and thus simply adding one master narrative to another. Nevertheless, both the foreword by Hew Strachan and the introduction written by the editors do an excellent job of not only situating Der Weltkrieg within the historiography, but also critically examining the creation and creators of the series. Throughout the volume, the editors consistently provide useful footnotes, not only to clarify various points in the text, but also to elaborate on the relationships between the subject matter and the authors of Der Weltkrieg (the most notable example being von Haeften’s consistently negative critique of Feldmarschall von Falkenhayn’s conduct throughout 1915, which directly stemmed from von Haeften’s personal loyalty to his former commanding officer, Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, who was replaced by Falkenhayn). Although the usefulness of Der Weltkrieg is limited by its high level focus (the series does not focus on any military unit smaller than a division and is mainly concerned with the leadership coterie of Germany’s war effort), it nevertheless remains an important resource for historians as the series was produced from sources which were destroyed during the Second World War by a wayward British bomber, and thus denied to current researchers. Although this official history was finished during the Nazi era, it remains remarkably free of National Socialist ideological overtones. Most of the politically motivated interpretations in the series are an expression of Imperial or Weimar era internal military intrigues, not those of the Third Reich.
Christine E. Leppard
The Flame warfare in which [Lt. Gen Andrew McNaughton] gave [Sir Donald] Banks such ‘foresighted assistance,' is nothing to the flame warfare that the unfortunate General is involved in here at the moment.1
1 Sir Patrick Duff, Permanent Secretary in the Office of Works to Dominion's Office Permanent Secretary Sir Eric Machtig in November 1943 The National Archives, DO 35/1210Permanent Secretary in the British Office of Works Sir Patrick Duff, though with tongue firmly in check, had it right: in November of 1943, Andrew McNaughton, Canada's soldier-scientist army commander was fighting for his professional life in a two front war and his enemies were well-coordinated. In one ear, Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King had his minister of national defence, J.L. Ralston, telling him that ‚Andy‛ had to go. He was tired, out of touch, affected by the loss of his son, and unduly committed to keeping the Canadian army unified. In the other, Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir Alan Brooke whispered that McNaughton was a poor trainer, and unfit for command in the field. The writing was on the wall.
Dr. Paul Hansen
While the title alone is enough to intrigue any curious reader, the content and delivery of Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War does not disappoint. The main strength, though some might argue weakness, of Lockwood's monograph is its wide-ranging scope. The writer is careful to point out in the Preface that he is not a historian, military or otherwise. He is an entomologist setting out to discuss 100,000 years of global history by linking how insects have been used, are being used, and may in the future be used towards military ends. By way of my own declaration, I am not a
historian or entomologist. I am an anthropologist geographically focused on Japan and theoretically focused on human-animal-technology relations. The book came to my attention because it contains three chapters on Japan's use of ‚six-legged soldiers‛ from the 1930s through to the end of the Second World War and this topic coincides with my own research interest in security (very widely and philosophically construed) in contemporary Japan. Personal reasons for approaching the book aside, I suggest that most readers would agree it is a masterfully written book. It appeals to a general audience through taking what could be, to a non-military historian, a dull read full of dates and documents alongside what could be, to a non-entomologist, an incompressible barrage of Latin names and genetic explanations, and cleverly fuses them into an enjoyable and thought provoking account with hooks, humour, and humility.