Up until about five hundred years ago, military leadership was essentially the equivalent of riot control. It was the ability to look into a mass of several thousand people fighting and spot where the key points were where you could send some more of your fighters to and turn the outcome of the riot in your direction.
Sun Tzu’s idea here is not so much not to fight, but that through superior planning, timing, and positioning an enemy choses to withdraw from battle without engaging. Most generals (ignoring Phyrrus) won’t drive a force into a frontal assault against a well entrenched opponent unless there is no other choice.
Things like the seige of Rabaul in WWII. Huge well fortified underground complex that would easily resist months of bombing and shelling…no problem. Surround and let them starve. A battle won with minimal if any fighting.
Take it from me, modern tactical leadership is riot control, too. A commander has to coordinate infantry, armor, artillery and air support while receiving dozens of different, often contradiatory reports every minute and dealing with the pleas and demands of hundreds of coordinates. 75% of military success consists of remaining calm in the eye of the storm - and that’s something that hasn’t changed since ancient times.
I don’t mean to say that technical knowledge of sailing is useful in today’s navy. I mean to say that the ability to organize a dozen ships, each with different capabilities, into a formation that best allows each ship to attack the enemy while giving the maximum protection to the most valuable ships is a kind of strategic thinking that not everyone can do. The skills (be they the finer points of sailing or missile targeting) can be taught to many people, but the inherent talents involved are rarer, and I think that with some training, Nelson would do well today.
And are you suggesting that discipline is somehow a greater problem in today’s Navy (either British or American) than it was two hundred years ago? Do today’s naval captains regularly have to worry about their orders being carried out? How is Nelson’s ability to have a sailor whipped relevant?
I think modern combat has a much closer resemblance to engineering. You’re basically applying forces. It’s no longer a case of two men standing a meter apart each trying to stab or club the other one. Now you have men shooting weapons at enemies they never see. You have powerful weapons that can literally disintegrate an opponent before he knows what hit him - but these same weapons can miss completely and the opponent will never know he was even being attacked. So nowadays the primary job of a military leader is to make sure the overwhelming amount of force at his command arrives at the proper place.
What I meant was that a leader needs to both know the technical side of his job (whether it’s cloth sails or modern electronics),AND know how to manage the people under him. Even before the word psychology was invented, a great general was also a good psychologist–i.e they had charisma and knew how to motivate others.
Nelson wouldn’t understand our modern psychology*. You can’t motivate today’s soldiers by threats of whipping.
- just like I can’t understand the psychology of people who owned slaves in Nelson’s day.
ISTM that successful flag officers have to be deeply embedded in the values of their time. Nelson’s "duty"signal before Trafalgar was powerfully motivating then. The present response of a Gen Y army is likely to be “Whatevah”. Different motivators are required in different eras.
Nelson, for example, had (to modern ears) a painful sense of his own honour and manifest destiny. This was common enough in its day. Anyone poncing about now with that level of preciousness could not motivate modern soldiers or officers.
Moreover, our sense of the way the world works is developed from early childhood. The relative pace of things like cars and aeroplanes, how much fuel they require, how many people each can carry, rate of consumption of ammunition, likelihood of a hit per bomb drop,etc, becomes instinctive if you grew up with these things. Not so much if you grew up with horses and hay.
If you took the Nelson from the battle of Trafalgar and asked him to fight Midway, it would be a disaster. His instinctive concerns about winds and tides would not lightly go away, and his complete lack of understanding of fueling and feeding a modern fleet, rotation times on flight decks, aeroplane ranges, tactics, etc would result in catastrophic failure. Things like the “Thatch Weave” are not intuitive just because you were once a good admiral unless you have a deep understanding of what it is like to fly in battle.
On the other hand, if you took an 18 year old Nelson and sent him to present day Annapolis, it would take him years to get on top of the 18 years of understanding and education about modern mechanics and electronics, etc, that his classmates already have. He’d be the class doofus, not from lack of intelligence, just from not knowing shit.
Moreover, the 18 year old Nelson was not the man who won Trafalgar. The older Nelson had years of life experience and confidence, building from success after success in wooden-ship warfare, that the 18 year old did not. And the older Nelson had enormous luck, surviving battles in which he displayed great physical courage, that might not replay second time around in modern conditions. Without all that, you can’t really call him Nelson.
It depends what you have in mind- if you’re suggesting we build a time machine, take Napoleon Bonaparte from 1805 to 1939, and see how he’d fare against the Wehrmacht… well, he’d be crushed. Too much changed between 1805 and 1939 for Napoleon to get up to speed quickly enough to lead the French Army.
