On Tactics by B. A. Friedman

This book is an excellent size and weight.  Small, portable, yet solid.  It’s published by the Naval Institute Press, they who took a chance on an unknown insurance man named Tom Clancy who’d written a thriller called The Hunt For Red October.

Amazon suggested this book to me as I was browsing translations of Sun Tzu.  Military history has interested me since I was a boy, maybe because 1) the stakes are so high and 2) the stories are so vivid.  Metaphors and similes drawn from famous war events are powerful and stark.  Consider for example Friedman’s description of the Battle of the Bulge:

… Although the Germans had caught the Allies at their culminating point, the Germans reached their own far too early.  Newly created infantry units were filled with hastily trained and inexperienced conscripts.  These green units could not effectively hold the territory gained by the leading panzer units.  On 22 December the fog cleared and Allied air units hammered the German formations from the skies.  Despite the prestaged fuel reserves, panzer units still ran out of fuel, just when they needed it to escape the Allied aerial counterattack.

Buried in there is a tactical lesson, and also an intense story about some poor children getting blown up right before Christmas.

The author was a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps.  If I understand right, might make this book the equivalent of a book called like Writing A Hit TV Show by a staff writer.  But Friedman seems like he’s gone deep on the knowledge, and there’s a quote from Gen. Anthony Zinni on the back.  Good enough for me.

Alexander The Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading – the men who have gone before us.  We have been fighting on this planet for 5,000 years and we should take advantage of their experience.

So goes a quote from James Mattis that opens this book.  Friedman cites the example of Cortes in 1520 CE, referring to written accounts of Alexander’s battle at Gaugamela eighteen hundred years before to design his tactics against the Mexica/Aztec.

What is strategy?  What is tactics?  Where do they divide?  Friedman summarizes Clausewitz:

Clausewitz divided warfare into tactics, actual combat between opposed military forces, and strategy, the latter being the overarching plan for using tactical engagements to achieve the ends as set forth by policy… The strategy acts as a bridge between the tactical actors (military forces) and the desired political end state of the entity those forces serve.

Much of this book is summaries of Clausewitz, really and Sun Tzu as well.  How could it not be?

What I thought I remembered most of all from Clausewitz is the concept of Fingerspitzengefühl, fingertips-feel, a sensing of what’s going on, and where.  But I don’t have my copy of Vom Kriege at hand, and searching for fingerspitzengefühl it seems possible the term may be of later origin.  Maybe it was discussed in the introduction.

Clausewitz is very concerned with will, the imposing of one’s will on the enemy, breaking the will of the enemy.  Given the time and place where Clausewitz was coming from, 1800s what’s now-Germany, I can’t help but think this idea of will was connected to other philosophers like Kant who were pondering the meanings and dimensions of will around then.

Friedman picks up on the idea of will, or what he refers to as moral cohesion.  He digs in on the idea of destroying the enemy’s moral cohesion.

Clausewitz defined the destruction of an enemy as “they must be put in such a condition that they can no longer carry on the fight” (emphasis added).  This does not mean that the enemy force must be totally destroyed.  Indeed, he went on to say, “when we speak of destroying the enemy’s forces we must emphasize that nothing obliges us to limit this idea to physical forces: the moral element must be considered.  In other words, breaking the moral cohesion of the opposing force is destruction of that force as an effective unit and the true goal of tactics.

In a whole chapter on moral cohesion, Friedman quotes Marine Major Earl “Pete” Ellis speaking of how important it was to marines fighting insurgents in the Philippines to believe that the United States was acting from “purely altruistic motives.”  Jim Storr’s The Human Face of War is quoted as well: “In general, defeat occurs when the enemy believes he is beaten… Defeat is a psychological state.”

Friedman brings out Clausewitz’s concept of “the center of gravity,” too, and points out, in a thought-provoking way that it’s not totally clear what Clausewitz meant or understood by “gravity,” and what Clausewitz understood about physics.  Clausewitz died in 1831 — have we even figured out gravity now?  Clausewitz noted that the center of gravity could be a capital city, an ally, the shared interests of an alliance, particular leaders, or popular opinion.  The North Vietnamese correctly located the center of gravity of the US in the Vietnam War as American political will.  They destroyed our moral cohesion.

Friedman is tough on the U.S war in Iraq, which he says is “a glaring example of tactics, strategy, and policy in disarray.”  We need to maintain our sense of moral cohesion.  It’s slipping away from us.

We get some Boyd, too, a favorite here at HelyTimes.  As a bottom line lesson on tactics, this is pretty clear and cool:

Boyd says if you move and decide faster than your enemy, you will win.

Friedman concludes by pointing out that tactics are subordinate to strategy.

The tactician employs tactics that will best serve the strategy, but he must also know when a flawed strategy cannot be achieved with reasonable tactics.  Duty might still demand that he try to accomplish the mission, but he will need to inform the strategist that his aims are improbable.

Taking on a big concept like tactics and attempting to codify and create a short, comprehensible theory or unified system is a nobel mission.  I found On Tactics profitable to read and full of stimulating ideas and examples.