The Sources of Military Doctrine

France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

Barry R. Posen

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780801468575
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Sécurité nationale

Barry R. Posen explores how military doctrine takes shape and the role it plays in grand strategy-that collection of military, economic, and political means and ends with which a state attempts to achieve security. Posen isolates three crucial elements of a given strategic doctrine: its offensive, defensive, or deterrent characteristics, its integration of military resources with political aims, and the degree of military or operational innovation it contains. He then examines these components of doctrine from the perspectives of organization theory and balance of power theory, taking into account the influence of technology and geography.

Looking at interwar France, Britain, and Germany, Posen challenges each theory to explain the German Blitzkrieg, the British air defense system, and the French Army's defensive doctrine often associated with the Maginot Line. This rigorous comparative study, in which the balance of power theory emerges as the more useful, not only allows us to discover important implications for the study of national strategy today, but also serves to sharpen our understanding of the origins of World War II.

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The Importance of
Military Doctrine

GRAND STRATEGY AND MILITARY DOCTRINE

Military doctrines are critical components of national security policy or grand strategy. A grand strategy is a political-military, means-ends chain, a state’s theory about how it can best “cause” security for itself.1 Ideally, it includes an explanation of why the theory is expected to work. A grand strategy must identify likely threats to the state’s security and it must devise political, economic, military, and other remedies for those threats. Priorities must be established among both threats and remedies because given an anarchical international environment, the number of possible threats is great, and given the inescapable limits of a national economy, resources are scarce.2 Because resources are scarce, the most appropriate military means should be selected to achieve the political ends in view. Of course, grand strategies are almost never stated in such rigorous form, but the analyst may be guided by this conceptualization in his attempt to ferret out the grand strategy of a state, and to compare the strategies of states.

I use the term “military doctrine” for the subcomponent of grand strategy that deals explicitly with military means. Two questions are important: What means shall be employed? and How shall they be employed? Priorities must be set among the various types of military forces available to the modern state. A set of prescriptions must be generated specifying how military forces should be structured and employed to respond to recognized threats and opportunities. Ideally, modes of cooperation between different types of forces should be specified.

Since the close of World War I, modern states have had land, sea, and air forces with which to achieve their goals. Since the close of World War II, some have had nuclear forces. States stress one type of force over another for geographical, technological, economic, or political reasons. Within forces, different sorts of weaponry could be stressed. Navies might stress submarines or aircraft carriers. Armies might stress armor or infantry. Air forces might stress long-range bombing of industry or short-range support of army formations. These latter choices shade off into the realm known as tactics.3

Military doctrine includes the preferred mode of a group of services, a single service, or a subservice for fighting wars. It reflects the judgments of professional military officers, and to a lesser but important extent civilian leaders, about what is and is not militarily possible and necessary. Such judgments are based on appraisals of military technology, national geography, adversary capabilities, and the skills of one’s own military organization. Military doctrine, particularly the aspects that relate directly to combat, is strongly reflected in the forces that are acquired by the military organization. Force posture, the inventory of weapons any military organization controls, can be used as evidence to discover military doctrine.

For what military ends shall military means be employed? Military operations can be broken into three different categories: offensive, defensive, and deterrent. Offensive doctrines aim to disarm an adversary—to destroy his armed forces. Defensive doctrines aim to deny an adversary the objective that he seeks. Deterrent doctrines aim to punish an aggressor—to raise his costs without reference to reducing one’s own.

Examples of Military Doctrine

An example of an offensive military doctrine is the method of combining tanks, motorized infantry, and combat aircraft to achieve rapid victory invented by the Germans in the 1930s, and called Blitzkrieg ever since. Modern Israel, since 1956, has to some extent imitated the operational aspects of the Blitzkrieg military format, with outstanding success in 1956 and 1967 and more limited success in 1973. The equipment has changed, but the method of combining the different types of forces for high-speed warfare has remained the same.

