This is a riff on a War Room Substack by Robert Lyman
What’s the purpose of an army? To fight battles? To fight wars? Yeah, that too.
Get this straight: fighting is a step on the path to achieving the ultimate purpose of an army that they sometimes don’t have to fight for:
The achievement of strategic effects.
The purpose of a military force is to ensure that a country secures strategic value from its existence. Since strategy expresses political purpose, the role of the military is to secure valuable political goals or results for the country. Maybe battles have to be fought on the way, and campaigns launched and won, but the purpose of all these is always to achieve a specific national purpose. This purpose will vary with time and circumstances. It may be to repel an invader, to destroy a particular threat, to work with an ally to prevent a hostile power taking advantage of a particular geopolitical situation, or to deter an enemy from taking up arms. The existence or otherwise of a military organization can be of incalculable value to a country. How good it is at fighting, how well funded, trained and equipped are important, but other things are even more important.
A sub-optimal view of war.
When Japan invaded India in March 1944, the bushido-driven Japanese 15th Army believed their job was to defeat their Indian and British opponents. That, after all, was where the glory was for the samurai. In that same campaign, when Sato Kotoku of Japan’s 31st Division came across opposition from an untried and weak battalion at Jessami, Sato stopped and spent five days wiping it out. He squandered the opportunity to fall on unprotected Kohima early. Further south, Yamauchi Masafumi’s 15th Division did the same at Shangshak. If both had ignored the lure of battle, the greater prizes of Kohima and Imphal might have fallen into their laps.
Battle isn’t the ‘be all and end all’ of an army’s purpose.
When Sato finally reached Kohima, he decided to fight a quick battle. He thought it would be easy, since he had about 15,000 men and the enemy only about 1,000. But by fighting at Kohima, he ignored one of the largest supply dumps east of Suez at Dimapur, 46 miles further down the valley, that the Allies meant to support their offensive across the Chindwin into Burma. Grabbing Dimapur would have had a dramatic effect on the ability of the Allies to wage war in the Far East, and would have fed his starving army that had been on short rations for months. Dimapur was a stone’s throw from Kohima, and yet Sato never once lifted his eyes from the battle in front of him to consider sidestepping it. By fighting at Kohima, he gave William Slim time to reinforce Dimapur and resist Sato’s onslaught. Slim’s forces could always grow as the battle continued; Sato’s could only shrink.
The Japanese commanders didn’t understand the purpose of their armies.
By January 1951, the Supreme Commander of the UN forces in Korea, Douglas MacArthur, had lost confidence in his inexperienced US and South Korean troops to turn the tide of the war. The Chinese had entered the fray in late October 1950 and had reversed MacArthur’s un-mandated rush to the Yalu. The “Big Bugout” after Thanksgiving 1950 humiliated MacArthur, who wanted a rapid, decisive reversal of US, UN, and, of course, his personal fortunes, reuniting the peninsula under one polity from Seoul, which was not in the UN mandate. He thought that the only way of achieving his desired strategic effect was to bomb China into submission, using nuclear weapons if necessary.
But calmer heads prevailed.
The ambition in Washington was not to escalate the war into a nuclear confrontation with Beijing and Moscow, but the men MacArthur had lost faith in were the instruments of change in the Korean conflict which, in Omar Bradley’s immortal terms, was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time against the wrong enemy. After MacArthur’s relief and recall in April 1951, the new UN commander, Matthew Ridgeway, knew that the further and faster the Chinese advanced, they’d eventually outrun their supplies. If he could slow the tips of the enemy spears, he had a good chance of stopping the Chinese advance and fulfilling the UN mandate, which was to save the polity of Seoul.
He was right.
Despite MacArthur’s pessimism before his relief, a reinvigorated US Eighth Army, X Corps, and troops from many nations stopped the Chinese offensive in its tracks and pushed it back. The Chinese never recovered; the UN stabilized the line roughly along the prewar dividing line, the 38th Parallel. The Chinese were not interested in reuniting Korea under a Pyongyang government; they wanted to wear down the UN sufficiently to overcome that troublesome polity on Taiwan.
Fighting could fulfill neither MacArthur’s nor Mao’s goals, but it could meet the UN’s.
The American offensives persuaded Beijing, Moscow, and Washington that a settlement on the battlefield in Korea was required. Ridgeway showed that well-equipped conventional forces could achieve a decisive strategic effect without resorting to atomic weapons: the ending of the war on terms that the US and UN had set out. If you believe armies are sub-strategic, and that the only strategic hammers in a country’s military toolbox are nuclear weapons, you deny vital tools in securing real strategic effect.
An army can be a tool for decisive strategic effect without fighting.
In 1936, the Western Powers suffered defeat in the face of Germany’s rampant militarism. That year, Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, forbidden to Germany by the Versailles Treaty. If Britain or France had enforced the treaty by sending back the troops they had removed in 1931, Hitler would have immediately backed down and ended his Nazi project in one swoop. But Hitler had somethings that neither France nor Britain had in 1936…
Deployable armies and political will.
Britain lacked a deployable ground military capability able to nip Hitler’s aspirations in the bud, and France, which lost 20% of its military-age men in the 1914-18 war, wouldn’t move without Britain’s backing on the ground. That and there was no desire in London or Paris to enforce the Versailles Treaty. London could not see the nature of the threat facing her country; France could, but political unrest tore at her social and political fiber.
Hitler’s six battalions had a strategic effect all out of proportion to its military capability.
Hitler’s naval and air forces in 1936 were inconsequential compared to that of Britain and France. A credible army could have as much deterrent effect as any nuclear de-terrent; perhaps more. Both play their own separate roles in a toolbox of military capabilities. A state can use both by not using them, but to be effective, the state must have them and be determined to use them as needed.
Limited thinking assumes a military establishment’s purpose is solely to fight.
A military establishment could be a decisive strategic tool in a country’s toolbox when it’s seen by a potential enemy as being capable enough of deterring it from doing what it wants. The trick is for the government to ensure that they have a force to achieve what we need for their security. It is important to use force strategically at the operational level of war, as the Japanese failed to do in 1944. It is equally important to realize that good armies can have grand strategic or political results if deployed as Ridgeway showed in Korea. But having a military, as Britain and France did in 1936, without the will to use it that Hitler had, negated the capability of both.
The purpose of any military force is to do the will of the state that controls it. If it cannot, or the state won’t use it, the state is at the mercy of opponents who have the will and the means.
The Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear: Japan’s Path to Armageddon
Japan didn’t have a problem using and misusing their military power, and that was part of their problem because their enemies had more power than they could ever develop.
And Finally...
On 14 November:
1916: British and French commanders agree to end the offensive known as the Battle of the Somme in France, effective two days later. In July 1916, the Anglo/French campaign began, meant to draw German forces away from their offensive at Verdun further south. It failed, showing the futility of the mass attack style of warfare then popular among the Allied generals, generating nearly a million Allied casualties for negligible territorial gains.
1988: Haywood “Possum” Hansell dies on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, at 85. He was an original member of the Army Air Corps’ first aerobatic team, and one of America’s primary air strategy planners before World War II. His inability to achieve the results with the B-29 Superfortresses that HH Arnold expected, however, ended his command of the XXI Bomber Command, making way for Curtis LeMay to take command and achieve the desired results.
And today is NATIONAL SEAT BELT DAY, marking the day in 1966 when seat belts became required equipment in the US. The carmakers replaced the earlier lap belts after the Swedish patent for the 3-point seat belt became public; Volvo does not enforce their patent. By some estimates, seat belts have saved over a million lives since.