Theoretical Paper No. Four

VULCAN'S ANVIL:

The American Civil War and the

Foundations of Operational Art

By

James J. Schneider, Ph. D.

Professor of Military Theory

SAMS/USACGSC

Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027

16 June 1992

“Reprinted with permission of James M. Schneider.

Presidio Press. 1994”

For all its modern developments, Waterloo

still belonged essentially with the wars

of Alexander or Caesar, just as Trafalgar

belonged essentially with those of the

Roman trireme or the Spanish Armada.

--Walter Millis, Arms and Men

The art of war, as a distinct creative activity, emerged during the establishment of organized warfare sometime around the fifteenth century B.C.i Since that time the art of war has changed remarkably little from a creative standpoint. As a form of art it was characterized by the Soviet military theorist, Georgii S. Isserson, as the strategy of a single point [strategiya odnoiy tochki].ii For centuries armies marched and came together in a dense mass on a single point in the theater of operations. For hundreds of years this style of fighting shaped military thinking and the creative employment of armed forces. Then suddenly during the American Civil War this pattern of activity was changed forever and a new style of warfare emerged. This new creative tradition came to be called operational art and became the chief method for waging total war.

Until recently the nature of operational art has been largely ignored in the West. In Russia, and later in the Soviet Union, however, the transformation in the conduct of war was viewed with great interest. Eventually by the 1930s it became the creative cornerstone of the Soviet warfare state and its theory for total war.

1. The Dreadful Symmetry It is imperative to understand how thoroughly the

"strategy of a single point" penetrated all military thinking, especially in the West. The strategy of a single point was the dominant military paradigm that shaped all creative military thought for hundreds of years, and to a large extent still does today.

It was an idea that reinforced a basic tendency to view war as "invariant against change."iii This Western

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tendency to see an invariant symmetry in warfare came as an outgrowth of the perceived symmetry in nature. Thanks to the great advances in the natural sciences, warfare, like the movement of the heavens, was seen as a natural incremental progression. Many Westerners even believed that war itself was governed by certain iron laws of nature. One of the most influential of these thinkers was Frederick William Lanchester, an engineer from Great Britain.

Lanchester, regarded by many as the father of aeronautics, published a derivation of his two laws of conflict in a series of articles in the British journal Engineering in 1914. These articles were republished two years later in a larger work entitled Aircraft in Warfare.iv In the book, Lanchester presented a special plea for the creation of an independent air force. In supporting his case, he derived a model that represented mathematically the "strategy of a single point." Lanchester called his model the "n-square law." In words, the square law states that military force is the product of the square of the numerical strength of an army, times the attrition rate of that army.v The practical implications of this law are readily apparent. Everything else being equal, the defeat of an enemy twice as large requires a friendly army four times as lethal; the defeat of an enemy three times as large requires a lethality nine times greater and so on. What Lanchester had developed was a mathematical model for the military principle of concentration.

For three thousand years the fundamental symmetry of military art had been founded on this simple precept. Theoretically an army of a thousand men well concentrated was a match for a million men in a loose distributed

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formation. The physical analogy that Lanchester drew from his engineering background was the well known principle of torque.

The idea behind torque is that a force applied at one end of a lever is concentrated at a single point at the other end. The importance of Lanchester's insight becomes apparent when we realize that the number of troops is analogous to length of the lever. Thus, the more troops involved the easier it becomes to "dislodge" an enemy. It also becomes apparent why Isserson characterized classical strategy as the "strategy of a single point." Under classical conditions armies concentrated their (physical) force at a single point like a fulcrum. It is important to realize that this was also extremely efficient. Indeed, this is the whole idea behind using a lever in the first place. In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, a revolution in warfare occurred that broke the classical symmetry, rendering war much less efficient. Even as Lanchester formulated his square law early in World War One, the law was already fifty years out of date. The old classical symmetry had been destroyed and a new one was quickly emerging.

2. The Symmetry is Shattered. In 1966 an American military scientist, Herbert

Klemm Weiss, challenged the validity Lanchester's square law not only with hard empirical evidence, but with evidence that suggested when the invalidation occurred. Weiss was a physicist who worked extensively on radar development in the United States during World War Two. Weiss was also an amateur historian with a particular fascination for the American Civil War. It was from this

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latter conflict that Weiss developed a data base hoping to validate Lanchester's equations. What Weiss found came as a complete surprise.

In his paper, "Combat Models and Historical Data: The U.S. Civil War," Weiss concluded that his results did "not follow from either the linear or the square Lanchester 'laws'."vi In fact Weiss was not the first to question the applicability of Lanchester's laws to modern warfare. In a little known study Richard H. Peterson was perhaps the first to question the validity of the square law using empirical data.vii After analyzing data from tank engagements in Northwest Europe during 1944, Peterson was surprised to find that the results supported a different model.viii Ironically Peterson in the end rejected his own findings, because they implied an entirely new symmetry that could not be explained, a symmetry that said, in effect, modern armies were penalized for concentrating. The more one concentrated, it seemed, the more casualties one incurred.

The most exhaustive study following Peterson's early empirical work was conducted in 1962 by Daniel J. Willard. Willard analyzed of 1500 battles from Gaston Bodart's Kriegslexicon.ix The study again suggested a new symmetry governing the conduct of war. More recently work by Ronald Johnson and Charles Allen is particularly noteworthy.

Johnson applied Willard's methodology to data from the National Training Center.x Through a unique set of circumstances, the NTC is a veritable battlefield laboratory. Because of the extensive use of electronic sensing devices to monitor casualties, the data from the Center is especially useful. Johnson demonstrated again the new pattern in warfare. Allen, on the other hand,

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used Bodart's data to determine historically when the break in symmetry occurred. His work supported Weiss: sometime during the American Civil War, a major revolution in the conduct of war occurred.xi This revolution would dramatically change not only the means of waging war, but it would also change forever the methods. Under the new emerging conditions war would become very inefficient compared to the classical symmetry. Battles, because they were less efficient, would become less decisive. The decline of the decisive battle in turn would lead to long protracted wars of exhaustion and place a whole new emphasis on the economic aspects of war. As a consequence the entire mode of thinking about war began to change as well.

What is still remarkable about the influence of this revolution is that our thinking continues to change. We are, relatively speaking, still on the cusp of this revolution with much of our thinking still influenced by the strategy of a single point. Despite, for example, the empirical refutation of the Lanchester's equations, virtually every computer simulation used by military science today still relies directly on some derivation of the square law, a law that at best represents Napoleonic and naval warfare. Despite the evidence to the contrary, the square law has never been completely rejected. The reason concerns the fact that few military scientists, at least in the West, have been able to explain why the square law should not hold.

Before proceeding further, just such an explanation must be presented. The explanation will focus on two critical aspects: the emergence of the empty battlefield and the rise of distributed free maneuver.

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3. The Paradox of the Empty Battlefield The overthrow of Lanchester's square law began at

the tactical level, on the battlefield. The new symmetry that ultimately supplanted the square law emerged as a direct result of changes in technology, many spawned by the Industrial Revolution. At the tactical level these technological changes brought about a profound paradox in warfare that became increasingly apparent toward the latter half of the 19th century.

The period 1860-1914 witnessed an unparalleled renaissance in military thought and literature. Among the many writers of the period was an obscure Prussian major by the name of von Scherff. In 1873 he wrote a book entitled The New Tactics of Infantry. The book examined the future role of infantry in light of the experience of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). In his writings von Scherff observed a phenomenon that he called the "void of the battlefield."xii He observed that the battles he had studied were characterized by a relatively greater dispersion of forces on the field of battle. This pattern of dispersion was quite unlike the dense packed deployment that characterized combat as late as the Napoleonic Wars. Von Scherff's observation touched upon a phenomenon that is known today as the "empty battlefield." It alerted theorists like Quincy Wright to the paradox that while weapons were becoming more lethal, there was an actual decline in casualty rates.xiii One recent military analyst wrote that "this paradox is occasionally noted by military theorists, military historians, and operations research analysts, but for all practical purpose it is ignored in historical works, in theory, in planning and analysis. The result has been a gross misinterpretation of recent wars, and in all

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probability an equally gross misperception of wars in the future."xiv On the face of it, von Scherff's observation seemed to resolve the puzzle. Combat casualties declined in the face of increased lethality because armies began to disperse. But this raised a more basic question: What process drove armies to greater dispersion in the face of more lethal weapons? This takes us to the theoretical heart of the matter.

As Lanchester had recognized, the fundamental physical characteristic of battle is destruction: people and machines are destroyed or rendered useless. Historically, this destruction was accomplished through fire action, shock action, or a combination of the two. In order to achieve maximum effect from fire or shock action the maximum physical concentration of troops on a battlefield had to be achieved. This fundamental requirement gave rise to the phalanx and other close-order battle formations early in the rise of organized warfare. With the development of firearms a soldier firing a smoothbore musket at a rate of roughly one aimed shot a minute stood in rank shoulder to shoulder with his comrades. Each soldier occupied about one square meter of ground. This aspect of tactical dynamics dominated warfare for two hundred years from about 1650 to 1850. Then within the space of forty years an invention was developed that would help revolutionize tactics by dramatically increasing battlefield lethality. This invention was the rifled musket.

The oldest known rifle seems to have been produced around 1500 for the Emperor Maximillian I. The rifle was slow in being adopted for major military employment, however, with its use generally limited to hunting. The chief reason for this slow adoption was the difficulty

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encountered when ramming a spherical bullet into a rifled barrel. The Baker rifle, for example, required a small mallet to seat properly the lead ball. In 1826 Delvigne of France attempted to solve the problem by developing a special chamber at the bottom of the barrel. The real breakthrough, however, did not occur until 1849 when another Frenchman, Charles Minie, refined the cylindro­conoidal bullet, the famous Minie ball. A British captain by the name of Norton, then serving with the 34th Regiment in India, is actually credited with inventing the basic design in 1823.xv He observed that natives of southern India used blowpipe arrows with a base of locus pith that expanded against the inside of the blowpipe when blown. This prevented the escape of air past the projectile, reducing windage and increasing muzzle velocity. In 1836, Greener, a London Locksmith, improved Norton's original design by adding a wooden plug at the base of the bullet. Both designs were rejected by the British Ordnance Department, however. Instead, Greener took his designs to France where they were quickly taken over by Minie. The rifled musket system was now complete. The rifling imparted tremendous spin to the projectile, which greatly improved accuracy over the smoothbore. The Minie ball also reduced windage, resulting in major improvement in range and hitting power. One historian noted that "to equal the performance of a rifled musket the smoothbore required twice the quantity of ammunition expenditure at 200 paces, five times the quantity at 300 paces, and at least ten times the quantity at 400 paces. Beyond 400 paces the smoothbore was completely useless, while the rifle hit larger targets, like troop formations at 800 yards,

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and at 1,000 yards the bullet retained sufficient terminal energy to penetrate four inches of soft pine."xvi

The impact of the rifled musket was dramatic. With its improved lethality the rifle rendered the dense battalion columns of the Napoleonic era obsolete. In order to decrease their vulnerability in the attack, tactical formations began to rely increasingly on skirmishers. By the end of the American Civil War whole formations deployed as clouds of skirmishers. At the same time, especially in Great Britain and the United States, armies began to employ entrenchments to further reduce vulnerability. As a consequence the defense, which Clausewitz had proclaimed to be the stronger form of war, became even stronger.

