COMBINED OPERATIONS IN STRATEGY1
ALL OF the operations described above, blockade, mining, raids, bombardments, “coups de main,” seem to touch only lightly upon the land.2 However harsh, their impact is superficial. The sea appears unable to reach the land’s vital organs.3 Is this really true? Are what we have called “skirmishes” not of more importance than they appear? Are they capable of terminating resistance on land, that is, of achieving a decision? To answer these questions, it is necessary to consider the defender’s situation, to find his weak points, or, better, the vital points where one can bring about his defeat. In this way, the proper route to a decision will be clear.
Whether or not one can attack the enemy’s maritime communications and territory by sea or defend one’s own depends upon whether one commands the sea. Moreover, while offensive success can be very profitable and affirms one’s superiority, only defensive success, though negative and conservative, is genuinely vital. Before killing one’s enemy, it is necessary not to be killed by him.4
Let us take a hypothetical land power, possessed of inferior maritime forces. Let us refuse him the advantages of a successful defense and suppose him to be incapable of maintaining his maritime communications or of preventing the enemy from attacking his territory by sea. His situation will be incontestably serious, but how serious depends on the geographical situation.5
Let us begin with an island, an essentially maritime nation like Britain. Her power, as everyone knows, is a complex edifice that rests not only on the territory of the home state but also on an extended network of commercial, financial, colonial, political, banking, and agricultural concerns, of which maritime communications constitute the soul, the nervous system, and the arterial circulation. The center of gravity of the system, to use a mechanical analogy, is not in the “old country” but elsewhere at some mysterious point situated in the immensity of the oceans. For such a nation, the two equally vital objectives are the maintenance of maritime communications and the protection of territory. Both are satisfied by domination of the sea. Terrestrial superiority alone, however, will only save the territory and, by ignoring the fundamentally important maritime communications, allow the island to perish. Navy superiority is for her a matter of life and death, and represents both a necessary and sufficient condition for survival.6
Very different is the more common intermediate case of a continental nation having both land and sea frontiers. For such a nation, maritime communications, through extremely useful, are not vital. The country relies at least in part on neutrals to act as its lifelines on land or at sea. Such was the situation of Germany and Austria, who managed during the 1914–1918 war to remain undefeated by the Allied naval blockade. . . . The Central Powers, however, were noticeably worse situated than normal for a continental nation of the “intermediate case.” Surrounded on three-quarters of their periphery by hostile states, they had only a half-open window on the outside world. Though benefiting in this instance from unusually advantageous conditions, the Allies proved unable to strangle the enemy. If Britain were at war alone against Germany, however, the latter’s maritime communications would not be subject to interruption because her resources would include the ports of her European neighbors.7
The power base of the terrestrial nation is, above all, at home.8 Its colonies are often nothing more than appendages, distant satellites, which can be lost without extreme peril. Only France, through her relations with her African bloc, can be considered to be, for political reasons, in a position vaguely recalling that of Britain. The vital defensive objective is to safeguard the territory, which one can expect to achieve through possession of superior forces on land. Since naval superiority is ineffective against a danger on land, a continental nation will find land superiority the necessary and sufficient condition for facing every eventuality.9
All of these characteristics are maximized when the land power is an immense whole, richly endowed with resources, virtually independent of the sea and capable of survival in isolation for an indefinite period of time. Examples of this extreme case, the opposite to the British, are the French First Empire at its apogee in 1810 and contemporary Russia, the giant between Europe and Asia.10 The position of the United States, having a continent to herself, is entirely parallel. For these colossi, maritime communications have had and will have only insignificant value, and their disappearance would not even be noticed. . . .11
Let us digress. With an obscure and sure instinct, the vox populi of various nations has always discerned the vital objective. It makes a cult of whatever constitutes the necessary and sufficient condition of power, venerating it and deifying it. Public opinion in an island nation considers the navy as the essential instrument of its security and of its existence; the army is only a complement, valuable but unable to achieve by itself the primary goal of complete defense. Such is the current view in Britain, where the navy holds the high ground and Trafalgar is deemed a necessary and sufficient national event; not only did it save the territory of Britain, but, equally important, it and only it could save her maritime communications.
In a continental nation, however, public opinion regards the army as the principal tool and makes the navy no more than an important satellite. Before 1914, it took an artificial agitation to bring about the birth of a German navy,12 and its activities were unnoticed by Germany’s military leaders in 1914, who turned their attention to it only later, when they thought it capable of introducing into the game a decisive trump, the submarine war, or when it was a matter of supporting army operations in the Baltic. In France, sea power was seen as facilitating the organization and equipment of the armies of National Defense in 1870–1871. . . .
