Napoleon

"I took that goddamn thing and threw it, it went out the window."

What I want to look at now, is what I call the three giants of the 19th century. First the super-practitioner, Napoleon, we’ll look at him in a lot of detail. Second, the philosopher of war, Clausewitz. And third, sometimes called the systemizer, Jomini. 

Clausewitz primarily was looking at the character and nature of war, Jomini was looking at it from an operational viewpoint. And of course, Napoleon was doing it.

Now the reason why we want to look at all three, why do we want to do that? 

Well first off, remember, we’re trying to search for invariants here. We’re going to look at all these guys from Sun Tzu, Alexander, Napoleon, the Germans, and we’re looking for ideas hold, what are the invariants that hold for all of them. We’re not going to just say, damn, that Clausewitz was a smart son of a bitch, and just take his whole bag of goods, use him as a lens to look at everyone else. No, you got to look at each different perspective, pull it apart first, so then you can put it back together. Pull Jomini apart, pull Clausewitz apart, Sun Tzu apart, and find those things, those invariants that hang together, and then put them back together in a new way.

So that’s one reason. The other reason is because these three guys — Napoleon, Clausewitz, Jomini had such a pervasive influence on modern operations and the way we look at war. And people don’t even realize it. Some of it good, some not very good. So we’re going to pull it apart, find what works, what doesn’t work, and then do what we call synthesis.

So with that in mind, let’s look first at Napoleon, the super-practitioner.

Napoleon

So Napoleon’s got this revolutionary army — storming the Bastille, reign of terror, and all that. Bunch of citizen-soldiers, not so well trained. And you might think that would make it harder for him, and maybe in some ways it did. But it also gave him some big advantages.

Gave him what some people call his “gifts of the revolution”

Moral/Physical energy: Remember, the people are now going to get a piece of the action, so they get this moral elan, they really want to go for it. Because they’re going to be part of the game now, instead of being held down by the aristocracy and Marie Antoinette, let them eat cake.

Irregular Formations. So even though maybe it wasn’t their goal, they stopped following the 1771 Drill Regulations — the use of line and column, the normal way they fought in the 18th century. Napoleon’s guys weren’t trained enough, they couldn’t do it even when they tried. In a way, that helped him. That was key. Had a mobility and fluidity of force much better than his adversaries.

Subdivisions of the army: Okay, another concept that came up prior to Napoleon: the idea of subdividing the army. Divide their army into five smaller corps. And each corps was their own organism, had their own infantry, cavalry, artillery, logistics, and could move totally autonomously. 

So it’s like Napoleon has got five different armies out there against the other guy. If you have one rigid body going in, it’s very immobile. But if you have all these divisions, if you’ve all these thrusts going there, you really have the ability to start pulling the other guy apart. You get at his flanks and rear, if you really pull, you get at his flanks and rear. Of course, that means you have to be a good commander, but Napoleon was that kind of a good commander.

Living off the countryside traveling light: In other words, sort of a reaction against 18th century warfare where they had all these supplies, so they live off the countryside, you operate at a much faster pace. Remember that’s what the Mongols did, living off the countryside, going 50-60 miles every day. And sometimes you see this in the rapid march, 120 instead of a standard 70 steps per minute. 

So you’ve got this moral/physical energy, irregular formations, subdivision of forces, and living off the countryside — gives him a dramatic advantage in terms of mobility, rapidity, fluidity of force. A lot faster than the other guy, could do more stuff, had that tempo advantage with the OODA loop. Let’s take a look at how he used that.

Napoleon — Themes

Strategic Planning — evolve strategic plan with different variations based on potential opponent reactions. Leading up to battle, have spies, agents, cavalry, recce units and so on probe the adversary to uncover their plans and intentions. He’s eliminating possibilities. In other words, keep his own plan simple, reduce his own uncertainty.

