" A complete battle of Cannae is rarely met in history. For its achievement, a Hannibal is needed on one side, and a Tarrentius Varro, on the other, both cooperating for the attainment of the great objective."
Pedants and Combat Leaders: Framing the Debate
The irresolute aftermath of the much ballyhooed "Hail Mary Pass" that capped Desert Storm has revived the old chestnut of the "Decisive Battle", or more properly, the question: "Do battles, by themselves, truly resolve anything lasting?" This article will briefly outline the notion of decisive battle through time by surveying both the ideal and the reality in several historical scenarios, both presumed and actual.
This may sound like one of those pedagogical beer and pretzels debates that infuriates combat veterans and raises the hackles of the more genteel, academic military historians. The latter, after all, are trying to surmount the "afteraction report" stigma associated with their concentration. But still, the question persists. Cynics see the debate merely as an occasion for bookish nitpicking. Isn't it one of those ethereal, scholarly conceits that exasperate pragmatic master sergeants? Does this erudite wordplay really matter in the concrete, untidy domain of battlefield butchery? And how does it relate to the larger implications: the broader question, "can military action remedy such-and-such difficulty and if so, can it be brought to a head in one or two quick, sharp victories?" So there's a box within a box. Do wars decide the course of civilization, and if so, do battles decide wars?
We'll condemn to the fringes of wee hours bull sessions in undergrad dorms the simplistic issue of whether military action is an outmoded solution to international, or intranational, emergencies. The very question is an ideological catchphrase for military bashers and a red flag for unappreciated old campaigners. Let's get down to the nuts and bolts.
Saddam Hussein remains firmly in the saddle five years after Desert Storm. His regime still frustrates inspections of illicit biological warfare plants and rattles sabres at unfriendly Gulf states. So, inquiring minds want to know, did one of the most clear-cut "wins" of American (and associated) arms in the twentieth century decide anything after all? That particular discussion will roll on interminably, along with the Kennedy assassination and a thousand other unsolved mysteries. Without trying to resolve specific points of disagreement, t it might be useful to briefly examine the fixation on decisive battle in military historiography.
General Norman Schwarzkopf's rightly acclaimed after-action briefing on Desert Storm's finale depicted, in both chart and succinct expression, that most elusive key to victory: the coup de main. The Gulf War's endgame, Operation Desert Sabre, represents the belated post World War II addition to the honor roll of conclusive clashes. A ledger of definitive military phenomena was first offered to a peacetime audience by Sir Edward Creasy in 1856 and updated periodically since.
An alternate way of expressing the "decisive battle" controversy is the great German military historian Hans Delbruck's late 1890s formulation of the strategy of attrition versus the strategy of annihilation. Frederick the Great, with his boxer's feints and jabs was said to wear his opponents down along an entire front (attrition) while Napoleon's maneuvers, in contrast, were done for the sole purpose of setting up a crushing hammer blow (annihilation) -- to hold and destroy the enemy's main force in a single concentrated stroke.
The perpetual search for the key to victory conforms with the concept of a single coup de main as the paragon of all military endeavor. Russel Weigley, in his 1993 Age Of Battles, argues that despite the alleged pursuit of decisive engagements from Breitenfeld to Waterloo, the battle was rarely, if ever, the payoff in that period. That is, an individual fight did not decide an entire war "on an afternoon." John Keegan, in his landmark study, The Face Of Battle, did an excellent job of tracking this standard through modern military history, whose leading lights have all written catalogues of "decisive battles since ...". See, for example, Liddell Hart's original configuration of his well-known book on Strategy of the Indirect Approach and J. F. C.Fuller's three-volume A Military History of the Western World. Each highlights history's deciding moments, all that goes in between comprising mere footnotes and parentheses.
Set the Pattern
Creasy set the pattern for popular modern military studies in his prototype, Decisive Battles Of History From Marathon To Waterloo. Ever since then, war analysts have wrestled with the notion of battles as key historical determinants. This debate has greatly sharpened since the Vietnam War, if not the Korean War. The wars were frustrating efforts to come to grips with an enemy who would not take the bait, but instead danced circles around the great lumbering colossus. If we could have just done a Dien Bien Phu on the NVA, why then ... or, to take 1964 presidential pandidate Barry Goldwater's phrase (a far cry from the 1990s elder statesman of that name) -- "We have nukes. We should use 'em and bomb 'em back into the stone age." Does "decision" in warfare still hold the same meaning as it did for Creasy, Liddell Hart and Fuller?
More Decisive Battle
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Decisive Battle: Introduction
Decisive Battle: Mission Creep: Armies Or Gendarmes?
Decisive Battle: Mining History for Validation
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© Copyright 1996 by David W. Tschanz.
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