From a pure geometric standpoint, the improved lethality at greater ranges caused the battlefield to expand by a factor of ten, an increase proportional to the new range of the improved weapons. At the same time as armies used looser formations, the battlefield began to empty. In antiquity, armies engaged in battle were deployed to a density of one man per ten square meters on the average. During the American Civil War the density had decreased to one man per 257 square meters. In World War One the dispersion rate was one man per 2,475 square meters. The end of World War Two witnessed a ten-fold increase to one man per 27,500 square meters. Today densities of one man per 40,000 square meters are common.xvii The expansion and evacuation of the battlefield all conspired to overthrow Lanchester's square law at the tactical level and to create new conditions that would contribute to the emergence of operational art.

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The new battlefield geometry essentially nullified Lanchester's basic metaphor of the lever. The idea of concentrating force with a lever against a fulcrum implies an extended coherent mass: the longer and more rigid the lever, the greater the amount of mechanical force concentrated at a single point, at the fulcrum; the larger and more cohesive the army, the greater the amount of military force concentrated at a single point. The new battlefield changed totally the fundamental physics of combat. Up until the mid-19th century tactics had been constrained by the laws of solid mechanics. Beginning chiefly in the American Civil War these laws became historically conditioned. Instead, the laws of fluid mechanics would transplant of the laws of solid mechanics. In a very fundamental sense the battlefield had become atomized. The application and concentration of force would have to be achieved with new methods. Now the physical analogy of mechanical force would be replaced by the analogy of pressure. This occurred for two main reasons. First, as armies began to disperse in response to increased battlefield lethality, the whole dynamics of tactical targeting changed. When units were deployed in a dense Napoleonic-style mass, it made sense to concentrate fire on the target. But under new conditions to concentrate against a dispersed target was actually counterproductive. This paradox was first voiced by the father of modern German military science, Generalleutnant H. Rohne. In developing his Musketry Instruction for Infantry during the 19th Century, Rohne wrote: In war, the number of hits is not as important

as the number of men put out ofaction. [Concentration of fire] isof little value, if only a single man

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is annihilated by a great number ofhits produced by one [volley]. . . .

A [volley], which produces probably only a fewbullet hits, which spread themselves overa wider area and disable a greater numberof men and horses, is more effective. An ideal distribution would be one in which each bullet struck just one combatant [emphasis added].xviii

The tactical implications of Rohne's insight were slow to be recognized outside of Germany for, like all great insights, it was counterintuitive. It meant that a volley fired by a group of expert sharpshooters, would score fewer effective hits than the same volley fired by recruits. A simple example will help to explain the paradox.

As the range of rifled weapons improved volley fire came to resemble "a 'bundle' of trajectories, which form a curved cone, which is very small in section at the shortest ranges, and goes on enlarging at the greater ones, just like a jet of water from a fire engine" [emphasis added].xix C. B. Mayne's metaphor suggests a further example that conveys the fluid dynamics inherent in the concept of pressure. If we use a garden hose to water a tomato patch, the nozzle of the hose allows us to concentrate a stream of water on a single plant, or distribute a stream of water over the whole patch. Any gardener knows that distributing a steady spray over the whole patch is the most effective way to water tomatoes. Today, the firing doctrine of every army in the world is

based on the principle that a dispersed target is serviced best with fire distributed uniformly over the target area. In the 19th century, however, the idea of concentrated fire died hard.

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When Captain Mayne wrote his Infantry Fire Tactics in 1888 the British Army had yet to adopt the German musketry doctrine. Even as late as 1909 an American officer had to remind his readers,". . .[I]t is self-evident that [an] organization will attain results in war in inverse proportion to the skill of the men in shooting, or as has been said, 'the better they shoot, the less they will get.'"xx But Rohne's experiments at the Spandau Musketry School uncovered yet another paradox: below a certain limit, the number of firers did not matter.

Mayne wrote "the experiments showed that the number [of firers] has hardly any influence on the results, provided there are at least 10 men firing."xxi This result obtained in the case of volley firing. By the beginning of the 20th century another startling discovery had been made. When a group of trained marksmen fire at will, that is, independently select its own target, maximum dispersion and target coverage is achieved. Furthermore, the number of firers made little difference in the results as long as at least one man fired.xxii

Instead the factor that tended to dominate the battlefield was the number of targets: an army sustains casualties in proportion to its size. This is nothing less than a verbal statement of the exponential decay law, a mathematical statement of the physics of pressure.xxiii Thus, it not only made some tactical sense to distribute rather than concentrate an army's fire, it also made sense to distribute one's own forces on the battlefield rather than concentrate them into a dense and lucrative target. By 1896 the battlefield dynamics of distributed infantry fire received a second significant impetus from the artillery.

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Ever since its invention, artillery had been used in a direct fire mode. With the improved lethality of infantry weapons, artillery was driven quite literally from the battlefield. Thanks to new developments in shell design and innovations in signals and communications technology, artillery became the dominant weapon system on the battlefield by the end of World War One. By design artillery also became the preeminent area fire weapon system. The principles of artillery employment fostered a doctrine of massive area coverage against the new distributed battlefield deployment.xxiv

Beginning with World War One and continuing to the present, artillery would cause more than fifty percent of all battlefield casualties.

The Erosion of Military Virtue The second reason for the change in casualty

patterns was the profound psychological maelstrom at work shaping and being shaped by the physical battlefield dynamics just described. The whole raison d'etre of tactical formations had been to maintain troop control: the denser the troop formations, the tighter the troop control. With the introduction of firearms dense cohesive tactical formations provided the new derived benefit of concentrated fire. But the use of massed formations provided a singular psychological benefit as well: the hardening of moral cohesion. S.L.A. Marshall captured this insight when he wrote:I hold it to be one of the simplest truths of war

that the thing which enables the. . . soldier to keep going with his weapons is the nearpresence or the presumed presence of a comrade.The warmth which derives from human companionship is as essential to his employmentof the arms with which he fights as is the

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finger with which he pulls a trigger[.]. . .[T]he other man may be almost beyond hailing orseeing distance, but he must be somewhat within a man's consciousness or the onset of demoralization is almost immediate and veryquickly the mind begins the despair or turns to thoughts of escape.xxv

The proximity of comrades in arms spins a kind of invisible thread that binds troops together. On the empty battlefield this thread was stretched to the breaking point. Fundamentally troops in the 19th century were confronted with a cruel dilemma: maintain a concentrated morally cohesive formation and die, or maintain a dispersed fragile unit and survive.

A particularly eloquent portrayal of these moral dynamics was provided by a Russian combat veteran of the 19th century. He wrote that "the first characteristics of the field of battle of today is, that one has to deal with an invisible enemy."xxvi Not only does the soldier have to contend with increased weapon lethality, he must deal with an invisible enemy without the full moral support of his equally invisible comrades. He feels terribly alone. Not only is the battlefield empty, it is psychologically desolate and forlorn. The veteran continues: "This struggle. . . create[s] a painful feeling of uncertainty and mistrust." Because of the long ranges at which engagements begin, moral disintegration can occur almost immediately: "A company begins to suffer from the fire of an enemy at several thousand yards from him, and even when separated from him by heights. Before the men can engage in the fighting. . . they are already materially and morally weakened. Sometimes they are obliged to remain several hours under this preliminary fire, from which ensues physical and

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sensory moral depression, even before they take part in the fighting."xxvii As the attacker creeps forward, more losses are incurred and the skirmish lines thin further and the feeling of moral desolation increases. Somewhere to the rear are the supports, perhaps misnamed because they are too far removed to provide moral support. At around 600 yards:The enemy fire builds up. Its aim becomes truer.

The men spread farther apart from each other, moving individually to whatever cover is nearest or offers the best protection. A few of them fire their pieces. . . others do nothing. Some fail to act mainly because theyare puzzled [at] what to do and their leadersdo not tell them; others are wholly unnervedand can neither think nor move in sensible relation to the situation. Such response asthe men make to the enemy fire tends mainly to produce greater separation in the elements ofthe company, thereby intensifying the feelingof isolation and insecurity in its individuals[emphasis added].xxviii

As already alluded to tactical formations are used primarily to control troops for the purpose of achieving maximum projection of combat force and of facilitating movement. Control ensures unity of effort and adherence to the stated objective. It was understood that . . .controlled fire can only be executed when the

men are collected into organized tactical groups or massed bodies [because under an enemy's fire, one leader alone cannot control alarge number of individual men. . . .] To getthe maximum efficacy of fire a large number ofmen must be brought into the firing line, andthe fire must be concentrated. . . . In obtaining the number of rifles required in thefiring line they must not be pushed in withoutorder or organization, else control will vanish. For this purpose, regular organizedunits only must be put into the line at a time.xxix

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By the end of the American Civil War it was becoming apparent that as units took advantage of survivability achieved through dispersion, the moral cohesion of troops became severely degraded. Due to the resultant psychological fragility of combat troops, units were unable to sustain the same intensity of combat as during the Napoleonic period. At the same time, command and control of the engagement was also degraded due to the consequences of dispersion. In qualitative terms, while weapons became more lethal, casualty rates declined.xxx

Mathematically, the monolithic metaphor implicit in Lanchester's square law had been shattered. The idea of concentrated, well directed fire by dense masses of drilled automatons was supplanted by the isolated soldier or crew on the empty battlefield. The essence of the exponential decay law says as much. From now on battle itself would become atomized and consist of clouds of engagements. These engagements would flow through the theater of operations creating great military pressure. Where the analogy of mechanical force had been the primary characteristic of classical strategy, the analogy of pressure would characterize modern warfare.

The dynamics of the empty battlefield did not, in and of itself, cause the emergence of modern warfare.xxxi

The empty battlefield, instead, created an essential tension that caused the attacker to confront the problem of the increasing strength of the defender in a new dimension. This new dimension was beyond the battlefield and it was reached through maneuver.

The Rise of Operational Maneuver On Monday, April 27, 1863, despite a heavy downpour,

four corps of Joseph Hooker's Union Army of the Potomac

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began the first operational maneuver in military history. Thanks to the employment of the Beardslee field telegraph, a large portion of his army moved off the battlefield. General Robert E. Lee, past master of Napoleonic warfare, was "temporarily baffled" by the strange Union maneuver.xxxii Five days later Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson launched military history's second operational maneuver, against Hooker's turning movement.xxxiii The maneuver from one battlefield to the next would increasingly characterize Civil War military operations by 1865. Under the paradigm of classical strategy maneuver had occurred most often on the battlefield. The emergence of inter-battle maneuver was both caused and later mitigated by technology. The incipient battlefield lethality made intra-battle maneuver increasingly more difficult, especially for the attacker. The development of near light-speed technology like the telegraph mitigated the difficulty of movement off the battlefield. At the same time as battles became more protracted, lengthy maneuvers now had more time to develop. New possibilities confronted the defender as well.

The great increase in strength that now accrued to the defense was directly attributable to the expanding battlefield. Under the old classical paradigm, the battlefield ratio of troops to space was about equal for both sides. Under the new conditions the effective ratio was dramatically tipped in favor of the defender. A little analysis can demonstrate this significant insight.

