PDA

View Full Version : The Canon



thedrifter
06-26-04, 05:16 AM
06-22-2004

Guest Column: The Canon (Part I)







By William S. Lind



My last column laid out the basic framework of the Four Generations of modern war (“The Four Generations of War,” DefenseWatch, June 10, 2004). Here, we pick up with a discussion of “the canon,” the seven books which, read in the order given, will take the reader from the First Generation through the Second, the Third and on into the Fourth.



The first book in the canon is C.E. White, The Enlightened Soldier. This book explains why you are reading all the other books. It is the story of Scharnhorst, the leader of the Prussian military reform movement of the early 1800s, as a military educator. With other young officers, Scharnhorst realized that if the Prussian army, which had changed little since the time of Frederick the Great, fought Napoleon, it would lose and lose badly.



Instead of just waiting for it to happen, he put together a group of officers who thought as he did, the Militaerische Gesellschaft, and they worked out a program of reforms for the Prussian army (and state). Prussia’s defeat at the battle of Jena opened the door to these reforms, which in turn laid the basis for the German army’s development of Third Generation war in the 19th and early 20th century. When I taught a course on the Four Generations at Quantico a few years ago, my students, Marine captains, said that of all the books in the canon, they liked this one best.



The next book is Robert Doughty, The Seeds of Disaster. This is the definitive history of the development of Second Generation warfare in the French army during and after World War I. This book is in the canon because we learned modern war from the French, absorbing Second Generation war wholesale from them (as late as 1930, when the U.S. Army wanted a manual on operational art, it just took the French manual on Grand Tactics, translated it and issued it as its own).



Every American officer to whom I have lent my copy has told me when he returned it, “This is us.” The Seeds of Disaster is the only book in the canon that is something of a dull read, but it is essential to understand why the American armed forces act as they do.



The third book, Bruce Gudmundsson’s Stormtroop Tactics, is the story of the development of Third Generation war in the German army in World War I. It is also a book on how to change an army. Twice during World War I, the Germans pulled their army out of the Western Front unit-by-unit and retrained it in radically new tactics.



Those new tactics, which are still largely new to American units today (how many American platoon leaders or company commanders have ever done a three-element assault?), broke the deadlock of the trenches, even if Germany had to wait for the development of the Panzer divisions to turn tactical success into operational victory.



Book four, Martin Samuels’s Command or Control?, compares British and German tactical development from the late 19th century through World War I. Its value is the clear distinctions it draws between the Second and Third Generations, distinctions the reader will find useful when looking at the U.S. armed forces today.



The British were so firmly attached to the Second Generation – at times, even the First – that German officers who had served on both fronts in World War I often said British troop handling was even worst than Russian. Bruce Gudmundsson argues that in each generation, one Brit is allowed really to understand the Germans. In our generation, Martin Samuels is that Brit.



I will conclude this discussion of the canon in my next column.



Guest Contributor William S. Lind, a veteran defense policy analyst, is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation, where this article originally appeared. He can be reached through the foundation’s mailform. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.

http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=DefenseWatch.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=538&rnd=687.8383342129524


Ellie

thedrifter
06-26-04, 05:16 AM
06-26-2004

Guest Column: The Canon (Part II)







By William S. Lind



This column, the third in a series, concludes a discussion of the canon, the seven books which, read in the order given, will take the reader from the First Generation of modern war through the Fourth. As one Marine Corps captain, an instructor at The Basic School, said, “Unless the guy’s a rock, he can’t read these books in the right order and not get it.”



(For my analysis of the first four books of the canon, see “The Canon (Part I),” DefenseWatch, June 22, 2004. Also see my earlier framework of the Four Generations of modern war, “The Four Generations of War,” DefenseWatch, June 10, 2004.)



The fifth book in the canon is again by Robert Doughty, the head of the History Department at West Point and the best American historian of the modern French army: The Breaking Point.



This is the story of the battle of Sedan in 1940, where Guderian’s Panzers crossed the Meuse and then turned and headed for the English Channel in a brilliant example of operational art. Here, the reader sees the Second and Third Generations clash head-on. Why does the Third Generation prevail? Because over and over, at decisive moments the Third Generation Wehrmacht takes initiative (often led by NCOs in doing so) while the French wait for orders. What the French did was often right, but it was always too late.



The sixth book in the canon is Martin van Creveld’s Fighting Power, the second-best book by this brilliant Israeli military historian. While The Breaking Point contrasts the Second and Third Generations in combat, Fighting Power compares them as institutions.



It does so by contrasting the U.S. Army in World War II with the German Wehrmacht. What emerges is a picture of two radically different institutions, each consistent with its doctrine. This book is important because it illustrates why you cannot do what the U.S. military is now attempting, namely combine Third Generation, maneuver warfare doctrine with a Second Generation, inward-focused, process-ridden, centralized institution. If you are a Marine, the next time the MAGTF Staff Training Program (MSTP) visits your unit, you might want to throw a copy of Fighting Power at them – hard.



The seventh and final book in the canon is van Creveld’s finest work to date, The Transformation of War.



Easily the most important book on war written in the last quarter-century, Transformation lays out the basis of Fourth Generation war, the state’s loss of its monopoly on war and on social organization. In the 21st century, as in all centuries up to the rise of the state, many different entities will fight war, for many different reasons, not just raison d’etat. Clausewitz’s “trinity” of people, government and army vanishes, as the elements disappear or become indistinguishable from one another. Van Creveld’s term for what I call Fourth Generation war is non-trinitarian warfare. He subsequently wrote another book, The Rise and Decline of the State, which lays out the historical basis of the theory in Transformation.



These seven books constitute the canon.



But there is one I am tempted to add, for naval audiences: Andrew Gordon’s The Rules of the Game.



The canon is based on land warfare, but the same elements we see in the First, Second and Third Generations also exist in naval warfare, although their development follows different patterns. In the second half of the 18th century, the Royal Navy developed and institutionalized Third Generation war – then loses it again in the 19th century.



The Rules of the Game explains how and why they lost it. At the heart of the matter lies signaling, and the illusion that advances in signaling permit effective centralization – a point of some relevance today as our military services drown in a tsunami of computers and video screens. It is a point Gordon does not miss.



As I said at the outset, what the canon (plus Gordon) offer is an intellectual framework, a construct the reader can use to make sense of events and discern larger patterns in them. There can, of course, be other frameworks, although I would urge caution toward those based on simple technological determinism (on that, see van Creveld’s Technology and War).



But without a framework of some sort, both history and current developments in war tend to appear chaotic. Soldiers as well as scholars need a framework if they are to make sense out of the world around them. The canon offers the best framework I know.



Guest Contributor William S. Lind, a veteran defense policy analyst, is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation, where this article originally appeared. He can be reached through the foundation’s mailform. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.

http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=DefenseWatch.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=543&rnd=745.1868685959183


Ellie