A History of Strategy (5 page)

Machiavelli’s place among the great political scientists of history is secure, and deservedly so. No one who has compared
The Prince
to, say, Erasmus’s
Ways of a Christian Prince
can but note the immense gap between them. Though separated by no more than two or three years, the latter is a treatise on morals, the former on power. Machiavelli’s insights into the nature of power have rarely been equaled, never surpassed. They remain as fresh today as they were when he put them down in 1513.

In spite of the attempts, made by modern historians, to include Machiavelli among “makers of modern strategy,”
The Art of War
does not really amount to a first-class treatise on the subject. Written in 1523, the work is cast in the form of a conversation which took place in a Florentine Garden. The chief character is Fabrizio Colonna, a member of a noble family of that name which had disturbed the peace of Rome for centuries. Like others of his kind, this Fabrizio had served as a mercenary commander under Spain’s “Catholic Kings,” Ferdinand and Isabel, during their wars in northern Italy. Now he is traveling back to his native Rome and, stopping at Florence, ready to hold forth on his experiences.

During his years in office (1498–1512) Machiavelli himself had been in charge of conducting Florence’s war against Pisa. The conflict dragged on and on; to save money, Machiavelli at one point persuaded the
signoria
to supplement the mercenaries which were doing the fighting with the conscripted inhabitants of Florence’s own
contado
or countryside. The experiment, which was the subject of much skepticism, worked and Pisa was duly taken. Not long thereafter, however, the same troops scattered to the four winds in front of Emperor Maximilian’s hard-bitten
Landsknechte
. As the Medici family, which had been expelled in 1494, returned, Florence’s republican government fell. Machiavelli himself was briefly imprisoned and tortured.

Nothing daunted, eight years later Machiavelli put his predilection for conscripts into the mouth of Fabrizio Colonna. The common opinion, which had it that civilians could not be successful soldiers, was wrong. “My Romans” during the Republic (both in this work and in others Machiavelli all but ignored the Imperial period) had been the best soldiers in the world. Since they had consisted of conscripts, so ought others in the “modern” age. Having thus proven the superiority of conscripts to his own satisfaction, Machiavelli proceeds to describe their selection, training, discipline, equipment, marching order, methods of castrametation, and the like. All of this was to be done in the Roman manner, partly as could be culled from Livy but mainly as described by Vegetius although Vegetius himself belonged to the late Imperial period rather than to the Republican one which Machiavelli so much admired.

Having shown what good soldiers his imaginary Romans were, Machiavelli draws them up for an equally imaginary battle. They are armed with a mixture of Greek and Roman weapons; since the formations he suggests are hopelessly out of date, to prevent them from being blown to pieces he must first of all pretend that artillery is of little use, even at the risk of having his audience laugh at him. Having done so, he is now in a position where he can dispense some useful advice. “In the midst of battle, to confuse the hostile army, it is necessary to make something happen that will bewilder them, either by announcing some reinforcement that is coming or by showing something that appears like it.” “When a general wins, he ought with all speed to follow up his victory.” A commander “should never fight a battle if he does not have the advantage, or if he is not compelled by necessity.” “The greatest and most important matter that a general should attend to is to have near him faithful men, very skillful in war and prudent, with whom he continually advises.” “When either hunger or other natural necessity or human passion has brought your enemy to complete desperation … you ought to avoid battle in so far as is in your power.” These and similar pearls of wisdom are provided with plentiful illustrations at the hands of examples, most of them taken from the ancient world. After all, if Minucius Rufus and Acilius Glabrio, “Roman consuls” in 217 and 191 BC respectively, could carry out this or that maneuver, why not we?

