Strategy (25 page)

Although Fuller played no role in the development of the tank and was not the first to conceive of it developing an offensive role, he was the preeminent figure in formulating the new Tank Corps doctrine. Once convinced that tanks offered much more than support to the infantry, Fuller began to describe what might be achieved when tanks could be deployed in larger numbers, at greater speeds, and over longer ranges. Mechanical warfare, he observed, was about to replace muscular warfare. The days when firepower would have to be carried by men or pulled by horses into battle were passing. The petrol engine was going to revolutionize land warfare just as surely as steam had revolutionized naval warfare. He knew that the first steps would be tentative, perhaps not much more than raids against German lines, but he envisioned a future army of one thousand tanks, dividing for a standard attack on enemy defensive lines and another attack directed at the enemy's command structure. His ideas were refined following the Allied retreat during the German offensive of spring 1918. He attributed the retreat to the paralysis of the high command. As “the potential strength of a body of men lies in its organization,” he concluded, “if we can destroy this organization, we shall have gained our object.” Fuller became an advocate of “brain warfare,” that is, attacks aimed at disorganizing the enemy's mental processes and ensuring the collapse of the enemy's will to resist. There was no need to target the enemy army; better to target the command structure. In his plan, the German army headquarters was the major objective. The aim was to shoot the enemy through the head rather than force death through many wounds to the body. Literally brainless, the enemy would be confused and its forces would turn into a rabble. Later in his life he reflected that Plan 1919 promised victory with a “stupendous drama, the only satisfactory way to win a war.”

In this metaphor of the army as a body, the headquarters was the brain and the lines of communication the nervous system, leading into the muscular forward forces. The whole system required constant supply. It was, however, still an analogy. As Brian Holden Reid noted, the army was not the same as an organism because the component parts could exist independently of each other. “Brains, courage and fighting power are not compartmentalized, and a crisis can throw up a relatively junior officer who can provide the guidance
formerly given by higher authority.” It was the case that the German collapse in 1918 was accelerated when the divisional headquarters was overrun by tanks, but this was at the end of a long and exhausting war, when morale on both sides was fragile. This encouraged the view that shock always resulted in a form of panic, and a tendency emerged to play down the other factors that might wear down an enemy. Again we can see the similarities with the early air power theorists, with whom Fuller had an affinity. He wrote in 1923 about an air attack that would transform London into a “vast raving Bedlam” so that the government at Westminster would be “swept away by an avalanche of terror.”
¹³
Fuller had also read Le Bon closely. His innovation was to use notions of crowd psychology to consider how not only civilians but also armies might buckle under pressure.

The odd thing about Fuller's military theories was that they drew upon and developed a wider set of ideas that had been gestating for some time and reflected his wide but idiosyncratic reading. Fuller dabbled in mysticism and the occult, had an enthusiasm for modernism and a contempt for democracy, and eventually developed a commitment to fascism. His readiness to challenge conventional religion led naturally, he judged, to a readiness to challenge conventional military thinking. In addition to Le Bon, social Darwinism and philosophical pragmatism had also influenced his thinking. He made the familiar claim that his approach to the study of war was scientific. His actual method belied this but did reflect his belief that he had identified patterns that would recur irrespective of time and place. He had little doubt that his analysis compared more than favorably with what he considered to be exasperating, amateurish, and doltish senior British officers. Their incompetence, fully demonstrated during the Great War, was now revealed fully in their failure to appreciate Fuller's insights. Yet his approach was based on grandiose claims and a romantic urge to find a form of battle that avoided the mass slaughter he had witnessed in France. Somehow this flawed and unappealing, arrogant and authoritarian character, whose theorizing beyond military matters was eccentric and often barely intelligible, hit upon an original conception of armored warfare that turned what was widely viewed as an interesting but limited specialist tool into the basis of a new type of warfare. Fuller became one of the first to focus on the possibility of disorienting the enemy's “brain” rather than eliminating his physical strength.
¹⁴