When speaking of the ratio of troops to space, it is important realize that we are really speaking of the vulnerable area of troops to space. The vulnerable area of a standing man is about .5 square meters.xxxiv A squad

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of ten men defending a position of 100 square meters yields a ratio of (10 X .5/100=) .05 Now, if we entrench this defending force, we compute a new ratio of (10 X .005/100=) .0005.xxxv This means that the defender is deployed in an area that is effectively 100 times larger relative to an upright attacker advancing across the same space (of 100 square meters). Further analysis reveals then just how dissipated an attacker's force really is.

Recall that under modern battlefield conditions, armies act like fluids creating great fronts of pressure. From physics we know that pressure varies according to

the following relationship: Pm = Fm/Am (1)

Where Pm = Military Pressure

Fm = Military Force Am = Battlefield Area.

The relationship implies that a defender deployed in an area (Am) can decrease the effects of an attacker's force (Fm) and the resultant pressure (Pm) by increasing Am. One way to accomplish this, as we suggested, is to entrench. The ten putative attackers would have their force dissipated one hundred fold against a defender that entrenches. Another significant benefit that then accrues to the defender is his ability to withdraw troops from frontline positions and create a large reserve.

In the initial analysis we said that a squad of ten men in the open defending 100 square meters would create a troop to space ratio of .05. Holding this value constant for conditions of entrenchment, theoretically upwards of 900 troops could be released from the defense to constitute a reserve. Increasingly the use of reserves would constitute the key unit of maneuver for

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the defender. The counter maneuver of Jackson's corps at Chancellorsville can thus be viewed as the use of a committed reserve.

A further glance at equation (1) reveals another insight and suggests the physical significance of maneuver. The most effective way in which an attacker can increase his effective military pressure (Pm) is to reduce the enemy's area of deployment (Am). This reduction in area increases the enemy's vulnerability to fire. A maneuver into the flank of the defender's position reduces his effective area of deployment in proportion of the square of the depth of the maneuver. Returning to the earlier example, a penetration of 5 meters increases the defender's troop to space ratio from .05 to (10 X .5/25 = ) .2, a fourfold increase. Providing the attacker can redirect his fire in concert with the maneuver, then by implication his effectiveness increases in proportion to the square of the depth of his maneuver. This leads to an important conclusion: even under modern conditions distributed force can still be concentrated to achieve the same effect as Lanchester's square law. Under modern conditions the process is different, however.

Under classical conditions, the square effects of torque were achieved through numbers. Under operational conditions the square effect of compression is achieved through maneuver. Thus, numbers and depth of maneuver are physically analogous.xxxvi Furthermore, a relationship between attrition and maneuver can be established: maneuver is clearly subordinate to attrition, but at the same time maneuver gives attrition its fundamental effectiveness. It explains, for example, why the Soviet Army has always subordinated its maneuver plan to its

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fire plan; and why the Soviet Army is a highly maneuverable artillery-oriented force.

The battle of Chancellorsville not only indicates an important event in this emergence of operational art, it also marks a transition from the tactical to the operational level of war. We thus now move from the battlefield to the theater of operations, the primary domain of operational art.

4. The New Symmetry and the Emergence of Operational Art On February 27, 1991 U.S. Army General H. Norman

Schwartzkopf gave his televised briefing signaling the end of hostilities in the Gulf War. During his "mother of all briefings" Schwartzkopf presented the Allied ground campaign plan in some depth. Among the many details Schwartzkopf mentioned was the importance of being "schooled in the operational art". The term "operational art" referred to the design and conduct of campaigns and major operations. The concept had come into the U.S. Army's official lexicon only in May 1986 with the revised publication of Field Manual FM 100-5 Operations.

Operational art, a term first given currency by Soviet military theorists in the 1920's emerged because a new style of conducting campaigns demanded a new name. The new symmetry in the way military forces were used created a revolution in the design and conduct of military campaigns. From an aesthetic standpoint a changing milieu created a new form of military art. Where classical strategists like Alexander the Great and Napoleon used the medium of the concentrated battle, the modern operational artist uses the medium of the distributed operation. Consequently, the difference in

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media had a profound impact on military thought, education and practice. The significance of this change in military artistic thinking can be grasped best if viewed as an analogy, where classical strategy is to painting as operational art is to sculpting. The validity of this analogy becomes more evident when we consider the spatial and temporal aspects involved. The classical tradition of a strategy of a single point became extended in breadth and depth through space and time under the new style of warfare.

This new form of military art was induced by a new symmetry in application of military force. Today the new symmetry is best characterized by the distribution of force in a theater of operations. The old classical symmetry was best characterized by the concentration force in a theater of operations and of course is reflected in Isserson's strategy of a single point. If one were to plot the distribution of casualties in a classical campaign, one would find them in a single dense mass concentrated in space and time. By the end of the American Civil War we find casualties distributed in depth, through space and time. Since casualties are the best manifestation of the expenditure of military force, it is easy to discern how the patterns of force distribution suddenly began to change during the Civil War.

These changes in force and casualty distribution patterns most pointedly underscore those profound implications for the military artist. For the first time in military history, maneuver, rather than mere movement, emerged to become the dominant creative aspect of warfare.xxxvii The emerging dominance of maneuver

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coincided with the declining importance of the decisive battle.

The Dead Hand of Napoleon Napoleon himself gazes Janus-like from a crossroads

in military history. From one perspective Napoleon gazes back across over 2000 years of warfare to predecessors who had all believed that the crowning achievement of a successful campaign was the decisive battle of annihilation. From the other perspective Napoleon looks out toward the emergence of total war: a new style of war waged by the means of the Industrial Revolution and the methods of operational art. Whatever Napoleon's perspective, he is clearly on the wrong side of the Industrial Revolution. Yet it is the conventional wisdom, especially in the West, to regard Napoleon as the father of modern warfare. In fact, if anything, he is the undertaker of classical warfare.

For over 2000 years armies had moved in single dense masses. These densely packed armies presented very little linear extension or depth. This style of warfare varied little throughout its long history. In the first place the art of maneuver was rather prosaic. With only one force to maneuver, it was virtually impossible to develop the complex combinations of maneuvers characteristic of modern operational art.

In the second place the compression of military units in space and time on a concentrated battlefield meant that the outcome had a more profound and immediate effect. Often the fate of empires was decided in an afternoon. But significantly, from the standpoint of maneuver, it made no sense to maneuver off the battlefield to attempt an envelopment or turning movement

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in the manner of Hooker's maneuver at Chancellorsville. By the time the maneuver took effect, the battle in all likelihood would have been over.

Third, the overriding requirement of controlling classical armies demanded that they move in a concentrated fashion. The use of permanent independent detachments deployed from the main army was seldom seen in any consistent pattern.

The fourth aspect of the classical concentrated style of warfare concerns the lethality of battle, which was a direct consequence of the emphasis on mass and concentration. In particular, the singular quality of mass had a special influence on such writers as Carl von Clausewitz, when he wrote his interpretation of Napoleon's style of war. Clausewitz observed that there was an inherent tension between distributing units throughout a theater of operations and concentrating them. He wrote that in war "basically, there are two conflicting interests one: possession of the country, tends to disperse the fighting forces; the other, a stroke at the center of gravity of the enemy's forces, tends, in some degree, to keep them concentrated." As we have noted, this latter consideration had dominated the thinking of most commanders throughout history. If a defender chose to disperse, so much the better for the attacker. The attacker would concentrate since "the larger the force with which the blow is struck, the surer its effect will be." It was this aspect of warfare that led Clausewitz to develop his analogy of the center of gravity: "A center of gravity is always found where the mass is concentrated most densely. It presents the most effective target for a blow; furthermore, the heaviest blow is that struck by the center of gravity."xxxviii The

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other great interpreter of Napoleon's style of war, Antoine-Henri Jomini, had championed concentration as the "fundamental principle of war."xxxix Thus, by their words both Clausewitz and Jomini anticipated the later mathematics of Lanchester and his square law.

At the end of the Wars of Napoleon it was apparent that the Napoleonic method of achieving concentration prior to the decisive battle had become the accepted military standard for conducting a campaign by virtually all major European armies. Eventually the Napoleonic paradigm would dominate much of Western military thinking down to the opening days of World War I. Yet one of the seeds of operational art was already contained within Napoleon's style of warfare, the very system of war that operational art would eventually supplant. The seed was the divisional organization.

Unfortunately for our discussion, this whole evolutionary process did not proceed according to some form of strict apostolic succession. One can say, however, that movement toward the method of waging total war becomes first barely perceivable with the development of the division system. This formation provided a primitive command and control mechanism for the lateral distribution of forces in a theater of operations.

Although anticipated by Marshal of France Maurice de Saxe, the divisional system was formally established by Marshal Victor-Francois de Broglie in 1760. In that year the Marshal issued his famous campaign "Instruction for the Army of the King." The divisional system was developed to overcome the battlefield agility of the Prussian Army by speeding up the French army's tactical deployment. Robert Quimby wrote that the divisional "system grew out of the. . . great difficulty in handling

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unitary [concentrated] armies of the size which was usual by [the mid-18th century]."xl Previous to de Broglie's "Instruction," most armies marched in one or two dense columns. Arriving upon the field of battle, the armies then had to deploy laterally into line of battle from line of march. Superior tactical drill gave the Prussians a significant deployment rate advantage. The French sought to nullify this advantage by establishing their order of march in six pre-deployment packages, or divisions. Since these divisions marched laterally dispersed from each other, they arrived on the battlefield virtually deployed in line of battle. The division system also ensured that orderly command and control was maintained during the march and during battlefield deployment.

Another contributor to the evolution of the divisional system was General Pierre de Bourcet. In 1764, while director of the staff school at Grenoble, Bourcet began writing his Principles of Mountain Warfare. Although this work was not formally published until 1788, the document was regarded as a confidential student text and circulated among officers of the French Army. The title is somewhat misleading because the book dealt with more than just mountain warfare. It dealt with the more fundamental problem of controlling the lateral distribution of forces. Only secondarily did Bourcet address the context of mountain warfare. But in addressing the more basic questions of control, Bourcet made a significant contribution to military thought by developing the first general staff system designed to control concentric movement. Because of this contribution, Bourcet is today regarded as the father of the modern general staff.xli

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Toward the end of the 18th century, an interesting but ultimately abortive glimmering of operational art was seen in an attempt to fashion a permanent system of laterally distributed forces. Known as the cordon (= ribbon) system, the early generals of the French Revolution used the divisional unit as a means to distribute forces across the expanse of their frontiers. The system ultimately broke down into a series of uncoordinated division actions because no proper command, control and communications system existed to support such widely distributed forces. The great demolisher of this primitive foreshadowing of operational art was Napoleon himself.

According to Quimby, Napoleon "saw the balance between dispersion and concentration, and understood how to bring all his forces to bear upon the decisive point. When this method was opposed to the cordon system, the

results could not fail to be successful." The key to Napoleon's success against the cordon system was the division. Napoleon "took full advantage of the divisional organization to maneuver extensively and prepare a surprise, but the divisions were not allowed to act independently upon their own initiative and spread out over a wide area, for although they were given room enough at first to make their evolutions easily, they were directed by a single will which converged them upon a single point" [emphasis added].xlii Thus, while Napoleon may have indeed added a new innovation in warfare by overthrowing the cordon system, this technique was hardly revolutionary. It is clear that his achievement was still within the broad context of the classical paradigm of warfare: "The strategy of a single point."

