Martin Van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985)
Overview: A long duree history on the evolution of command systems in war from ancient Greece to Vietnam. The work is a study of command over millennia and six major types of war, using case studies from antiquity, Napoleon’s battle of Jena-Auerstedt, the Prussian-Austrian War, World War I, Israeli battles in 1967 and 1973, and Vietnam, to examine the organization, processes, and technologies of command.
Central Thesis: The function of command has not fundamentally changed, but the evolution of command is as complex as any other evolution in war. Command can be divided into three categories: organizations, procedures, and technological means. Command systems, therefore, exist to eliminate uncertainty, something that has held true since 500 BC.
Scope of Book: This book covers how command systems developed from their stone age styles to modern computerized systems: the birth of the nation-state regular army, the rise of the science of military strategy, the advent of new communication technologies, the development of means for mobilization, and the emergence of computer and space technologies
- Command organizations developed to match developments in weapons, tactics, strategy, and other factors.
- The procedure of submitting daily strength reports at the end of the eighteenth century, for example, gave birth to the specialized personnel of the General Staff system. Thus the shift from oral to written orders represents a monumental shift in command systems.
- The telescope, telegraph, telephone and especially the radio had immense effect on the changing nature of command systems.
- Van Crevald is enamored with how organizations and commanders react to information. “Confronted with a task, and having less information available than is needed to perform the task, an organization may react in either of two ways. One is to increase its information-processing capacity, the other to design the organization, and indeed the task itself, in such a way as to enable it to operate on the basis of less information. These approaches are exhaustive; no others are conceivable. A failure to adopt one or the other will automatically result in a drop in the level of performance.”(269)
- van Creveld favors the training and education necessary to operate in complex scenarios with less information. It is with this in mind where auftragstaktik, mission-type orders, and Mission Command can begin to truly thrive.
- Van Creveld assets, persuasively, that strategic command prior to Napoleon was nearly nonexistent. The best that a commander could do was guess to place himself at the decisive point of a battle and bull through with sheer physical force. For van Creveld, Napoleonic warfare was the “greatest single revolution ever wrought in the art of command—and one, moreover, that owed little to technological advances.” (14) Napoleon’s success lie in his genius, greater organization of manpower, better logistical support in roads, maps, and canalsand communication capabilities.
- Van Creveld sees command as relatively unchanged from ancient greek’s until the second half of the seventeenth century when “senior commanders habitually start taking their place behind, rather than in front of, their ment, and Frederick the Great was probably the first commander in chief regularly depicted as wearing a suit rather than of armor.” (17) This, he asserts, is because there were no fundamental changes in the technical means of communication before then.
- Van Creveld argues that Vietnam was a step too far, where colonels in helicopter turned the “directed telescope of command” into a paralyzing instrument of over-control, and statistical methods directed the army into doing what could be measured rather than what mattered.
- He asserts at the end that “The history of command can thus be understood in terms of a race between the demand for information and the ability of command systems to meet it.” (265)
Commentary: A solid if dated exploration of command and control over the grand scope of history. An updated, nuanced take on Vietnam and even exploration of modern command systesm would be an excellent addendum.