THE ACTION OF POLICY ON STRATEGY1
RELATIONS OF POLICY WITH STRATEGY
STRATEGY AND policy, two distinct but equally important servants and executors of the national will, are necessarily intimately linked. Our earlier metaphor from physics compared strategy to the visible part of the solar spectrum and policy to the infrared with the two separated only by a blurred zone into which both penetrate.
The undisputed links between strategy and policy are repeated in an abundance of common circulated aphorisms like “war is a violent form of policy” or “war is nothing other than policy continued in arms” (it is, I believe, Clausewitz, who said this or something similar).2 Another German scholar, Bernhardi, said that “war is the extension of policy by other means and is at the same time the most efficacious, if most dangerous, instrument of policy.”3 Our reflections on the relationship between policy and operations will not reiterate these truisms but show instead that the facts suggest a slightly altered situation.
The conventional approach implies that the link between strategy and policy is a serial one, that the two never function at the same time. Policy and its extension, strategy, operate successively, one yielding to the other at the appropriate time. The two activities are compartmentalized. On Bernhardi’s argument, for example, policy defines the objective of the war, the importance and the nature of the interests involved, the choice of the opening moment, the desired success, etc. He adds, “War remains a means of attaining an objective completely outside of its competence. It cannot chose the goal itself.”4 Thus, the strategist receives his mission at the beginning of a war from the policy maker, who steps back to watch his acolyte perform. Only after the strategist has fulfilled his task, well or badly, successfully or otherwise, does the policy maker return to the scene. In peacetime, the policy maker acts alone, and the strategist rests. In war, it is the reverse. But is this really how things work, or is the reality of human conflicts not infinitely more complex?5
We can find the answer by searching the historical experiences of our ancestors for examples from the past. We will thereby be on firm ground and in the practical world. In this concrete realm we see that, far from effacing themselves in the course of a war while only the strategists operate, policy makers continue to act in wartime. The two zones of activity are neighbors that mix and become entangled with one another.6
In particular, policy undertakes to aid strategy. With more or less success, policy strives to lighten strategy’s task by negotiating with other nations for support or, at least, benevolent neutrality. Sometimes, in spite of its good intentions, policy blunders and adds to the problems with which strategy must cope. These are indirect influences of policy on strategy.
More directly, policy intervenes to orient strategy in specific directions. Such interventions can be positive, that is, prescribing actions, or negative, forbidding specific enterprises. Obviously, political demands are not always the most judicious; their inspiration can be good or bad; they may be lacking in foresight. Frequently policy comes to trespass on the domain of strategy and interferes excessively in the conduct of operations and in other matters that do not concern it. Nonetheless, the demands made by policy cannot be neglected or distrustfully dismissed; they have a preponderant weight. Consequently, strategy cannot abstract itself from policy and work in isolation.
OLD MEMORIES
Direct negative action by policy on strategy can be seen at the end of the First Anglo-Dutch War, when British military leaders led by Monk7 dreamed of exploiting Britain’s maritime victories with a final campaign to crush Holland. Thanks to the exceptional skill gained by the British army during the Civil War, Monk’s ambitions extended to the conquest of the Low Countries. Cromwell, however, stopped him in the name of policy. The Protector required not total victory but merely Dutch acknowledgment of the Navigation Act.8 Further attacks would have undermined higher policies based on the two countries’ joint interest in opposing a marriage9 that, by uniting the Houses of Orange and the Stuarts, threatened both Britain and Holland with monarchy. Also, Cromwell hoped to attack Spain after taking on Elizabeth’s role as protector of the Protestants. Because the annihilation of Protestant Holland went against Britain’s larger aims, Monk had to renounce his larger offensive aspirations.
Similarly, during the War of the League of Augsburg, Herbert,10 who commanded the British fleet, had conceived a defensive plan of withdrawing from a confrontation with Tourville11 and holing up in the Thames where he would both avoid destruction and be ready to react to events.12 He counted, rightly or wrongly, on the real advantages of the “fleet in being,” but politics intervened.13 Queen Mary, regent of England, alarmed that continuous retreat would demoralize the country and stimulate Jacobite activities, ordered Herbert to fight. The military result was the defeat at Beachy Head.14
Two years later, it was the turn of Torrington’s foe to experience the pernicious effect of excessive political interference in military operations. Before engaging in the great battle designed to allow the troops of James II to cross the Channel, Tourville wanted to unite his forces and, especially, to join with those arriving from Rochefort and the Mediterranean. The impatient Louis XIV, anxious for the much desired invasion of England, insisted on immediate action. If the resulting battle of the Hogue,15 fought at odds of two against one, was the most admirable of its day, it ended indecisively, and losses in the ensuing retreat paralyzed France for an entire year and blocked progress towards attaining the political objective. . . .16
MODERN EXAMPLES
Such are the memories of the past, but more recent events present the same observations. Let us take, for example, the American Civil War. On the Northern side, during the campaign on the James River, political considerations led Lincoln to prevent McDowell’s corps from reinforcing McClellan in spite of the imminence of a clash that could have given victory to Richmond. On 27 May 1862 Lincoln recalled McDowells’s corps to defend Washington.17 Similarly, political concerns were at least partly responsible for the great Federal offensive in the Mississippi Valley. If it was partially a matter of cutting the Confederacy in two and preventing provisions from moving from the Trans-Mississippi region, the Union also wanted to reopen the mouth of the river to its western states like Missouri and Ohio, which were inclining towards compromise with the South. It was for this reason that Lincoln chose to make a great effort to take Vicksburg and Port Hudson.
