©2002 by Robin Higham and Mark P. Parillo. All rights reserved
Document created: 25 March 02
Aerospace
Power Journal - Spring 2002
|
Dr. Robin Higham
Dr. Mark P. Parillo
©2002 by Robin Higham and Mark P. Parillo. All rights reserved
|
GENERALLY VICTORY IS attributed to generalship, esprit de corps, greater resources, and so forth. Too rarely is tribute paid to grand strategy and management.
These latter two factors are perhaps more important in the limited wars of the present than in the major wars of the past. Whether that will be so depends upon the philosopher-kings at the top of Plato’s pyramid and upon their military advisers charting a wise course and providing for the execution of policy decisions. Ends (strategic objectives) must be connected to means (resources) by an appropriate grand strategy.
The management pattern has to include both the downward dissemination and following of orders and an upward flow of understanding, constructive criticism, and obedience. As an example, in 1993 the chief of the air staff of the Netherlands Air Force had to explain to the civil leadership that in order to keep 72 F-16s operational, he needed 124 machines.
Management and leadership are not the same. The former impersonally carries out business affairs and makes submissions. The latter personifies command or authority. Too often, unfortunately, it is assumed that military leadership includes administrative talents, but this is often not so. Lord Hives, chairman of Rolls-Royce, could still pick up any tool on the shop floor and demonstrate its proper use. How many air marshals can do that? Indeed, until after 1945, how many understood the complexities of the bamboo basket of supply? Or even of the barbed-wire-strand decision pattern? Marshal of the Royal Air Force (MRAF) Sir Arthur Harris’s des-patch on Bomber Command, 1942–45, makes it clear how much vision and management skill was needed to bring that force to the level of the 1939 dream.
War requires the organization, management, and efficiency of the invisible infrastructure in peace as well as in war.
Not only bards and historians, but also businesses themselves have neglected the need to publicize what it took to ready successful armed forces. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, ever more complex weapons systems have required parallel organizations to make and care for them. The emphasis upon staff work that was made visible by the Crimean War and the struggles of the 1860s–1870s, including the introduction of the telegraph, railways, steamships, and the enormous capacity of the Industrial Revolution, demanded skilled management planning and execution by general staffs from well before mobilization. Yet, both navies in the nineteenth century and air forces in the twentieth resisted the necessity to encompass grand strategy in visions of the future. At the same time, careerism swung in and out of favor, critically damaging technical management by the emphasis upon rank and sometimes irrelevant activities, versus the benefits of long-nurtured experience.
War requires the organization, management, and efficiency of the invisible infrastructure in peace as well as in war. And wars may occur because an underpinning is not in place upon which politicians can confidently erect their grand strategies for stability and peace.
As a direct result of the naval scouring of the Baltic in the Crimean War, the Russians built a railway line to Europe, unreachable by blockade, and also launched 95 new steam warships for ocean raiding against the vulnerable British merchant fleet. At the same time, the British and the French, concerned with their own rivalries, concentrated on the new battleships and so ignored the Baltic in 1863. Thus the Polish Rebellion was crushed. The legacy of La Gloire and Warrior (the first of the new ironclad battleships) was a dockyard revolution which saw private companies building and the navies managing the new technology while neglecting grand strategy. This period also pointed to the risks of waiting until technology was ripe for use, a period we might call “waiting to want,” which may extend as long as 40 years.
An analogous case occurred with the development in the commercial world of mainframe and personal computers. At first only corporations could afford the mainframes, but then personal computers appeared that were so powerful that many could use them. Similarly, miniaturization has gone from the Loran of 1945 to the Global Positioning System of today. In the process, companies like IBM, which pioneered the electric typewriter, made their own servicing force obsolete- was this an unintended consequence of progress?
In the airline business it was more efficient to hand-sort reservations until the global computer systems came in the 1960s, bringing with them both a technical-commercial and a social revolution, just as the first of the big jets enormously increased capacity. Yet, historical knowledge of travel patterns by destination, season, and routes remained indispensable. Airlines are a very useful model since they are constantly in competitive war and in combat with nature and humans. These daily struggles give them rapid-march experience of equipment, methods, and merchandising. The military, in contrast, operates in a peace-and-paucity norm, interrupted episodically by peak activity in crisis or war.