After the war, reflecting on the fate of what he described as “pot bellied and pea brained” armies fixated on firepower, Fuller sought to develop further the possibility of using tanks and aircraft in a battle that would be decisive as a result of psychological dislocation rather than physical destruction. As with
many of the technological optimists of the time, he underplayed the logistical difficulties inherent in his vision and overplayed the extent to which it would not require the enormous armies of the Great War or the vast resources of industrial societies.
¹⁵
His theories depended on a dim view of humanity. His first major book,
The Reformation of War
, made a crude elitist distinction between the masters (super-men) and the slaves (super-monkeys), with the latter mentally challenged, naturally fearful, and tending to the feminine (a common reference of the time to emotional, hysterical personalities). In his next major theoretical statement,
The Foundations of the Science of War
,
¹⁶
he ruminated more on the nature of crowds. This was central to his view of an army and society at large as an organism which could be swayed by strong leadership. Fuller saw a grasp of crowd psychology as the “foundation of leadership.” Crowds, whether they started as heterogeneous or homogeneous, tended toward a single “mind” controlled by a “soul” which was in itself dominated by instincts. It was Le Bon's story of a crowd acting like an irrational individual rather than a mass of separate rational individuals. Fuller's crowd was “a mere automaton under the will of the suggester, and, through lack of intellect, its acts [were] always unbalanced and extreme-lower or more exalted than the individual's, according to the nature of the suggestion it has received.”

To Fuller, crowds were pathologically mad, credulous, impulsive and irritable, and ruled by sentiments. To challenge the crowd, the “man of genius,” refusing to “swim with the stream,” must instead divert “the stream from its course by compelling it to swirl forward in his own direction.” If, as Napoleon put it, the moral was superior to the physical by three to one, the genius was more important than the normal by ten to one. A normal man should be considered a piece of machinery. Fuller urged that it was necessary to devise for such a man an “accurate system” that could be presented in “so simple a form, that without thinking, without perhaps knowing what we intend, he with his hands will accomplish what our brains have devised.”
¹⁷
In this he was probably influenced by Frederick Taylor, whose system of scientific management is discussed in
Chapter 32
.

Fuller described a “military crowd” by reference to Le Bon's “mass of men dominated by a spirit which is the product of the thoughts of each individual concentrated on one idea.” Hopefully this would be the will to win, but should it become disorganized by surprise or some calamity, then an urge to self-preservation would take over. An army was an organized crowd, held together and directed through training and common purpose, but it was a crowd nonetheless and so could turn when stressed. With strong “mind” and
“soul,” an army could endure, but once it faced heavy losses, morale could suffer and fear take over.

As the battle bursts into flame, creative reason holds control or is lost; imagination rattles the dice of chance and the man obeys, or, like an animal hunting another, acts on his own intuition. Self-sacrifice urges men on; self-preservation urges men back; reason decides; or, if no decision be possible, sense of duty carries the will to win one step nearer to its goal. So the contest is waged, not necessarily by masses of surging men, but rather by vacant spaces riddled by death.
¹⁸

In battle, an army shocked and bereft of leadership could lose its discipline and readiness to go forward. In civilian life, there was no real contest. The emotional, impulsive crowd was doomed to panic.

A strategist should think in terms of paralyzing, not of killing
.

—Basil Liddell Hart

S
IR
B
ASIL
L
IDDELL
Hart was also shaped in his thinking by his experiences in the Great War (he had been gassed and wounded at the Somme
¹
) and his determination that future wars should avoid the sort of mindless slaughter he had witnessed. Fuller was the more original and powerful thinker, but not always the most accessible. His friend Liddell Hart had a crisper style, and despite some poor calls in the run-up to the Second World War, his reputation grew after that war. This was partly because he gave unstinting support to a new generation of civilian strategists and military historians, who were able to develop their craft in the comparative security of the universities rather than through continual freelancing like Liddell Hart. In addition, Liddell Hart's ideas about limited war gained traction as thermonuclear weapons gave new meaning to the idea of total war. He was also a relentless propagandizer on his own behalf, to the point of suggesting that the tragedy of the Second World War was that British generals neglected his ideas on armored warfare, while German generals turned them into the blitzkrieg. After his death in 1970, his history was challenged and his self-promotion rebuked,
²
but the central idea of the “indirect approach” continued to gain adherents in business as well as military circles.

