All that pertains to operations as such takes place, on the whole, independently of actual combat, whereas in the term “strategisch” (strategical) things become easily confused, as has been proved by the example of our enemies who are wont to speak of strategical conditions when it is merely a question of purely local matters. At any rate, the term “strategy” ought to be confined to the most important measures of high command
General Hugo von Freytag-Loringhoven1
What is operational art and where did it come from? Most simply, operational art is the design and conduct of campaigns just as tactics are the design and conduct of battles and engagements. Operational art is normally employed by senior military leaders using what we will refer to as operational-level units—these types of units can act independently or in concert with each other over a sustained period of time. On land usually an army corps or higher can be considered an operational unit, although sometimes divisions can be characterized as such, but an operational unit usually does not encompass the totality of a nation’s military land power. At sea it is a bit different, but the fundamental rule gives us a grouping of warships referred to variously as an independent squadron or fleet, but normally not the totality of the nation’s, or coalition’s, naval forces.
As to the origins of operational art, the first serious writing on it and on the operational level of war can be identified in the 20th century by Imperial Russian and later Soviet military officers. These officers built on ideas that Baron Antoine Jomini, Carl von Clausewitz and, later, the military historian Hans Delbrück discussed in their various writings.2 It might seem strange to start out a book on the Napoleonic Wars with a discussion that includes Soviet military theory, but it makes sense when one remembers that often we humans make sense of things after they have occurred and not while they are occurring. This was the case for the political-strategic-military revolution wrought by the French Revolution.3
THE “DISCOVERY” OF THE OPERATIONAL LEVEL OF WAR
Napoleon’s two contemporary interpreters, Jomini and Clausewitz, are the intellectual discoverers of what we today understand as the operational level of war. Antoine Jomini was first. The son of a Swiss banker, from the middle class of that day, the developments of the French Revolution fascinated him. He also had a thirst for military history. He conducted what might be called an operational study of the campaigns of Frederick the Great. From that intellectual endeavor he came up with his famous “principles of war,” embodied in the concepts of maneuver, mass, offensive, and objective. It was only after this initial study that Jomini came to Napoleon Bonaparte’s attention, as well as coming to see the reflection of his principles in the style of war that Napoleon practiced.4
As Professor Tom Huber has said, “Jomini created a theory of deployments,” or for our purposes a theory of how to integrate logistics and maneuver into a theory of operational principles.5 The durability of these principles can be confirmed easily by looking at the recent doctrine of the U.S. Army in Field Manual (FM) 3–0 Operations. More recent U.S. doctrines such as Army Doctrinal Publication 3–0 and Army Doctrinal Reference Publication 3–0 have deleted a listing of these principles, but the careful reader can still find them in the sections on “operational art” and “the tenets of unified land operations.”6
At the same time, the Prussian officer Carl von Clausewitz was also reflecting on the nature of war, although publication of his work would not occur until after his death in 1831. Clausewitz also gained his inspiration from the French and every page of his masterpiece On War breathes that inspiration. He spread his ideas about operational art throughout his work, but his most formal notions and writing about operational art can be found principally in three “books” from On War: Book Two on theory, Book Three on strategy, and Book Six, his lengthiest, on defense. In Book Two, he discusses war as both a science and an art, and clearly makes room for what he calls “creative ability.”7 Clausewitz devotes the entirety of Book Three to a discussion of strategy and first defines it as:
Strategy is the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war. The strategist must therefore define an aim for the entire operational side of the war that will be in accordance with its purpose…. he will draft the plan of the war, and the aim of the war will determine the series of actions intended to achieve it: he will, in fact, shape the individual campaigns and, within these, decide on the individual engagements.8 [emphasis mine]
Compare this with the Army definition found in Field Manual 3–0:
The operational level links employing tactical forces to achieving the strategic end state. At the operational level, commanders conduct campaigns and major operations to establish conditions that define that end state.9 [emphasis mine]
Clearly Clausewitz’s definition of strategy describes the operational level of war. The context of Clausewitz’s times, the Napoleonic Wars, is betrayed by where he locates the strategist in the activity of war—not back in the capital but, “it follows that the strategist must go on campaign himself.”10 The strategist is a campaigner in the early 19th century, but not so in the 20th and 21st. As one proceeds through Book Three’s discussion, one finds just how congruent Clausewitz’s view of “strategy” in action was with that of his contemporary Baron Antoine Jomini. The chapters in Book Three sound like a Jominian recitation—“Surprise, Cunning, Economy of Force, The Geometrical Factor.”11 Clausewitz’s book on strategy is clearly about the operational level of war. He does cloud the issue slightly in linking war aims to the campaign (which really is a function of strategy), but effective operational art does not operate in a vacuum but serves the ends of strategy.