Thus three of Machiavelli’s key propositions—his underestimation of artillery, his recommendation that pikes be supplemented with swords and bucklers, and his preference for citizen-soldiers over professionals—proved to be dead wrong. The last of these ideas even compelled him to strike some decidedly un-Machiavellian attitudes. So, for example, when he claimed that professional soldiers could not be “good men.” A claim which, when put into the mouth of a man who was himself a professional soldier, forced him to turn some strange intellectual somersaults. It also compelled him to pretend that Roman military prowess ended around the time of the Gracchi and devote but little attention to the exploits of a Marius, a Sulla, a Pompey, or a Caesar. Even less attention was paid to other Roman commanders who had the misfortune to live during the Imperial period.

Why Machiavelli’s work attained the fame that it did remains a mystery. None of his contemporaries took his advice with regards to conscription. However, they do seem to have appreciated his emphasis on discipline and order. He obviously had a good understanding of the differences among the armies of his day. But his discussion of this topic is of interest only to the kind of military historian who takes the Renaissance as his specialty and wants to know, for example, how the Imperial horse differed from the French and Spanish ones. Many of his concrete suggestions are sensible enough. However, being taken almost entirely from Livy, Frontinus and Vegetius (not knowing Greek, and preferring the Roman legion to the Greek phalanx, he placed much less reliance on the remaining ancient authors) they lack originality.

An underlying philosophy of war may be discerned in Machiavelli’s insistence that rich and well-ordered states cannot exist without strong defenses. In
The Prince
he says that “a just war is a necessary war,” thus cutting through the Gordian knot formed by endless Medieval discussions of Just War from Saint Augustine to Saint Thomas Aquinas. The reason for including him in these pages is principally because he is there and because in other respects he is a commanding intellectual figure. Like a major general standing in the middle of the road, one must salute him whether one wants to or not.

In truth, much of the remaining military thought produced between Machiavelli and the French Revolution is even less impressive. Why this should be the case is not easy to say. Certainly Gustavus and Turenne, Marlborough and Prince Eugen and Maurice de Saxe and Frederick the Great, deserve to be included in the list of great commanders. Yet even as they fought their various campaigns military thought continued to draw on “the ancients.” Taking their works as the acme of wisdom, it contributed little that was fundamentally new. To cite but one extreme example, when the Marquis de Folard wrote a famous essay on tactics in the 1720s he cast it entirely in the form of a commentary on Polybius and, specifically, the (unsuccessful) combat of Macedonian phalanx against Roman legion. Even to the point where he treated the musket, now fixed with the newly invented bayonet, almost as if it were simply some sort of pike.

After Machiavelli, the first writer whose
oeuvre
must be discussed on these pages is Raimondo Montecuccoli. Montecuccoli was an Italian nobleman who served the Habsburgs continuously from the beginning of the Thirty Years War to his death in 1680. During his career he somehow found time to take an interest in every aspect of the intellectual life of his times including, not least, the occult. His most important work was the
Treatise on War
which was written in 1639–1643 when the author was a prisoner of the Swedes. However, apparently it was seen as a state secret and, though allowed to circulate in manuscript form, was published only long after his death. Foreshadowing the Enlightenment, Montecuccoli’s objective was to investigate every part of the art of war at the hand of observation and experience. Next he proposed to draw up detailed rules, and join them into a system which would be subject to reason.

Accordingly, part I discusses preparations for war, including political preparations—the creation of alliances—on the one hand and the amassing of supplies, arms and money on the other. Part II deals with training, discipline, logistics, and intelligence. Montecuccoli, unlike Machiavelli, was a firm advocate of standing, professional forces of the kind which had been pioneered by the Dutch general, Maurice of Nassau. This part also has much to say about the conduct of war, including fortification, marches, operational maneuver—a field in which Montecuccoli was considered a master—and the peculiar tactical difficulties that resulted from the need to combine cavalry with artillery and infantry as well as muskets with pikes. Finally, Part III deals with what we today would call “war termination” and the attainment of a more favorable peace.

