Cornell Studies in Security Affairs

Wartime Lessons from the Western Front

Michael A. Hunzeker

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501758461
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

In Dying to Learn, Michael Hunzeker develops a novel theory to explain how wartime militaries learn. He focuses on the Western Front, which witnessed three great-power armies struggle to cope with deadlock throughout the First World War, as the British, French, and German armies all pursued the same solutions-assault tactics, combined arms, and elastic defense in depth. By the end of the war, only the German army managed to develop and implement a set of revolutionary offensive, defensive, and combined arms doctrines that in hindsight represented the best way to fight.

Hunzeker identifies three organizational variables that determine how fighting militaries generate new ideas, distinguish good ones from bad ones, and implement the best of them across the entire organization. These factors are: the degree to which leadership delegates authority on the battlefield; how effectively the organization retains control over soldier and officer training; and whether or not the military possesses an independent doctrinal assessment mechanism.

Through careful study of the British, French, and German experiences in the First World War, Dying to Learn provides a model that shows how a resolute focus on analysis, command, and training can help prepare modern militaries for adapting amidst high-intensity warfare in an age of revolutionary technological change.

CHAPTER 1

Assessment, Command, and Training Theory

It is not merely the tools of warfare but the organizations that wield them that make for revolutionary change in war.

—Eliot A. Cohen, “A Revolution in Warfare,” 1996

The Question

Assessment, command, and training (ACT) theory seeks to explain why some wartime militaries are better than others at learning so as to correctly update how they fight. It is therefore useful to start by defining two concepts that are at the center of this outcome: learning and doctrine.

LEARNING

As traditionally understood, learning involves the act of acquiring new knowledge, skills, and experience. We usually think of learning as something that individuals do. Nevertheless, scholars have long believed that organizations can also learn.¹ Of course, I must modify this definition, because I want to understand how a specific subset of organizations (militaries) learn while under extraordinary conditions (warfare). War is a complex phenomenon, and militaries invariably acquire all sorts of new knowledge, skills, and experiences from fighting them. To keep my analysis manageable, I focus specifically on one type of learning: how militaries update, revise, and otherwise change their war-fighting doctrines (which I define below). Learning is also usually treated as something worth pursuing for its own sake. Although I do not dispute this view, wartime imperatives lead me to look at learning in instrumental terms. I am particularly interested in how learning helps a military force become more effective on the battlefield.

These considerations lead me to define learning as the act of updating and refining an existing war-fighting doctrine so as to make it as effective as possible. In other words, it is the iterative process by which a military determines the best way to fight given its goals, adversaries, resources, and limitations. Previous scholars, including Richard Downie, John Nagl, and Janine Davidson, similarly highlight both doctrine and effectiveness in their definitions of military learning.²

It is still relatively unusual to look at military change through the lens of learning. Scholars have traditionally preferred to focus on innovation, adaptation, and emulation. Learning has an advantage over these concepts, because innovation, adaptation, and emulation overlap to such a degree that it is practically impossible—and analytically arbitrary—to distinguish between them.³ There are, after all, few pure examples of each, particularly in a wartime context. If one looks closely enough, every innovation contains countless smaller adaptations and emulations. The opposite is also true. Emulations involve elements of innovation and adaptation, since organizations cannot copy practice, doctrine, or technology wholesale, at least not if their goal is to improve performance. Subtle differences in culture, structure, geography, and capacity mean that emulators need to modify imported doctrines to make them fit. Such modifications represent adaptations—and even innovations—in their own right.

