Joint warfighters are expected to have at least a basic familiarity with the Principles of War. These principles "guide warfighting at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels," Joint Publication 3-0: Doctrine for Joint Operations tells us, "They are the enduring bedrock of U.S. military doctrine." Ten years ago the Strategic Studies Institute published a monograph—The Principles of War in the 21st Century, written by William T. Johnsen and several co-authors—that neatly summarizes the understanding of the principles of war. The principles are an "intellectual framework" that "shapes" the professional soldier's "thought processes," Johnsen and his co-authors state. The warfighter should possess a "comprehensive understanding of the principles" so that he can "expand creatively upon them" as well as decide which are relevant to circumstance, and which are not. Thus conventional thinking would have us believe that the principles of war, rooted in experience and validated by their pivotal station in the formulation of joint doctrine and professional military education, are vital to efficient war planning and effective command.
The thesis of this paper is that war, dominated by the particularity of circumstance as well as by human frailty and resourcefulness, is not subject to principles, which by definition are fixed and universal laws. What we call the principles of war are nothing more than factors that influence, but do not necessarily determine, the outcome of battle. The terms themselves—among them mass, maneuver, and objective—occupy a prominent place in the warfighter's vocabulary. But they are not principles as that term is commonly defined. The principles of war is a misnomer that suggests that warfighting is at heart a mechanical activity. It should be dropped from the warfighter's lexicon. The Oxford English Dictionary—the ultimate authority on the usage of our language—defines "principle" as "A fundamental source from which something proceeds; a primary element, force, or law which produces or determines particular results; the ultimate basis upon which the existence of something depends; cause, in the widest sense."
A Redefinition
The interplay of circumstance, fog, friction, and the reactive decisions of warfighters in combat undermine the idea that principles can explain or govern warfighting. A much more suitable description of objective, surprise, simplicity, and others, is "terms of warfare."
Apart from replacing principles of war with terms of warfare, military education at all levels must give greater emphasis to the literature of our profession. Military history, biography, autobiography, and the memoir must be assigned a prominent place in commissioning programs. These works will inspire young officers to read worthy books and develop a vigorous critical intelligence from the start of their professional lives. A solid knowledge of history will encourage a fuller and more animated understanding of objective, surprise, and the other terms of warfare. The point of encouraging historical-mindedness is not to transform commanders and staff officers into bloodless encyclopedias crammed with undigested knowledge and clever notions. Resolution, courage, perseverance, and calculated audacity are every bit as important today as they ever were. Even so, historical-mindedness can help the warfighter connect thought to action in ways that a mechanistic understanding of war—which is encouraged by the idea that battle is governed by principles—never can.
The principles of war in their current form are a relatively recent development. Maxims on warfighting can be traced back to Sun Tzu's The Art of War (1500 B.C.), but the earliest European expression of this idea can be found in De Re Militari (On Military Institutions), written in 390 A.D. by Flavius Vegetius Renatus. A number of similar collections surfaced between the Renaissance in Europe and the age of Napoleon Bonaparte. These treatises offered nothing more than terse advice; they were not intended to be immutable and authoritative. It was Antoine-Henri Jomini who in his book, The Art of War (1838), first argued for a set of principles that were prescriptive, timeless, and comprehensive. The list of nine principles that we use today—Objective, Offensive, Mass, Economy of Force, Maneuver, Unity of Command, Security, Surprise, and Simplicity—first appeared in an American publication in 1921 (United States War Department, TR 10-5: Doctrines, Principles, and Methods). This set of principles acquired immense credibility with the U.S. armed forces during World War II when industrial processes were applied to everything from the production of raw materials and finished goods to the management of personnel. The principles of war proved especially useful as a kind of Cliffs Notes in the training of recruits when the shopkeeper or undergraduate, wholly ignorant of martial culture and unschooled in military history, might find himself within weeks after basic training commanding an infantry company in battle against Waffen SS units. The problem is that the principles when used in such a manner—however valid the immediate justification—encourage an artificial or strictly mechanical understanding of war.