THE SOVIET OPERATIONAL ART MODEL
Clausewitz and Jomini’s approach to operations and operational art has sometimes been called linear. Jomini, in particular, talked about lines of operations, but Clausewitz did as well, although both emphasized that a single line of operation no longer needed to exist to approach an objective in war, but that these did tend to conform to geography and established lines of communications such as roads and rivers. However, it was the Russians who developed some of Clausewitz’s ideas a bit further, once removed by way of another German, the historian Hans Delbrück.
Hans Delbrück’s great contribution to the theory of war was to break strategy into two types, an annihilative strategy (Neiderwehrfungsstrategie) that tended toward quick, rapier-like offensives and an attrition strategy of exhaustion (Ermattungsstrategie) that emphasized, often, the defense, and wearing one’s enemy down until the final offensive coup de grâce. Delbrück used the same database as Jomini, the campaigns of Frederick the Great, and found that Frederick triumphed in his war more through the use of exhaustive strategies and maneuver than through the annihilation of his enemy in short decisive campaigns like Napoleon conducted for most of his career.12
These findings did not endear Delbrück to the German officer corps of his day. Among the reasons the Germans discovered but did not develop further the operational approach (at least in their officer corps) had as much to do with the successful practice of a sort of operational art 1.0 (using software nomenclature) by the elder Helmut von Moltke and his contemporaries. Success in two relatively short wars—the Austro-Prussian War (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) seemed to indicate no real pressing problems that needed to be solved with the existing German “way of war.” Alfred von Schlieffen’s two-front nightmare of fighting the French and Russians was to be solved with Jominian operational approaches with a dash of Clausewitz, not with protracted campaigns that might hinge on the defense.13
For the leaders of the Imperial Russian Army, the German intellectual framework formed the starting point for their thinking about how to organize, mobilize, and (most of all) think about war in the brave new industrial world. Their defeat in the Crimean War against the Turkish and Anglo-French forces convinced them of the need for reform and they turned deliberately to a Prussian model that included freeing their serfs (as the Prussians had done after their defeat in 1807). Freed serfs provided the Russians a huge manpower resource for conscription on the Prussian model, not just a reflection of Western liberal principles and the “rights of man.” These reforms also resulted in a German system for operational staffs and military education that would prove breeding grounds for the nascent operational artists and theorists of both the late Tsarist and early Red armies.14 Nevertheless, the Russians made substantial intellectual progress of their own, but initially within the confines of a German operational design that depended on the short decisive war of maneuver without fully understanding how Moltke’s approach differed from the Jominian-Napoleonic models.15 However, their experience in the Russo-Japanese War—where they had exhausted the Japanese Army despite numerous errors—and preparation for a war with both the German and the Austrian-Hungarian Empires led to certain Russian staff officers to think about industrial war at the operational level under protracted circumstances. “In a word, Jomini was out, and Clausewitz and the elder Moltke (as modified by experience and observation) were in.” Russian officers such as A. A. Nezmanov and especially N. P. Mikhnevich examined a new level of war between tactics and strategy at the General Staff Academy. Their views, in particular, emphasized the importance of operational planning, either for short war or for protracted war.16
However, it was the experience of World War I that finally pushed the Russian and then Soviet officer corps to begin to put together a framework for what became mature operational art in the 20th century. A. A. Svechin, writing about strategy after the war, essentially updated the framework proposed by Delbrück for the unique challenges (or one might say perceived threats) and geography of the new Soviet State.17 War must be a tapestry of campaigns, depending on circumstances, that would either be offensive or defensive in character. Given the exhaustion of the Soviet Union after constant war from 1914 to 1922, and the need to rebuild an industrial economy, Svechin naturally favored a strategic defense and exhaustion as best suiting short-term