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During his reform of the French army from 1802 to 1804, Napoleon permanently established the corps system. Some writers, including B.H. Liddell Hart, have misinterpreted the significance of this innovation.xliii

The corps system was simply the next logical step in the evolution of the division. The employment of the corps was still subordinated to the aim of achieving concentration through concentric maneuver upon a single decisive point more rapidly than an enemy. This is evident from Napoleon's own conduct of battle. His watchword had always been: march dispersed, fight concentrated. The corps provided the means not only to control the army during the march, but also to array the army immediately before battle. The corps were never intended for use as independent "chess pieces." Battles like Jena-Auerstadt, where Marshal Louis Davout's corps fought an independent action, were rare. Once the battle plan had been determined, the corps were primarily used to control the engagements of the massed infantry, artillery and cavalry formations.

By 1815 the Napoleonic variant of the classical paradigm of military art, characterized by concentric maneuver upon a single point, was firmly established throughout Europe. Forty-six years later the dead hand of Napoleon would guide the initial clash of Federal and Confederate armies on the other side of the Atlantic. It was during the American Civil War that we find the first full and complete expression of operational art and total war.

The Birth of Operational Art In terms of our contemporary understanding of

operational art, we notice several unique aspects that

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distinguish it from classical strategy. If one were to reduce these elements to one single characteristic, it would be this: operational art is characterized by the employment of forces in deep distributed operations. These maneuvers consist of deep battles and extended maneuvers punctuated by periods of inaction. Unlike classical strategy, battle was now seen merely as part of the whole of maneuver, much like knots on a length of rope. Operational art, as a unique style of military art, became the planning, execution and sustainment of temporally and spatially distributed maneuvers and battles, all viewed as one organic whole. Before the emergence of operational art, movement of field forces in single dense masses obviated the need to coordinate actions with other forces. The undistributed, classical army--an army before the time of the Industrial Revolution--had only to integrate actions with itself. At the same time the decisive battle of annihilation was itself the culmination of all activity in the theater of operations. All planning and execution ended with the decisive battle of annihilation. The idea of simultaneous and successive operations, thoroughly integrated by means of a distributed system of communication, was therefore alien to the Napoleonic style of warfare and its precursors.

The evolution of forces toward a state of distribution went through two virtually simultaneous phases. The first phase was the lateral distribution of forces across a theater of operations and the emergence of a continuous front. The second phase was the deepening of the theater of operations.xliv This led to the conduct of successive deep battles and extended maneuvers throughout the depth of the entire theater of

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operations. Thus, the expansion of the concentrated forces in a theater, in breadth and in depth, meant that the campaign could no longer be decided by one decisive action. Because of the tremendous burden now placed upon staff planning, resources and logistics, for the first time campaigns had to be conducted in discrete phases of activity called operations. Each operation in its own turn comprised a unique set of deep battles and extended maneuvers, each defined by a specific objective. It fell to post-Napoleonic commanders to exercise a new style of military art that would enable them to integrate these operations, separated in space and time, into one coherent whole.

One aim at this stage is to examine in greater detail the primary characteristics of operational art. It is our purpose to examine briefly these criteria within the context of the American Civil War, and set the stage for the intellectual revolution made later by Soviet military theorists. The hope here is to present the reader a kind of "Rosetta stone" with which to understand operational art in contra-distinction to classical strategy.

In summary, it is again important to understand that operational art stands as a creative military tradition qualitatively different from classical strategy. Thus, the purpose here is not to define a genre within an art form as one might define various genres of painting. Instead, the purpose, is to define a different type of art in the same sense that sculpture is a different type of art than painting. It has been suggested here that Napoleonic warfare is a different genre within classical strategy. Under the earlier Alexandrian genre, classical strategy was defined by concentrated maneuver and battle.

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The defining characteristic of the Napoleonic genre was concentric maneuver and concentrated battle. Operational art is defined by extended maneuver and deep battle. It is fundamentally the process of distribution that causes the change in classical strategy and the emergence of operational art.

Earlier discussion indicated that at the tactical level battle became distributed and created a certain essential tension that caused armies to overcome battlefield lethality through extra-battle maneuver. The next area of interest, therefore, concerns the problem of maneuver.

Maneuver is typically defined as the movement of forces so as to achieve positional advantage over an enemy.xlv But the question becomes, "positional advantage" to accomplish what? Beginning in the time of Alexander the Great, armies maneuvered to achieve a positional advantage for battle. The decisive battle was seen as the crowning achievement of classical maneuver and continued through the time of Napoleon. Typically the maneuver was directed against an opponent's line of communications. For example, Darius III placed his army astride Alexander's communication in October 333 B.C. This maneuver was crowned by the battle of Issus. Particularly in the West one of the difficulties in attempting to establish operational art as sui generis concerns the very definition of maneuver. Operational art cannot be characterized uniquely different from classical strategy unless maneuver is understood operationally. How can this be done? We must again return to the purpose of maneuver.

Under the classical form of military art, the purpose of maneuver was maximum concentration of force to

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achieve a decisive positional advantage for the onset of battle. Returning again to the metaphor of torque, one can imagine armies as levers maneuvered to a single point or fulcrum where force could be applied to a decisive advantage. Under the operational form the metaphor of mechanical force and torque is replaced by the analogy from pressure and compression. On the battlefield tactical units are in a physical sense liquefied. In the theater of operations the army itself in its distributed state is like a gas. Under these conditions what can be the purpose of maneuver?

The purpose of operational maneuver is to maximize the flow of force in tempo and density. Given this purpose, we can define operational maneuver simply as relational movement in depth that maximizes freedom of action for the destruction of the enemy's capacity to wage war. The idea of "freedom of action" implies the maximization of force flow or pressure. The definition has a definite offensive cast to it. A further implication arises from our definition and concerns the purpose of battle. Under the classical paradigm battles were waged to destroy the enemy's army. Under the new operational paradigm battles were fought to retain or deny freedom of action. Battles are seldom fought for the simple destruction of the enemy's forces. Grant's battles through the Wilderness, for example, were fought to retain his freedom of action in his maneuver toward Richmond. Lee fought to deny Grant this freedom. Beginning with Hooker at Chancellorsville, the whole idea of inter-battle maneuver aims at achieving and maintaining freedom of action. The idea of freedom of action implies that enemy destruction can be achieved better indirectly, that is, through envelopment and

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encirclement than through direct battle and attrition. Indeed, when freedom of action is lost, attrition ensues. From a creative perspective it is possible to see more

clearly what the change in maneuver implies. Regarding military organizations--army groups, armies, corps, etc.­-as the tools of the military artist, then his primary media is the extended maneuver and the deep or distributed battle. Largely because of the Industrial Revolution the military artists' media was changed. The stark colors of battle, applied by broad brushstrokes of concentrated maneuver upon a two-dimensional canvas became transformed. During the Civil War, military art took on the form of a work of sculpture. Military artists like U.S. Grant, W.T. Sherman, and J.E. Johnston who, using deep chisel-like sweeps of maneuver and hammer blows of battle, created great three-dimensional masterpieces that even today seize the eye of the beholder. Turning to this milieu, one finds several essential characteristics of a new form of military art. Such an examination begins by looking at the railroad,

the first-born offspring of the Industrial Revolution.

5. The Chariot of Mars The railroad transformed classical strategy in the

same fashion that the rifled musket transformed classical tactics. The railroad, in the words of Larry H. Addington, became the "bones" of operational art.xlvi The railroad, along with the telegraph led directly to the structure of distribution that under girded the basic milieu of the operational artist. If the railroad formed the bones of operational art, then the telegraph provided the nerves. Together the railroad system, comprising the steam engine, the railroad bed and track and the

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telegraph, would also permanently forge a link between the military front and the industrial rear. The unification of front and rear would establish a condition of continuous mobilization that would ultimately lead to the idea of total war. This issue will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.

Operationally, the railroad system caused a number of things to occur.xlvii First, railroads greatly speeded the movement of troops into the theater of operations. During the campaign of 1859 French and Austro-Hungarian troops moved into Italy in two weeks. Under classical conditions such a move would have taken at least two months. More importantly, the movement of troops along separate railines enforced a distributed pattern of deployment into the theater of operations.

Second, troops arrived in the theater of operations in much better physical condition than under the classical paradigm. It was not entirely necessary, therefore, that troops be seasoned before commencing a campaign. Reservists, straight from relatively easy civilian endeavors, could be immediately integrated into the standing army. The minimization of sickness and disease that might otherwise have occurred through exhausting marches also had a positive influence on troop morale.

Third, logistical problems were greatly simplified. Under the classical paradigm large scale movements had to be sustained by foraging and by the painstaking accumulation of magazines. Operational armies could move relatively quicker and with fewer encumbrances.

Fourth, the railroad created a profound psychological link with the rear that had always been severed in wars prior to the Industrial Revolution.

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Troops, wounded in battle, would not have to languish in some field hospital. They could be sent home quickly to recuperate among family and friends. Troops could also be sent home on furlough. For example, a furloughed soldier from Wisconsin fighting with the Army of the Potomac could expect to reach home in no more than three days time. The swift rail movement of mail also tended to cement the soldier at the front with the home he had left behind. The rapid movement of information, provided for by the electric telegraph and the emergence of news wire services, brought a new kind of immediacy about the war to those on the home front. The psychological unification of front and rear also began to erode the distinction between soldier and civilian.

Fifth, the telegraph and the railroad unified large geographically separate military formations that under classical conditions would have operated independently. Thanks to the telegraph, distant armies like those serving under Grant could operate as one unified force.

Finally, the economic unification of front and rear had an operational impact as well. Michael Howard captured this insight when he wrote: ". . . [n]ow, if the railways lines were intact, the trains smoothly organized, and supply from the railhead unhampered, armies could keep the field [continuously] so long as there was blood and treasure in the nation to support them--and this power of endurance the American Civil War provided the first great example" [emphasis added].xlviii

An economic rear, transforming men and material through continuous mobilization, could provide continuous logistical support to armies conducting a continuous series of simultaneous and sequential deep operations. By the end of the American Civil War the railroad would

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drive the United States into the realm of modern warfare and operational art. In its fullest expression operational art is manifested through several key attributes.

6. The Structure of Operational Art

ONE: The Distributed Operation On May 7, 1864 a remarkable event occurred: a

defeated army advanced. At the direction of U.S. Grant the Army of the Potomac under George G. Meade advanced in deep maneuver around Robert E. Lee's right flank. The advance followed hard on the heels of the Union defeat during the battle of the Wilderness. The event is significant because for the first time it marks clearly the execution of multiple deep maneuvers and distributed battles for the sake of freedom of action, rather than for the purpose of positional advantage and annihilation. This fact has further significance because it helps define the first characteristic of operational art.

Operational art is characterized first by the distributed operation: an ensemble of deep maneuvers and distributed battles extended in space and time but unified by a common aim. That common aim is the retention or denial of freedom of action. Spatially these operations are extended in depth as well as in breadth. Because of this temporal and spatial distribution, forces never concentrate at a single point in space and time. The distributed operation is the basic building block of all operational planning and execution and began to characterize all military operations in the Civil War, particularly after April 1864.

