Okay. Jomini. He’s systematizing Claueswitz and Napoleon, draws all these diagrams in his book.
First thing he does, is he generalizes the oblique order, traces it all the way back to Frederick at Leuthen and Leuctra, like we looked at.
And he talks about the importance of setting up a multiple supply lines and bases of operation, so you can change and shift them — like we talked about with Napoleon. So you can actually maneuver and gain leverage.
And then he says employment of forces should be regulated by two fundamental principles: the first being, to obtain by free and rapid movements the advantage of bringing the mass of the troops against fractions of the enemy; the second, to strike in the most decisive direction.
That’s an important statement: “free and rapid movements” to carry the bulk of our forces against “fractions of the enemy”. If you’re not free and rapid, how are you going to get your strength against their weakness? You’re not going to be able to. Once again, the speed in the sense is the higher principle than the idea of concentration. He in a sense says that right in the statement. And all that Clausewitz was starting to bring out, Jomini is trying to systematize it.
And he recognized the importance of seizing supply and communication lines. Cut him off from support. People tend to panic when they lose their support, and start doing dumb things. He talks about other stuff too — force him to fight on a reverse front. If the enemy’s forces are too much extended, pierce his center. The strategy of central position with Napoleon. Go out, flank, and turn their wing. Contain him at the front and hit him in the flank. That’s Patton. Hold him by the nose and kick him in the ass. He might have read Jomini and got it out of that. I don’t know.
He says this thing, “attack may be made simultaneous upon both extremities, but not when the attacking force is equal or inferior to the enemy’s”. There are too many counterexamples to that. It doesn’t stand up. Even Napoleon at Dresden pulled it off. You look at Cannae and many other of the damn things done. Just too many counterexamples of that. It doesn’t work out.
But if you look at it more carefully than what he’s writing, what he’s really doing is he’s juxtaposing the double envelopment versus single envelopment. Basically, what he is saying is you can get the same leverage with less force out of a single envelopment scheme as opposed to a double envelopment. Basically that’s what he’s saying. If you look at it in a very rigid sense, that sort of holds together.
Critiquing Jomini
Now we critique Jomini. So a lot of good stuff there, but he had too much of a preoccupation with a formations, arrangement of bases, geometry. In other words, very formal, very rigid thinking in that sense. Also, a lack of appreciation for the use of loose, irregular swarms of guerrillas and skirmishers to mask your movements — He didn’t even talk about that. He had some good ideas but you’ve got to really throw away those rigid lattice work formations.
He even kind of saw it himself, but he didn’t want to see it. He talks about cavalry, juxtaposes the Cossacks versus the French cavalry. He talks about it and he says, the Cossacks “acquire a habit of moving in an apparently disorderly manner, whilst they are all the time directing their individual efforts toward a common object”. And he makes a comment upon the fact that Lloyd, who preceded him, saw that really the Cossacks were a better cavalry than all the other cavalries because of this disorder they created. Then Jomini looks at this. He said he agreed with Loyd, he said Cossacks win all their battles, “but however, we all know the regular cavalry is better,” so he voted against the evidence. He had all the evidence and voted the other way. He said, “We’re going to have these guys in nice neat formations.”
In fact, there’s a book— anybody ever read Forward into Battle? And there’s another book — I’m trying to remember the name of it now. The one that two guys wrote about the Civil War southern military tactics.
Zeno: Oh, McWhiney and Jamieson —
Boyd: What’s the name of that?
Zeno: Attack and Die —
Boyd: Yeah. You want to read that very carefully. There are some interesting things in there. They’ve got a lot of quotes. There are a couple cases in there where a so-called attack “broke down”. Note the words. They really didn’t break down, but they lost all their goddamn uniformity and rigidity, and the goddamn guys floated at the enemy line every which way and they won. They sat there mystified. How did we do that? Then they went back to their old ways again, tried to pound it home and they couldn’t.
The attacks that were breaking down — what they thought were breaking down were actually succeeding. What they didn’t realize was the ambiguity and deception, the unpredictability, enemy couldn’t deal with the fluidity.
So here these other guys had the evidence where these guys are floating in and infiltrating the lines, and they said “We’re going back the other way”. You want to read Forward into Battle. It’s in there. I read it. I said, “God, they don’t even read their own reports.” It was right there, right in front of their eyes. Couldn’t see it because they had preconceptions, presuppositions in their mind, those goddamned drill regulations.
They said the attack broke down, but it succeeded. The attack didn’t break down —their formations broke down and because their formations broke down, it did succeed. That was the answer. Because the formations broke down, they were able to succeed. Incorrect interpretation.
Critiquing the Three Giants
In any case, we tie them all together, Napoleon, Clausewitz and Jomini. As a whole, they all had this same problem. They did not appreciate importance of loose, irregular tactical arrangements and activities to mask or distort own presence and intentions as well as confuse and disorder adversary operations.
They had this idea of adaptable planning and surprise at the strategic level. But on the tactical, they really didn’t appreciate the importance of irregular and varied execution. They were all top down. No bottom up.
And that pervasive influence came forward to the present day. I was telling some army colonels about that. I said that the Army, you guys emphasize adaptability at the top of command and regularity at the bottom. And one of them got up and said, you’re wrong Boyd. I said, why? He said, because today we’ve got regularity at both the top and bottom. Hah. I said, I’ll remember that, that’s very good.
So, why did that occur? Why did they gravitate to that? Remember Napoleon himself. Even though he was a product of the Revolution, he also reinstalled the aristocracy, where, you know, the aristocracy wants to control the people below them. So he did that. Plus the fact that he’d got a large empire here. He had to use foreign troops. He wanted to be able to also control them. So those kind of things happened. So, in a sense, by his own conquest and by elevating his own positions, he starts doing the kind of things that the people did before him that allowed him to take then down. I guess you can go back to Lord Acton’s statement, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
He was trying to run the whole Empire, and he had these allies, you know, the Prussians, who were supposed to be subservient to them, and so he had to put down stringent rules upon them. He wanted to be able to control them. Obsession for control. Obsession for control; that’s what we’re talking about. And the more you try to control people, guess what? The less control you get. It’s like a paradox. The more you try to constrain their activities, the more you control people, the less control you get over the situation.
That’s why you’ve got to make those people responsible below feel like they’re part of the action. They’ve got things they need to do, and we’re not going to treat them like automatons. The more you try to treat them like automatons, that's an obsession for control.
It’s like discipline. You don’t really want to have to discipline your people. What you want to inculcate in them is a sense of self-discipline because then you have discipline. If you always need to discipline people, you got a problem. You want to be able to set things up so inside themselves they build up a sense of self-discipline. That’s what counts. That’s what you want to do as a commander or a leader, be able to inculcate them with a sense of self-discipline. Then you’re a real commander. You’re a real leader. Not only that, you have real control then, too.
→ Next up, read Chapter 6: WWI
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