Riding the Red Horse (52 page)

LTC Tom Kratman, U.S. Army (ret) is a former practitioner and lifelong student of the art and science of war. He is a Ranger and served in the storied Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne. He took part in the occupation of Panama with the 193rd Infantry Brigade, and first encountered the elephant in Kuwait, where he earned the Combat Infantry Badge while attached to the 5th Special Forces in Gulf War I. In addition to his practical experience of tactical combat, Tom also possesses a remarkable command of both strategic matters and military history; after obtaining his degree and license to practice law in Massachusetts, he returned to the Army and lectured at the U.S. Army War College as Director, Rule of Law, for the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute.

One of the staunchest of the Baen Books stalwarts, Tom has published a considerable quantity of popular military science fiction. He is best known for the six-volume
Carreraverse
, which began with
A Desert Called Peace
.
The Rods and the Axe
is the sixth and most recent novel in that series. He has collaborated with John Ringo on three books, the most recent of which is
The Tuloriad
, and his
Big Boys Don't Cry
, published by Castalia House, may be the first story in which the reader finds himself inclined to shed a tear for the fate of an intelligent, 20,000-ton main battle tank.

One of the most-feared monsters under the bed of the science fiction left, Tom is the Grand Strategikon of the Evil League of Evil; his hobbies include crucifixion, waterboarding, and training up a new generation of right-wing intellectual warriors. He is a hard man who is far more decent, kind, and generous than his fans, let alone his detractors, would likely believe possible. He can, however, be provoked…. Regardless, it is men like him who permit civilized society to survive in a world of chaos and war.

I’m a pedantic son of a bitch and I know it. Since you’ve gotten this far, gentle reader, by now you probably know it too. Pedant or not, however, I am not, in a paper of this length, going to make you an expert in war or the principles of war. The most I can hope for is to give the interested student some tools—not a full toolbox, just a few tools—he can use to learn how to understand war. Note I said “learn to understand.” I did not say, “teach to understand.” War is too complex, too variable, too subject to chance, too much in defiance of the normal rules of linear logic to teach anyone to understand it even if the teacher has infinite time and space, and the student infinite patience. The most I can do is teach you a bit of how to teach yourself.

If you’ve gotten this far, it is just barely possible that you don’t mind pedantry in a good cause.
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With that hope ever in mind…

The Principles of War, of which there are many versions and variants, ours having come—much altered and filtered—from the Napoleonic Swiss general Antoine Jomini and the British general J.F.C. Fuller,
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share a few important things in common. I don’t mean the principles themselves, but rather the uses to which they’re put. Those uses? It might be helpful to first observe what they should not be used for.

The Principles are not a checklist to victory. We've never heard of anyone who tried to construct his plans through constant reference to the Principles: “Do I have enough security? No, no, gotta have more security. How about Mass? Wait, wait, wait, can I afford any more economy of force to gain more Mass? And what about Unity of Command? Have I given my bloated staff enough power for Unity of Command? And…oh, my God! I need a smidgeon more Surprise in the recipe!” We’ve probably never heard him of because he and his force were buried in unmarked graves somewhere.

Note that in the title of this piece, the active verb is “learning.” That’s one of the three things the Principles are about. They are a study guide to war, a constant reference to what happened, why and when, way back then. The student is to use them as an analytical tool for every work he reads, fiction and non-fiction, on war. In this way, if he is a true student and studies diligently, an understanding of war becomes a part of him, permeates his thinking on war, and structures his mind so that, rather than going through some sort of programmed ritual, he knows what matters and what to do in any given circumstance.

While I came to this conclusion independently, it may reassure the reader to know that I didn’t come to it uniquely. From the Japanese Ground Self Defense Force’s
Senri Nyumon
(An Introduction to the Principles of War), translated by Dr. Joseph West:

However, in order to be able, under all situations, to make accurate decisions and to form creative plans that accomplish the mission, it is absolutely necessary ordinarily to identify these principles in all military histories and other books on military science, to give careful thought and consideration to them, to train in them through applied tactics and field exercises, and to incorporate them into one's own capability.
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The second purpose the Principles of War serve is as guides to training men for war. In this case, a checklist or recipe approach has more validity, because in training men for war one must take an incremental approach as there is only so much time to spend on any given matter. There is nothing wrong with looking over a training plan and deciding, “You know, the men have really never had a sound lesson in the pain of being surprised, nor in the benefits that flow from gaining surprise,” or “the boys are really concentrating too much on taking out the enemy to their front when I want them to bypass that enemy and drive to the deep objective…is that my fault? Have I not been giving them sufficient openings to slip through and bypass? Have I been putting the enemy on the objective so that they instinctively go for the enemy, because he is always on the objective? Well, I can fix that little problem…”

The last purpose the Principles serve is as a defense against intellectual horse manure and the interference of the ignorati. Sadly, they aren’t used for those purposes nearly often enough.

Though lists across different armies will vary, the United States and most of our allies use the same nine principles, or a similar set that bears an obvious relationship to a common conceptual ancestor. The British, for example, have ten, eight of which are very similar to eight of ours. They leave off Simplicity, and add in exchange Maintenance of Morale and Sustainability. The Russians currently have twelve “principles,”; the word is in scare quotes because some of them strike me more as tenets or maxims than principles.

As per Raymond L. Garthoff’s
Soviet Military Doctrine
, the Soviet’s Red Army once subscribed to a principle called “Annihilation,” which seems to have disappeared. It’s hard to say what the Chinese Red Army's principles are, insofar as the PLA appears to be deep in the throes of change from one military paradigm to a new one. However, note that Lin Biao, the third-ranking of the Ten Marshals of the Chinese Civil War wrote, “
War of annihilation is the fundamental guiding principle of our military operations.
”
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I’ll discuss Annihilation, which I consider to be a valid principle, below.