On the Confederate side, Jefferson Davis conceived the idea of invading Maryland for political reasons and imposed it on an unwilling Lee. The Southern President hoped thereby to satisfy Virginian desires for vengeance and to win over Maryland to the pro-slavery cause, to which he believed public opinion was favorable. In reality, his political hopes were disappointed; Maryland remained unmoved, and the venture ended at Antietam.18
Jefferson Davis tried again the following year; he ordered the second invasion of Maryland for similar reasons and again against the advice of Lee, who preferred to relieve Vicksburg.19 Counting on the machinations of the “peace democrats” of the “copperhead” party, that is, on Northern proponents of a peaceful entente with the South, Davis wanted to penetrate into Maryland in order to encourage them and to support the uprisings that he predicted in Washington and Baltimore. Hence, Lee’s operations, which were more political than military, looked more to the occupation of the country and the requisition of foodstuffs than to seeking the organized forces of the enemy. Gettysburg, however, soon put an end to this enterprise.
Policy’s impact on strategy is not representative of any one particular kind of government. France’s shift during the 1870 War from an imperial regime to a government of National Defense did not change the tendency of government to intervene in strategy. . . .
That policy does not always have perfect perception is clear from the Second Balkan War. After their victory over the Bulgarians at Bregalnitza,20 the Serbians could have exploited their success to put their enemy out of action. At the end of July 1913, however, Marshal Radomir Putnik, the Serbian generalissimo, received orders to stop his pursuit from a government that insisted on tying the army’s actions to those of the Rumanians, who had the initiative from the political point of view. The subordination of strategy to policy was of disputable value here, for it retarded the military action and the final victory. Fortunately, the enemy was—at the same time—even less well served by his policy makers.
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE POLITICAL ACTIONS
Policy is not always so badly directed. It achieved an exemplary intervention in the French “ten kilometer withdrawal” of 30 July 1914. By ordering her troops to move back from the frontier, France convinced a still-wavering Britain of her peaceful intentions. . . . Adopting a similar policy towards Italy, on whose neutrality she counted, France delayed dispatching to Bizerte the battleships intended to bring the force there to wartime strength. . . .21 Later events showed the political leadership to have been very happily inspired in both cases.
Alongside this type of intervention, negative in the sense that it prohibited certain operations, the 1914 war also produced examples of positive interventions or political insistence on certain actions. At the end of 1914, the British and French governments decided to undertake operations in the Orient over the objections of the army commanders on the Western Front. Similarly, in April and September 1915, the French government required the general in chief to dispatch four additional divisions to the east in order to extend the Dardanelles offensive to the edge of Asia. A month later, the government conceived of the Salonika landing and imposed it upon the military commander, pushed in this direction not only by the necessity of aiding Serbia but also by the hope of achieving political benefits in the form of changed attitudes on the parts of Greece and Bulgaria.22
ECONOMIC POLICY AND STRATEGY
One part of naval strategy includes the operations for economic and military exploitation of mastery of the sea (as we understand the concept) after mastery has been obtained by eliminating the enemy fleet. This exploitation has both military and economic components, and the latter, blockade, naturally impinges upon the neutrals and brings politics into play. From the beginning of the 1914 war, the Allies attempted to cut off German supplies through increasingly restrictive interpretations of the London Declaration regarding contraband.23 In suppressing contraband, however, they were obliged to heed the concerns of the United States, not only to avoid acquiring a new enemy but because of their own dependence on the Americans for significant quantities of supplies. It was necessary to find a compromise, as Sir Edward Grey24 says, “to maintain the tightest blockade possible without breaking with the United States.” There was, as in mechanics, a sort of state of equilibrium between pressure and resistance.
Difficulties appeared when the Allies manifested the desire to include in the absolute contraband list rubber, copper, and cotton, products formerly considered to be conditional contraband. Certain of American protest against the inclusion of cotton, the Allies dealt at first only with rubber and copper, commodities whose shipment to Germany they were able to bar. They had less luck with objects destined for neutral European ports because the United States refused to acknowledge the absolute contraband label in these cases. Britain was forced to undertake long and painful negotiations on the matter. . . . Occasionally, as in the Dacia case, relations between Britain and the United States were protected by having a French cruiser stop the American ship, a subterfuge suggested in this case by the American ambassador to Great Britain.25
Cotton always remained merely conditional contraband because the Allies could not block this indispensable American export, especially given the degree to which the war itself had gravely hampered the cotton trade. United States merchant ships traveled in armed convoys, which the Allies could stop only at risk of war against the United States. Tolerance of American cotton shipments was a painful concession to policy by strategy, which saw the material used by the enemy in producing munitions.
All of these complications obviously disappeared after the United States entered the war . . . but given the extent of the difficulties in a case relatively favorable for the belligerents, one can imagine the problems in a future war in which the neutrals are numerous and powerful. Economic strategy will be paralyzed to a much greater extent by political considerations.
POLICY AS AN AUXILIARY TO STRATEGY
Coalition politics also acted during the 1914 war to enhance strategic opportunities, principally by securing foreign aid and benevolent neutrality. From the beginning Sir Edward Grey divided the neutrals into four classes: (1) genuine neutrals (Spain, Denmark, Norway, Holland, the states of Central and South America); (2) neutrals with pro-German tendencies (Turkey, Bulgaria, Sweden); (3) neutrals with pro-Allied tendencies (Italy, Rumania, Greece); and (4) the United States. Political actions towards the nations of the first category had to be, at least at the beginning of the war, limited to seeking good relations and benevolent neutrality. Here, the Allies were generally successful in spite of occasional tensions with the northern powers over the issue of contraband of war and Allied insistence that benevolent neutrality extend to the abolition of trade with their German neighbor.