Soviet needs, although he also believed in the offensive under the right circumstances based on his study of the famous Brusilov Offensive in 1916. In his 1926 book, Svechin for the first time defined operational art: “Then, battle is the means of the operation. Tactics are the material of operational art. The operation is the means of strategy, and operational art is the material of strategy. This is the essence of the three-part formula given above.”18 Svechin’s ideas irritated the inclinations of Marshal Mikhail Tukachevsky, who believed that the Soviet Union, if properly mobilized and correctly fighting in depth on the battlefield, could win with a series of operational blows on the offensive “as the means to conduct decisive operations in a total war.”19
It was the writing and thinking of those considering how to construct and synchronize successive engagements and campaigns that the operational art “Soviet-style” came into being. Studying World War I, the Soviets, and especially Svechin, identified in the Brusilov Offensive during the summer of 1916 the components for offensive success, despite the ultimate defeat of that operation later that year. Brusilov had solved the problem of the static front with intelligent use of artillery and infiltration tactics, but his offensive had ultimately failed, at least as analyzed after the war by Soviet officers, because it had advanced on too many fronts without setting aside any reserves to exploit the breakthroughs in the front.20 With the problem of how to restore maneuver to the battlefield solved, the Soviets turned their attention to how to sustain such a fluid battle and how to fight it in what they called “depth,” both geographically and in time. For the first problem, as advanced principally by Tukachevsky, the state must essentially prepare for total war through a total and ongoing mobilization. As will be argued later in this chapter, the French has established a nascent version of what James Schneider has called “the warfare state,” although Schneider argues that its first mature or perfect form was that imagined by the interwar Soviet operational art theorists and then implemented in the war against invading Nazi armies.21
The idea of “deep battle” also permeates the Soviet writing on operational art. The two most prolific authors on this score were V. K. Triandafillov and G. S. Isserson.22 Of the two, Isserson is perhaps more important for our purposes. Both of these Soviet officers believed that modern operations in the future total war must be executed throughout the depth of the battlefield. At the operational level, this meant that one must plan for both simultaneous and successive operations, to meet the enemy’s tactical, operational, and strategic reserves. These reserves, or defensive “echelons” as Isserson called them, were to be met and dealt with in turn by offensive operational echelons. Isserson was perhaps most explicit in laying a formula for how to do this:
A modern operation essentially elicits distributed efforts in time, thereby conditioning strategy…. Modern operational echelonment is the sequential and continuous increase of operational efforts aimed at breaking enemy resistance through its whole depth…. While deploying for a modern deep operation, it is necessary to calculate forces and means both along the linear dimension of a front and in the new dimension of depth.23 [emphasis added]
The upshot of the analysis to be used in this study, then, will be that the criteria for examining the elements of operational art in the great Napoleonic campaigns will consist of looking at the depth of operational engagements and battles, use of “warfare state” methods such as the mobilization of the entire society, and the presence of multiple operational and even strategic echelons during these campaigns. Isserson also used the term distributed in describing modern operations, and the next section provides a brief discussion of how that concept will be used in this analysis.
SCHNEIDER’S FRAMEWORK FOR OPERATIONAL ART
James Schneider has argued that the emergence of operational art is tied closely to the emergence of technologies in the 19th century that enhanced movement, firepower, and communications—the steam engine, mass-produced rifles and high explosives, and the telegraph. These technologies certainly influenced the tempo and complexity of modern war, but they did not foreclose a more nuanced view of operational art, that is, the conduct and practice of war at the operational level by military men, usually officers of field grade (major) or higher. Accordingly, we shall examine Schneider’s model for assessing operational art without tying it too closely to 19th-century technological developments.