Initially Liddell Hart's work was wholly derivative. Before he sought to claim a remarkable parallel development between Fuller's ideas and his own, he had pronounced
The Reformation of War
to be “the book of the century.” He had read T. E. Lawrence's early presentation of his ideas in
The Army Quarterly
in 1920 and appears, although this is less easy to document, to have drawn on the work of Julian Corbett as well. Liddell Hart was never challenged by those from whom he had borrowed so liberally. Lawrence kept no records and so was only impressed later by the similarity between his views and those of his good friend, Liddell Hart.
³
In 1922 Corbett died. Fuller did not care about the plagiarism, although his wife did. Following Fuller, Liddell Hart adopted the analogy of the brain controlling the body to call for attacks on the enemy's communications and command centers. His appeal for an “indirect approach” as the “most hopeful and economic form of strategy” struck a chord with those who believed that cleverness was preferable to brute force. Moreover, unlike Fuller, he asserted his own originality by comparing the indirect approach to the more direct, which he claimed to be Clausewitz's terrible legacy.

Liddell Hart blamed Clausewitz, or at least his followers, for their conviction that everything must be geared to decisive battles with the sole aim of destroying the enemy army through frontal assaults. Everything he hated about the futile mass offensives and horrific bloodshed of the Western Front in the First World War he seemed to blame on Clausewitz, the “evil genius of military thought.” His presentation tended to caricature, as if Clausewitz was gripped by some sort of bloodlust, unable to view war except in absolutist terms, anxious for battle at the first opportunity, and seeking to win through overwhelming numbers rather than proper strategy. He wrote furiously in one of his earliest books about “the Ghost of Napoleon.”
⁴
The approach he deplored was mechanical and a-strategic. Clausewitz's “gospel deprived strategy of its laurels.”

Eventually Liddell Hart acknowledged that the differences between Clausewitz's view of war and his own were not large—they both understood that it was an extension of politics and influenced by psychology as much as brute force.
⁵
He could point to the density and philosophical complexity of
On War
. This made it more likely that Clausewitz would be read as an incitement to early battle at the first opportunity rather than at a more advantageous moment. The view that Clausewitz's disciples extracted simplistic slogans and applied them crudely was clearly expressed late in his career when Liddell Hart wrote the introduction to Samuel Griffith's popular translation of
The Art of War
. Sun Tzu's “realism and moderation,” he wrote, formed a contrast to “Clausewitz's tendency to emphasize the logical ideal
and ‘absolute' ” that had led these disciples to develop “the theory and practice of total war beyond all bounds of sense.” Interestingly, Liddell Hart recorded that he was first made aware of Sun Tzu by a contact in China in 1927. “On reading the book I found many other points that coincided with my own lines of thought, especially his constant emphasis on doing the unexpected and pursuing the indirect approach. It helped me to realize the agelessness of the more fundamental military ideas, even of a tactical nature.”
⁶
According to one biographer, there was no direct influence of Sun Tzu when Liddell Hart was developing his approach in the 1920s because he did not actually read the book until the early 1940s.
⁷
This makes his specific mention of 1927 curious, especially since he started to develop his “indirect approach”—so close to Sun Tzu in many clear elements—over the next two years. There was certainly no mention of Sun Tzu in the first version of his constantly refined presentation of his core ideas,
The Decisive Wars of History
, but the last version,
Strategy: The Indirect Approach
, included extensive quotes at the front of the book. The Giles translation of Sun Tzu, the one most in use at the time, includes the line: “In all fighting the direct methods may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.” Later translations from the Chinese, however, contrasted the straightforward with the crafty, the normal with the extraordinary, or the orthodox with the unorthodox.