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This was especially true of the distributed operations in the east. The great mentor of J.F.C. Fuller, Colonel G.F.R. Henderson, recognized this when he wrote in 1894 that operations in the American Civil War "give a better clue to the fighting of the future than any other [campaign] which history records."xlix The participants themselves began to understand that all military action in war was characterized increasingly by large blocks of battles and maneuvers that we would regard today as distributed operations. What is all the more remarkable is that these same participants recognized the activity as unique and so derived new terminology. They called these deep operations "epochs," meaning successions or pauses. Colonel Emory Upton, for example, writing on events up the siege of Petersburg identified military activity broken into six distinct epochs or operations.l These epochs followed generally Meade's main maneuvers around the right of flank of Lee's Army of Virginia and were creatively woven into a grand pattern called a campaign.

TWO: The Distributed Campaign If the distributed operation is the basic building

block of operational art, what is the final structure the operational artist builds? He builds a distributed campaign, the second attribute of operational art. Notice that under the classical paradigm, the fundamental building block in campaign design was the decisive battle. Although a distributed campaign may consist of a single operation, in its fullest expression operational art, however, is characterized by the integration of several simultaneous and successive distributed operations in a campaign. As we noted earlier, a distributed operation is an ensemble of deep maneuvers

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and distributed battles extended in space and time but unified through a common aim. Because of this distribution, forces never concentrate at a single point.

Under the classical paradigm the battle was the chief component of campaign design and the primary means of destruction. With the emergence of the distributed operation, a new form of destruction intruded between the two classical levels of war, strategy and tactics. In order to accommodate the intrusion a new, largely still unrecognized, level of war was created, the operational-tactical level. At the same time as forces became increasingly more distributed, battle itself became fragmented and changed from its decisive role of annihilation. Under operational conditions, battles were fought to achieve or deny freedom of action rather than to attain total destruction of the enemy. This only made sense if we recall that forces in deep maneuver, if they were to move deep at all, had to maintain freedom of action through successful execution of successive battles. Consequently battle itself became subordinated to maneuver. In virtue of this subordination, operations and campaigns became protracted and would have a profound impact on the conduct of modern warfare. The great military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, had already begun to anticipate these implications toward the end of his life.

Clausewitz had written that although the defense was the stronger form of war, it relinquished the initiative. Unlike the offense, whose positive aim sought to overthrow the enemy through battle, the defense could only wait until it was strong enough to transition to the offense and regain the initiative. Following his experience with the Russian Army in 1812 Clausewitz began

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to see the defense in a new light. In his study of the defense Clausewitz identified two types of defensive action. The first type was to wait and engage the enemy in battle after he crossed the friendly frontier. The second, least desirable, was to draw the enemy deep into friendly territory and exhaust him through maneuver and battle.li Because modern warfare emphasizes battles and maneuver, distributed campaigns are inherently exhaustive.

The emergence of the distributed operation as the primary form of destruction, as well as the resultant disaggregation of the classical battle of annihilation, meant that distributed campaigns began to develop an increasing orientation toward geography and terrain and away from the enemy army. This, again, made sense if one considers how forces began to exhibit distributed patterns of deployment, since these deployment patterns increasingly oriented toward the retention and seizure of key economic and industrial areas. Furthermore, the emergence of operational maneuver, that is, movement to seek or deny freedom of action, meant that battles would occur around key terrain features capable of sustaining deep maneuver. Grant's operations against Forts Henry and Donelson, for instance, were preparatory battles fought to secure Grant's subsequent freedom of action. Consequently, a distinction that Clausewitz made between the destruction of the enemy's army on the battlefield and the occupation of his territory became indistinguishable under modern conditions.lii The forces, and the terrain upon which they maneuver, became a unified whole. One of the first to recognize the possibilities and pitfalls in the design of a distributed

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campaign was Ulysses S. Grant, perhaps the father of operational art.

Grant's Distributed Campaign, 1864-65 If one were to hazard a precise date as to the birth

of operational art, that date would be April 4, 1864. On that date, in a letter to Sherman, Grant set forth a campaign design that was "to work all parts of the [entire Federal] army together, and . . . toward a common center." At a stroke Grant had exposed and rectified the main defect of the cordon system: Grant would unite all military activities east of the Mississippi into an integrated chain of distributed operations. In his report to the Secretary of War Grant wrote:

The armies in the East and West acted independently and without concert, like a balkyteam, no two ever pulling together, enablingthe enemy to use to great advantage his interior lines of communication for transporting troops from east to west, re-enforcing the army most vigorously pressed, andto furlough large numbers, during seasons ofinactivity on our part, to go to their homesand do the work of producing for the support oftheir armies.

. . . I therefore determined, first, to use the greatest number of troops practicable againstthe armed force of the enemy, preventing himfrom using the same force at different seasonsagainst first one then another of our armies, and the possibility of repose for refitting andproducing necessary supplies for carrying onresistance; second, to hammer continuouslyagainst the armed force of the enemy and hisresources until, by mere attrition, if in noother way, there should be nothing left to himbut an equal submission. . . .liii

Grant's campaign consisted of several distributed operations. First, in the west three armies under Sherman would strike along one operational axis toward

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the rail and industrial network at Atlanta. At the same time he was to fix Johnston's Army of Tennessee, "break it up, and get into the interior of the enemy's country as far as [possible], inflicting all the damage [Sherman could] against their resources."liv Sherman's deep maneuver was ultimately aimed at Lee's rear. Second, an army under Nathaniel P. Banks was to conduct a supporting operation from Mobile, Alabama toward Atlanta.

For his part, Grant would direct three distributed operations in the east against Lee's Army of Virginia. First, Franz Sigel's Army of West Virginia would advance south through the breadbasket of the Confederacy, the Shenandoah Valley, and seize Lynchburg cutting the Petersburg-Lynchburg railroad. Second, George A. Meade's Army of the Potomac would advance south and try to fix Lee's Army in order to sustain Sherman's freedom of action further from the west. Third, Benjamin F. Butler's Army of the James would advance northwest along the James River and seize by the back door the industrial and political center of the Confederacy at Richmond.

These five chisel-like operations define the quintessence of Grant's operational genius. Seen as a whole the forces under Grant sought to maintain maximum freedom of action while robbing it from the enemy. Under the pressure of Grant's incessant hammering the Confederate's were denied the freedom of action necessary to wage war. Sherman, for one, recognized the significance of Grant's plan. On April 10, 1864 Sherman wrote Grant. In his opening lines he observed: "That we are now all to act on a common plan, converging on a common center, looks like enlightened war."lv Many years later Dwight D. Eisenhower, commenting on Grant's

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campaign report, wrote: "Ever since I read that report my respect for Grant has been high. . . . ."lvi

Despite these testimonies to Grant's genius, every artist is necessarily and ultimately constrained by the quality and quantity of his materiel. In military art this increasingly becomes the realm of logistics.

THREE: Continuous Logistics Recalling our physical view of warfare, we said that

classical warfare is best expressed by the laws of solid mechanics. Modern warfare on the other hand is best expressed by the laws of fluid mechanics. Fluids represent two states of matter: liquids and gases. Units engaged in distributed battle are analogous to liquids under the dynamics of extreme heat and pressure. Formations conducting a distributed campaign are analogous to gases undergoing similar force dynamics. If we are to maintain the validity of this particular physical analogy, we must show how these fluids maintain their density.

Under the classical paradigm Clausewitz characterized the strategic level of war in terms of space, time and mass.lvii In terms of space, strategy is concerned with the expanse of a theater of operations; in terms of time, with the duration of a campaign; and in terms, mass with the density of an army as a whole. Since the classical strategic level of war equates to the modern operational level, we can exploit this typology to address the question posed in the previous paragraph.

Under modern conditions the army as a whole can be visualized as flowing or percolating distributively through the depth of the theater of operations. At this level the army projects force by virtue of its rate of flow: its tempo and density. Because of the significance

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of this physical relationship we can see why it becomes critical to view operational maneuver as relational movement to achieve and deny freedom of action. Fundamentally, the denial of freedom of action drives military force and pressure to zero. Since pressure is proportional to density (mass) and tempo (acceleration), the ability of the attacker to mass and continue his momentum must be maintained. But tempo is not only practically a function of freedom of action, it is also a function of movement. And movement brings us to the issue of logistics.

Logistics is concerned with the movement and sustainment of armies in the field. Not only does logistics sustain the movement tempo of an army, it also sustains its force density. Without operational logistics an army would, by analogy, simply evaporate. In order for a modern industrial army in a theater of operations to maintain a militarily effective presence, its logistics system must be continuous. This was recognized as early as the American Civil War.

During the first year of the Civil War it became evident that the methods of classical logistics could no longer be applied successfully to American conditions.lviii

According to Edward P. Hagerman, "In logistics, as in other areas of military theory and doctrine, Civil War experience forced American military culture to reassess its eighteenth-century world view and acknowledge the realities of modern warfare" [emphasis added].lix In Napoleon's time scavenging was still supplemented extensively by a system of magazines and depots.lx The use of the magazine system served Napoleon's army as a logistical "slingshot." During the Civil War there were no neutral or friendly nations accessible in which to

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prestock military stores before the start of a campaign. Thanks to the railroad and the mechanization of the factory, materiel could be brought to the armies in the field on a continuous basis.

Tactically Confederate and Federal armies still had to carry their stores with them on pack animals and wagons. This of course greatly retarded the mobility of formations. Typically oxcarts moved at rate 15-17 kilometers a day; wagons somewhat faster.lxi Equally significant was the fact that classical logistics could no longer sustain dense concentrations of troops for protracted periods of time. Only the bulk cargo rates of the railroad could sustain such densities. By 1863 the Federal Army in particular was earnestly seeking a solution to the problem of logistics. At the tactical level the solution was provided by the French colonial school of warfare.

In 1840 the French, particularly Thomas Robert Bugeaud, recognized that because the Arab insurgents in North Africa had a tremendous mobility advantage over the French colonial forces, the classic style of logistics would not be effective there. To increase the mobility of his forces, Bugeaud created highly mobile independent detachments called "flying columns" by lightening greatly the logistical structure of his force.lxii Around 1860 a study of Bugeaud's logistical methods was written by Alexis Godillot. On January 2, 1862 the Federal Army's Quartermaster General, Montgomery Meigs, ordered that a translation of Godillot's pamphlet be distributed throughout the Army. By 1864 Bugeaud's method of flying columns formed the core of Federal Army logistical doctrine. This triumph over the old classical system was

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demonstrated decisively in Grant's invasions of the South.

At the operational level the railroad system played a decisive role in establishing a continuous system of logistics. The railroad provided a network for the continuous supply and movement of large formations. This vast iron network became an energy grid that a maneuvering formation could plug into at any point and conduct protracted operations. Indeed, it was precisely because of the continuous arterial nature of operational logistics that protracted battles and operations--the very hallmark of modern warfare--could be conducted at all. It is this notion of continuity of operations that particularly distinguishes modern warfare from the classical style.

The Industrial Revolution began the mechanization of virtually every aspect of human society: in Siegfried Giedion's words, "Mechanization takes command."lxiii The machine supplanted the muscle. From a military standpoint armies could move continuously and rapidly over great distances: they no longer had to rest after a 15 to 20-mile march. This fact was in evidence during the very first battle of the Civil War, a battle won as a direct result of the railroad.