A point worth making here, which distinguishes Montecuccoli from previous writers, is that he looks at war as something waged by states rather than by peoples (as in classical Greek and Republican Rome) or rulers (as in China, Imperial Rome, Byzantium, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance). Explicitly following the ideas of the late sixteenth century political scientist, Justus Lipsius, he clearly distinguishes between external and internal war. Indeed, the point was soon to come where the latter no longer counted as war at all but was downgraded to civil war, revolution, internal dissent, and, in our own day, terrorism. To use a term I previously coined, the age of trinitarian warfare—government against government, regular army against regular army, with the people reduced to a passive role—had dawned. A century or so after Montecuccoli wrote, Frederick the Great said that Lipsius was hopelessly antiquated and should be thrown out of the window. That was because the Flemish philosopher’s ideas of the state as the only legitimate war-making organization were now being taken very much for granted.

On the other hand, and much like his predecessors, Montecuccoli still failed to distinguish between strategy, the operational level, and tactics. As has been well said, war during most of its history, consisted mainly of an extended walking tour combined with large scale robbery. Deficient communications prevented the coordination of forces unless they were kept closely together; whereas the short range of weapons meant that active hostilities against the enemy could only get under way on those comparatively rare occasions when armies drew up opposite each other so as to give battle. Though statesmen such as Pericles, and commanders in chief such as Hannibal, clearly had in mind some master plans by which they sought to achieve victory, he who looks for the above mentioned distinctions in any of the writings discussed so far will do so in vain. Towards the end of Montecuccoli’s life the term tactics, derived from the Greek and meaning the ordering of formations on the battlefield, was just beginning to come into use. However, another century had to pass before it was clearly distinguished from strategy in the sense of the conduct of war at the higher level.

To a man, Montecuccoli’s eighteenth-century successors continued to write as if tactics, operational art, and strategy were one. To a man, too, they accepted the idea that war was something to be conducted against foreigners in a different, normally but not invariably neighboring, country. Finally, to a man they shared his notion that the purpose of theory was to reduce warfare to a “system” of rules. The latter would be grounded in experience and supported by reason. Obviously this was something that was much easier to do in regard to fields where the enemy’s independent will did not have to be taken into consideration. Thus discipline, marches, logistics, and cantonments were easier to encompass than were tactics; tactics, easier than operational art; and operational art, easier than strategy. Hence, as Clausewitz later noted, from about 1690 on there was a tendency for theory to grow from the bottom up, so to speak. It started with the most technical operations. Only then, expanding its horizons, it moved towards greater things.

Montecuccoli having pointed out the things military theory ought to aim at, the first part of the art of war to be reduced to a “system” was, as might be expected, siege warfare. Since the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, a period which saw the introduction of the first effective siege artillery on one hand and of the bastion on the other, both the art of attacking fortresses and defending them had made great strides. By the late seventeenth century the acknowledged master in both fields was a Frenchman, Sebastien le Prestre de Vauban. Vauban, who was of bourgeois origins, was a military engineer. He spent his life alternately building fortifications for Louis XIV or conducting sieges in that king’s name. Late in his career he put down his experiences in two slim volumes which dealt with the defense and the attack, respectively. They neither were nor claimed to be a comprehensive treatise on the art of war. On the other hand, and thanks largely to the fact that of all types of military operations siege warfare was the easiest to reduce to rules, they were a model of their kind which others sought to emulate.

The precise ways in which Vauban recommended that fortresses be attacked or defended do not concern us here. Suffice it to say that, in both respects, he proposed an extremely methodical
modus operandi
designed to achieve the objective step by step and with as few casualties as possible. After all, the king’s professional soldiers were expensive to raise, equip, and maintain. Focusing on the attack, the first step was to concentrate an army as well as sufficient supplies of everything needed, including, the men, their arms, ammunition, powder (for mines as well as firearms), engineering materials, and tools. Then it was necessary to isolate the soon to be taken fortress by isolating it from the outside world, using lines of vallation and counter-vallation for the purpose.