The Allied political effort in regard to Turkey focused entirely on persuading that nation to remain neutral despite the influence of a very powerful pro-German party. Turkey’s stance was of particular concern to Britain in view of its proximity to the Suez Canal and because an anti-Turkish policy could anger Britain’s Muslim subjects. Thus, the Allies showered manifestations of their good intentions upon Constantinople. Denying any threat to the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, they dangled before the eyes of the Turkish government suggestions of economic advantage and the suppression of the Capitulations,26 all, of course, on condition that Turkey remain neutral and repatriate the crews of the Goeben and the Breslau.27 Turkey, however, disregarded Allied concerns by incorporating the German ships at least notionally into her own fleet, an action that the Allies bore without protest. Allied forbearance on this matter managed to slow Turkey’s inevitable adhesion to the German cause, which occurred only on 28 October 1914, on the occasion of the Turkish fleet’s hostile demonstration off the Russian Black Sea ports.28 Allied policy had won two and a half months to transport Indian and Australian troops to Egypt and to reinforce positions in the Mediterranean. Moreover, the coalition avoided assuming in Moslem eyes the appearance of aggression against Turkey. These were substantial advantages. British policy intelligently avoided the grave error of following Turkey’s entry into the war with the annexation of Egypt. By contenting herself with a protectorate, she mollified both Allied suspicions and Moslem sensitivities.
Similar considerations led the British to decline Greece’s offer of 18 August 1914 to join the Allied camp. Though the offer was a seductive one, acceptance would have provoked immediate Turkish and Bulgarian entry into the war, and Russia had made clear her anxiety to avoid Turkish hostilities as long as her efforts against Germany and Austria left the Caucasus stripped of forces. Since a vigorous Russian military action on the German eastern front was absolutely essential to the Allied cause in August and September 1914, objections from St. Petersburg militated decisively against an inopportune Greek offensive against still neutral Turkey. In declining the advances of Mr. Venizelos,29 the policy makers wisely abstained from complicating the strategists’ task at a particularly critical moment. . . . In general, Allied policy suffered only one defeat in forming the coalition—continued Bulgarian hostility. Never before, except in the wars of the Revolution and the Empire, had politics acted so energetically to the benefit of military strategy. . . .
INTERNAL POLICY
In coalition warfare, policy also has a vital internal role. A coalition is not an idyll, a cloudless marriage of devoted partners, but a transitory assembly of nations brought together by temporarily shared interests on some points but still disagreeing on others. Conflicts spring up within coalitions, causing anything from minor dislocation to complete disintegration, the latter a catastrophe that destroys strategy as well.
Policy alone can guard against these dangers, avoid them, minimize discord, level differences, and maintain cohesion. In coalitions, policy sees open before it an internal field—inter-allied policy—in addition to the external arena. Both kinds of policy aid and support strategy.
Staying with the war of 1914, we have seen already that Russia raised difficulties in the negotiations concerning the entry into the war of Greece, Italy, and Rumania that could be ended only by firm and open pressure exercised by Britain and France in the name of the common cause. In the month of January 1915, the Turks, very demoralized by their defeat at Sarikamish30 in the Caucasus and by the Russian squadron’s raid in the North Sea, showed signs of weakness. The Turkish liberal faction hoped to make a separate peace with the Allies, retaining as its only condition respect for the territorial integrity of Turkey. The commandant of the 1st Army Corps at Constantinople, Mechemed-Pasha, suggested to Mr. Venizelos that he launch a coup in order to free Greece of its German alliance. Russia, aware of these intrigues, was disturbed and irritated because guarantees of Turkish integrity directly challenged her own ambitions toward Constantinople. On 27 January 1915, Sir George Buchanan, ambassador to Petrograd, was charged to remind Russia in the names of France and Britain that the inter-Allied convention of 5 September 1914 barred any separate peace.
The Dardanelles attack soon provoked another grave crisis in the alliance. In November 1914, the Russians had received from Britain a vague assurance that Russian interests would be taken into consideration in any postwar settlement of the fate of Constantinople and the Straits, and matters remained there until the first naval attacks against the outer forts of the Dardanelles of 19 February to 2 March 1915. In Russia, this operation provoked considerable ill-feeling, skillfully exacerbated by the maneuvers of the pro-German Count Witte. It was said that while Russia did her duty for the common cause on the German front, Britain and France would take advantage of the opportunity to seize the Straits. Some ambiguous phrases pronounced by Sir Edward Grey in the House of Commons heightened the tension. The Russian legislative assembly (Duma) and public opinion at large became excited and angry. On 1 March, Russian minister of foreign affairs Sazonov,31 demanded of the French and British ambassadors a clear statement yielding Constantinople to Russia at the conclusion of the war. On 3 March, Sazonov further extended Russian ambitions to include the Sea of Marmara, southern Thrace, the Dardanelles, Imbros, and Tenedos.
Policy found its work cut out to appease an explosion of Russian discontent that could have put an end to the coalition. The moment was critical, and on 8 March 1915, Delcassé32 authorized a declaration to Sazonov that Russian aspirations would meet with the goodwill of the French government. But the Russian required a formal official declaration, and for Britain, such a declaration was completely inconsistent with her long-term policy on the Straits that had led to the Crimean War and dictated her position during the Turko-Russian War of 1878. So serious was the matter that the liberal government called the leaders of the opposition to join in the deliberations. On 12 March, the Cabinet, bowing before the hard necessity of maintaining the coalition at any cost, yielded to Russian demands and transmitted on the following day the necessary reassurances to the Russian government.33 The crisis of the alliance was averted, but, in the meantime, the western Allies had been forced by Russian veto to renounce Greece’s offer to collaborate in the Dardanelles attack. Thus, policy managed to avoid the nightmare of a separate peace, but the threat had been a near one. . . .34
POLICY AND ITS CONVERSATIONS
But policy deals with more than neutrals and holding alliances together. So far is it from lethargy during a military conflict that it confronts the enemy through direct conversations in which the two parties probe one another, test their respective appetites, and sketch the contours of the future negotiations through which they will eventually lay down their arms. Communication with the enemy never absolutely ceases in the course of a war. Conversations continue, sometimes directly and sometimes through third-party intermediates. These do not always act disinterestedly but, like the Bismarckian “honest courtier” draw from their mediatory role commissions in the form of material or morale advantages. Even the most destructive wars cannot escape this rule because they are almost always the longest, and long wars are likely to have moments in which weariness overtakes the belligerents and pushes them to preliminary negotiations likely to lead, if not to a stable and definitive peace, at least to a truce.
