Strategy for Chaos: Revolutions in Military Affairs and The Evidence of History (Strategic Studies)

296 Pages·2004·2.29 MB·English

by  Colin Gray

STRATEGY FOR CHAOS
Cass Series: Strategy and History
Series Editors: Colin Gray and Williamson Murray
ISSN: 1473–6403
This new series will focus on the theory and practice of strategy. Following Clausewitz,
strategy has been understood to mean the use made of force, and the threat of the use of
force, for the ends of policy. This series is as interested in ideas as in historical cases of
grand strategy and military strategy in action. All historical periods, near and past, and
even future, are of interest. In addition to original monographs, the series will from time
to time publish edited reprints of neglected classics as well as collections of essays.
1. Military Logistics and Strategic Performance, Thomas M.Kane
2. Strategy for Chaos: Revolutions in Military Affairs and the Evidence of History, Colin
Gray
3. The Myth of Inevitable US Defeat in Vietnam, C.Dale Walton
4. Astropolitik: Classical Geopolitics in the Space Age, Everett C.Dolman
5. Anglo-American Strategic Relations and the Far East, 1933–1939: Imperial
Crossroads, Greg Kennedy
STRATEGY FOR CHAOS
Revolutions in Military Affairs and the Evidence of History
COLIN S.GRAY
University of Reading
With a Foreword by
WILLIAMSON MURRAY

FRANK CASS
LONDON • PORTLAND, OR
First published in 2002 First published in paperback in Great Britain by FRANK CASS
PUBLISHERS Crown House, 47 Chase Side, Southgate London, N14 5BP
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

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Copyright © 2002 Colin S.Gray
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Gray, Colin S. (Colin Spencer), 1943– Strategy
for chaos: revolutions in military affairs and the evidence of history.—(Cass series. Strategy and
history; no. 2) 1. Strategy—Philosophy 2. Strategy—History I. Title 355.4’01
ISBN 0-203-33925-8 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-7146-5186-9 (Print Edition) (cloth)
ISBN 0-7146-8483-X (Print Edition)
ISSN 1473-6403
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gray, Colin S. Strategy for chaos: revolutions
in military affairs and the evidence of history/Colin S. Gray; with a foreword by Williamson
Murray. p. cm.—(Cass series—strategy and history, ISSN 1473-6403; 2) Includes bibliographical
references and index. ISBN 0-7146-5186-9 (cloth) ISBN 0-7146-8483-X (paper) 1. Strategy. 2.
Military art and science. 3. Military history, Modern-Case Studies. I. Title. II. Series. U162 G724
2002 355.4–dc21 2002067625
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher of this
book.
To Dr Finella Brito Babapulle, for her dedication and skill
Contents

Foreword by Williamson Murray vii
Preface x
List of Abbreviations xiv

1. High Concept 1
2. RMA Anatomy: Patterns in History? 27
3. RMA Dynamics 59
4. On Strategy, I: Chaos Confounded? 80
5. On Strategy, II: The RMA Connection 104
6. Case Study I: The Napoleonic RMA 122
7. Case Study II: The RMA of the First World War 151
8. Case Study III: The Nuclear RMA 197
9. Strategy as a Duel: RMA Meets the Enemy 239