Security — generate misinformation, false plans, stratagems to confuse and baffle enemy spies. Employ screens of cavalry, infantry, or both and make the use of natural features such as terrain, weather, and darkness to mask intentions and cloak movements against enemy observation.  In other words, he wants to present an amorphous kind of a being, guys can’t figure out what’s going on, even his own guys. If you want, you can think of the operational security as being the cheng, the stuff that’s designed to keep the other guy’s attention — and then the vigorous offensive action, that’s going to be the ch’i.

Vigorous offensive action — seize initiative at the outset by attacking enemy with an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of (strategic) moves and diversions in order to upset his actions and unsettle his plans thereby psychologically unbalance him and keep initiative throughout.

Strategic dispersion and tactical concentration — You read the literature, they talk all about “assembling concentration”. You really read between the lines, it’s a sort of strategic dispersion followed by tactical concentration. In other words, you start by operating with really wide spaces between your guys, and then as you get closer, suddenly bring your force together in one spot and pounce upon a fraction of your adversary. Again, only works if you have the speed, tempo, fluidity of action. And Napoleon had all that.

Supporting centers of operation, depots and base. The idea being, rather than being constricted by only having one supply line — reinforcement, and ammunition, and information — all that. You want multiple supply lines, so if we get sawed off from one, we’ve got other supply lines in the field. By doing that, they— it frees up his freedom, you’ve got more freedom of maneuver than his adversary, because his adversary only has one line of supply.

Now let’s look at some of Napoleon’s strategies with those themes in mind. 

Napoleon’s Strategies

Ok, the strategy of envelopment. Let’s take a look

Stage I. The Envelopment March: So Napoleon’s guys are blue, enemy is the gray. You can see, on the left, you’ve got the gray guys holding a line of defense, and they’ve got supply lines (LOC) that goes to the right. First thing we do is send in the pinning force and tie down their line of defence, that’s the cheung. And meanwhile, you sneak in the back door, cut off his line of communications so he can’t get supplies, reinforcements, ammunition, all that. That’s the ch’i.

Stage II: Reversed front battle: now you fold back into him from behind and put him under all kinds of pressure, the other guy’s trying to make all the adjustments, defend his rear. And then have your pinning force go after him too. Pull him apart. That’s his strategy of envelopment.

Ok now, let’s look at his strategy of central position. This is the one Jomini liked to talk about:

Stage 1: Advance to Contact. The other guy has two main forces, maybe they’re allies or different generals, or something. You wedge in between him, shove him apart. 

Stage II: Double Battle. Press on one of the sides, in this case the right — that’s your main attack. Just do your best to hold off the guy on the other side. 

Stage III: Coup de Grace. After you clean up with your main attack, you go back and take on the other side. So what you’re doing, really, is taking on the two sides one by one, so you always have numerical superiority. Divide and conquer. That kind of idea.

Ok, one thing I want to point out. With both those strategies, the envelopment and the central position — with both of them, there’s an assumption. And the assumption is speed. Only works if you have the tempo advantage. And that often isn’t brought out when people talk about Napoleon. The assumption is relative speed. 

Okay, so that’s the strategic level. With that in mind, let’s step down to the tactical level. Napoleon was pretty good here in the early battles, but maybe not so good with the later ones.

Napoleon — Tactical Level

Here’s a passage describing a typical engagement in one of his early battles:

“The action was opened by a cloud of sharpshooters, some mounted, some on foot, who were sent forward to carry out a general rather than a minutely-regulated mission; they proceeded to harass the enemy, escaping from his superior numbers by their mobility, from the effect of his cannon by their dispersal. They were constantly relieved to ensure that the fire did not slacken, and they also received considerable reinforcement to increase their over-all effect … Once the chink in foe’s armour had been revealed … the horse artillery would gallop up and open fire with canister at close range. The attacking force would meantime be moving up in the indicated direction, the infantry advancing in column, the cavalry in regiments or squadrons, ready to make its presence felt anywhere or everywhere as required. Then, when the hail of enemy bullets or cannon balls began to slacken … The soldiers would begin to run forward, those in the front ranks crossing their bayonets, as the drums beat the charge; the sky would ring a thousand battle-cries constantly repeated: “En avant. En avant. Vive la Republique.” (from Chandler)

