Nothing new under the sun

Faithful readers know that I'm a student of John Boyd. (See A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America's War on Terror.) More recently I got interested in an older war, the one that began on September 1, 1939, and as is my habit I fetched the bound volumes of Life magazine home to look at contemporary photos and articles. I was flabbergasted to read this analysis of the invasion of Poland, in the October 2 issue:

The German Army Invents a New Kind of War
.... The Germans therefore decided to carry the war of fast mechanized columns to its farthest extreme. Normally the end of war is to destroy the enemy's armed forces. To do so it is essential to maintain one's own strength by keeping lines of communication to the rear open. The Germans tried something radically new.... It was a logical extreme development of the infiltration tactics used by the German army in 1918.
This new tactic was simply to strike for the enemy's bases and communications, hell-bent for leather, and largely ignore his armed forces.... Deprived of [its supplies] by loss of its bases, [a modern army] will sooner or later be rendered powerless. A mechanized army can move as fast as 15 m.p.h., as against infantry's 2 m.p.h. It can flicker around infantry and hit it in the back while infantry is slowly turning around....
The Poles heard that the Germans were at Lodz, at Warsaw, at Random, at Sandomierz, at Brest-Litovsk, at Lwow, and they were filled with bewilderment. Their commanders could not force the Germans to stop and fight long-drawn-out frontal battles. The mechanized columns slid around them and vanished on into Poland.

This is pure John Boyd, even unto the bewilderment, which he regarded as essential to an opponent's defeat, whether in an aerial dogfight, a ground campaign, or basketball or chess. It is also a very good description of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Grab 'em by the nose and kick 'em in the ass

Whenever I run out of books to read, I turn back to Mr. Sawyer's interesting but very difficult The Tao of Deception. Last night I broke up laughing when I spotted this advice, quoted from the One Hundred Unorthodox Strategies:

"When engaging an enemy, frighten them in the front and overwhelm them in the rear...."

Which put me in mind of General George Patton's speech to the troops in May 1944, just before the D-Day landing in France. His words, which are usually misquoted in the more pungent form above, went like this:

"We're going to hold onto [the enemy] by the nose, and we're going to kick him in the ass."

Do you suppose Patton was reading the Chinese military classics at the time? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

44's non-strategy

I think it's no secret that I am underwhelmed by the president whom GrEaT sAtAn"s gIrLfRiEnD refers to as "44." So much so, that I have been reluctant to diss his new National Security Strategy, for fear my comments would come across as just more snarky stuff from the right wing. But now I have cover! Leslie Gelb, late of the New York Times and the Carter administration, assesses the non-strategy on The Daily Beast. I particularly liked this complaint, which gets to the heart of the matter: "To shape a true strategy, the president must establish and explain priorities. In the Obama document, everything seems to be a top priority...."

Yes! What the president has given us is a State of the Union laundry list. Either Mr. Obama doesn't know what a strategy is, or (even more terrifying) his advisers don't. This feeds rather neatly into a discussion I have been following over on the Kings of War blog, to wit: why is it that the United States is so bad at strategy? (Great at winning battles, lousy at winning wars. It's almost as if we go from aspiration direct to tactics, so we keep ending up in a situation where the thought balloon over the president's head reads: "Uh-oh! What do I do now?") Mr. Gelb's analysis is worth reading, and the KOW discussion is worth skimming. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Master Sun on long wars

Patrick Moran has published a new translation of one of strategy's great books, which he titles Master Sun's Art of War. It's available as a ten-dollar paperback or a three-dollar PDF download at Lulu.com. I particularly liked this little riff:

When engaging in warfare, make victory the highest priority. If warfare goes on for a long time the troops will lose their edge.

If city walls are besieged, then one's energies will be entangled.

If one exposes one's army to danger for a long period of time, then the resources of the nation will eventually fall short....

Truly, I have heard of cases when armies suffered due to their inelegant haste,but not of armies long enduring through serendipity.

To which Mr. Moran adds a pungent note: "Things eventually go wrong." Blue skies! -- Dan Ford