The basic difference between business and military environments has led to contrasting management strategies. On the one hand, businesses- and airlines again are an excellent example- operate on the barbed-wire strand of a straight-line progression with regularly spaced change nodes. By the time facts have become evidence and a decision has been made, the facts have all changed. The military, however, has to live with a wave theory, where peacetime is the norm and war the exception. While both operate under the money sign, business aims to make as much as possible to enhance investments, attract the public, and pay for modernization, while in peacetime the military is constantly pressed for money, staff, and preparatory procurement. The result is that when the military is suddenly confronted with hostilities, everything has to be rapidly and wastefully expanded, stocks have to be consumed before replacement, and the whole managed by amateurs at many levels. Except in the case of linked wars, the professionals lack the practical experience of running the establishment at maximum power. Thus military management is heavily tasked to plan for all contingencies so that for want of a nail the horse will not be lost.
Before World War II the Germans knew that they had to win with blitzkrieg and planned accordingly. But when by 1942 that no longer worked, it took- like the contemporary new jet engines- too long to spool up to full power. In contrast, the French had failed to settle upon policy, envisage time scales, understand the challenges and needs, and attune themselves to modern war. The result was that the French had already defeated themselves before 1940 by the inability to create a grand strategy to suit the times because of a riven political-social climate.
The Battle of Britain was won in part in 1917 when Parliament created a single air force and in part because of the linkages between the two world wars. The bamboo basket would not be functioning at full speed until 1943, but at least manpower and manufacturing were in sync. On the other hand, the Air Staff was undermanned, and ends and means were not harmonized until late 1942, in spite of having prepared tables for wastage and consumption by 1934.
But at least planning started in 1932, and the political decision was taken to give priority and money to Home Defence in 1936, whereas the French Air Force (FAF) did not get a desirable budget until 1938. Moreover, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding’s strenuous refusal to fritter away his fighter assets in falling France and his meticulous attention to technical detail, as in his air exercises of the late 1930s, just enabled him to win in 1940. During World War II the key to success was manpower allocation, especially in those countries such as Britain which were scraping the bottom of the barrel by 1944.
The epitome of American management skill was embodied in Lt Gen William H. Tunner, who ran the “airline” over the Hump from India to China in World War II and then in the 1948–49 Berlin airlift. Parallel to those airlifts were the convoys that carried the lifeblood of the Allied forces across the Atlantic and the Pacific in World War II, to Korea (1950–53), to Vietnam (1965–72), and to the Gulf (1990– 91). The Battle of the Atlantic was the exception in that it was also a naval operation, which then went on continuously throughout the six years of the conflict.
What in the twentieth century vastly complicated matters for management was technology. For the first 60 years until the plateau was reached in the early 1970s, change was the constant. Quantum leaps outdated materiel. In aviation there were the revolutions of 1934–45 in airframes, engines, fuels, electronics, production, airfields, weapons (including the atomic bomb), computers, and jets. Those changes had stabilized by the 1970s, when management began to realize slowly, and then by 2000 definitely, that miniaturization of electronics and computers and reworking of airframes would mean that some airframes might have at least double the older 25-year life while periodically being internally refitted. This has brought a new approach to the planning of funds and personnel amidst constantly altering challenges. The geometric increases in production and costs since 1935 have now plateaued in real terms for some aircraft types.
What was forgotten was that the object of war should be peace and trade.
In the past, management has had to cope with the cycle of revolutionary developments followed by a plateau after three generations- or 60 years- followed again, later, by new technological revolutions. International competition, combined with the inability of leadership to understand and forecast the impact of change, led, amongst other things, to World War I and again to World War II when the offensive edge became highly critical with the chimera of the “air menace” (bombing) and the reality of blitzkrieg. But the Germans shot their edge by failing to understand the nature of their opponents and the possible consequences of an illusive victory.
The radical changes in the twentieth century came from the advent of the internal combustion engine and electricity, both of which had political, economic, social, and ideological consequences, not to mention the military ones. In the latter case, change tended to be in the charge of junior officers commanded and managed by senior officers who were unattuned to its potential and ultimate significance.