Operational Art as Science
Indeed, the idea that a set of principles can guide commanders and planners reflects as well as encourages an understanding of warfighting as chiefly an engineering challenge. Joint doctrine suggests that warfighting pivots entirely on issues such as weight of effort, logistical efficiency, and the like. The Joint Staff Officer's Guide, which aims to provide "the basic fundamental principles" of operational warfare, reads very much like a technical manual featuring steps, charts, and sidebars with bullet statements. Like the principles of war from which they derive, most of the terms of operational art—culmination, phases, centers of gravity, termination, leverage, balance, simultaneity, synergy (a clumsy merging of synthesis and energy that comes to us from the computer industry)—are scientific in their origins. JFSC Pub 1 compares the application of operational art to the creative intelligence of the virtuoso painter, but the argument betrays an ignorance of the context—historical, aesthetic, and cultural—that inspires art of lasting value. In fact the comparison falsely assumes that art is a mechanical process, that one can create, say, something comparable to Caravaggio's "Adoration of the Shepherds" by following an instruction sheet. Attempting to explain warfare by using abstractions, and in the absence of a suitably rigorous historical understanding, is a similarly futile idea.
The most striking weakness of assuming that warfighting can be guided by a discrete set of principles is that such an approach is at odds with the kind of war we are fighting today and will probably be fighting years from now. How does one use mass, for example, against an idea or a frame of mind that is beyond the compass of reason, such as the sectarian zealotry, feral cruelty, and conscienceless mayhem perpetrated in its name that obtains in parts of the Middle East? One can play semantic games to come up with a notional fit—"we can mass information operations, or make sure coalitions embody unity of command"—but the definition of the terms would have to be recast to the point at which they can mean anything—and thus nothing.
Of greater concern is that trying to understand war by the light of principles has affected how we interpret our past and so prepare for the future. Concepts such as mass and objective can help us to appreciate the lasting relevance of a campaign only if we bring to it a suitable historical-mindedness but our approach is often quite the opposite. For instance, in the conventional manner of teaching operational art, the student—usually but not necessarily of field-grade rank—is first expected to memorize the various terms and their definitions. He then applies the concepts, along with the principles of war that govern them, to an historical case, which is frequently based on an extract from a brief survey of a campaign. Perhaps a bit of contrast is mixed in with the comparisons, but the result is the same. The campaigns of Syracuse, Agincourt, Marston Moor, Vicksburg, and Desert Storm are shown to embody the elements of operational art and the principles of war, thus encouraging students to infer that warfare across the ages always conforms to some kind of adamantine logic that stands in relief when the principles of war, or the terms of operational art, are draped over it. Put another way, warfighters, from the commander down to the private soldier throughout time—from Achilles and Thersites to Guy Sajer and Heinz Guderian—congeal into an undifferentiated mass of unwitting acolytes to these higher laws.
The Failure of Analysis
A survey of the Stalingrad campaign illustrates the futility of mischaracterizing otherwise useful terms as principles. Analyzing—if that is the right word—the campaign strictly by applying the principles of war will yield little more than a facile understanding of an intricate situation.
The war between Germany and Russia, 1941 to 1945, was the largest land battle in the Western world. It was a clash between two absolute dictatorships driven by antagonistic ideologies, each armed to the teeth and possessed of the political wherewithal to fight total war. The incineration of the German Sixth Army and part of the Fourth Panzer Army in February 1943 moved the strategic initiative irrevocably in Russia's favor, though the war would go on for another 27 months. In the summer of 1942, Army Group South was divided into two joint task forces—each with a sensible enough objective: Army Group A's mission was to seize the raw materials-rich areas of the Caucasus. Army Group B, comprising the Sixth Army and the larger part of the Fourth Panzer Army, was expected to cut off traffic between Russia's agricultural and manufacturing centers in the Stalingrad region and provide flank protection for Army Group A, destroying Russian forces in the Don River bend along the way.
In the Stalingrad campaign, the Germans went to the offensive from the start and kept on attacking until their forces were no longer capable of doing so, a point reached shortly before the Russian offensive in November that encircled the Sixth Army. Certainly the Germans employed mass in Stalingrad: entire army corps were used to attain tactical objectives within the city itself. Economy of force also was employed, as the bulk of German troops were committed to the main objective of seizing oil fields in the Caucasus. Less capable allies—Hungarian, Romanian, and Italian troops—occupied supposedly quiet areas on the flanks of the Sixth Army. The Germans also employed maneuver, using concentric attacks on Stalingrad until the Russians, badly mauled by the months of close combat, were left holding only a tiny fraction of the city. The Germans demonstrated unity of command to a fault, as Hitler denied his field commanders independence of action. Concerning security, in early November, Sixth Army intelligence identified the Russian troop build-up on the west bank of the Don, north of the city, though commanders at the strategic and operational levels badly underestimated Soviet intentions and the scale of their reinforcements. As for surprise, the entire German operation caught the Soviet High Command (Stavka) off guard. In the summer 1942 Stalin was expecting an attack on the central front, with Moscow as its objective. Hitler's war directives that bear on the Stalingrad campaign are a marvel of lucidity and concision—simplicity exemplified.