Consider popular impressions of the great Anglo-French duel of the past centuries. In Britain, the national heroes are the Drakes, the Hawkes, the Nelsons—saviors of the national territory, certainly, but, also and especially, exploiters of sea power to safeguard maritime communications.13 In France, the great war hero remains Joan of Arc, liberator of territory through land power alone. . . .
We French sailors, nautical servants of a land power, must not be surprised by this attitude. Neither saddened nor complaining, we must accept the situation and concern ourselves with land war because of its importance to the country and the major role that we ourselves must play in it. Though strategically subordinate, our role is nonetheless vast and fundamental. Soldiers of the air must think the same way.
Let us now treat these diverse cases from the offensive point of view, keeping in mind the vulnerability of the land to attack from the sea. One can only reduce an island state like Britain through naval superiority, which we will assume to have been attained. This superiority allows the invasion of territory and the interception of communications. But the first operation is not indispensable; the second is sufficient in itself against an island or semi-island belligerent. The sea can thus limit itself to “skirmishes” because one of these, the blockade, promises a rapid decision. . . . Peninsular nations can also be vulnerable, though less so, to this sort of operation. Italy, for example, would suffer significantly from the loss of sea routes and, in particular, from interruption of her coastal trade.
If the sea faces a continental nation, the problem is generally very different. Such an adversary being insensitive to interruptions of communications, one must attack his territory itself. Naval superiority proves to be only an intermediary that must be exploited through larger operations. Sea power is valuable only to the extent that it contributes to victory on land, and the sea will support the armies’ operations or, better still, participate in them by landing forces from elsewhere. . . .
Britain herself, imbued as her people are with naval prejudices and the excessive conviction that mastery of the sea suffices to handle any contingency, has come to understand the limitations of sea power. Nelson, who found himself in the Gulf of Genoa during Bonaparte’s stunning victories in Italy in 1796, lamented his own helplessness. In our day, Corbett acknowledges the situation in the following terms: “Because men live on the land and not at sea, the outcomes of great wars among nations have always resulted, except in very rare cases, either from what one army managed to do to the territory or national life of the enemy or from fear of the possibilities which a fleet could give to the army against the same territory or national life.”14 Thus, in spite of their reluctance, the British were forced to participate vigorously in the land conflicts of the wars of the Revolution and Empire and the 1914–1918 war. The necessity of waging war on land is even clearer in the third case, when the belligerent is not merely a continental nation but a continent in itself. . . .
In the second and third cases, achievement of mastery of the sea, acquisition and domination of maritime communications, however offensive they may be from the naval point of view, are only defensive actions within the framework of the war as a whole. If naval action goes no farther than this, it can neither strike the death blow nor obtain a decision.
If navies would do more, they must conduct combined operations, enterprises of vast scope that transcend the limitations on the sea’s ability to operate against the land, which are described above. They are the centerpiece of what the British call “amphibious strategy.” In these operations troops transported and protected by naval forces attack enemy territory either to obtain a decision or to contribute strongly to one. Amphibious operations can reinforce the existing effort on the main front, create a new front in distant and hitherto virgin territory, or do both at once.
Although the term combined operations ordinarily implies a contested landing of troops on a beach, which obviously requires a “combination” of the actions of the army and the navy, and even of the air force, though the latter’s collaboration is a more strictly tactical one, an unopposed landing of troops in neutral, friendly, or allied country is also a combined operation. Thus, Wellington’s landing in Portugal, the Allies in Turkey during the Crimean War, and the British and French in Salonika and Egypt were all combined operations. . . .15 Such operations belong to general strategy, which transcends land strategy, naval strategy, and air strategy and coordinates all three, uniting under a higher plan the actions of armies, navies, and air forces whenever the three find themselves simultaneously in play.
Perhaps the operations that concern us might best be described by the all-encompassing expression “overseas operation,” which would include all operations involving crossing the sea and therefore requiring mastery of it. They come about through sea power, and they ought to be treated as part of the sea’s offensive against the land.
This rapid overview of the nature of the subject leads us to scale our examination proportionately to the present study. We will address only what concerns strategy, excluding everything having to do with execution or tactics. We will treat only the intentions behind these operations, the inspirations that give them birth, their place in the general conduct of war, the needs that bring them into being—in a word, the elements of the general idea of manoeuvre. As the following will demonstrate, this conceptual area is already immense.
Overseas operations have on occasion had their confirmed detractors. An oft-cited condemnation from von der Goltz’s Nation Armée argues that contemporary European nations are so well organized militarily that, even if all active and reserve troops were engaged on the frontiers, they could still rapidly amass superior numbers to counter a landing. Troops would always be available from depots and fortress garrisons, while the telegraph and railway would facilitate movement from the most distant provinces. Thus, amphibious landings would suffer great difficulties and promise only poor results. For a populous state with a good military organization, they will prove an opportunity for victory rather than a serious threat.