While many agree that the Great War of 1914–18 developed into a stalemate because of the inability of governments to manage such vast industrial, military, and social enterprises, we suggest that the very occurrence of both world wars can be blamed on the paucity of management skills. The legacies of the past all fostered an inability of governments to grasp the depth and breadth of the issues and delayed their making effective responses. These effects produced both a sense of the inevitability of conflict and a lack of comprehension as to how it might be averted. The prewar secret treaties were a legacy of monarchical absolutism and peacetime lethargy and complacency, a balance that had been upset by the emergence of the new powers- the United States after 1865, Japan after the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), and Germany and Italy following the wars of unification in Europe (1871 and 1860, respectively). Each of these powers flourished in a Mackinder heartland (the core area of Eurasia) and saw its destiny in mercantilist imperial expansion.
Like their mercantilist predecessors, the “imperialist” managing elite, including those in the older powers- Britain, France, and Russia- failed to take into account the impact of medicine, population growth, urbanization, and the mechanization of agriculture. Underlying the new age was the rapid spread of scientific knowledge. All of these developments accelerated growth when coupled to the steam and telegraphic evolutions, which in their turn spawned fresh management techniques and new methods of feeding the urban masses.
The management of World War I required the reinvention of the medieval planned economy, the mobilization of all of the society’s resources, and the establishment of additional ministries to order and control the necessities or sinews of war. And these new bureaucracies tended to be staffed and led by an influx of amateurs and professionals bringing such methods as cost accounting. The war also demanded imaginative financing. The Germans disdained paying for the war as they went and suffered ultimately through hyperinflation and bankruptcy. The British followed the precedents of the Napoleonic Wars and accumulated an enormous bonded indebtedness, including that to the United States. What was forgotten was that the object of war should be peace and trade. Unfortunately, the legacy of military ineffectiveness was inflation, depression, and unemployment. The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 exacerbated the situation and indicated that the leadership of the victors did not understand business management and, accordingly, was not apt to demonstrate competence in matters of national economy and grand strategy. This led to vast unemployment throughout the industrialized world. Ironically it can be argued that in Britain, for one, greater spending upon national security would have pumped money into the economy, the ripple effect of which would have led to recovery, while at the same time providing the strength to impose a nonappeasing diplomacy. That would have been a true deterrent. Unfortunately, the political-psychological effect of weakness led to the very expensive World War II.
As new ministries came into being and as technology became more complex, so Parkinson’s Law of a six percent per annum growth of bureaucracy came into effect. Examination of the British Air Ministry’s Distribution of Duties shows that the size of the bureaucracy was relatively stable from 1917 to 1934 but that it grew exponentially thereafter. The ultimate effect of this technological expansion was that by 1944 when RAF Bomber Command at last reached its planned strength of 100 heavy bomber squadrons, it had a rising unserviceability rate due to a shortage of radar mechanics in a society which had had few wireless sets before 1939.
It should also be noted here that when the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain appeased Hitler at Munich, he did so for military technological reasons as well as personal weakness and ignorance. He was fully aware of how weak his country was because he had been financing the defense requirements since 1932, two years before the Geneva disarmament talks collapsed in 1934. An industrialist himself, he understood that change took time. He was also aware in September 1938 at Munich that in the midst of change in fighters, RAF Fighter Command was impotent and Britain defenseless against the air menace.
Japanese leadership was similarly myopic, especially in the matter of reserving experienced pilots, as they flew until they were killed or incapacitated. Thus their hard-earned lessons were not passed on to the neophytes. At the same time, the indiscriminate drafting of able-bodied men, regardless of their skills, is a classic example of Japanese managerial shortsightedness, which sacrificed long-term productivity for short-term military manpower increases. In the case of the longshoremen, the army took stevedores and then had to clear the consequent backlogs in the ports using a larger number of draftees lacking in the skills needed for efficiency. This meant that the army’s combat power actually declined. At the same time, direct military supervision of industrial facilities, because officers mistrusted the profit motive, further reduced production efficiency and left a legacy of mistrust of the military in the zaibatsu management, whose skills were challenged by junior officers placed in command of their complexes.
The whole quarrel within air forces and governments over grand-strategic bombing versus tactical air forces can be seen as a struggle for efficient management of resources of all sorts. Victory through airpower was possible, but only in cooperation with surface forces able to defeat the enemy on land and at sea. Ironically, while in the West the Allies carried the air war home to Germany and impressed upon Hitler’s followers that in modern war no one was immune to attack, the Soviets saw grand-strategic bombing as the greatest postwar imperialist threat and reacted accordingly.
