Alexander - How wars are won : the 13 rules of war-- from ancient Greece to the war on terror

Table of Contents

List of Maps

Civil War Eastern Theater, 18611865

Assault over Lech River, Bavaria, 1632

Jena Campaign, 1806

Defense of Kum River Line, 34th Infantry, July 14, 1950

Defense of Kum River Line, 19th Infantry, July 1316, 1950

Mongol Conquest of Hungary, 12411242

Shenandoah Valley Campaign, 1862

Italian Campaign, 17961797

The Waterloo Campaign, June 1519, 1815

Tunisia, 1943

Gustavus Adolphuss Campaigns, 16311632

Winfield March on Mexico City, 1847

The Saratoga Campaign, 1777

Yorktown and the Battle of the Virginia Capes, 1781

The Chancellorsville Campaign, 1863

Battle of Rossbach, November 5, 1757

Battle of Leuthen, December 6, 1757

The Western Persian Empire, 334331 B.C.

Battle of Austerlitz, December 2, 1805

The Schlieffen Plan, 1914

Battle of Tannenberg, August 2631, 1914

German Attack on the Soviet Union, 1941

Operations Against Quebec, 1759

Conquest of the Low Countries and France, 1940

Marengo Campaign, 1800

Allied Advances in the Pacific, 19421945

Inchon Invasion and Chinese Intervention in Korea, 1950

Introduction

The New Kind of War

THE ATTACK ON the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, dramatically changed the face of war. Suddenly war ceased to be primarily an enterprise employing military weapons against expectant armies, and changed to include lethal blows with civilian devices against innocent people.

This is a new kind of war in that no warriors previously had employed such a weapon as an airliner loaded with passengers and jet fuel, but it is also the most ancient kind of war in that the strikes were ambushes, a tactic used in war from Stone Age times onward. Ambushes are designed to inflict the most damage at the least cost, to hit unwary, vulnerable targets, preferably those without means of defense.

September 11 will therefore go down in history as the moment when the world ceased to think of warfare exclusively as conventional clashes of massive, sophisticated weapons on the battlefield, and reverted to seeing war in its rawest, truest, and oldest form, characterized by small groups of warriors striking by surprise, or at night, against the actual or psychological rear of the enemy. Ravaging defenseless civilians, hit-and-run raids, sudden assaults on ill-defended places, hiding in inaccessible lairs, all these and more are the centuries-old elements of irregular warfare: the strategies of the snare and of refusal to meet the main military strength of the enemy in open battle. The specific ancient rule the terrorists followed was to avoid the enemys strength and strike at weakness.

Other terrorists will surely employ other rules of war by innovating other techniques of engagement, and using other devices to carry out their aims. Since the rules the terrorists use are universal, the civilized world must use the same rules to defeat them. The distinction now is that the rules and tactics will be played out in a much different fashion and in much different arenas from those seen in the huge wars and battlefields of the twentieth century.

Future wars are likely to be more limited, more specific in purpose. They will likely resemble guerrilla operations. Such conflicts are now largely being conducted by disaffected groups or factions within states, such as the Basques in Spain, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, and various rebel groups in Colombia. But the irregular methods that characterize these strugglesand have marked partisan war since prehistoric timesare being refined into a radically new type of warfare that pays little attention to national boundaries or to the old rules of orthodox war.

In coming to terms with the motives of the terrorists, we will do well to remember that war is essentially a political act to secure an aim; this was as true in Paleolithic times as it is today. One tribe ousting another from a hunting ground 20,000 years ago was executing a political act no less than the Allies preventing Germany from conquering Europe in World War II.

Likewise, the United States fought the Persian Gulf War of 1991 to keep Saddam Hussein from getting control of the oil supply of the Middle East. The purpose was not, as was advertised by the first Bush administration, to preserve the freedom of the autocratic little oil sheikdom of Kuwait.

This connection of war with politics is frequently misunderstood. Yet war is a military act only to the extent that military forces are needed to carry out a nations political goal. The most memorable quotation from Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian author of the influential study On War, is war is only a continuation of state policy by other means. Thats why the French premier in the First World War, Georges Clemenceau, said wars are too important to be left to the generals. There can be no more graphic an example of war as politics than the destruction of the World Trade Center and the dreadful damage to the Pentagon.

The attack of September 11 focused attention on partisan or unorthodox war. But no matter what kind of war we face in the future, whether from terrorists or more traditional armed forces, in formulating effective responses we can draw lessons and devise tactics using military rules or maxims whose origins go back beyond recorded time. The key defining feature of terrorist war is surprise, and we may not be able to predict exactly where or how our enemies will strike in the future. But we can understand their methods and techniques, and we can construct systems to defend against their blows and root them out of their holes.

Even before the terrorist strikes, war had changed profoundly in recent years. By the mid-1990s, military planners had determined that massive, world-scale wars no longer could be fought. The Persian Gulf War of 1991 showed that modern conventional weapons had become so accurate and so deadly that human beings would simply not be able to survive in appreciable numbers on traditional battlefields. With the subsequent completion of the satellite-directed Global Positioning System, or GPS, the vulnerability of troops on the battlefield has become even greater because bombs and missiles can be sent with almost pinpoint accuracy to practically any spot on earth.

This means that the huge weapons and massive collisions of millions of men in battle, which characterized the two world wars of 19141918 and 19391945, have now passed away.

The development of nuclear weapons from 1945 onward had already created enormous doubts about the possibility of fighting large wars. When the United States and the Soviet Union came within an eye blink of nuclear confrontation in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, every responsible person realized that nuclear weapons could not be used in war. Any nuclear strike would lead to counterstrikes that could accelerate beyond human capacity to control. This reality forced people everywhere to step back from the abyss.

But only since the Gulf War have military leaders finally abandoned the concept that wars could still be fought between formal armies arrayed against each other using conventional, or nonnuclear, weapons. Traditional fire-and-maneuver tactics of individual military units, whether infantry, artillery, armor, or combinations of the three, are now out of date. Today in almost any environment, including mountains, troops massed in even small groups are extremely vulnerable. Even if masked, they can usually be seen by aerial photographs, satellite scanners, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), aircraft, or helicopters. Once detected, they can be precisely located by GPS and hit with bombs, missiles, or shells directed by laser, infrared, acoustic, or radar homing signals.