All of this is true—if the sea commits the stupidity of attacking the land under such eminently unfavorable conditions. But there are more inviting possibilities. The landing force can intervene to reinforce the principal theater. It can attack at a distant point where poor communications hamper the defender’s response. It can seize territory in a region where the adversary will be forced to guard extended lines of communications and that is very far from his other responsibilities. All these methods will improve the value of the attack because they will diminish the defender’s strength in the landing theater to the point where the situation described by von der Goltz is entirely reversed.
This is the element of combined operations that constitutes the finesse in the strategic game. Everything rests on the choice of point of application of the new effort, on avoiding the bad point and on choosing the good. And here one should meditate upon Bernhardi’s admirable definition of strategy as “the art of leading troops to combat in the decisive direction and in the most favorable conditions”
In the course of history, several nations have made the mistake of launching their combined operations in the mistaken direction indicated by von der Goltz, and they have regretted it. But others who have avoided the error have prospered. It is clear, to illustrate the point, that the project sketched by Admiral Fisher during the last war for a landing on the coast of Pomerania in imitation of the Russians of 1761 was a very chancy one. After reflection, the British renounced it and other plans for landings in Schleswig or the Frisian Archipelago. The terrain being strategically deplorable, every advantage would have accrued to the defender. . . .
Von der Goltz’s observations are valid only for enterprises that are so blatantly ill-conceived as to deserve no further attention. His horizon is far too narrow, and one can read between the lines of his work a sole concern with a Franco-German war.16 He has not looked further, not acknowledged the possibility of future wars other than one that will pit France and Germany alone along the line from Luxembourg to Basel. He did not foresee the magnitude of the 1914 war, its half-land, half-sea form, the multiple theaters of operation, the role of the sea, the stabilization and continuousness of the main front, in brief, everything that should have made combined operations both possible and necessary. He did not think that the Germans, confirmed land animals who shared his world view, would themselves undertake combined operations in the Baltic Islands in 1917 and in the Aland Islands in 1918.
Other theoreticians of the same school and active commanders have criticized overseas operations as diverting troops from the principal front, but this point of view depends on the case. . . . True, perhaps, for the Franco-German situation in 1870, when the Germans were pleased by the prospect of seeing French troops scattered in pursuit of objectives in the north or south of Germany, but it is far less so in other situations. It suggests a hypnotism by the current situation and lack of general understanding and lends legitimacy to Corbett’s antipathy for the ideas of the continental strategists!17
The situation will often be utterly different from that of 1870. It is possible that the struggle on the principal front will reach such a condition of stalemate that any major offensive would have to take place overseas. It is even possible to have such an abundance of force that not all can usefully be employed on the principal front. Fortifications there may allow troops to be withdrawn for use elsewhere without granting the enemy an opportunity to act. An ally may enter upon the scene with new forces and open a new front because he lacks political or geographical concerns on the initial one. All of these circumstances create possibilities and demands for new combinations through operations overseas. The 1914–1918 war provides apt lessons, and comparison with the 1870 war reinforces our understanding of the general principles.
It remains to add a few words about the realization of combined operations in the domain of strategy. The first question, whether creation of an overseas theater is possible and necessary, involves an infinite complex of conflicting political, military, naval, economic, psychological, and other factors. Since it concerns the overall conduct of the war, it must be handled by the government or, often, by the government working within the framework of a coalition.
Next comes the problem of choosing the region where the combined operation will take place. This decision, too, pertains to general strategy, but it is notably influenced by land strategy, because its final objective is to put the army into action with the best chance of success. Land requirements dominate the situation and override maritime ones.
Only after the theater of future action has been determined do military and naval points of view return to a position of near equality. Each will have his own valid concerns in the debate over the choice of the landing point. The army commander naturally seeks a position where he can achieve superiority, establish a large bridgehead, and achieve easy access by land to his final strategic objective. The naval commander concerns himself with hydrographic and meteorological conditions, with the need for an anchorage protected against bad weather and enemy attacks, water deep enough for the navy to support the landing close inshore, etc. Because army and navy requirements will often be contradictory, planning will require compromise. But this is the domain of tactics. . . .18
It would be vain to deny that the technical instruments of our day render the execution of combined operations, and especially the contested landing, much more difficult than before. The speed of enemy warships has increased much more rapidly than that of the convoyed merchantmen, which are also vulnerable to mines, submarines, and aircraft. Surprise has become infinitely more elusive as the abundance of intelligence and speedy propagation of news make secrets hard to keep. Enemy reconnaissance aircraft sweep the skies in constant search for expeditions while radio alerts a defender capable of much more rapid response than in the past. His aircraft will quickly mass over the landing area. Defending troops will arrive by railway and truck, while the attacker’s forces will be impeded by the vast encumbrances a modern army brings with it. The infantry now carries an immeasurably greater weight of weapons and equipment, while the number of combat and transport vehicles has greatly increased. Some of these, tanks and heavy artillery in particular, even require special landing vessels. All of these details immensely complicate the task of the attackers. One may admire the landings at Old Fort or Sidi Ferruch19 but must remember that the obstacles overcome on those occasions were trivial compared with those facing belligerents today.20
All of these difficulties naturally increase with the size of the landing and reach their maximum with the great combined expeditions that are of the most interest. Corbett, who rightly gave a very large place to overseas operations, wrongly limited them to the rubric of “limited war,” a favorite idea of his that he treated as uniquely British. Corbett saw combined operations as intended to seize a minor piece of territory and hold it against all attempts at dislodgement. Colonial wars and certain European wars seemed appropriate for the practice of what he himself called “an inferior form of war.” But Corbett looked only at indecisive examples, while we are concerned with combined operations on a grand scale, decisive attacks by the sea against the land, manifestations of amphibious strategy intended to obtain a victory directly, or, by unhinging the enemy on another front, indirectly. In this fashion these vast enterprises, hardly “limited,” have intervened and will intervene again in numerous wars, especially in the colossal perturbations that our old European world has experienced and will experience again.