On July 20, 1861 Johnston's Confederate army joined P.G.T. Beauregard's forces at Bull Run following a thirty-mile movement by rail. This, perhaps the first truly operational movement in military history, took less than a day to accomplish. Under classical conditions, such a move by foot would have taken at least two days. In such an instance Johnston probably would have arrived a day after the battle. The employment of the railroad

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at the first battle of Bull Run established a pattern for the logistical use of rails for the rest of the war.

On the night of September 16, 1862, following the first day of the decisive battle of Antietam, the Federal commander, George B. McClellan was confronted with the decision of whether he would be able to continue the fight on the next day. He was particularly concerned about the potential depletion of his ammunition stocks. McClellan duly wired Assistant Secretary of War Watson ordering up a special express train loaded with ammunition. Assured that such a train would depart promptly on the 17th, McClellan decided to continue the fight in the event it lasted beyond the first day. Although the battle is generally regarded a draw, it gave Lincoln sufficient political capital to issue has Emancipation Proclamation.lxiv

A year later at the battle of Gettysburg the railroad again proved decisive. On July 1 the small rail terminus at Westminster, Md., twenty-five miles southwest of Gettysburg, was capable of handling only three or four trains a day. Just three days later, thanks to the herculean efforts of logisticians Hermann Haupt and Rufus Ingalls, supplies were arriving at Westminster at a rate of 15 trains and 15,000 tons a day. Returning trains were evacuating 2,000 to 4,000 casualties to Baltimore. With such continuous logistical support General George Meade was prepared to fight his Army of the Potomac all month if necessary.lxv Lee, compelled to sustain his army by foraging in the Napoleonic style, was forced to retreat back to Virginia.

The Confederates were only rarely able to mount such feats of operational logistics. On September 9, 1863 trains began to embark north of Richmond James

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Longstreet's corps of the Army of Northern Virginia. Eleven days later after completing a circuitous thousand mile train ride the force, consisting of two infantry divisions and a battalion of artillery, arrived in time to shift the tide of battle in the Confederate victory at Chickamauga.lxvi

The Union responded to the defeat at Chickamauga with the rapid redeployment of the Eleventh and Twelfth Corps to the Army of the Cumberland at Chattanooga. In less than two weeks 23,300 men with all their equipment and horses moved 1,233 miles. It was the greatest rail move in military history prior to 1904.lxvii

Perhaps the most dramatic achievement in operational sustainment occurred during Sherman's Atlanta campaign. According to Sherman:

That single stem of railroad [southward from Nashville], four hundred and seventy-three miles long, supplied an army of one hundred thousand menand thirty-five thousand animals for the period ofone hundred and ninety-six days, [namely], from May1 to November 12, 1864. To have delivered regularlythat amount of food and forage by ordinary wagonswould have required thirty-six thousand eighthundred wagons of six mules each, allowing eachwagon to have hauled two tons twenty miles each day,a simple impossibility on roads such as then existedin that region of the country....Therefore,reiterate that the Atlanta campaign was an impossibility without these railroads; . . . [emphasis added].lxviii

Following November 12, 1864 Sherman launched his deep strike to the sea. Although he did not rely on railroads during this deep maneuver, the move could never have been mounted without the massive buildup of logistics at the Atlanta rail terminus that preceded the move. Sherman heavily victualed his two remaining armies from this huge stockpile before advancing through Georgia.

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I

The final significant wartime employment of the railroad occurred during the redeployment of General John M. Schofield's Twenty-third Corps of 15,000 men. The move began in the winter of 1865 in southwestern Tennessee and ended eleven days later on the banks of the Potomac, 1,400 miles away.lxix

One of the most astonishing feats of railroad-based logistics occurred at the end of the war. The most extensive troop movement occurred during demobilization. From May 27 to July 6, 1865 233,200 men, 12,838 horses,

and 4,300,850 pounds baggage left Washington, D.C. after the grand review and dispersed to the hometowns of veterans throughout the north.lxx

Crucial to the development of operational art and total war was the importance of another element of the railroad system, the telegraph.

FOUR: Instantaneous Command and Control The railroad system is simply the nineteenth century

progenitor of the twentieth century road system. Both create and sustain conditions for the practice of operational art. The relationship between the two military technological systems can be seen the following table.

RAIL ROAD o Steam Engine o Internal Combustion

Engine o Locomotive o Wheeled Vehicle

(Motorization) o Tractor (steam) o Tank

(Mechanization) o Railed Road o Paved Road o Telegraph o Radio/Telephone Table. Technology of Distributed Operations

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The radio and the telegraph emerged because both movement systems were commercial systems. The railroad developed the means to move large tonnages swiftly, efficiently and continuously. In order to ensure that the most effective use possible was made of this transportation system, a parallel means of communications was developed. This ensured that freight schedules were met and car space was always full. Furthermore, since trains were running on single tracks, it was imperative to know updated departure and arrival times in order to avoid collisions. When armies began to move by rail, they naturally exploited the instantaneous command and control capabilities of the telegraph.

The telegraph was used in war for the first time against Mexico in 1846. By that year some 1,200 miles of telegraph lines joined northeastern cities like Washington, New York and Philadelphia and had revolutionized communications. Although the telegraph was never used operationally in the War with Mexico, it became an important innovation in speeding the procurement of troops and materiel throughout the northeast.lxxi

The telegraph made its real operational appearance during the American Civil War, however. McClellan first used the telegraph in June 1861 during his operations in Western Virginia. Communications were standardized with the development of the Beardslee field telegraph. The Beardslee system included a wagon with a standard set of equipment. Each set included twenty miles of insulated wire that could be laid at a rate of three miles an hour. For more permanent installation twelve-foot ashen poles

equipped with insulators were used. In this case

48

equipment sets were modified to include 400 such poles, along with ten miles of insulated wire and batteries to drive the Beardslee apparatus. Experience demonstrated that ten miles of wire could be strung permanently in four hours.

The ease with which the Beardslee system could support distributed operations was a function of its ability to sustain rapid operational maneuver. We have already noted Hooker's use of the telegraph to support operational maneuver at Chancellorsville. Meade used the Beardslee telegraph to support his deep maneuver through the Wilderness to the James River in 1864. Although the maneuver covered fifty miles, over 350 miles of telegraph wire was strung to support the move.

The operational significance of instantaneous means of communications becomes apparent when one considers the distributed nature of forces deployed in a theater of operations. Unlike classical conditions the distributed deployment of forces creates a greater variety of unexpected or unanticipated tactical and operational possibilities. As a result this variety generates greater information. Since information is the basis of decision, the operational commander is confronted with many more decisions than his classical predecessor. The operational commander thus requires an instantaneous means of communication in order to adjust his distributed forces in rapid counteraction to the unexpected actions of the enemy. One can readily imagine the results of Waterloo if Napoleon had a telegraphic link to Grouchy's errant army; or the result of Jena-Auerstadt if Napoleon had had a similar link to Davout.

It is, therefore, less than surprising that one year after McClellan's use of the telegraph, there were over

49

3,500 miles of military telegraph lines in use. By the middle of 1863 another 1,755 miles had been added. On March 3 of that year the U.S. Congress enacted legislation to create the world's first separate Signal Corps. By 1865 15,000 miles of military telegraph line were in use, sending messages 10 to 1,000 words in length at a rate of over 3,300 a day.lxxii

FIVE: The Operationally Durable Formation The system of continuous logistics and instantaneous

communications helped to create operationally durable formations, formations capable of conducting indefinitely a succession of distributed operations. Toward the end of the classical period the corps d'armee emerged as a tactically durable unit capable of independently fighting a battle for a day against superior odds. Before the Napoleonic phase of the classical period, the primary formation that had tactical durability was the concentrated main field force. By the time of the American Civil War the field army emerged as the dominant operationally durable formation. The railroad had much to do with the rise of the field army.

By 1842 thanks to the spread of the railroad, communications with Washington and the outlying military districts were greatly improved. Accordingly on July 11, 1842 the larger Western and Eastern military divisions were reorganized into nine smaller separate military departments.lxxiii On the eve of the Civil War there were as many as 53 administrative territorial departments distributed throughout the United States.lxxiv Many of these departments fielded its own army. Command of the field army devolved upon the departmental commander, who, under the Federal system, was responsible to Washington. Later on a higher headquarters was deemed necessary to

50

control these distributed field armies. The result was the emergence of the army group.

During the Napoleonic period the use of the corps d'armee in concentric maneuver raised the command and control role of the army in the field. This circumstance was addressed through the refinement of the general staff. In the Civil War the telegraph greatly ameliorated the command and control problems stemming from the employment of multiple field armies. The Confederates were among the first to recognize that without a superior integrating headquarters to control the distributed operations of subordinate field armies, the same defect inherent in the cordon system would wreck any hope of coordinating a series of multiple advances. As a result a military division was established under Joseph E. Johnston to coordinate the operations of Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee, E. Kirby Smith's Army of Kentucky and John C. Pemberton's Army of Mississippi.lxxv Recognizing the same problem, the Federal army on October 16, 1863 promulgated General Order 337 creating the Military Division of the Mississippi. This quasi-army group was placed under the command of U.S. Grant and embraced the Army of the Tennessee under Sherman, the Army of the Cumberland under George H. Thomas and, later, the Army of the Ohio under John M. Schofield. After April 1864 the Union forces in the east established a similar army group structure.

The idea of an operationally durable formation had special significance for the employment of cavalry. Under the classical paradigm cavalry was used tactically in battle for shock action and pursuit. Under the operational paradigm the role of cavalry changed dramatically. Coupled with an inherent ability to fight

51

as dismounted infantry, Civil War cavalry on both sides came to possess the requisite cybernetic and logistical structure to conduct independent distributed operations. From an operational standpoint this meant that cavalry could conduct exploitation as well as tactical pursuit. Fundamentally, exploitation is an operational function of cavalry and today's mechanized forces. This makes sense if we regard operational maneuver as relational movement to seize, maintain and deny freedom of action. In order to reap the benefit of operational maneuver, it must be exploited. The cavalry formations during the Civil War demonstrated their exploitation capability by means of the deep strike.

The Confederate cavalry under J.E.B. Stuart developed deep-strike techniques that were initiated and later refined by Federal cavalry commanders. Typically these "strategic raids," as the contemporary authors called them, were directed at deep objectives such as lines of communications, rail centers, ports, factories and bases of operations.lxxvi The evolution of the deep strike during the Civil War culminated in the famous deep maneuver conducted by James H. Wilson. To direct attention from his invasion of South Carolina, Sherman launched a cavalry corps under Wilson against Confederate forces in Alabama and Georgia to exploit Union freedom action. The corps consisted of 13,480 troops organized in three cavalry divisions and a mounted infantry brigade. In less than two months Wilson's troopers had exploited 525 miles into the heartland of the Confederacy. Wilson's deep strike would stand as the largest independent cavalry operation until well into World War I.lxxvii

52

During the Civil War deep exploitation was a technique not necessarily limited to cavalry. Sherman's so-called "March through Georgia" was a deep strike conducted primarily with infantry. In November 1864 after John Bell Hood cut Sherman's lines of communications with Chattanooga, Sherman made the bold decision to abandon his lines and drive on to Savannah. Here Sherman established a new base of operations and continued his drive north into South Carolina. Sherman accomplished his deep exploitation with significant help from the Federal Navy.

