A Quick Look at the Historiography
Concomitant with the idea of a “Western Way of War” is the quest for decisive battle. Throughout much of history, militaries and generals have sought to decide conflicts in one decision — achieving goals through annihilation of the enemy rather than protracted, prolonged wars of attrition and exhaustion. An infatuation with great battles pervades much of popular military history as well. This chase thus placed a premium on conventional operations as armies sought short decisive wars while neglecting the reality that victory in war is decided through attritional conflict more often than not. According to Cathal Nolan in The Allure of Battle, a decision in war more often comes after political and social exhaustion, which battles contribute to but are also influenced by economics, logistics, and alliances. War, therefore, is generally decided by attrition than one monumental fight. While some examples of short, decisive wars persist — notably Prussia in the mid-19th century, these are far from the rule. Regardless, few battles in the modern era have been anything more than tactically decisive. Battles are often indecisive, as Patrick Porter writes in Military Orientalism.
The influence of Napoleon is critical in advancing these ideas into the modern age. Napoleonic wars represent a shift from avoiding battle to deliberately seeking it. According to Gunter Rothenberg, Napoleonic warfare returned decisiveness to war. The performance of the Grande Armee at Austerlitz is a shining example of his most famous maxim. Napoleon was convinced that it was essential to destroy the enemy through massed concentration of force. Napoleon thus gave Anton-Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz ample fodder for their ideas about warfare and decisive engagements. Jomini’s most crucial principle in The Art of War (1838) rested on applying an army’s mass against the enemy’s decisive point, something he learned from Napoleon. Clausewitz also espoused the validity of attaining superiority at the culminating point in his On War (1832). As Jomini became the principle text undergirding western military doctrine, so too did the idea of seeking a decisive engagement that would destroy the enemy’s forces. “Battle-Seeking” became ubiquitous thereafter as armies and leaders digested interpretations of Napoleon that viewed the battle as the ideal form of war.
Notions of Napoleonic genius codified in Jominian principles helped fuel a fixation with quick victories throughout the 19th century. Prussia’s successive quick victories in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars in battles of annihilation in the middle of the century helped fuel the short war myth even though the Crimean and American Civil War providing ample evidence that attritional war would become ever more prevalent as new technology and defensive capabilities developed. Prussian success in 1866 and 1870–71 helped propel German operational hubris in 1914 and again in 1939. Jack Snyder argues in The Ideology of the Offensive that the success of the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars combined with Napoleonic ideals led to a “cult of the offensive” forming among great powers by 1914 — notably Germany, Russia, and France — despite recent wars demonstrating that new technology would give defenders the advantage.
The allure of short, decisive victories is enticing because it promises to provide clarity while avoiding long-drawn-out struggles. Attritional war, especially after the Western Front of World War I, appeared immoral and useless. Short, decisive, heroic offensives were the key to restoring honor to war. Nolan’s “allure” comes from the idea that a short war is possible if only circumstances and luck break perfectly for the nation planning for it. In Germany’s case in the early twentieth century, if they could achieve short victories, they might have avoided problems in grand strategy and logistics inherent in their operational plans. However, as no plan survives first contact with the enemy, their plans were quickly thwarted by a series of decisions, not to mention Allied decisions and therefore the contingency of historical actors.
Another influential theorist chasing the ideal of decisive battle heavily influenced naval development. Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that naval power and national power go hand in hand. The battlefleet is the means to secure this power, which then entailed concentrating ships to gain ‘command of the sea’ through a decisive defeat of the enemy fleet. If the enemy avoids this, then attacking the fleet in its harbor is preferred. To achieve that end, Mahan advocated a robust system of overseas coaling stations by which turn of the century coal-fired ships could refuel and resupply throughout the world. These ideas influenced much of American imperial policy, including the 1898 Spanish-American War and subsequent control over the Philippine Islands, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.
Airpower theorists like Giulio Douhet and Billy Mitchell also sought to quickly bring about decisions through the strategic bombing of enemy populations and their vital industrial centers. In the end, this proved untenable as civilian morale could not be easily demolished, and the bomber alone was insufficient — it required escorts. As Tami Davis Biddle shows in Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, pre-war rhetoric did not match reality. While necessary for defeating Nazi Germany, according to Richard Overy in Why the Allies Won, the air arm’s primary importance was in achieving air supremacy, allowing Allied ground forces to defeat Nazi Germany.
In Quest for Decisive Victory, Robert Citino argues that war lost its decisiveness after Napoleon and regained it in the German campaign of 1940. The latter becoming the benchmark for modern warfare. While this is true to a degree, he is effectively leaving out those instances that did prove decisive while omitting the reality that while early German operational campaigns in 1940 were decisive, they did not, in turn, decide the war like World War II swiftly devolved into an attritional and German defeat.
In the quest for decisiveness, many militaries have chosen to gloss over, or even outright ignore other types of warfare. Ingo Trauschweizer argues in The Cold War U.S. Army that the United States, despite war’s in Asia, prioritized its mechanized units in Europe. The United States viewed a decisive confrontation with the Soviet Union as the most dangerous outcome and worth of priority. Andrew Krepinevich argues in The Army and Vietnamthat the U.S. Army was neither trained nor organized to fight effectively in an insurgency conflict environment. According to Krepinevich, the Army focused on conventional engagements requiring high volumes of firepower — decisive battles. When forced to fight an insurgency that they could not defeat in one decisive battle turned to a strategy of attrition conducted through large-scale operations better designed for high-intensity conflicts. Ergo, the U.S. Army’s focus on preparing for decisive engagement with the Soviet Union precluded it from adapting to the exigencies of low-intensity conflict in Vietnam.
It remains clear the quest for decisiveness in battle is a tradition in military thinking since Napoleon seemingly returned decision to the battlefield. In attempts to lessen casualties and shorten wars, militaries have continuously placed primacy on achieving quick results — often at the expense of planning or preparing for long, drawn-out struggles of attrition. This focus has caused militaries to often ignore the reality that battles in and of themselves are rarely decisive, and warfare has often required strategies designed to exhaust one’s enemy.