Take, for example, the US Army’s AirLand Battle, which scholars and policy makers often use as an example of doctrinal innovation. Unveiled in 1982, AirLand Battle outlined a radical new vision for defeating the Soviet Army in Europe. This vision called for American ground troops to conduct rapid combined-arms attacks against Soviet frontline units by harnessing a range of new communications and long-range precision strike technologies. Simultaneously, American airpower would conduct strikes against Soviet command-and-control assets and follow-on forces deep behind enemy lines.⁴ As such, AirLand Battle represented a radical break from the far more conservative active defense doctrine that preceded it. And at least according to its most ardent proponents, AirLandBattle set the stage for institutional reforms and acquisition programs that helped the United States defeat Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

But how innovative was AirLand Battle? Carl von Clausewitz talked about combining speed and maneuver to strike at an enemy’s center of gravity. The microprocessing technologies, long-range weapons, and rapid communications technologies behind AirLand Battle had been around for decades, at least in the private sector. And American planners borrowed the entire idea of using computers and microprocessors to develop long-range deep-strike weapons from the Soviet Union, which was a generation ahead of the United States in thinking about how computers could revolutionize warfare but a generation behind in its ability to actually build them.⁵

It is ultimately hard to argue that AirLand Battle represented a pure case of innovation, adaptation, or emulation, since it clearly involved pieces of all three. This observation suggests that how one categorizes organizational change largely reflects where one chooses to look. To ignore or privilege innovation, adaptation, or emulation over the other two is to omit a critical part of the causal story.

Thinking in terms of learning helps us bypass these arbitrary distinctions. After all, most of us do not care whether a military is better at navigating wholesale transformation or empowering ad hoc modifications per se. Instead, we care about whether it can change so as to meet wartime challenges and realities—changes that will often require a mix of innovative, adaptive, and emulative behavior. A learning approach helps us pay attention to the organizational characteristics that impede and enable all three important forms of change.

DOCTRINE

If learning is the process through which a military acquires new skills, knowledge, and expertise about how to fight, then doctrine is the mechanism by which it codifies and transmits these lessons. At its most essential, doctrine refers to how a military plans to fight and win on the battlefield.⁶ Doctrine plays at least five key roles. First, it provides a standard playbook that allows units to coordinate their actions on and off the battlefield. In peacetime, it serves as the basis for developing the training standards that help units prepare for combat. Once the fighting starts, doctrine helps units synchronize their operations in accordance with an overarching set of principles and objectives, even when they cannot communicate with one another directly.⁷ Second, doctrine educates and socializes junior leaders. By articulating an overarching “theory of victory,” it prepares new frontline officers and noncommissioned officers to make decisions under conditions of fog, friction, and uncertainty, providing them with guidelines and rules of thumb for acting in the absence of concrete direction.⁸ Third, doctrine serves as a source of institutional memory, capturing experience and knowledge that might otherwise be lost.⁹ This function is especially important in wartime, given the casualties and personnel turnover caused by combat. Fourth, doctrine serves as a prescriptive conceptual framework that informs long-term decisions about weapons procurement; recruitment, training, and education; and organizational structure.¹⁰ Finally, doctrine helps the entire organization think about the future. The act of bringing officers and experts together to debate about what future battlefields will look like and the best way to prevail on them represents an invaluable opportunity.¹¹ In many respects, the process of developing a new doctrine is probably more important than the document that ultimately emerges.

Unfortunately, it is usually easier to describe what doctrine does than what it is or looks like. Scholars and policy makers alike have a bad habit of using doctrine as a catchall term to describe everything from national strategy (e.g., the Truman Doctrine) to nascent operational concepts (e.g., multidomain operations).¹² As I use the term, doctrine has several defining characteristics. It is officially endorsed by top-level leadership and widely promulgated within an organization. It is usually written down, albeit in sometimes frustratingly vague language.¹³ Yet imprecision does not imply irrelevance. The nebulous and abstract way in which many modern doctrines are written serves an important purpose. As military historian M. A. Ramsay reminds us, military “planners and writers can deal only in probability and estimates.”¹⁴ They must therefore write in general terms that offer “guidance for the force to use in its war preparation without being so specific that it binds too tightly the hands of the future commanders who will have to use it.”¹⁵ Doctrine is also multifaceted, not monolithic, insofar as militaries often have multiple overlapping doctrines. Scholars tend to talk about doctrine in singular terms, as if a given military can only have one doctrine at a time. However, contemporary armed forces must perform a wide range of missions, and they often develop separate doctrines for each one. Take the US Army, for example. It had 344 service-level doctrinal manuals as of early 2020, each of which applies to a distinct technical, tactical, operational, or strategic task.¹⁶ Field Manual 3-0: Operations, outlines the US Army’s preferred approach to deter and defeat peer and near-peer adversaries on conventional battlefields. Meanwhile, Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency, describes its doctrine for combating insurgents, guerrillas, and other violent subversive movements.