Such was the case of Britain in 1796. Three years of war against France had produced no result suggestive of eventual victory—far from it. France had overcome the external dangers pressing her on the Continent, and the Basel treaties of 1795 had marked a significant victory.35 Next had come Bonaparte’s brilliant campaign in Italy which, joined with Corsica’s change of heart and the Franco-Spanish alliance of August 1796, forced the British to evacuate the Mediterranean. Britain’s situation was far from brilliant. After the imminent Austrian peace,36 she would be alone against France. Her successes at sea in the battles of Prairial, Groix, Noli, etc., had all been indecisive. The invasion of French political exiles at Quiberon, supported by Britain, had proved abortive. Finally, Britain was suffering a grave internal crisis. New industrial machines created overproduction which, because of the interruption of continental trade, led to lower prices and diminished wages. At the same time, the cost of living had increased (the price of wheat having almost doubled from 1792 to 1796), and discontentment became general. Confidence plummeted, public funds were low, and the government found itself unable to borrow. The entire British nation prayed for the return of peace.
In such circumstances, it is not surprising that the British showed themselves interested in conversations with their enemy. From October 1796, Lord Malmesbury began privately sounding the waters in Paris, and official negotiations opened in Lille in July 1797. The British envoys were very conciliatory, recognizing the French territorial gains in Europe and asking only foreign compensation. The French delegates, however, intransigently ignored popular desires for peace until the coup d’état of 18 fructidor (the last month of the French Revolutionary calendar) ousted the pro-peace faction from the Directory and the Councils.37 The French plenipotentiaries increased their demands, and the conversations broke off on 18 September 1797. At the beginning of the Consulate,38 Bonaparte sent new peace initiatives to the King of England39 and the Emperor of Austria,40 but the Peace of Amiens was concluded only on 25 March 1802.41
Inconclusive talks occurred again in 1806 after Trafalgar had been followed by Austerlitz42 and the French seizure of Dalmatia and the kingdom of Naples, which directly threatened the British situation in the Mediterranean. When the despondent Pitt died on 23 January 1806, his successor, Grenville,43 resigned himself to seeking conversations with Napoleon, who welcomed his overtures. Initially productive, the talks soon stalled over the kingdom of Naples and Napoleon’s intransigence over the Dutch colonies. Negotiations broke off at the end of September, and Britain reasserted herself by launching the Fourth Coalition against Napoleon. Thus, the conversations of 1806 ended as unhappily as those of 1796. Only one more such attempt, a vague one in 1809, would occur before the end of the wars of the empire.
Such were the most important attempts at Franco-British rapprochement between 1793 and 1815, and there were others too trivial to recall here. What is important is that France and Britain never ceased, throughout this whole period, to remain in political contact directly or indirectly.
The most striking of the peace initiatives during the 1914 war was the German offer of December 1916.44 It was rejected, but was the rejection inevitable? Some individuals in the Allied camp felt considerable uncertainty about the value of continuing the war. Sir Edward Grey’s memoirs recount his own fear at the beginning of 1916 that the war had become unwinnable by either side.45 Hoping for United States’ mediation to put an end to hostilities, he communicated with Colonel House,46 éminence grise of President Wilson, who had already himself conceived of such an intervention. The two men drafted a memorandum in February 1916 defining a course of action for the President of the United States. The challenge was to contrive an arrangement judged by Colonel House to be acceptable to both sides and that would include the restoration of Belgium, the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, Russian acquisition of access to the sea, and compensations for Germany outside of Europe. The Grey-House memorandum was communicated to the British War Committee, which decided not to act on the matter at that time, and was transmitted to the French government purely as a matter of information.
Certain favorable events of 1916, such as the failure of the German attack on Verdun, the battle of the Somme, the success of the Brusilov offensive, and Rumania’s entry into the war, somewhat increased Sir Edward Grey’s confidence.47 That autumn, however, Rumania was knocked out of the war, and Grey’s returning pessimism led him to present to his colleagues once again the memorandum composed by himself and Colonel House. His hopes were raised by the knowledge that Colonel House, in addition to his visits to London and Paris, had gone to Berlin and made inquiries implying American willingness to mediate between the two adversaries. . . .
It is no secret now that many individuals among the Allies, discouraged by the persistent and apparently permanent military stalemate, shared Grey’s discouragement. Though such feelings were stigmatized in the light of the later victory, they were perfectly explicable and natural at the time.48
At the same time, moreover, similar doubt and perplexity attacked the enemy. To Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg,49 especially, the military situation did not appear much brighter than it did to the Allies. Seeing Colonel House in Berlin in early 1916, Bethmann-Hollweg spoke to him of “the universal merit which the President could earn as the founder of the peace.”50 In the course of the summer, he told Ambassador Gérard, who was leaving for the United States, that Germany would welcome with favor United States’ action to this purpose. Behind his pessimism were the same considerations that induced a moment of despair in the Allies in 1916. Even the victory over the Rumanians seemed to the chancellor a bargaining chip at best since total victory appeared improbable.