1. Raoul Castex, Théories stratégiques, vol. 5 (Paris: Société d’Editions Géographiques, Maritimes et Coloniales, 1935): 95–115.
2. These operations, assembled under the rubric “escarmouches,” are the subject of Castex, Théories, vol. 5, part 1.
3. Written, of course, before the capabilities of the aircraft carrier, let alone ship- and submarine-launched missiles, had been demonstrated.
4. This is why Corbett is haunted by the defensive aspect of the problem and correctly envisages the offensive as following after the defensive (author’s note). See Corbett, Principles, 231–61.
5. Repetition of typology in chapters 2 and 17.
6. The argument for necessity is clear, but that for sufficiency is not.
7. Neutrals greatly affect the ability of the master of the sea to impose economic pressure. Sea mastery is most effective in the great conflagrations (like the Wars of the French Revolution and Empire and the 1914–1918 war), in which there were few or no neutrals concerned. It is less so in wars of limited scope where there are few belligerents and many powerful neutrals requiring careful treatment (author’s note).
8. Castex vacillates between arguing that mobilization for total war has led to autarchy and that the industrial revolution created a world of economic interdependence.
9. This explains, for example, why Britain and France ended their long struggles without radical revision of their respective positions. One remained superior on sea, the other on land, which were the necessary and sufficient conditions for their respective survivals (author’s note). Again, a dramatic leap from necessity to sufficiency.
10. Castex, Théories, chapter 3 (author’s note).
11. This is undoubtedly why Soviet military writers dismiss mastery of the sea as a “bourgeois idea” (author’s note).
12. See Holger H. Herwig, Luxury Fleet: The Imperial German Navy 1888–1918 (London and Boston, 1980), and Berghahn.
13. For a discussion of the importance of the navy in British national consciousness, see Cynthia Fansler Behrman, Victorian Myths of the Sea (Athens, OH, 1977), especially pages 111–35.
14. Corbett, Principles, 16, quoted above, 44.
15. During the 1914–1918 war, the only major overseas operation involving a contested debarkation with all of its difficulties was the Dardanelles expedition (author’s note).
16. This narrow method of reasoning was von der Goltz’s system. As he said in his famous aphorism, “He who writes about strategy and tactics ought to teach only a national strategy and national tactics, the only ones profiting the nation for whom he writes.” Often repeated by others, this creed combines the true, the disputable, and the false. Undeniably one ought not live entirely in the realm of abstract strategy but must focus on one’s own situation because it affects the destiny of the country. Such narrow inquiries cannot, however, produce a complete theoretical or doctrinal work, which must rest on analysis of the most varied possible range of circumstances. A work like von der Goltz’s offers as general truth conclusions that are only valid for the particular situation and, when it neglects to make its assumptions explicit, entirely deceives the reader (author’s note).
17. See Corbett, Principles, 75–76, for the argument that von der Goltz’s emphasis on complete destruction of the enemy army “tends to turn the art of war into mere bludgeon play.”
18. Pages 111–12 are omitted.
19. The bay west of Algiers where the French expedition landed in June 1830.
20. Some have deduced from these facts that landings will be impossible in the future, but this view is too extreme. Like the offensive against a fortified front, the problem simply requires the right equipment. Even now, solutions like an amphibious tank are being devised (author’s note). For evidence of the contemporary French navy’s skepticism about amphibious operations, see “Note sur le fonctionnement de l’Ecole de Guerre Navale et des Centres d’Etudes dans le cadre de la Défense Nationale,” n.d., 1, Service Historique de L’Armée de Terre, Paris, Carton 2N20/3 (Dossier for C.P.D.N. meeting of 29 July 1936).