A History of Strategy by Martin van Creveld Read Free Book Online

amassing of supplies, arms and money on the other. Part II deals with training, discipline, logistics, and intelligence. Montecuccoli, unlike Machiavelli, was a firm advocate of standing, professional forces of the kind which had been pioneered by the Dutch general, Maurice of Nassau. This part also has much to say about the conduct of war, including fortification, marches, operational maneuver—a field in which Montecuccoli was considered a master—and the peculiar tactical difficulties that resulted from the need to combine cavalry with artillery and infantry as well as muskets with pikes. Finally, Part III deals with what we today would call “war termination” and the attainment of a more favorable peace.
    A point worth making here, which distinguishes Montecuccoli from previous writers, is that he looks at war as something waged by states rather than by peoples (as in classical Greek and Republican Rome) or rulers (as in China, Imperial Rome, Byzantium, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance). Explicitly following the ideas of the late sixteenth century political scientist, Justus Lipsius, he clearly distinguishes between external and internal war. Indeed, the point was soon to come where the latter no longer counted as war at all but was downgraded to civil war, revolution, internal dissent, and, in our own day, terrorism. To use a term I previously coined, the age of trinitarian warfare—government against government, regular army against regular army, with the people reduced to a passive role—had dawned. A century or so after Montecuccoli wrote, Frederick the Great said that Lipsius was hopelessly antiquated and should be thrown out of the window. That was because the Flemish philosopher’s ideas of the state as the only legitimate war-making organization were now being taken very much for granted.
    On the other hand, and much like his predecessors, Montecuccoli still failed to distinguish between strategy, the operational level, and tactics. As has been well said, war during most of its history, consisted mainly of an extended walking tour combined with large scale robbery. Deficient communications prevented the coordination of forces unless they were kept closely together; whereas the short range of weapons meant that active hostilities against the enemy could only get under way on those comparatively rare occasions when armies drew up opposite each other so as to give battle. Though statesmen such as Pericles, and commanders in chief such as Hannibal, clearly had in mind some master plans by which they sought to achieve victory, he who looks for the above mentioned distinctions in any of the writings discussed so far will do so in vain. Towards the end of Montecuccoli’s life the term tactics, derived from the Greek and meaning the ordering of formations on the battlefield, was just beginning to come into use. However, another century had to pass before it was clearly distinguished from strategy in the sense of the conduct of war at the higher level.
    To a man, Montecuccoli’s eighteenth-century successors continued to write as if tactics, operational art, and strategy were one. To a man, too, they accepted the idea that war was something to be conducted against foreigners in a different, normally but not invariably neighboring, country. Finally, to a man they shared his notion that the purpose of theory was to reduce warfare to a “system” of rules. The latter would be grounded in experience and supported by reason. Obviously this was something that was much easier to do in regard to fields where the enemy’s independent will did not have to be taken into consideration. Thus discipline, marches, logistics, and cantonments were easier to encompass than were tactics; tactics, easier than operational art; and operational art, easier than strategy. Hence, as Clausewitz later noted, from about 1690 on there was a tendency for theory to grow from the bottom up, so to speak. It started with the most technical