Except for the parties of the Right, all of the various political factions held the same view. All believed peace absolutely necessary, especially in view of the economic hardship caused by the blockade.51 Victory seemed impossible. As Deputy Conrad Haussemann wrote to the chancellor on 25 October 1916, a favorable moment for peace negotiations had arrived, and diplomatic inertia threatened delay and lost opportunity.52 Others, like von Jagow, were not loath to describe the continuation of the war as folly. Kaiser Wilhelm II spoke in favor of peace, and he pressed Bethmann-Hollweg to that effect in a letter of 31 October. . . .53
Given that the two adversaries shared virtually identical attitudes towards peace and that the terrain had been well prepared on both sides by active and adroit third parties, one might expect that direct conversations would have had good chances of success. At that moment, however, the Allies were bracing themselves for a supreme effort to carry on hostilities. In Britain, on 8 December 1916, Lloyd George54 replaced Asquith as prime minister. Affirming his resolution to carry the struggle to the end, he created a new, smaller War Cabinet. The same tendency was evident in France. After secret debates in the Chamber of Deputies from 20 November to 7 December, the Cabinet was reorganized on a narrower basis and a War Committee established. In Russia, after Stumer’s55 disgrace on 24 November, one saw a violent reaction against the Germanophile party.
It was under these unfavorable conditions that the Germans made their peace offer. On 12 December 1916, the chancellor, not wanting to await a United States’ initiative, delivered to the neutral representatives in Berlin a proposal for negotiations whose terms implied a complete end to the war. On 19 December, President Wilson entered the scene with a demand that the belligerents announce their war aims. On 27 December, Germany and Austria responded with a short note offering no illumination of their views. On 30 December, the Allies rejected the German offer and responded to President Wilson’s interrogative by stipulating peace conditions implying the definitive defeat of Germany. Thus, prospects for peace were checked. . . .
Throughout these and other wartime attempts to negotiate, policy continued to work to the benefit of strategy. Having attempted at the war’s beginning to launch strategy in the best possible conditions and during the conflict to facilitate its tasks, policy acted when strategy appeared deadlocked to seek an honorable exit by means of exchanging views preliminary to an acceptable settlement. Such is the teaching of experience. . . .
This is not to say, however, that one ought to welcome all conversations, whether public or secret, whether initiated by oneself or by the enemy. Why make war at all only to seize every possible opportunity for negotiation? Neither desirable at all times nor a perversion always to be rejected, communication with the enemy must be treated as a natural phenomenon, sometimes appropriate and not to be rejected out of hand. Everything depends on the specific case.
Peace negotiations constitute a severe challenge for a people at war, testing not only their will to struggle and their moral solidarity, but also the political and military judgment of their leaders. Whether or not to continue the battle is an agonizing dilemma whose resolution demands as much energy and clairvoyance as did the original entry into the war itself and which assumes both certainty of information and firmness in its exploitation.
The test is even stiffer for a coalition than for a single nation because the prospect of peace and postwar settlement reveals fissures within the alliance that prevent the adoption of a single, unanimous line of conduct. Here one ought to acknowledge that the fact of having weathered such crises without damage, having continued without deviation to the point of victory, was certainly the most glorious success of the anti-German coalition of 1914–1918.
The many services that it renders or tries to render to strategy give policy the right to be heeded by its associates. Although political counsel cannot be followed blindly and can, even if inspired by the very best of intentions, lead to military disaster, it cannot be disregarded. Soldiers, both past and present, often misunderstand this relationship. Failure to acknowledge that policy must direct strategy explains the refusal of some of them during the 1914 war to see beyond their fixation on the Western Front. Citing Clausewitz, of whom they were novice acolytes, they deemed an eastern approach “a fatal example of mixing policy and strategy” and considered the idea of breaking Austria “nothing but pure politics. . . .”
Prime Minister Lloyd George ran up against the single-mindedness of military strategy when he decided after Caporetto56 to send British reinforcements to the Italian front over the objections of General Robertson,57 the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Sir Douglas Haig.58 The latter, engaged at the time in his Passchendale offensive,59 refused to yield a single division for the Italian front. Annoyed by this resistance, Lloyd George answered, “It’s perfect. You soldiers take a village in Flanders and Serbia collapses. You take another, and it is Rumania which falls. Possibly you will take Passchendale next week, and it will be Italy’s turn for annihilation.”60 The prime minister overrode military objections for reasons of overall policy. What he criticized in this sally was less military hostility to his ideas, for strategy was not required to bow without discussion before the suggestions of policy, than its rejection of arguments foreign to pure military necessity.
POLICY AND STRATEGY IN TIME OF PEACE
These examples show that policy and strategy are not juxtaposed end to end with one succeeding the other when one passes from a state of peace to a state of war. Policy does not hibernate in wartime but works in liaison with strategy. Does this condition of “operation in parallel” cease with the end of the abnormal situation that is war? Does peace see policy completely eclipse strategy?
Not at all, for there exists, as we have remarked earlier,61 a true “peacetime strategy” that encompasses all of the measures, ranging from new-construction programs and provisioning to training of personnel and drafting plans of operations that one can take to increase the power of an army or a fleet. As Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge said, “The work of strategy never ends” and its field of action remains immense in peacetime. Strategy’s incursions into a peacetime arena seemingly reserved to policy mirror the actions of policy in entering into strategy’s wartime realm. We find the two together again, always side by side.
One ought then to expect to find between policy and strategy in time of peace the same tight links that unite them in time of war. Are the two not both servants of the same cause?
Nothing of the sort. It is easy to grasp why their peacetime bonds are generally much looser and sometimes altogether absent. The intimate collaboration evident in wartime reflects tragic, imperious, and implacable necessity. Problems of a political-military nature constantly arise and demand immediate solution at any cost. Since cooperation must be daily and constant, the links that develop naturally assume a semi-permanent character.