Note what he’s saying: “carry out a general, rather than a regulated mission”. What does that provide me? It allows me to be adaptable. If you’re regulated, you’re non-adaptable. With that adaptability then, then you can go after the chink in your foe’s armor, in other words strength against weakness. That’s the Sun Tzu idea. So the idea here is adaptability, strength against weakness.

And you’ve also got these ideas of the dispersion/concentration game as well, keep the swarm of sharpshooters dispersed, mobile, hard to hit. And then when you find a weakness you use your superior mobility to concentrate quickly and hit him with superior forces at the point of attack. 

And then you started to see a shift in Napoleon’s tactics. Here’s a typical description of his later battles. You notice I took quotes here in both cases because they’re so nicely written:

“At the outset, a heavy bombardment would be loosed against the enemy formations, causing fearful losses if they failed to seek shelter, and generally lowering their power of resistance. Under cover of this fire, swarms of voltigeurs would advance to within musketry range and add a disconcerting ‘nuisance’ element by sniping at officers and the like. This preliminary phase would be followed by a series of heavy cavalry and infantry attacks. The secret of these was careful timing and coordination. The first cavalry charges were designed to defeat the hostile cavalry and compel the enemy infantry to form squares, thereby reduce fire in any one direction and enable the columns to get to close grips before the enemy could resume his linear formation. The infantry (deployed or not) and accompanying horse artillery would then blaze a gap in the enemy formation and finally the cavalry would sweep forward, again, to exploit the breakthrough.”

For these late battles, we’ve got all this attrition stuff. Heavy bombardment with artillery, cavalry going at cavalry, strength against strength. So in some sense, we’ve got a regression here in tactics. He’s falling back to the old ways, focusing more and more on the physical aspects of war, just hammering on the other guy’s strengths.

And notice, everything’s got to be carefully timed. Says it outright, “the secret is careful timing and coordination”. Well guess what? We still got that idea today. Anybody seen the Army Field Manual 100-5? They got these four things up front of the manual: depth, synchronization, agility, and initiative. 

Agility and initiative are good. Depth, there’s nothing wrong with it, except it’s too high on the list, should be lower with agility and initiative. But synchronization? Synchronization’s a disaster. 

Christ, we’re in a war of confusion, how are you going to do this careful timing stuff, that’s bullshit. You don’t synchronize human beings, you synchronize watches. If you want to use a word, use harmony. Synchronization is part of harmony, but harmony is not necessarily part of synchronization.

I’ll tell them right to their face, it’s bullshit. You got to learn how to use that noodle of yours. You don’t synchronize human beings. That’s not saying you shouldn’t synchronize watches, I’m not against that. Once in a while, you want a very tight synchronization with the artillery coming in on time, on target, or something like that, but you don’t synchronize human beings. Anybody who says they're going to synchronize me, I get personally irritated.

Relevant passage from Army Field Manual 100-5:

Synchronization usually requires explicit coordination among the various units and activities participating in any operation. By itself, however, such coordination is no guarantee of synchronization unless commanders first visualize the consequences to be produced and how they sequence activities to produce them. Staff must understand their commander’s intent since they make a large part of the synchronization plan happen. Synchronization thus takes place first in the minds of commanders and then in the actual planning and coordination of movements, fires, and supporting activities. Rehearsals are key to successful execution of synchronized operations.

Zeno: But also doesn’t 100-5 on synchronization— Your point’s well taken, I agree with it completely, sir, but synchronization is, to be fair, they also refer to it as the state of mind of the commander.