All of the land powers on the eve of World War I held offensive doctrines. The French are perhaps best known for their commitment to “l’offense a l’outrance”—offense to the limit. After the fact, this same commitment has come to be known as the “cult of the offensive.” All of these offensive doctrines call for early and intense attack. All include important preemptive strains.

A well-known example of a defensive doctrine is the complex of French policies, much misunderstood, that are symbolized in current discourse by the Maginot Line. The apparent ease with which the line was flanked by the Germans in 1940 has given defense a bad name ever since. Plans to protect part of the U.S. strategic bomber deterrent in the 1950s with concrete blast shelters were derided by the U.S. Air Force as Maginot-Line-thinking. In 1973 such shelters stood Egypt in good stead against Israel, discouraging a 1967 style aerial preemption. Like the Maginot Line, the Great Wall of China played an important role in a defensive doctrine. For the British Empire the English Channel, a large fleet, and a small army provided the elements of what was essentially a defensive doctrine.

An example of a deterrent doctrine, and as pure a one as is likely to be found, is that associated with present-day France and its Force de Frappe. France has managed to build enough atomic-powered, nuclear-armed submarines to keep at least one at sea at any given time. Eventually this number will rise to two. France also maintains some thirty-three strategic bombers and eighteen intermediate-range ballistic missiles. While the small size of this force makes it more vulnerable to surprise attack than that of the United States, the French believe that the threat to eliminate even a small number of the most important Soviet cities is menacing enough to discourage aggression by her most probable adversary.

An example of a deterrent doctrine achieved with conventional military technology is that of modern Switzerland. The Swiss Army has little hope of denying much of the country to a large and determined adversary. Rather, the army and air force are deliberately and carefully structured so as to make the price of action against Switzerland very high. It is of critical importance not only that the initial defense be stalwart but also that painful and determined resistance continue over an extended period. The Swiss cannot deny their country to an adversary, but they can make him pay for the privilege of entry, and punish him for staying around.

THE IMPORTANCE OF MILITARY DOCTRINE

Military doctrine is important for two reasons. First, the doctrines held by the states within a system affect the quality of international political life. By their offensive, defensive, or deterrent character, doctrines affect the probability and intensity of arms races and of wars. Second, by both the political and military appropriateness of the means employed, a military doctrine affects the security of the state that holds it. A military doctrine may harm the security interests of the state if it is not integrated with the political objectives of the state’s grand strategy—if it fails to provide the statesman with the tools suitable for the pursuit of those objectives. A military doctrine may also harm the security interests of the state if it fails to respond to changes in political circumstances, adversary capabilities, or available military technology—if it is insufficiently innovative for the competitive and dynamic environment of international politics. If war comes, such a doctrine may lead to defeat.

Offense, Defense, and Deterrence:
Military Doctrine and International Conflict

The offensive, defensive, or deterrent quality of a military doctrine is important because it affects states’ perceptions of and reactions to one another. International politics is a competitive arena. Because offensive doctrines appear to make some states more competitive, they encourage the rest to compete even harder. Defensive and deterrent doctrines should tend to produce more benign effects.

Offensive doctrines increase the probability and intensity of arms races and of wars. To argue this is to argue that the international system is more than a mere group of dissimilar states coexisting in a particular historical period. Much of the unsavory behavior of states is best explained by similarities among them and the identical condition that they face. States are alike insofar as they are autonomous social organisms that wish to remain so. They may wish to grow larger, but they do not wish either to be subsumed in some larger organism or to be made smaller. They also share at least one important condition—anarchy, the absence of a world sovereign. So long as technology, geography, and economy make it possible for states to aggress against one another, and so long as there is no international authority to protect those satisfied with the status quo and to punish those who violate it, states will be strongly encouraged to take steps to protect themselves from one another. These steps are all part of a state’s grand strategy.