The operationally durable formation is the primary engine of operational design: it is the hammer that drives the operational chisel. In order for these tools to be used effectively they must be used with tremendous creative vision.

SIX :Operational Vision Operational artists have had characteristically a

unified and holistic approach in the design, execution and sustainment of their campaigns. They have had that intuitive ability to render incomplete and ambiguous information into a meaningful impression of the true state of affairs in their theater of operations.lxxviii

The gift of operational vision has often been associated with mental agility, the ability to react to incoming information faster than it arrives. This quality has been termed the ability to be "perceptually fast."lxxix

Before the Industrial Revolution the basic unit of real time was about one to two hours in duration. This meant that it took the average Napoleonic commander, for instance, one to two hours to process battlefield information and render a decision. With the expansion of the theater of operations and the battlefield more

53

-- --

--

information (=entropy=variety) was produced. This demanded that commanders and their staffs process information more rapidly in order to render a timely decision. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution the basic unit of real time decreased to one minute. Within the last thirty years it has been further reduced to 10 seconds.lxxx Perceptual speed is especially important because of the role that instantaneous communications plays in supporting operational art.

The relationship between operational vision and instantaneous communications was captured quite poignantly by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his August 1914:

How disastrously the conditions of warfare had changed, making the commander as impotent as arag doll! Where now was the battlefield that was no wider than a man's field of vision, across which he could gallop over to a faltering commander and summon him to his side? The extent of the battlefield [and the theater

of operations] had started to growunmanageably...and now [1914] the situation wasfar worse. For a distance of forty-five miles, across enemy country, under threat of bullets or capture those trusting Cossacks had riddenfor twelve hours...carrying this documentwhich in Kutuzov's time [c. 1812] had been amere three miles -- the only means remained the same horses' hooves, whose stride had not increased by an inch since Kutuzov's day[emphasis added].lxxxi

The extension and distribution of forces meant that the view of these formations locked in battle, which previously under the classical paradigm had been brought directly to the eye of the commander instantaneously, could no longer hold under operational conditions. This new problem was further aggravated when operationally

54

durable formations were able to operate independently along separate axes of advance. One of the first commanders to manifest such operational vision was U. S. Grant, a point first articulated by J. F. C. Fuller.

Before Fuller began his study of Grant, he accepted the conventional view that Grant was a "butcher and Lee one of the greatest generals this world has ever seen." But after he completed his comparative study of the two generals he concluded: "Few generals-in-chief have suffered greater injustice than Grant. The reason for this misunderstanding is obvious,...the 1864-1865 campaign...was the first of the modern campaigns; it initiated a[n] epoch, and did not even resemble the wars ten years before its date" [emphasis added].lxxxii Grant arrived at his operational vision through perceptual speed and a "gift of historic imagination," that enabled him to "take in at a glance the whole field of war, to form a correct opinion of every suggested and possible...campaign, their logical order and sequence, their relative value, and the interdependence of one upon the other" [emphasis added].lxxxiii

Another factor that has been closely linked to the operational vision of the commander concerns the crucial role the staff plays in sustaining that vision. Together, the commander and his staff constitute the brain of a military organization. The staffs on both sides of the Civil War have been largely maligned for their alleged inefficiency and technical incompetence. Two factors are overlooked in such a critique. First, there existed a highly developed "shadow staff" consisting primarily of civilians contracted to perform functions traditionally under the purview of the military. For instance, operational signals were under

55

the control of Pinkerton. Second, unlike many of their foreign counterparts, Union and Confederate staff officers demonstrated a high degree of technological competence, especially in such areas as signals and communications, heavy engineering and logistics.

SEVEN: The Distributed Enemy The discussion of some of the structural aspects of

operational art suggests a metaphor that may have utility in further distinguishing operational art from classical strategy. One can develop an organic metaphor beginning with Addington's insight that equates the railroad with the "bones" of operational art. A reminder concerns an earlier suggestion that equated the telegraph with the "nerves" of operational art and operational logistics with a circulatory system. Continuing along these lines, one can equate the operationally durable formation with the "sinews" of operational art. Finally, this operational organism is guided by a perceptually fast "brain" that is gifted with operational vision. Standing back and gazing upon this creation, the first thing to strike one's eyes is its three dimensional extension. Its classical ancestor appears strangely jellyfish- or amoeba-like in comparison. The utility of a skeletal structure becomes more evident as we consider the armament of such an operational system. Armed with the "chisel" of the distributed operation, such a system can sculpt its way into an extended enemy. Its classical counterpart, lacking skeletal extension much like a squid, cannot push through the depths of a deployed enemy. Thus, from an organic design standpoint, such an operational system evolved most effectively against a similarly designed opponent, an opponent that constitutes

56

-- --

the "stone" upon which the operational artist performs his creative work.

Consider, for instance, the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. The war was unique because the Austro-Hungarian Army was not operationally structured to feel the real bite of Moltke's three operational chisel blows advancing against it. Following the initial border engagements, it was apparent that Benedek's army lacked the operational structure to maintain its extension: instead, it collapsed upon Königgrätz like a burst balloon. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) the war began along an extended front, but the French failed to contest the advance of the distributed operational axes advancing upon them. Instead, each of the French armies collapsed in Napoleonic fashion to await decisive battle. In Vietnam the enemy, thanks to Mao's theory of protracted war, failed to present a palpable operational medium upon which to work.lxxxiv As a consequence, the United States was criticized for not practicing operational art. Except perhaps during the Tet Offensive in early 1968 and during periods when the enemy moved to the third, conventional, phase of Mao's protracted war typology, Generals William C. Westmoreland and Creighten Abrams stood before an empty sculptors' pedestal. During the recent Gulf War, however, the Iraqi enemy presented the Allies with a particularly rich creative medium.

EIGHT: Distributed Deployment With rise of modern industrial warfare deployment

patterns changed dramatically. If a nation was to sustain a protracted war of any duration, it would have to defend and seize the resource and production base. During the Civil War the Confederacy, for example, had to secure Texas as a continuous source of cavalry

57

remounts; southern Tennessee for its source of iron ore; Richmond and Atlanta for its industrial capacity; its

port facilities; its entire rail infrastructure; and food sources like the Shenandoah Valley. This list is by no means all inclusive, but it does show that increasingly deployment patterns and force posture had to take into consideration the defense of key resource and industrial areas. This tended to create a more intimate association of force deployment, maneuver and battle to economics, society and geography. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution the army and the terrain took on a closer association than ever before. Consequently commanders, echoing Clausewitz, could no longer view dispersion simply as "a necessary evil" until concentration occurred for the decisive battle of annihilation.lxxxv

7. Conclusion: Operational Art and Total War In its greatest fullness of expression, for any form

of art to flourish and sustain itself creatively certain necessary and sufficient contextual conditions must exist. One can ask, for example, what conditions must exist before the sculptor can sculpt? He must have tools, material, creative ability and so on. One can pose the same question with respect to the practice of operational art as the primary method for waging total war. Before providing an answer, the nature of operational art must be reexamined briefly.

Operational art is the creative use of distributed operations for the purposes of strategy. A distributed operation is a coherent system of spatially and temporally extended relational movements and distributed battles, whether actual or threatened, that seek to seize, retain or deny freedom of action. Offensive

58

--

freedom of action exploits the capability to direct operational force against the enemy's capacity to wage war. Defensively, freedom of action seeks to preserve one's own capacity to wage war. But unlike the classical defense, operational defense also retains a positive aim in that its purpose is to exhaust the enemy. As a distinct activity the distributed operation is determined by spatial and temporal extension, force distribution and aim. From a creative standpoint operational art finds its fullest expression in the distributed campaign. Offensively, operational art is best expressed creatively in the employment of axes of advance and in the use of reserves. Defensively, it is best expressed in the identification and destruction of the enemy's main operational axis his "center of gravity"-- and in the employment of reserves.

In order for operational art to flourish and sustain itself creatively, seven necessary and sufficient contextual conditions must first exist. These conditions are a direct result of the culmination of certain technological innovations that are causally linked to the Industrial Revolution and, therefore, do not exist generally until the American Civil War.

First, weapon lethality must have advanced beyond the technological stage of the smoothbore musket. Without this condition, battles do not attain sufficient lethality, extension and duration to induce inter-battlefield maneuver.

Second, logistics must have advanced to the stage of supporting successive movement and sustainment. Without the condition of successive or nearly continuous logistics, operational formations do not possess

59

sufficient endurance to conduct distributed operations. The railroad accommodates this condition.

Third, signals technology must have advanced sufficiently to sustain instantaneous communications. Without instantaneous communications, commanders cannot control properly those extended formations conducting distributed operations. The telegraph supports this condition.

Fourth, formations must be operationally durable. Formations must be able to conduct a succession of battles and deep maneuvers indefinitely. Without the proper force structure and leadership, extended formations lack sufficient endurance and resonance to conduct successive distributed operations.

Fifth, the command structure must possess operational vision. The commanders and staff must be technologically competent and "perceptually fast." They must be able to envision creatively all actions in a theater of operations as a whole and coherent pattern of activity, extended through space and time but unified by a common aim. Without this creative unifying ability, operations appear as an inchoate ensemble of discontinuous events.

Sixth, the enemy must be operationally minded; he must be similarly trained, armed, equipped, structured and commanded as the friendly force. Without this symmetry or "self-reflection" the whole aesthetic aspect of operational art is subverted: tremendous ambiguity and confusion ensues because the requisite creative medium does not exist.

Seventh, nations must have a distributed capacity to wage war. In the period prior to the Industrial Revolution a nation's capacity to wage war was embodied

60

in the army. With the emergence of modern war the nation's capacity to wage war became greatly distributed. It included not only the nation's armed forces, it also

included its production capacity, its working population, its leadership, its resource base and its distribution infrastructure. Armed forces evolved to take these new conditions into account. For instance, the air force emerged as a new arm to deal with the enemy's economic rear area. In a very real sense Sherman was functionally Grant's air force. Today, when one speaks of annihilation, the Napoleonic sense the destruction of the enemy's army is no longer meant; instead, the modern meaning conveys the destruction of the entire enemy's capacity to wage war: that is, destruction throughout the strategic depth of the enemy.

Finally, distributed campaigns must be sustained strategically by a system of continuous mobilization. Without the continuity of strategic mobilization, all protracted military activity in a theater of operations quickly shuts down. The theory of continuous mobilization is significant for three reasons. First, it suggests a link forged between the civilian rear and the military front, a characteristic of total war. Second, it suggests a unified joint service approach to the conduct of total war. Finally, it indicates an economic and social dimension to total war.

This final condition is of such crucial importance to understanding the emergence of operational art and the rise of the Soviet warfare state, that the next two chapters are devoted to its consideration. More generally, however, eight contingent criteria have been identified that will aid this study in its examination

61

and investigation of the emergence of the Soviet warfare state.

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ENDNOTES

i. Arther Ferrill, The Origins of War (New York: Thames & Hudson, Inc. 1985), pp.