When the Germans attacked in 1941, the Soviets were able to display their managerial understanding of the nature of modern war. They were on their third five-year plan, had the experience of wars in Spain and Finland, and had the perspicacity to start moving their industrial base east of the Urals. Thus they could field air armies of up to 4,000 aircraft on any front. They had leapt from the Middle Ages to modern war by unhorsing the aristocrats.
At sea, naval officers lacked not so much technical abilities as they did strategic and tactical perceptions. But naval management was unable to think of the consequences of the new unconventional undersea and air weapons they reluctantly championed, either dismissing them or overrating their effectiveness. In World War I, Adm Sir John Jellicoe, one of the technical leaders of the Royal Navy, knew so much that he made himself into a pessimist who was forced to readopt convoys as the requisite counter to U-boats. In 1939 the Admiralty once again adopted convoys but lacked (until 1943) the necessary escort vessels both to protect the merchantmen and to hunt and kill the predators. The grand-strategic management battle in London was over the allocation of resources- to build escorts in Britain to defend the convoys or bombers to obliterate the submarine building yards in Germany. It was simply a question of destroying U-boats before they could put to sea and hide in the vast reaches of the oceans, or of bombing cities. In the meantime, the Germans had refined the basic Type VII World War I design into a true Type XIX submersible, which employed the German chemical genius for torpedoes, engines, and even the health of crews.
The war at sea required the management of all resources from raw materials to finished products.
The war at sea required the management of all resources from raw materials to finished products. A part of this was the development of successful shore-based antishipping strikes, an offensive in which the new operational-research scientists (the boffins) played a key role in achieving effectiveness. Both the Germans and Italians deployed antishipping strike forces. The former in the landlocked Mediterranean were countered by conquest and the latter by employing escort carriers on the Murmansk convoy routes.
The very vastness of the Pacific with its few atolls created a very different war. The Japa-nese attack on Pearl Harbor knocked out the US Navy’s battleship force, while allowing much of it to be salvaged and rearmed for the new judo blitzkrieg carrier and amphibious conflict. The May–June 1942 Battle of Midway showed that carriers were both potent and vulnerable. The decline of the Imperial Japanese Navy started off the China coast in the late 1930s, when carrier operations were so successful that naval management did not foresee the need to prepare for a long-term training program to provide replacement aircrews. The result was that in contrast to the US Navy’s thoughtfulness in accumulating a pool of aircrews, the Japanese lost their first team and had neither the time nor the fuel to replace them. And when the ultimate air assault on the “Home Islands” came, enough planes existed to have made a more effective resistance if trained pilots had been available.
The Japanese had for a long time bifurcated management at the top because of two political realities: the army and the navy were intense rivals, and no agency, institution, or individual proved strong enough to prevent military predominance in matters of national policy. And even each service was divided so that, for example, one of the principal commands in China, the Kwantung army, was independent of Imperial headquarters in Tokyo and chose its own course, including open hostilities with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) at Khalkin Gol in 1939, while Japan was already embroiled in a struggle with China. Yet, one of the basic prerequisites for management is to know both the limits of the organization and of oneself. Strengths and weaknesses should be both a guide and a limitation when matching means to ends.
The Japanese also failed to recall the lessons of their destroyers in escort duties in the Mediterranean in World War I and so, like the Royal Navy, neglected the commerce-raiding submarine threat, which eventually brought the island kingdom to its knees before the air attacks began. In other words, the Japanese high command mismanaged key assets so that they became the Achilles’ heel of their expansionist grand strategy. They ignored the advice of their sometime Harvard business school graduate and former naval attaché Adm Isoruku Yamamoto that the United States would be a fatal nemesis.
In the cases of Germany and Japan, the top management became so hypnotized by their early successes that they took on too many enemies at once, partly through an arrogant misappraisal of their enemies’ weaknesses. They overlooked the fact that in war, victory needs to come quickly and be complete for very sound political, diplomatic, military, economic, scientific and technological, medical, social, and ideological reasons. Ultimately, in a long war, victory is likely to go to those who have the greater economic, intellectual, and manpower stamina and who make the fewest managerial mistakes, a point not to be overlooked in the twenty-first century.