Schneider has made the assertion that it was during the American Civil War that “a new style of warfare emerged,” which he characterizes as operational art. Schneider presents eight “key attributes” that allow for the “fullest expression” of operational art. He identifies these attributes as a distributed operation, distributed campaign, continuous logistics, instantaneous command and control, operationally durable formations, operational vision, a distributed enemy, and distributed deployment.24
Before a discussion of the course of these campaigns, we must present the definitions of Schneider’s eight “attributes” or elements of operational art. This will allow the reader to identify the appearance of any or part of these elements as we review the history. His first element is the distributed operation. “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.” This definition includes the existence of “temporal and spatial distribution” in the conduct of a campaign. The relationship between this “characteristic” and what the U.S. Army labels deep operations is in fact the fundamental discriminator between operational art and classical strategy.25 Modern U.S. Army doctrine defines deep operations as those that “engage enemy forces throughout the depth of the battle area and achieve decisive results rapidly.”26 Therefore, the existence of “deep operations” will be a key indicator that an operation is distributed.
Schneider’s next element is the distributed campaign, which he characterizes as the distributed operation’s “final structure,” the product of the operational artist’s vision. Several characteristics of distributed campaigns include the subordination of battle to maneuver, and then, “Because modern warfare emphasizes battles and maneuver, distributed campaigns are inherently exhaustive.”27 Continuous logistics is a third element found in operational art. “In order for a modern industrial army in a theater of operations to maintain a militarily effective presence, its logistics system must be continuous.” Schneider makes the analogy that in modern warfare the laws of Newtonian physics are replaced by the laws of fluid dynamics. The dynamics of war using the operational art construct more closely resemble fluid laws governing distributed operations and modern industrial warfare just as Newton and classical physics (mass, accelerations, force) were superseded by the laws of fluid dynamics and later the laws of probability and quantum mechanics.28
The fourth element is instantaneous command and control. Distributed operations generate more information; therefore, command and control must be instantaneous. Schneider’s criterion here relies on the technology of the telegraph in order for operational art to be in its most mature form. In this discussion, Schneider uses the battles of Jena-Auerstadt (1806) and Waterloo (1815) as examples to prove his point. Schneider hypothesizes that had Napoleon had telegraph at either of these two engagements the results may have been very different. In fact, a very good argument can be made on both counts that telegraphic communication would not have affected the outcome of either battle. Another point to make is that a form of command and control (C2) that the U.S. Army calls “mission command” obviates the need for constant, instantaneous communications via wire or wireless means on today’s battlefield and requires no technology at all, but rather clear, mission-focused orders in order to give subordinates the ability to exercise disciplined initiative in the absence of such communication.29 A better measure might be the effectiveness of the information transfer, vice its speed of transmission. Schneider’s own example of the Battle of Chancellorsville supports this proposition. Even with telegraph, the command-and-control climate and its effectiveness, not the speed of information transfer, helped make the difference at Chancellorsville. It is not the speed with which a commander communicates, but the understanding of his intent by his subordinates and their ability to execute that intent in the presence of an enemy.
The fifth element that Schneider uses is operationally durable formations. These are “formations capable of conducting indefinitely a succession of distributed operations.”30 According to Schneider, these formations were first seen during the Civil War as field armies. Russell Weigley, on the other hand, hints that this type of force, one that relied on attrition and exhaustion, had already been developing for some time. The Russians may have had operationally durable formations as early as the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763)—the time when European armies were becoming difficult, if not impossible, to destroy in battle. This dynamic will be another key component in this analysis, since many scholars focus precisely on the Napoleonic period as giving birth to such formations as a result of the total mobilization of the nation-state.
Until 1809, the French armies almost always had an asymmetric advantage over their opponents because their armies were durable as a result of mass conscript, their patriotism to serve the colors, and Napoleon’s institutionalization of the new combined arms organizations—the division and army corps—which combined artillery, infantry, and cavalry to make these units even more durable should they encounter an enemy unit on their own. Although Napoleon’s opponents adopted these measures—in 1809, the first such anti-French army was put in the field by Austria—it was rare that a Napoleonic Field Army was destroyed in one day’s battle or even in one campaign.31 Sir Charles Oman’s monumental work on the Peninsular War in Spain (1808–1814) emphasizes Duke of Wellington’s astonishment regarding the durability of French armies. The Duke of Wellington freely admitted that he never saw anything like the recovery of the French armies after their retreat from Portugal after their defeat at Salamanca, and Marshal Soult’s unexpected offensive across the Pyrenees with a French army that had been shattered at Vitoria some months earlier.32 Another of Schneider’s criteria for judging the maturity of the element of operationally durable formations is “the emergence of the army group.”33 As we shall see, the Napoleonic era provided abundant examples of this type of formation, especially after 1805.