In peacetime, however, things are entirely different. The threats are eventual, hypothetical, distant. Demands can be deferred, at least for a time. Events are awaited at leisure. Nothing presses. Circumstances do not demand the collaboration of policy and strategy for immediate ends, and the two often disassociate themselves from one another.
The nations that present exceptions to this generality are those animated even in peacetime by the will to struggle. Expanding and conquering peoples manifest in all of their actions an offensive drive conducive to long-term projects. In other nations, one usually finds in peacetime only a vague defensive and conservative instinct, lacking an established direction and stirred up by every possibility without attaching itself to any one of them. Policy is inchoate, uncertain, changing; strategy lacks orientation or precise objective. Ignorant of the path to follow and of the nature of future hostilities, it can only offer static measures for organization and mobilization. Active dispositions such as plans of operations cannot develop because they require determination of the enemy to be fought and of the objective to attain. If neither policy nor strategy properly exists, then there can logically be no rapport between them.
This pernicious state of affairs does not improve until the nation becomes the object of a direct threat and the desire for self-defense fosters the creation of both policy and strategy, which can then cooperate with one another. The situation is now similar to one of war, to which it is generally a prelude.
The rise of Prussia in the second half of the nineteenth century exemplifies the liaison between policy and strategy in a nation motivated by unchecked ambition. A clear and vigorous will for struggle presided over Bismarck’s Machiavellian plan to destroy the old German edifice of 1815. Each of the successful stages of Prussia’s growth marked the unceasing collaboration of policy and strategy. She drove Denmark out of the Duchies and used this event to catalyze the desired break with Austria, who was left isolated diplomatically by Prussian agreements with Italy and by French inertia.62 Bismarck’s Prussia led the resisting German states to the Austrian war and unification in spite of anti-Prussian sentiment.
Incarnating Prussia’s will to expand, Bismarck directed the whole program and inspired what might be called Prussia’s “war plan.” Though foreign minister in title, Bismarck also managed internal politics and thereby conducted both the whole of the war and one of its component parts.63 But he could have achieved nothing without the support of a powerful strategy and without a collaborator both adept at the preparation and conduct of military operations and cognizant of their political implications.
Chance filled Bismarck’s need in the form of Moltke, Chief of the General Staff, that is, of the organ that became the principal lever of the chosen policy. Bismarck allied with Moltke; their shared hopes united them. Before Sadowa,64 Moltke took an active part in the alliance with Italy. He inspired the draft of the Usedom note to General La Marmora of 17 June 1866, which outlined the military requirements for cooperation with the Florentine cabinet. The solidarity of the Bismarck-Moltke team reinforced itself on the field of Sadowa during the four agonizing hours they spent together awaiting the arrival of the army of the crown prince.
After this campaign, in August 1866, Bismarck sought Moltke’s advice on measures to take against France, and Moltke then contributed to writing the secret treaties with the southern states.65 In the spring of 1867, Bismarck again asked for Moltke’s written opinion about disquieting French military preparations, and Moltke responded with two memoranda on the very same day.66 In June 1867, Bismarck and Moltke visited France together, taking advantage of that year’s exposition for purposes one can easily divine.67 The famous falsification of the Ems telegram marks the culminating point of this collaboration between Bismarck and Moltke.68 Before Bismarck’s démarche, the partners feared the possibility of a peaceful settlement of the Hohenzollern incident, in the foreign minister’s words, that “the affair be lost in the sands.” Rarely does one see such tight intercourse between policy and strategy in peacetime preparations for war. At the decisive moment, they supported one another with a clear and stimulating vision of the profits to come.69
Modern Italy gives another possible picture of the intimate peacetime union of policy and strategy in a nation aspiring to expansion or hegemony. Here, policy is primary; it finds its milieu. It is ordinarily farsighted, informed, capable, flexible, resourceful. It helps strategy, which is less assured, to achieve, at the least cost, the advantages that strategy cannot win on its own, always careful that strategy not be left unsupported except against the weakest adversaries. Politically, the Italian method consists of approaching objectives serially; militarily, it is to insinuate themselves into the conflicts of others or to assure from the beginning the assistance of reliable allies and to act only in entirely favorable circumstances. . . .
Nations that live in a state of political and military expectancy, nations that have no positive program for the growth of their power, are generally afflicted with a mutual semi-indifference of policy and strategy. The two cooperate with one another only when a direct threat forces them to contrive the necessary defense. In France between 1870 and 1914, the German menace was obvious to everyone, the people and the government alike. It dominated the national consciousness, which never lost sight of it in spite of temptations posed by other European or colonial objectives. Because the need to face Germany was accepted with unanimity, conditions were eminently favorable for a collaboration of policy and strategy, conditions which were not, however, always exploited as they should have been. . . .
NEO-POLITICS
But our discussion of policy, strategy, and their mutual rapport may appear outmoded and obsolete since the event in 1928 that claimed to eliminate war from world affairs. I speak of the Kellogg Pact, whose central idea was the repudiation of war as an instrument of national policy. The fifteen states that signed the Kellogg Pact on 27 August 1928 agreed to settle all disputes by peaceful means, thus establishing a new kind of politics to which strategy is irrelevant. . . .70
The lessons of forty centuries, however, support Bernhardi’s conclusions that “war is the most efficacious instrument of policy” or, more exactly, that life is a struggle, whether for gain or for self-preservation. There is no reason to believe that things will be different in the future, that politics will have no recourse to force nor need for concourse with strategy. Experience has proved such ideas artificial and unrealizable. . . .71
1. Raoul Castex, Théories stratégiques, vol. 3 (Paris: Société d’Editions Géographiques, Maritimes et Coloniales, 1931): 3–53.