Select Bibliography 258
Index 266
Foreword
The gap between historians and political scientists in dealing with strategy, war and
military institutions has, if anything, widened over the past several decades. On the one
hand, historians, those few who remain interested in such issues—given the rush to
political correctness throughout the discipline—remain mired in the peculiarities and
details of their peculiar period. One might best sum up the prevailing attitudes in the
historical profession in the following terms: ‘Generalize or suggest larger patterns of
behavior? My goodness, we certainly wouldn’t want to do that, would we?’ Thus, most
works on military or strategic history focus on the specific with little willingness—or
interest—to generalize, much less theorize, about the larger issues and patterns of war
throughout the ages. And that is why Thucydides remains by far and away the greatest
strategic and military historian of all time, despite the fact that he wrote his seminal work
on the history of the Peloponnesian War over 2,400 years ago.
There have, of course, been a few historians, Michael Howard in particular, who have
attempted to deal with the wider implications of historical research and what it might
suggest to policy-makers as they grapple with the intractable intellectual and moral
problems involved in the making of strategy. But, for the most part, military and strategic
historians have remained a small, isolated group in a discipline more interested in fleeing
from the real world than in addressing the larger questions, on which history might
actually provide a dim light for the future. And they have been all too unwilling to
engage in the great defense debates that swirl around Washington’s Beltway or even
within the larger defense community.
Political scientists, on the other hand, have been all too willing to theorize without
coming to grips with the harsh complexities of historical research or of the alien world—
at least to many of them—of real facts. The result has been theories that bear little
relation either to history or to how human institutions work. Yet, as Clausewitz suggested
in his seminal work On War, any theory of war must remain closely tied to the historical
record—at least, as we can know it. Theories of war and strategy which remove
themselves from the realities of the historical record not only become increasingly
irrelevant, but can at times become positively dangerous.
There have been a few political scientists who have been willing to grapple with
historical scholarship in its breadth and depth. In the United States, the late Michael
Handel and Eliot Cohen have brought a sense of the complexities as well as the rigor of
historical scholarship to their work. By remaining consistently honest to the historical
record, they have been able to combine the strengths of history with that of theory to
extend our understanding of the role of war and strategy—past, present, and future. The
third of the political scientists who have managed to relate theory to the real historical
world has been the author of this present volume, Colin Gray. But, unlike Handel and
Cohen, Professor Gray has also been able to inform his work with the extensive
experience he gained in the Washington political and policy-making arena. Like Handel
and Cohen, Gray has found his Weltanschauung informed, molded, and guided by
Clausewitz’s universe of complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty.
Professor Gray has addressed a myriad of subjects, ranging from his early work on
nuclear strategy at the Hudson Institute to naval strategy, geopolitics, and grand strategy,
to name just a few. In all of his previous efforts, Gray’s mixture of history, theory, and
deep understanding of how the world works has placed him firmly in the camp of the
neo-Clausewitzians—those who recognize that the fundamental nature, if not the means,
of the conduct of war and strategy has not and will not change; at least as long as human
beings are involved in the processes. In this volume, Gray now turns his analytic power
to the examination of one of the most important insights to emerge from the demise of the
Soviet Union and the emergence of the United States as the world’s sole superpower in
the early 1990s: the idea that revolutions in military affairs (RMAs) have been occurring
throughout the history of the rise of the West to world domination over the past 500
years, and that we are on the brink of another period of revolutionary change in the
means with which men (and increasingly women) wage war.
The idea of the possibility of revolutionary change first appeared in the writings of
Soviet military theorists and leaders in the early to mid-1980s, as they began to recognize
that technological developments in the US military threatened to render obsolete the vast
military forces—nuclear as well as conventional—on which they had lavished so much of
their gross national product. The Soviets appear to have been sensitized both by their
belief in revolutionary change and by the fact that they were watching the larger
framework of the emerging technological improvements of the United States (ranging
from stealth and precision to computers and command and control), while the Americans
themselves were submerged in the technological details of bringing new technologies on
line. The Soviets were also undoubtedly sensitized by being on the receiving end of the
new American capabilities in places such as the Bekka Valley.
Andrew Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment in the Pentagon was the first in the
United States to pick up on the significance of the Soviet writings, and in the early 1990s
suggested that a fundamental change was occurring in how wars would be fought in the
future. From the first, Marshall and his analysts have argued that such a revolution was
only beginning, that the human elements would be by far and away the most important
elements in its development, and that it was by no means certain that the US military
would be the realizers of the transformation. That, of course, has not prevented a whole
host of experts, both inside and outside the US government, from proclaiming that they
have seen the future and they have the prescription, whatever it might be. To a
considerable extent, Marshall and his office have waged a noble and at times Quixotic
effort to bring wisdom to the debate about RMAs against a tide of those enamored only
with technology. Not surprisingly, the US military services jumped in to add their version
of the future RMA, which almost invariably boiled down to weapons systems from the
Air Force’s F-22 to the Army’s ill-fated (and astonishingly misnamed—in view of the
only place in the world where it could fight) ‘Crusader’ artillery system.
Yet the persistence of the RMA concept over the past decade, in a town where
concepts and their acronyms appear and disappear with startling speed, suggests that
there is something to the idea of revolutionary military transformation. The great
difficulty that confronts the layperson, and most strategic and defense planners are lay
people, is that so little historical analysis has examined the historical phenomena of
RMAs outside of the seventeenth century. Various pieces exist, but for the most part they
lie, untapped, deep within an historical literature more interested in the specific course of
events rather than with larger patterns. Thus, it is relatively easy for the high priests of the
coming RMA within the military or irresponsible political scientists to rummage through
history in search of any odd fact or event that lends support to their current arguments,
theories or weapons system.
In this book, Professor Gray has finally provided the analyst or policy-makers with an
understanding of history, strategy, and even the processes of policymaking. He has
managed to create a larger framework for thinking about revolutions in military affairs
(one which largely agrees with that of MacGregor Knox and myself). In doing so, he has
brought the historical record to bear on both the specifics of the processes that have
contributed to RMAs in the past, as well as the creation of a theoretical framework to
shed light on how we need to think about future RMAs. The theory is as important as the
specifics, for without a theory there is no means to think coherently about what the past
suggests. Yet, if the past does not form the basis for creating the theory, then any theory
about RMAs will do. To paraphrase the old aphorism, ‘if you don’t know where you’ve
been, then any road will do’.
Moreover, Professor Gray has tied strategy into the picture of understanding how to
think about RMAs. Without a strategic framework that actually relates to the problems of
the world as it is, all the success in creating an RMA or multiple RMAs will inevitably be
for nothing, as the fate of Germany between 1860 and 1945 underlined all too well. In the
1860s, guided by the brilliance of Otto von Bismarck’s grand strategy, the Prussian
military’s RMA destroyed a European balance of power that had lasted for over 200
years. But in the twentieth century, in World War I and World War II, the Germans
created strategic frameworks of such imbecility that their nation managed not once but
twice to take on virtually the whole of the rest of the world. And within that strategic
framework, the German military’s brilliant virtuosity in creating a number of RMAs was
bound to founder. The brutal result was catastrophic defeat and the division of Germany
for nearly 50 years.
As another ‘American Century’ begins, there is a profound lesson in this for the US
military. Without a serious addressing of what the past suggests about RMAs, there will
be no basis for serious debate and dialogue about potential paths to the future. Then any
path, any technology, any weapons system will do, at least until war and the enemy
appear to disabuse us of our arrogance and ignorance. In the end, Colin Gray has done an
immense service not only to the historical and political-science communities, but to those
who make strategic and military policy in the Pentagon as well. For the former, he has
framed the debate about RMAs for the foreseeable future. For the latter, he has provided
a deeply serious work of scholarship to frame the thinking that must take place. Whether
anyone will pay attention is another question.
Williamson Murray
Senior Fellow, Institute for Defense Analysis, Alexandria, VA
June 2002