Boyd: Oh, the commander, he’s going to synchronize everything now—

Zeno No, I mean, he’s considering—

Boyd: He’s considering — he can’t know everything of what his troops are going do, or what’s going to happen. He’s not going know the infinite details, if he tries to get in there, he’s going screw up the operation, period. We’ve done that over and over again. These generals, I don’t know what the hell they’re thinking about. They want to choreograph the whole damn thing, down to the platoon level. Because they ran a platoon one time, twenty years ago, I guess they still want to fight war at the platoon level.

Did you remember, Patton criticized his own guy? He told a colonel, goddamn it, I don’t want you to interfere with their tactics. You just tell them what they’re supposed to do, and they’re going to do it how they want, and that’s your job. Be sure they get the resources, he told his colonels, but stay out of it. He said, and I quote, “all you’re gonna do is muck it up.” He understood that. Can’t say he wasn’t a successful commander. And he says, “all you’re gonna do is muck it up.”

Zeno: Colonel Boyd, didn’t we start doing that though, during the Korean War, with nuclear weapons and communications were better—

Boyd: You’re raising a very crucial point. What’s happened, because of the rise of nuclear weapons — boy they didn’t want some guy flinging off nuclear weapons, so they had very tight control, because it’s an awesome weapon. And they should. But you shouldn’t — just because you have that kind of control for nuclear weapons, that you want to have it at all other levels. Once again, that’s a rigidity of mind.

What you want to do when you give an order is, you want to tell somebody what the goal is. And let them determine how it’s going to be carried out. You should also tell them why you want it done. You know, so they can see that there’s a reason for it, not some goddamn bullshit in itself. You tell them what and why. They get to decide how. And ok, put whatever constraints that you want, because you’re probably going to have this thing in a larger context, and if people start doing anything they want, it can cause you some problems. So you should have constraints. Unfortunately, what we do is make the constraints so goddamn narrow, the guy can only do one thing, so therefore he’s got no freedom of action

Zeno: All those things you just said, you know, give the guy an order, let him do it how he wants, that’s what we’re told in school.

Boyd: That’s correct.

Zeno: But then we have commanders come in, and—

Boyd: I know exactly what you’re telling me. They say “oh, we agree with you,” and then they give you orders, and Christ, you don’t have any freedom of action. That’s exactly right. In other words, they’re saying one thing but they’re doing another. In other words, it’s a huge goddamn deception operation. On you! You’re the object of the deception. 

I’ll give you a good example of when I was overseas, of how they wanted me to do it. Vietnam war — I was sent over to Task Force Alpha. You probably know that was the old sensor program, sometimes called Igloo White or some other names. People didn’t like that name. In any case, over in southeast Asia.

They went through seven base commanders in two years. They said, Boyd, you got to clean it up there, you’re the new base commander. I didn’t want the job, hell I don’t want this, goddamn. But I had to take it over. Well, I’d been there for a few days — hell, I didn’t even know what my responsibilities were — when a couple of our electric goons, those spy C-47s crashed, with their ELINT13 gear and listening gear and all that. Of course, they crashed out there in areas where there might be guerrillas, and we had to figure out how to send choppers to go rescue the pilots.

Now I hadn’t been there too long, just got there. This guy, a captain, he says, you’re the commander on the spot. I said, I am? He says, yeah. And he said, here’s your checklist. I goddamn near fell over. I said, what do you mean, checklist? I took that goddamn thing and threw it, it went out the window. 

I said, where’s a map, let’s find out where they are, and let’s start making some decisions. Then the guy brought the checklist back in, and I threw it back out the goddamn window. Some captain. I said, you can’t operate this way. If I read this thing, those guys will die of starvation out there before we even get to them.

So I said, now where’s the map? I said, get that goddamn thing out. You point to where they were flying. They said, we don’t know. I said, who knows? He said, we’ll find out. We’re on that. I said, fine. What resources do we have available? I’m going to take the choppers out there. Then we found out we don’t have enough choppers to get out there. They said, well yeah, but those other guys have got to use the choppers first. Fuck that, I don’t care. So I reversed the whole order, and sent the choppers out and everything else. And the guy kept bringing the checklist back. I said, I don’t give a goddamn to hell you fucking bring it back in here again.