The Assumptions

ACT theory rests upon two assumptions. The first is that there are better—and worse—ways to fight at any given point during a conflict. What this superior way looks like will depend on a wide and complex range of factors, including—but not limited to—one’s adversary/ies; allies; political aims; the state of military technology; national sources of military power (e.g., industrial and technological bases, economic and financial resources, social resilience, etc.); the quality and quantity of one’s military forces; and the geographic features that define the land, air, and water on which they are fighting. As these factors shift, so too does the best way to fight. The second assumption is that, all things equal, military organizations want to win and prefer to do so at the lowest possible cost in lives and matériel. In other words, militaries care about being effective and efficient. And they generally believe that the best way to be efficient is to be effective.

Taken together, these assumptions imply that that a superior war-fighting doctrine exists, even if it only becomes evident in hindsight. They also imply that fighting in the best way possible gives a military the best chance to achieve its goals at the lowest possible cost. In this way, a superior doctrine is like a Platonic ideal. It exists independent of whether or not any of the combatants manage to approximate it. However, the closer a military comes to fighting the “best” way possible, the more likely it is to achieve its goals at the lowest possible cost.

It is also important to clarify what these two assumptions do not imply. First, they do not mean the side that fights the best will always win. Many factors combine to determine victory and defeat in war.¹⁷ Battlefield effectiveness and efficiency are of course important factors in shaping the final result, but even the most effective and efficient armies, navies, and air forces cannot overcome inept or poor political, economic, and social decisions. Wars are also stochastic. They remain a game of chance.¹⁸ The better a military’s war-fighting practices, the better its chances are. Yet at the end of the day, even the best war-fighting practices in the world will not prevent lieutenants from getting lost, sentries from getting drunk, or the enemy from getting lucky.

Second, these assumptions do not mean that the superior way to fight is necessarily the same for every military. What works for one ally or adversary may not work for another. However, the more characteristics combatants share in terms of size, resources, objectives, culture, and weapons, the more likely it is that they will also share the same superior way of fighting. The opposite is true in highly asymmetric conflicts.

Third, these assumptions have nothing to say about when—or how often—the superior way of fighting changes over the course of a war. It could evolve multiple times in a short period of time or remain consistent for the entire conflict.¹⁹ The factors and forces that determine the superior way to fight are virtually endless and may become obvious only in hindsight.

Finally, these assumptions do not imply that a change in one of the myriad factors that determine what the superior way to fight looks like (e.g., a shift in political aims or the introduction of a new technology) will yield a proportionate shift in the superior war-fighting doctrine. For example, a seemingly revolutionary new weapon might have a negligible effect on the best way to fight. Such seems to have been the case with tanks, at least during the First World War, and with atomic weapons, at least vis-à-vis twentieth-century ground combat.²⁰ The reverse can also be true. A small change in technology could trigger a major change in the best way to fight. The breech-loading rifle is one such example.²¹ This observation has important ramifications for prediction. Being able to detect a looming shift in technology or objectives does not translate into being able to predict the best way to fight before the fighting breaks out. There is an important difference between realizing that the best way to fight is about to change and knowing both the degree and the direction in which it has changed. As the case studies in this book demonstrate, when it comes to war fighting, being off by even a little bit can prove costly.

ARE THESE SOUND ASSUMPTIONS?

These might seem like strong assumptions. However, most scholarly critiques of military effectiveness rest on even stronger ones. To criticize military performance and decision making (e.g., the French Army in the Second World War, the United States in Vietnam, or the Soviet Army in Afghanistan) relies on the assumption that there was a better way to fight and that political and military leaders at the time should have known ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Assessment, Command, and Training Theory
• 2. Learning on the Western Front
• 3. The German Army on the Western Front
• 4. The British Army on the Western Front
• 5. The French Army on the Western Front
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index