What makes a military concept a principle, as opposed to a maxim, tenet, or simple opinion? In order to be a principle, it has to have been true—even if unnoticed, still there to be discovered—since the dawn of war. It has to be credibly presumed to be valid and effective into the future, even unto the end of time. It has to be, and have been, generally applicable most of the time between those two events. And it must apply from the senior political leadership all the way down to the smallest unit, either the individual or the crew of a ship or armored fighting vehicle.

Note that for the purpose of training yourself to understand war, it doesn’t really matter all that much which set of principles you use. Indeed, the ideal might be to use all of them, though probably not all equally. Even in the armies which, like the Russians, tend to elevate tenets to the level of principles, one can learn how to fight them, and how their military history and practice in war has been affected, through reference to what they believe to be their principles.

The US military’s principles are:

• Mass
  
• Objective
  
• Security
  
• Surprise
  
• Maneuver
  
• Offensive
  
• Unity of Command
  
• Simplicity
  
• Economy of Force
  

There are a few similar acronyms used as mnemonics for these nine principles. I use “MOSSMOUSE.” However, note that I will not be following that precise sequence in this essay. In addition to those nine, I postulate three additional principles. One is taken from the Reds, as mentioned above. The three additional principles are:

• Attrition
  
• Annihilation
  
• Shape
  

I should mention that there does appear to be a movement to replace the original nine principles with a different and larger set.
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I am not a fan of that larger set for a number of reasons. One is that I think people are seeing revolutions in military affairs where no military revolutions have actually taken place. Another is that the principles are general and generally useful study guides to war as a lasting, eternal phenomenon, and that new set seems to me altogether too focused on the very specific, very local, and very temporary. A third is that I rarely find much of merit in the new and faddish. A fourth is that, where we have specific, local, and temporary differences, we are probably better off calling the methods of dealing with that something besides “principles”. That’s not an exhaustive list. Even so I could be convinced and I am not going to try to convince you, just now, one way or the other. For the time being we will remain with the original nine Principles, plus my three additions.

In discussing the Principles below, I am utilizing quotes and definitions from
Field Manual 3-0, Operations
(formerly 100-5), the 2008 edition, instead of the newer 2011 edition. I am doing this because the Principles appear to have been redacted from the newer version, which is entitled
Unified Land Operations
. Is that redaction part of a move to actually change the Principles to something brand new? I don’t know, but somehow the name Nikolai Yezhov seems to ring a bell.
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However, even the 2008 edition appears to be infected with aesthetic influences having little to do with war per se. For example, it lists as additional principles for “Joint Operations” (two or more service branches acting in cooperation) as Perseverance, Legitimacy, and Restraint. Those are all very nice things to have, I suppose, but why are they specific to Joint Operations and do they really meet the test to be considered proper Principles. One has one's doubts.

Mass

This Principle appears sometimes as “Concentration” or “Concentration of Force.”
FM 3-0
asserts, “concentrate the effects of combat power at the decisive place and time.” That sounds very much like a spin-off of “Effects Based Operations”, which has been a failure.
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Let me try another way to explain Mass. Mass is decisive combat power. Through history Mass has had three main effects. One of these is that, because you had more combat power in position to damage the enemy than he had in position to damage you, you could kill or wound him quicker, and lose less in the process than you would if you didn't have as much of a Mass advantage. Second, if the enemy saw that you had a considerable Mass advantage and knew he was going to die if he didn’t scramble, the enemy would sometimes abandon the field without fighting. Third, in the time of phalanx warfare, Mass involved not only the physical push of pike and spear but the deployment of a human battering-ram that would simply bowl the enemy over.

In addition, Mass can be qualitative, which includes the technological aspects. Fifteen hundred Westerners, properly trained, equipped, and led, have rarely been outmassed by even very much larger numbers of spear wielding locals, even when those locals are well-trained, well-led, and fiercely disciplined. History records all of two examples, if I recall correctly.

Mass has always been a proper Principle of War. It was true when Og and Mog got together and used rocks to beat the brains out of their cousin, Gog. It was true when Miltiades formed up his Athenian and Plataean hoplites with heavy wings at Marathon, even if Militiades didn’t specifically articulate it. It was true when Pagondas massed his Thebans twenty-five deep at Delium. And it was true fifty-three years later when Epaminondas, having perfected Pagondas’ early experiment, ended ancient Sparta’s military dominance at the Battle of Leuctra.

This is why, in an age of planes and tanks and even nukes, we still study ancient war. We study it for two reasons. One is that ancient war illustrates the Principles in stark simplicity, which makes it easier grasp their essential nature. The other is that the heart of man does not change over time. The Spartan and Theban hoplites at Leuctra, charging forward, were no different, at core, than one of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard marching up the slope west of La Haye Sainte, just as the British footsoldier who awaited that Guardsman was, in turn, no different from a rifleman in the US 16th Infantry, storming down the ramp of his landing craft into the bullet-swept waters off Omaha Beach, or the German machine gunner who was doing the sweeping.

Economy of Force

The Battle of Leuctra serves as a useful illustration of Economy of Force. The older, pre-Yezhoved version of 3-0 said this principle mandates that one, “Allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary efforts.” That’s true but it is a little misleading because it sounds like a prescription rather than a guide to study. I would rephrase it thus: “When seeking to understand war and battle, look to the occasions where a commander has accepted risk in one area in order to gain Mass in another.