He said — you know, as the new guy — said I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I got them all out. Rescued our guys and blew up the two planes. You know, we had to blow them up because of all the security equipment all in there. But I didn’t go by any goddamn checklist. I said, you know, what should we do, and did things that had to be done. If I started reading a checklist, hell, that’s bullshit. 

Of course, I’m a fighter pilot, I think that way. When I was a fighter pilot, they had this huge book. You got to go sign it on all the regulations you agree to, and so if you violate it, they can hand you your ass. Well, nobody ever reads the son of a bitch, they just signed it and walk out the door and said, yeah, I read the son of a bitch. I bet it’s probably this goddamn thick now.

Zeno: They’re a lot thicker now. You don’t sign anymore, sir. They just say you’re responsible for all these regulations, even some that you don’t know of. That’s the new way.

Boyd: Yeah. Well we all go in here, great, sign, walk out the door. It took thirty seconds. Nobody reads the son of a bitch. And they had this huge book for it. That was so if you violate something, they could hang your ass and they got your name on it. That’s all it was for.

You really read that thing, you’d be here a week. Like you said, it’s even thicker now because they got more regulations in the meantime. It’s a huge thing. We all used to laugh. I’d say, we’re all a bunch of goddamn liars.

You go down there and stand in line and flip through this huge book. Boy, you really walked out of there fast. It’s a disaster.

Okay. I’m getting off track. Now we were going to look at Napoleon. Did I take you through that yet? Yeah. Okay. Well let’s talk about his art of war.

Napoleon’s Art of War

Time to do an evaluation of Napoleon’s approach. At the strategic level, he used ambiguity, deception, and mobility. Generated a lot of confusion, uncertainty in the enemy. The strategic, I want to give him high marks. Tactical level, not so good as time went on.

Actually, after a time, he had his guys get back to the 1791 Drill Manual. Column for movement and line for attack and perfect formations and all that. And he ran a very heavy-handed application of that, actually. And what you get is battering ram tactics, strength against strength.

Ok, so you open the battle with ambiguity and deception, that kaleidoscope of strategic maneuvers. Good stuff there, play the concentration/dispersion game, unsettle the guy, take the initiative. But then you have to go for the killing blow, and Napoleon was just too predictable there, goddamn everyone saw what he was trying to do. By the end, everything was stereotyped and obvious. And he could not procure victory because of it.

Waterloo’s a good example. Christ, Napoleon made some mean strategic moves. But after that it was “hey diddle diddle, right up the middle.” He got taken out. Wellington, remember what he said? Napoleon came on the same old way, and we beat him the same old way. Because he figured out the tactics that had to be used against Napoleon down in Spain. And so guess what: Napoleon saw those tactics didn’t work, he still used them at Waterloo, and he got hammered one more time.

Second problem — he emphasized the conduct of war from the top down. Strictly a top-down mentality. Whereas he had a scheme in his mind, his marshals didn’t know. Since they didn’t know, they had to do exactly what he said to do. And they worried their own troops wouldn’t do it. It gets more and more rigid as you go down lower and lower. Wanted to synchronize his guys, make them automatons.

The problem with the automatons is that they only do what you tell them to do. They don’t do anything else. They don’t think ahead. They don’t think about what’s happening. They don’t think about what the other guy’s doing. They don’t think about what’s happening to them. They don’t think about what they’re doing. They don’t think about what they’re not doing. They don’t think about what they should be doing. You want to have people who can think, who can act, who can be responsible for themselves. So you’ve got to go through those steps. You’ve got to keep pushing responsibility down.

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→ Next up, read Chapter 4: Von Clausewitz

→ See the full book here.