Operational vision, a distributed enemy, and distributed deployment comprise the final three elements, or criteria, that Schneider uses to characterize operational art. Schneider associates operational vision “with mental agility, the ability to react to incoming information faster than it arrives.” Schneider adds that a staff plays a “crucial role…in sustaining that vision.” Therefore, this book uses the following definition for operational vision: seeing beyond local operations and results to a future end-state that accomplishes strategic goals. This vision must be exercised in a distributed environment, which is often a very broad front with some depth, similar to that described by Schneider, in order for it to be operational.
As discussed earlier under instantaneous command and control, Schneider indirectly gave Napoleon credit for being a distributed enemy, by using two of his campaigns as examples relevant to a discussion on instantaneous command and control. However, for mature operational art to present we must also look for instances where both sides operated in a distributed manner, not just one side or the other. In almost every instance where French armies fought a counterinsurgency (COIN in today’s parlance) against guerillas and irregulars—in the Alps, in Spain and Portugal, in southern Italy, in Russia in 1812, and in Germany in 1813—their enemies were distributed. However, because the French also fought against conventional forces in all but one of these COIN campaigns—a type of conflict known as compound warfare—this aspect of operational art will be discussed as a component of these campaigns rather than separately from them.34
Schneider provides no precise definition for distributed deployment, but does tie this element to the industrial revolution and a nation’s capacity to wage war. Nations must “defend—and seize—the resource and production base.” This element would seem to be a given if the operation is distributed and nations have undergone the kind of total mobilization we see occurring in the latter half of the Napoleonic Wars. But its earliest expression may have been the announcement of the levee en mass and Lazare Carnot’s efforts in 1793–1794. At any rate, we will define distributed deployment as deployment in breadth and depth, both military and economic, in support of operations of war. This element can also include a maritime component, as demonstrated most effectively by Great Britain during these wars. Because of the Royal Navy’s reflection of this, we see then that operational art is not only limited to land but can also encompass purely naval as well as combined (joint) operations.35
* * *
Invention, whether for abstract scientific questions or for humdrum day-to-day practical issues, often springs from the solution of a specific, seemingly intractable problem or set of problems. Usually there is no need to invent a new approach if the problem can be solved with existing means. Such was the case with the emergence of what I have been referring to as operational art. The thinking and writing about operational art, like the calculus, emerged from several different contexts in separate parts of the world during a relatively short time span of history. Just as Gottfried Leibniz and Issac Newton, among others, sought to solve the seemingly intractable problem of figuring out complex kinematic trajectories and the area under a curve, so too did the operational theorists labor to solve what they saw as emergent problems related to the complexity of modern, industrial war.36
An operational examination of Napoleonic campaigns has value because so many of their characteristics resemble current American military thought and practice. The Napoleonic period resembles a veritable laboratory of coalition and operational-level warfare and provides a means of understanding the lessons of a historic period as a way to help understanding the dynamics of coalitions and operational art. Coalition warfare, because of its breadth and depth of complexity and often its scope of military activity, may in fact be a context that highlights the practice of operational art. Additionally, the primacy of politics, maneuver, mission command, and early forms of deep operations emphasize areas of similar importance in current U.S. Army doctrine today. Although the solutions and operations cannot be applied directly to today’s challenges, the process of operational art, and the dynamics of human behavior on the grand scale of history, can be understood so as to better understand modern challenges and the process that could lead to their resolution.
In summary, the problem of modern operations is not new. Since the beginning of the modern era, roughly in the 16th century, the complexity of war and expansion of its scope have constantly challenged those who think, write, and practice it to try to keep up with its evolving nature. In the pages ahead, the fundamental goal will be to describe these campaigns, armies, and leaders, using the lens of operational art. Descriptive details of battles, leaders, and equipment will be economized in order to more fully look at operational structures, maneuvers, and consequences. No model, or framework, can completely describe any past reality, but in using new ones, some new insights might be gained.