2. This offhand reference to Clausewitz’s celebrated dictum from On War, book 1, chapter 1, para. 2 (Howard, 87) and book 8, chapter 6B (Howard, 605–7) sums up Castex’s treatment of the German theorist.
3. Bernhardi, Notre avenir 59 (author’s note).
4. La guerre aujourd’hui, vol. 2 (author’s note).
5. Castex is unjust to Clausewitz, whose description of war as a trinity of violence, policy, and chance, though notoriously vague about practical mechanisms, demands that all three elements function in wartime, On War, book 1, chapter 1, para. 28 (Howard, 89).
6. We will discover the link between policy and strategy exemplified in the relationship between the government and the high command, which we will examine with attention (author’s note).
7. George Monk (1608–1679), First Duke of Albemarle, defeated Tromp’s fleet at Scheveningen, the last battle of the First Anglo-Dutch War, on 31 July 1653.
8. Navigation Act of 1651.
9. Between Charles I’s daughter Mary and William II of Orange.
10. Arthur Herbert (1647–1716), created Earl of Torrington in 1689.
11. Louis XIV’s most distinguished sailor, Admiral Anne-Hilarion de Cotentin, Comte de Tourville (1642–1701).
12. His Anglo-Dutch force was outnumbered seventy to fifty-five because King William had part of the British fleet with him off Ireland, Michael Lewis, A Social History of the Navy 1793–1915 (London, 1960): 467.
13. Castex discusses the “fleet in being” in chapter 16.
14. France could not exploit her greatest naval victory, that at Béveziers (Beachy Head to the British) on 10 July 1690, because of bad weather, wretched conditions on Tourville’s overcrowded ships, and poor coordination of land and naval forces. See Etienne Taillemite and Pierre Guillaume, Tourville et Béveziers (Paris, 1991); Symcox, The Crisis of French Seapower, 99–100; and J.R. Jones, Britain and Europe in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1966): 88, 91. For Torrington’s controversial decisions, for which a court martial exonerated him, see Corbett, Principles, 214–19, and Mahan, Influence, 162.
15. Tourville was defeated by Admiral Sir George Rooke (1650–1709) at the Battle of Barfleur-The Hogue on 23 May 1692, Peter Kemp, ed., History of the Royal Navy (London, 1969).
16. Other eighteenth-century examples are omitted.
17. Castex’s terse narrative does no justice to the complex series of orders and counter-orders given to McDowell’s corps in April and May 1862.
18. Castex is no historian of the American Civil War. If many of the reasons to invade Maryland in the summer of 1862 were indeed political, foremost among them the hope that another victory following upon the Second Battle of Bull Run and Jackson’s Shenandoah campaigns would finally bring about European recognition of the Confederacy, it was General Robert E. Lee who sought battlefield victory in the North while President Jefferson Davis preferred a defensive strategy, Russell Weigley, The American Way of War (New York, 1973): 114, and Frank E. Vandiver, Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy (New York, 1970): 151.
19. Castex again reverses the roles of Davis and Lee. Lee hoped that by invading the North he could draw the war out of Virginia and distract Union efforts from Vicksburg, Edwin B. Coddington, The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command (New York, 1984): 5–7.
20. 2 July 1913.
21. Bizerte, now Banzert, was France’s naval base in Tunisia.
22. Castex ignores another kind of political motivation behind the dispatch of the French Eastern Army, the Left’s insistence on establishing an adequately important command for republican General Maurice Sarrail, whom General Joffre had relieved from command of Third Corps, Jan Karl Tannenbaum, General Maurice Sarrail 1856–1929: The French Army and Left-wing Politics (Chapel Hill, 1974): 57–62.
23. See Théories vol. 1, part 2, chapter 1 and vol. 3, part 3, chapter 6 (author’s note).
24. Sir Edward Grey, Viscount of Fallodon (1863–1933), whose memoirs Castex cites, was a liberal imperialist and Asquith supporter. Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the Campbell-Bannerman cabinet in December 1905, he retained the office until David Lloyd George assumed the premiership in December 1916, Herwig and Heyman, 169.
25. See Grey, Memoirs, 407 (author’s note).
26. The “Capitulations” were a series of increasingly unfavorable trade agreements between a declining Ottoman Empire and various European powers.
27. In August 1914, the Goeben, a new German battle cruiser armed with 11-inch guns and capable of doing twenty-seven knots, and the light cruiser Breslau eluded British Mediterranean forces and made their way to neutral Constantinople, where their appearance aided the pro-German lobby and contributed to the Turkish decision in October 1914 to enter the conflict alongside the Central Powers, Hough, 70, 82.
28. Turkish naval forces, including the Goeben and Breslau, initiated hostilities on 29 October 1914 by shelling Odessa, Sevastopol, and Novorossiisk, Alan Morehead, Gallipoli (New York, 1956): 18.
29. Eleutherios Venizelos (1864–1936), six times premier of Greece, headed a pro-Allied faction in opposition to King Constantine I.
30. Russian General Vorontsov stopped Enver Pasha’s offensive on 29 December 1914, and his counterattack of 3 January 1915 destroyed the Turkish army.
31. Sergyei Dmitrievich Sazonov (1866–1927) was Russian foreign minister four times.
32. Théophile Delcassé (1852–1923), French foreign minister 3–4 August 1914 and 27 August 1914 to 12 October 1915.
33. These “reassurances” included a secret treaty promising Russia Constantinople, the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles.
34. Pages 25–26 are omitted.
35. The Treaty of Basel of 5 April 1795 took Prussia out of the War of the First Coalition.
36. Campo Formio.
37. The pro-peace faction described by Castex was made up of the royalists, who had made substantial gains in the 1797 council elections but were ousted in September 1797 in a coup by the directors Reubell, La Reveillière, and Barras supported by the generals, Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France. V.1: 1715–1799 (1963): 253, Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1974): 63–65.