But of course, that’s NOT how things work in real life. In real life, military officers (like aviators and physicists and medical doctors) are constantly learning new techniques and trying to keep up with technological changes. Warfare changed drastically in Napoleon’s lifetime, and he adapted to all the changes over time. If he’d lived a century later, he’d have had to make a very different set of adaptations… but there’s no reason to think he couldn’t have.
All valid points, but that works in reverse, too. Bull Halsey couldn’t have taken over for Nelson at Trafalgar, either.
Sports analogies don’t always work, but let’s try this one:
Some people would argue that, if Babe Ruth were transported from 1923 to the modern era, he’d NEVER get around on a Justin Verlander fastball, and would be regarded as a fat joke. And there’s some validity to that. But as I said earlier, change DOESN’T work that way. Change is incremental,. and the best of the best adapt.
Baseball changed DRASTICALLY between 1907 and 1927 (the dead ball era ended, for one thing), but somehow Ty Cobb hit over .350 both years.
Baseball changed drastically between 1943 and 1957 (the end of WW2, the integration of baseball), but somehow Stan Musial managed to win the NL batting title both years.
Baseball changed drastically between 1972 and 1990, but somehow Nolan Ryan managed to strike out a ton of batters both years.
The Babe Ruth of 1923 COULDN’T compete today, but so what? Over the course of time, he’d have made adjustments, and probably would have thrived.
There’s no reason to think military geniuses couldn’t have made adjustments too, given enough time to learn.
Nope. It may seem like that in theory, but in practice, it’s all still chaos and confusion and panic and blood.
That may still be the experience of the people in the battle. But do you really think those are factors the person leading the battle must deal with? Foch and Manstein and Schwarzkopf weren’t ducking bullets and wiping blood off their uniforms. They were sitting in a room full of couriers and telephones, managing the allocation of units. Yes, there were moments of confusion and uncertainty to overcome but they didn’t face the same visceral experience of battle than Alexander or Hannibal or Caesar did. Military leadership has gone from riot control to information management.
The telegraph and the rifled musket. The telegraph meant the speed of information was no longer limited to the speed of a man on horseback. The rifled musket meant Napoleon couldn’t observe and direct the fighting as close to the front in 1860 as he did in 1800 without putting his life in extreme risk. I have no doubt that he could have adapted to it, but it was technology forcing a change in the manner of leadership at high command. During the Civil War lower ranking generals and officers directly leading their men at the brigade and regimental level suffered proportionately higher casualties than the rank and file.
Another major military advance - canned food.
Napoleon was very much aware of the problem of logistics. He had to devote a large amount of his time to figuring out ways to keep his troops fed in the field. Supply and the lack of supply often drove military decisions.
Napoleon offered a sizable cash reward for anyone who could come up with a good way to preserve food for military campaigning. And the prize winner was the idea of putting food inside a sealed glass or metal container and boiling the container to sterilize its contents.
Unfortunately for Napoleon, France was not able to get canning operations up and running in time for it to have a major effect on his logistics. But the superiority of the method was so obvious it was quickly adopted by military forces all over the world.
By the time of the American Civil War it was possible to keep much larger armies in the field and for a much longer time than would have been possible in Napoleon’s day.
nevermind
nm
Exactly what makes this Wargamer think if any of the generals of antiquity got a chance to play modern wargames modeled on their exploits they’d find them laughably absurd.
“Flanking? Are you kidding? Most of my energy was spent keeping these jokers from eating each other!”
Tell that to Hannibal at Cannae.
As a longtime wargamer, I know what you mean. I tell myself they’re games not historical simulations.
I’m sure Julius Caesar would be impressed if he sat down to play Conquest of Gaul and he found out both sides get to see where all the forces are and are even given numerical ratings for how strong they are.
Sun Tzu’s advice is generally regarded as better adapted to handling insurrection and guerrilla warfare than the Western concept of decisive battle. “His” (probably not one individual) theories guided North Vietnam’s little experiment in that regard.
Grant of the Petersburg tench-warfare siege and frontal assaults despite heavy losses? I think he’d have fit in fine in WWI. The usual lament runs the other way – why didn’t the WWI generals learn from Grant?
Eh. Rommel was instrumental in adapting the 88 for anti-tank use, and Panzerfausts were heavily deployed among the German infantry he commanded along the Atlantic Wall. He also warned the German high command that Allied airpower was going to make movement on the roads all but impossible, and that it would destroy his tanks if they had to move long distances. I think he already understood both these points you’ve made, and would be not at all surprised by modern refinements.