Because behavior is unregulated, because states must look to their own defenses, they watch their neighbors carefully. Military doctrines and capabilities are hard to hide, but the political intentions that lie behind the military preparations are obscure. This being the case, in watching one another, states tend to focus on military doctrines and military capabilities. They take these capabilities at face value. Arabs infer malign intent from the offensive military doctrine of the Israel Defense Forces. Both the United States and the Soviet Union infer malign intent from each other’s offensive, counterforce capability. Israel, the United States, and the Soviet Union all maintain offensive military capabilities; their opponents infer aggressive motives. As Robert Jervis has observed: “Arms procured to defend can usually be used to attack. Economic and military preparedness designed to hold what one has is apt to create the potential for taking territory from others. What one state regards as insurance, the adversary will see as encirclement.”4 In short, “many of the means by which a state tries to increase its security decrease the security of others.”5 International relations theorists call this the security dilemma. The security dilemma arises “not because of misperception or imagined hostility, but because of the anarchic context of international relations.”6 States seek to preserve their autonomy in an environment where perhaps any other state can become a threat, and where “self-help” is the fundamental prerequisite for security. The more offensive are the military doctrines of one or more states, the more nervous everyone else in the system is likely to become.

A foregone conclusion, given these considerations, is that offensive doctrines tend to promote arms races and war. Because states take measures to ensure their security in the context of anarchy, and because they carefully watch the measures that other states take to improve their security, it follows that they also respond to the measures that others take with additional measures of their own, if others’ measures appear to make them less secure. In short, states engage in what balance of power theorists call “balancing behavior.” This is perfectly reasonable behavior for states that enjoy being autonomous and notice that others are doing things that might threaten their autonomy.7

Traditionally, balance of power theorists focused on coalition formation as the principal type of balancing behavior. The concept of balancing behavior should logically be expanded, however, to include internally generated military or economic preparations for possible wars.8 If another power is increasing its capabilities by coalition building, arms buildup, or any other measure that can be construed as threatening the security of a given state, a reaction in the form of coalition building and/or arms-racing is probable. A good deal of diplomatic history is loosely informed by this view of how international politics works.9 The important thing to bear in mind is that the history of relations among states is rife with all sorts of action-reaction phenomena, political and military.10

Arms Races

Offensive military doctrines promote arms races in two ways. First, a tenet of offensive doctrines is that an effective first strike can quickly, cheaply, and successfully end a war; so the state will support that first strike with large resources. Second, since offensive doctrines imply a belief in the superiority of offensive action over defensive action, states feel greatly threatened by increases in one another’s military capabilities and react quite strongly to those increases.11

The Soviet-American nuclear arms race illustrates how the offensive doctrines of two great powers affect their views of each other and their military preparations. Each interprets the other’s military doctrine as offensive. In some measure, each imitates the other.12 Both states have tended to expand their ability to attack each other. Both have allocated very substantial resources to the military competition.

Current Western views of the offensive character of Soviet military doctrine are well known.13 The doctrine of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces does appear to aim at disarming the United States. We assume that our own doctrine, one of deterrence, could not have anything to do with Soviet doctrine. Yet, careful observers of U.S. military forces agree that the Strategic Air Command has always targeted enemy nuclear forces and targeted them massively.14 Moreover, the United States has usually tried to deploy sufficient forces to allow counterforce missions to be completed after a Soviet first strike. Of course, this much insurance may appear to the Russians as an attempt to achieve a high-confidence, disarming, first-strike capability against them. Indeed, while it is difficult to separate genuine fear from propaganda, passages in Soviet Marshall V. D. Sokolovsky’s Military Strategy impute to the United States offensive inclinations that we have come to identify with Soviet doctrine.15

Fortunately, although the two superpowers have both maintained an offensive doctrine, each has also prudently guarded its second-strike retaliatory forces, thwarting the best efforts of the other to achive a war-winning capability. The hypothesized consequences of mutually offensive doctrines have emerged, however. Soviet and U.S. strategic nuclear arsenals have grown substantially, measured in numbers of nuclear warheads. In the last ten years the number of U.S. warheads has doubled, reaching eight to ten thousand. The Soviets have reached a similar level.16

In gauging the relative threat of each other’s military spending, each s...