What went wrong for the Germans? The Soviets exploited fully their reserves of manpower and equipment, employing greater mass at decisive points to realize their objective of entombing the Sixth Army. Surprise was achieved by double envelopment. The Germans did not expect the attack on their southern flank. Economy of force was achieved by the Russians supplying the armies fighting in Stalingrad with only enough reinforcements to keep the city from being overrun, and directing their pincers at the weakest points in the German line. Stavka's plan was simple enough and Stalin—unlike his counterpart—did not interfere unduly in operational matters.
The Intangibles
Since both sides employed the principles of war in nominally effective ways, what will today's joint warfighter likely take from such a drill? The temptation—perhaps the natural course of this kind of exercise—is to place these items on a scale which will tip toward the Russians because their use of mass, maneuver, security, and surprise was ultimately more decisive than that of the Germans. The battle, of course, was far more complicated than that and much worthier of intense study than such an analysis would have us believe. Indeed, one would need to consult a number of books and examine a range of perspectives before being substantively prepared to evaluate the campaign. The vanity, egotism, timidity, foolhardiness, bigotry—and a score of other emotions and character traits—of Hitler, Stalin, von Manstein, von Paulus, and others shaped the battle and determined its outcome in ways that the principles of war can never illuminate. Careful study of the battle will reveal that friction between the operational, strategic, and tactical commanders paralyzed the Germans. The Russians, who struggled with fog and friction as well, were far less confident and far more anxious about their counteroffensive than its stunning success would have us believe.
The chief interest of the campaign for the joint force planner in particular resides not in the force-on-force activity, which is bound to the conditions of time and place—how well did the Russians employ maneuver given the terrain west of the Don River and the weather between 19 and 23 November 1942? Given the physical and moral state of the German soldiers at the time, how effective were their defensive fires?—but in the things that transcend the historical moment. What elements of character impelled von Paulus and von Manstein to make the decisions that they did? Why did senior German staff officers ignore the gathering catastrophe and, correspondingly, are we vulnerable to similar habits of mind today? Why did rank-and-file soldiers fight effectively long after they realized, and felt keenly, that senior commanders had failed them? On 12 January 1943, for example—more than a month after the Sixth Army suffered its first starvation case—the remnants of the 29th and 3rd Motorized Divisions, hunkered down on the ice-blasted steppe, managed to repulse 10 to 12 Red Army divisions and destroy more than 100 tanks in a single day. In this engagement and elsewhere the German troops fought with a skill, zeal, and valor that cannot be explained entirely by an instinct for self-preservation or by a fear of Russian captivity. Better-provisioned armies at other times facing similar circumstances were routed or melted away.
The Value of History
Using campaigns from the past as a prop to illustrate the principles of war awards an unwarranted credibility to an indifference to, or contempt for, historical study. "I am offended by your claim that to succeed in this business you need to know history," announced a field grade officer to this writer during a recent class on operational art. His point was that the principles of war and associated concepts were more than adequate. The point of view expressed by this student and other anecdotal evidence reflect a broad trend in how we as a profession view our past even though noble exceptions to this outlook can be found.
It seems that few officers, fewer than at any time in the past, engage in any kind of private study of history, a circumstance that follows inevitably from American culture at large. History effectively disappeared from elementary and high school curricula several generations ago, replaced by an amorphous miscellany of mostly dubious information called social studies. At the university level historiography remains in a wretched state, and military history is hardly known outside of the service academies and professional service schools—where it is largely taught in survey courses. Much of what flourishes today in American culture is ersatz history in the form of TV programs aimed at an untaught and inattentive audience, simple-minded popular fiction, and slapdash narratives assembled by clerks in the service of celebrity-scholars. The cramped understanding of history that prevails in our culture cannot help but shape the intellectual outlook of officers long before they even decide to volunteer for military service. Our culture no longer produces—perhaps no longer can produce even if there exists a noticeable desire to do so—college-aged men and women who might someday compare favorably to Thuycidides, Julius Caesar, Clausewitz, Rommel, and Patton. These men were brilliant field commanders and valiant soldiers who also wrote histories that have become literary classics in their own right. They were every bit as interested in their profession, as expressed in history, as they were in the immediate obligations of their careers. Of course they were extraordinary men by any standard, but they were also products of a cultural milieu that has passed away. Abraham Lincoln, a first-rate military strategist and a rival of George Washington as our most distinguished president, largely educated himself while living on the frontier. How many college-educated Americans under the age of, say, 40 are possessed of the essential learning and can summon the concentration to fully appreciate Lincoln's greatness as expressed in his writings and speeches?