38. The consulate was established by coup d’état on 9 November 1799. Intended by the conspirators to be a triumvirate, it fell immediately under the domination of the first consul, Napoleon Bonaparte.
39. George III (1738–1820).
40. Francis II (1768–1835), Holy Roman emperor from 1792 until 1806 and thereafter emperor of Austria.
41. The Peace of Amiens allowed France to retain her conquests up to the Rhine and in northern Italy and required Britain to give up all of her overseas conquests except Trinidad and Ceylon. That the British public so warmly welcomed a peace thoroughly incommensurate with their military successes supports Castex’s claims of British economic hardship. Hostilities between Britain and France resumed in March 1803.
42. 2 December 1805.
43. William Wyndham Grenville, Baron Grenville (1759–1834) was foreign secretary from 1791 to 1801.
44. Details in Gerhard Ritter, The Sword and the Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in Germany, vol. 3: The Tragedy of Statesmanship—Bethmann Hollweg as War Chancellor (1914–1917), trans. Heinz Norden (Miami, 1972), chapter 8.
45. Grey, Memoirs, 420ff. (author’s note).
46. Edward Mandell “Colonel” House (1858–1938) was Wilson’s closest adviser.
47. Positive appraisal of the outcome of Verdun or the Somme was probably more difficult at the time.
48. Moreover, as we shall see later, Théories, vol. 3, part 2, chapter 2, the Allied financial situation was extremely grim at the end of 1916 (author’s note).
49. Theobald Bethmann-Hollweg (1856–1921) was chancellor of Germany from 1909 to 1917, when the German army forced his resignation. At the Crown Council at Pless on 9 January 1917, he yielded against his better judgment to the navy’s call for unrestricted submarine warfare, see Herwig and Heyman, 87.
50. Bethmann-Hollweg, Considerations sur la guerre mondiale, 261ff. (author’s note).
51. Hardships denied by Castex elsewhere to have existed as early as 1916.
52. Conrad Haussemann, Journal d’un député au Reichstag (Paris, 1928): 97 (author’s note).
53. Bethmann-Hollweg, 266 (author’s note).
54. David Lloyd George (1863–1945) served as Liberal prime minister of a coalition government from 7 December 1916 until 22 October 1922.
55. Boris Vladimirovich Sturmer (1849–1917) was a prime minister, minister of interior, and minister of foreign affairs of such striking incompetence that he was alleged to be a German agent, Herwig and Heyman, 330–31.
56. Its army’s collapse on 24 October 1917 in the face of an Austro-German offensive northwest of Trieste almost knocked Italy out of the war.
57. The only British field marshal to begin his career as a private soldier, Sir William Robertson (1860–1933), was chief of the Imperial General Staff from December 1915 to February 1918.
58. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (1861–1928) was commander in chief of British forces on the western front from 1917–1919.
59. The Third Ypres offensive of October–November 1918.
60. Wickham Steed, Mes souvenirs, vol. 2 (Paris: Plon): 111 (author’s note).
61. See Théories, vol. 1, part 1, chapter 1 (author’s note).
62. In the Danish War of 1864 Austria and Prussia allied to wrest the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein from the King of Denmark. A three-month alliance between Prussia and Italy was signed on 8 April 1866.
63. Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) was minister president, not foreign minister, of Prussia from 1862 and chancellor of the new German Empire from 1871 to 1890.
64. Sadowa, or Königgrätz, was the Prussian victory over Austria in Bohemia on 3 July 1866 that determined the result of the Austro-Prussian War.
65. Correspondance militaire du maréchal de Moltke (author’s note).
66. Ibid., no. 10 and 11 (author’s note). What Castex does not say is that Moltke advocated war against France in 1867, a policy Bismarck entirely opposed.
67. Though widely believed in France after 1870, the insinuation that the true purpose of the visit was to reconnoiter the defenses of Paris has no basis in fact, A. J. P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (New York, 1967): 108.
68. The Ems telegram of 13 July 1870 reported to Bismarck King William I’s acquiescence to Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen’s withdrawal from candidacy for the vacant throne of Spain and the resulting moderation of tensions between Prussia and France, but Bismarck, set on war, offered the press a version implying that Franco-Prussian relations were on the verge of collapse, Halo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany: 1840–1945 (New York, 1969): 213–14.
69. Castex is unusual in praising the Bismarck-Moltke partnership, usually treated as a model of civil-military relations gone wrong. The two disagreed on such important matters as Moltke’s preference for aiding Austria against France in 1859, the desirability of war against France in 1867 and 1875, the provisions of the peace with France in 1871, and Bismarck’s plan for a Russian alliance. Their arguments during the Franco-Prussian War, especially Moltke’s complaints about civilian interference in military matters, were notorious, Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron, Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York, 1979): 121, 130, 137, 144–46, and A. J. P. Taylor, Bismarck, 105, 133, 210. Castex himself echoes the conventional view below, 255.
70. French foreign minister Aristide Briand first proposed a bilateral renunciation of war by France and the United States as a means of achieving a de facto alliance with the latter. Hostile to any special relationship with France and contemptuous of peace advocates, United States Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg subverted Briand’s plan by proposing instead a multilateral agreement abjuring the use of force as an instrument of national policy. The irrelevance of the resulting Kellogg-Briand Pact to events of the 1930s is hardly surprising, given that neither of its sponsors had any interest in the abolition of war, Arthur Ferrill, Peace in Their Time (New Haven, 1952).
71. Omitted are a further five pages of Castexian denunciation of the chimera of a politics that disavows war.