44-63.

ii. G. S. Isserson, Evolutsiya operativnoye iskusstvo (Moscow: Voyenizdat, 1937), pp.

96-7.

iii. Manfred Schroeder, Fractals, Chaos and Power Laws (New York: W. H. Freeman

and Co., 1991), p. xiii.

iv. Frederick W. Lanchester, Aircraft in Warfare (London: Constable & Co., 1916).

The Russian, M. Osipov, published a similar derivation entitled "The Effect of the

Numerical Size of Engaging Forces on their Casualties," Voyenniy Sbornik (nos. 6-10),

pp. 59-74,25-36, 31-40, 25-37 and 93-96. Unlike Lanchester, Osipov was one of the

first military scientists to attempt an empirical derivation for his mathematical model of

combat. Unfortunately, Osipov relied, in part, on data from the Napoleonic period

which skewed his results.

v. For a thorough overview of the relevant literature and a reinterpretation of

Lanchester's laws, see James J. Schneider, "The Exponential Decay of Armies in

Battle," Theoretical Paper No. 1 (Ft. Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military

Studies [SAMS], USACGSC, February 1985).

vi. Herbert Klemm Weiss, "Combat Models and Historical Data," Operations

Research (September-October 1966), p. 788.

vii. Richard H. Peterson, "Methods of Tank Combat Analysis," Report of the Fifth

Tank Conference, ed. H. Goldman and G. Zeller, Report No. 918 (Aberdeen Proving

Grounds, MD: Ballistic Research Laboratories, 24-26 February 1953), pp. 134-50.

Herbert Klemm Weiss presented a seminal piece at the same conference entitled

"Requirements for a Theory of Combat," pp. 5-26. The paper formed the rudiments for

a theory of combat now under development by the Military Conflict Institute.

viii. The model discovered by Peterson was called the "logarithmic law" The law is

functionally the same as the "exponential decay law." See Schneider, op. cit.

ix. Daniel J. Willard, "Lanchester as a Force in History," RAC-TP-74 (Bethesda, MD:

Research Analysis Corporation, November 1962).

x. Ronald Johnson, "Lanchester's Square Law in Theory and Practice," Student

Monograph (Ft. Leavenworth: SAMS, USACGSC, December 1989).

xi. Charles Allen, "The Evolution of Modern Battle," Student Monograph (Ft.

Leavenworth: SAMS, USACGSC, December 1990).

xii. James J. Schneider, "The Theory of the Empty Battlefield," Journal of the Royal

United Services Institute for Defense Studies (JRUSI), September 1987, p. 37.

xiii. Quincy Wright, The Evolution of War (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1965,

2d ed.), pp. 218-248.

xiv. Trevor N. Dupuy, The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare (Fairfax, VI: HERO

Books, 1984), p. 307.

xv. J. F. C. Fuller, The Conduct of War (New York: Minerva Press, 1968), p. 88.

xvi. Dupuy, op. cit., p. 191.

xvii. Ibid., p. 312.

xviii. H. Rohne, New Study on Shrapnel Fire, tr. E. L. Gruber (Ft. Leavenworth, KS:

n.p., n.d.), p. 64. Also published in Artilleristische Monatshefte, January, February,

March 1911 and January 1914.

xix. C. B. Mayne, Infantry Fire Tactics (London: Gale & Polden, Ltd., 1888), p. 59.

xx. Henry E. Eames, The Rifle in War (Ft. Leavenworth, KS: U. S. Cavalry Assn.,

1909), p.42.

xxi. Mayne, op. cit., pp. 158, 160, 169.

xxii. Eames, op. cit., pp. 19-43, 236-38.

xxiii. James J. Schneider, "The Exponential Decay of Armies in Battle," op. cit.

xxiv. See, for example, Army War College, Effects of Artillery Fire, (Washington: U.

S. GPO, August 1917).

xxv. S. L. A. Marshall, Men against Fire (Glouster, MA: Peter Smith, 1978, rep. of

1947 ed.), pp. 42-3

xxvi. Anonymous, "Infantry Combat in the Russo-Japanese War," JRUSI, Vol. L,

p.1274.

xxvii. Ibid., p. 1275.

xxviii. Marshall, op. cit., pp. 48, 76.

xxix. Mayne, op. cit., pp. 343, 406.

xxx. Schneider, "The Theory of the Empty Battlefield," op. cit., p. 44.

xxxi. See, for example, Christopher Bellamy, The Evolution of Modern Land Warfare

(London: Routledge, 1990) who, in an otherwise well-written work, attributes the

emergence of operational art solely to the expansion of the battlefield. This view is

adequate as far as it goes, but must consider other factors such as the development of

the railroad and the impact of telegraphy. Bellamy also mistakenly views the origins of

operational art in Napoleonic warfare (pp. 53-79). This latter view is typical among

many Western writers on the origins of operational art.

xxxii. Vincent J. Esposito, ed., The West Point Atlas of American Wars (New York:

Praeger Publishers, 1959), I, map 84.

xxxiii. Edward Hagerman, The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern

Warfare (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 82-7.

xxxiv. Schneider, "The Theory of the Empty Battlefield," op. cit., p. 39, table 2.

xxxv. Actually, the vulnerable area of an entrenched man has been taken to be "nil."

See ibid., p. 39, table 2.

xxxvi. See Schneider, "The Exponential Decay of Armies in Battle," op. cit., pp. 42-7.

xxxvii. James J. Schneider, "The Theoretical Implications of Operational Art,"

Military Review, September 1990, pp. 17-27.

xxxviii. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, tr. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 485-6.

xxxix. A. H. Jomini, The Art of War, tr. G. H. Mendell and W. P. Graighill

(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1862), p. 63.

xl. Robert S. Quimby, The Background of Napoleonic Warfare (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1957), pp. 94-6, 175.

xli. Ibid., pp. 176-84

xlii. Ibid., p. 256. Clausewitz, op. cit., p. 301, notes that the dispersed movement of

corps and divisions prior to battle should be regarded as a "conditional state and a

necessary evil, while fighting with all forces combined is the true purpose" [emphasis

added].

xliii. B. H. Liddell Hart, 'T. E. Lawrence,' (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), p. 440 and

The Ghost of Napoleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928), p. 27.

xliv. James J. Schneider, "The Loose Marble -- and the Origins of Operational Art,"

Parameters, March 1989, pp. 87-88. For a slightly more complex taxonomy see G. S.

Isserson, op. cit., pp. 96-7.

xlv. U. S. Army FM 100-5 Operations (Washington: U. S. GPO, May 1986), p. 12.

The manual defines maneuver as "the movement of forces to secure or retain positional

advantage."

xlvi. Larry H. Addington, Background to War in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 44.

xlvii. Edwin A. Pratt, The Rise of Rail-Power in War and Conquest (London: P. S.

King, 1915), pp. 1-13; George Edgar Turner, Victory Road the Rails (Westport, CT:

Greenwood Press, 1975 rep.), pp. 15-61; Ernest F. Carter, Railways in Wartime

(London: Frederick Muller, Ltd., 1964), pp. 11-53, 67-78; and Carl R. Gray, Jr.,

Railroading in Eighteen Countries (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955), pp. 1-

9.

xlviii. Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War (London: Methuen, 1961), p. 3.

xlix. G. F. R. Henderson, "The Campaign in the Wilderness of Virginia, 1864,"

Lecture to the Military Society of Ireland, January 24, 1894.

l. U. S. War Department, War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and

Confederate Armies (Washington: U. S. GPO), series I, volume 36, part 1, pp. 665-71.

Hereinafter cited as O. R.

li. Clausewitz, op. cit., pp. 92-4, 380-6.

lii. Ibid., p. 90.

liii. U. S. Grant, "Report to the Secretary of War on Operations, March 1864-May

1865," July 22, 1865, O. R., ser. I, vol. XLVI, pt. 1, no. 1, p. 11.

liv. William T. Sherman, Memoirs (New York: Da Capo, 1984 rep.), P. 26.

lv. Ibid., p. 27.

lvi. Alfred D. Chandler, et al., eds., The Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), Letter to William E. Brooks, November 12, 1946, vol.

VIII, pp. 1372-3.

lvii. Clausewitz, op. cit., p. 280-1.

lviii. John G. Moore, "Mobility and Strategy in the Civil War," Military Affairs,

Summer 1960, pp. 68-77.

lix. See also Edward P. Hagerman, "The Reorganization of Field Transportation and

Field Supply in the Army of the Potomac, 1863," Military Affairs, December 1980, pp.

182-6.

lx. Martin van Creveld, Supplying War, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1977), pp. 40-74.

lxi. R. J. Forbes, Studies in Ancient Technology (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1955), vol. 2, pp.

154-5.

lxii. Douglas Porch, "Bugeaud, Gallieni, Lyautey: the Development of French Colonial

Warfare," Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton University Press,

1986), pp. 376-87.

lxiii. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Norton, 1969),

passim.

lxiv. James A. Huston, The Sinews of War (Washington: U. S. GPO, 1970), pp. 204-5.

lxv. Ibid., pp. 206-7.

lxvi. Turner, op. cit., pp. 282-6.

lxvii. Huston, op. cit., pp. 209-10; Schneider, "The Theoretical Implications of

Operational Art," op. cit., pp. 17-27.

lxviii. Sherman, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 399.

lxix. Huston, op. cit., p. 210.

lxx. Ibid.

lxxi. Ibid., p. 128.

lxxii. Ibid., p. 195. See also Hagerman, The American Civil War and the origins of

Modern Warfare, op. cit., passim. on the use of telegraphy during the Civil War.

lxxiii. William A. Ganoe, The History of the United States Army (New York: D.

Appleton and Co., 1924), p. 192. The composition of the nine departments is given in

footnote 10 of that page.

lxxiv. Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1984), p. 228.

lxxv. This formation was officially designated a department, but in reality it functioned

as a geographic division. Johnston's formation was disbanded after the Confederate

defeats at Vicksburg and Chattanooga. It was resurrected on October 17, 1864 under P.

G. T. Beauregard with the formal designation of Military Division of the West. See

Mark M. Boatner, III, The Civil War Dictionary (New York: David McKay and Co.,

Inc., 1987, rev.), pp. 236, 241.

lxxvi. James A. Schaefer, "The Tactical and Strategic Evolution of Cavalry During the

American Civil War," (University of Toledo: unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1983),

pp. 196-259.

lxxvii. Schneider, "The Loose Marble -- and the Origins of Operational Art,' op. cit.,

p. 94.

lxxviii. On the issue of operational vision, see James J. Schneider, "An Open Letter to

George S. Patton, Jr.," Military Review, June 1986, pp. 64-71.

lxxix. Thomas L. Laffey, "The Real-Time Expert," Byte, January 1991, p. 260.

Laffey's insight is gleaned from the realm of artificial intelligence (AI).

lxxx. Bernard de Fontgalland, The World Railway System (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1984), p. 16.

lxxxi. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, August 1914 (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), pp.

330-31.

lxxxii. J. F. C. Fuller, Lee and Grant (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1957), p.

245.

lxxxiii. Ibid., pp. 248-49.

lxxxiv. Mao Tsetung, Selected Military Writings (Peking: Foreign Language Press,

1972), pp. 187-267.

lxxxv. Clausewitz, op. cit., p. 301.

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