A Battlefield Recipe
Our commendably ardent embrace of efficiency in transacting business has warped how we dispose of our leisure hours, to the extent that we carve out any time at all for reflection from the hectic pace of life that our devotion to technology—blackberries, cell phones, 500-channel television networks—has imposed on us. Reading a substantive book—Winston Churchill's Marlborough: His Life And Times, for example, or C. V. Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War—is seen as a profligate use of one's time. The mechanical and frenzied temper of modern American life, perhaps in no more than an attenuated form—so an optimist might argue—dampens our interest in military history, limits our professional imagination, and thus hobbles our ability to write good doctrine and make wise decisions. Indeed, a lack of historical-mindedness can be dangerous when applied to the battlefield—the "systems of systems" approach and its associated terminology comes to mind—as we are encouraged to see the enemy as a machine that can be manipulated by applying pressure in a given spot so as to yield a predictable set of results. This is a recipe for unpleasant surprises, especially when fighting an enemy that does not think rationally and who does not know, perhaps cannot recognize, when he is beaten and who sees negotiation and the laws of armed conflict not as we see them—civilized means of preventing gratuitous carnage—but as an alloy of credulity and cowardice.
How do we address this problem? We should begin thinking about military service in a more traditional way. For some time, perhaps since the decade before the World War II, military professionals have increasingly adopted the outlook of the scientific and engineering vocations—principles of war being a pertinent example—but in truth command and staff work bear a much closer resemblance to the practice of law. The judge of common law decides a case based on precedent. What decisions have been rendered in the past under similar circumstances? Is there good reason to rise above custom or precedent—do the facts at hand make a given case unique? Successful commanders and staff officers, as historical accounts amply demonstrate, approach the task of subduing an enemy in similar fashion.
A not uncommon remark from senior leaders from all the services is that mid-career grade officers in particular don't think strategically. There are several unavoidable and even praiseworthy reasons for this, e.g., the emphasis on mastering one's technical specialty and the tactical point of view that must dominate an officer's first few years on active duty. A cultivated appetite for military history, particularly books by the masters of operational narratives—Creasy, Duffy, Fuller, and Keegan—will engender a strategic perspective even as it strengthens one's understanding of the potential strategic impact of tactical decisions. Instead of grasping after laws, or principles, that seek to reduce operational combat to a science, military education and doctrine should emphasize with greater force the value of historical-mindedness to commanders and planners especially. The terms of warfare—as the principles of war should really be called—can only serve the warfighter when they are anchored to an understanding of war's human dimension, which is to be found in histories, memoirs, and biographies. Far better for planners and commanders to possess a discerning grasp of campaigns from the past, which provide a record of things actually accomplished or thwarted, than to put faith in abstractions or formulaic approaches to warfighting.
Interaction of Circumstance and Character
In summary, historical study encourages a perceptive understanding of why leaders made the decisions that they did. How does a commander whose forces are out-gunned and out-provisioned, inflict a demoralizing setback on a capable opponent? Why does an otherwise courageous, quick-witted, and perceptive commander fail? Given contemporary circumstances, what other decisions might he have made that would have yielded success? What pressures vitiated his judgment and how might we use such knowledge to refine our professional intelligence? By scrutinizing the interaction between circumstance and character that history puts before them, professional soldiers can discern and so prepare to overcome the vexing difficulty of connecting thought to action. They can ponder such habits of mind as were in play during a given campaign and so weigh their own decisions by the lights of broad experience and perhaps grow wiser and more humane as a result. The terms we currently identify as principles can help describe or summarize a given action but only if we take them for what they are—shorthand for military operations—and avoid using them as if they were immutable laws that transcend fog, friction, chance, and, most importantly, the moral and intellectual constitution of commanders and their soldiers.
Lieutenant Colonel Hanley is an instructor at the Joint Forces Staff College and holds advanced degrees from the University of Oxford and the University of North Carolina. He is an associate editor of War, Literature & the Arts and has published a book and numerous essays. His operational background includes tours of duty with AWACS and Joint STARS units.