In many ways 1945 marked a sharp division between the Victorian age and the modern. A great many technological revolutions had taken place by the end of World War II, innovations which had vastly increased the costs of war and readiness and complicated the reli-ability of military devices, thus spreading the impact and cost worldwide. This was epitomized by the nuclear revolution, though the extent of the changes wrought by this phenomenon was parleyed out of context by airmen continuing their crusade both for independence and their belief that bombing or its threat could end all conflicts. In fact the opposite has transpired, as minor wars continue to occur. These have been harder to handle, as there has not been the jingoism at home to support them since the massive losses of life in both world wars. More recently the stakes have not been victory but return to the status quo ante bellum by means of a limited struggle. And in a place like Bosnia or Kosovo, planning and managing an airpower response faces pesky little problems, such as multiple 23 mm cannon or shoulder-fired missiles.
In Korea the conflict followed so closely after 1945 that experience and expertise were readily available, while two new developments on the technical side were the unusable atomic bomb- checkmated by the Soviet development of one- and the jet aircraft. The result was a contest more like an American football game of controlled violence limited by many lines and fine rules. The no-win situation led to paranoia at home and the election of yet another soldier president, Eisenhower. The Cold War was the dominating grand-strategic theme from 1947 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a failure caused by massive mismanagement.
The Cold War made for a complex scenario or business plan rather akin to earlier US foreign policy with two notable differences- NATO and forward American deployment in Europe, and enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, now by the United States instead of the Royal Navy. Part of the deterrent force was the US Navy’s Polaris submarine fleet created by Adm Hyman Rickover, a man with business and political acumen coupled to engineering and scientific skills and drive, which paralleled that of Rear Adm William A. Moffett in his creation of US naval aviation in the 1920s.
Ultimately, in a long war, victory is likely to go to those who have the greater economic, intellectual, and manpower stamina and who make the fewest managerial mistakes, a point not to be overlooked in the twenty-first century.
On the Soviet side, the managers in the Kremlin were driven by fear of capitalist strength and bellicose statements about the USSR, as well as by the need to recover from the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45 and to maintain full employment. The Kremlin did little cost accounting and no cost-benefit analysis, maintaining instead monolithic forces which rotted from the top down until Afghanistan destroyed them in 1979–89.
In the meantime, sales of arms abroad allowed various minor countries to defend themselves. However, many turned into ongoing guerrilla contests, which sopped up used arms from various sources, delivered by devious routes and means, sometimes as parts of the East-West struggles and complex financial schemes. In many ways, walking into such conflicts, particularly “people’s wars,” is like going to a North American mall, where the staff and the customers all dress alike. For bureaucratic military machines such as the US armed ser-vices, fighting an antiguerrilla war was extremely trying, as in Vietnam with all the complexities of operating seven different air forces in one war- a management headache.
These difficulties could be traced back to Washington’s fear of the domino effect and to instant communications, which allowed micromanagement. Lack of understanding of the nature of the war, omission of a cost accounting of body counts, and the like led to a wasteful expenditure of American resources (estimated at $465,000 US for each dead enemy). It would have been far cheaper to have opened giveaway supermarkets and seduced the enemy with goods.
What makes the Israeli management of conflict successful is its efficiency. Wars with the Arabs, of which the Gulf was an adjunct, have been swift and clean, demonstrating the flexibility of airpower and the benefits of combining all the assets of the state to achieve victory by matching means to ends and ends to means. Hours and just-in-time resupply have always been critical for the Israelis. Maximum benefits have been derived from both training and leaving out complexities for simplicity and serviceability.
In the future only a higher direction with either its own or vicarious historical experience will have the breadth to manage conflicts. Many of the important human factors will remain constant, in spite of the differences between the generations, and while classic weapons will change very slowly now, new technologies will be weaponized. Nuisance wars may involve more intensely human operations in strange and inhospitable territories, unless a major war breaks out between civilized powers. Bosnia, Afghanistan, and other places present situations of internecine, national-religious hatreds and problems of arms supply and sequestration. Management of conflict in such cases involves a supraregional view in which political overtones will likely rule.
In the past, war was the business of the State, and it generally remains so today, even if under a UN flag or directed against nonstate terrorists. It is a complex but irregular activity which requires flexible planning, cost-benefit accounting, manpower, prescient management, and total awareness of political nuances.
Some Suggested Readings on the Management of and for War
|
Contributor
Dr. Robin Higham (AB, Harvard University; MA, Claremont Graduate School; PhD, Harvard University) is professor emeritus of military history at Kansas State University and editor emeritus of Military Affairs and Aerospace Historian. He is the current editor of Journal of the West. He previously served on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts and the University of North Carolina. Dr. Higham is the author of 16 monographs, including Air Power: A Concise History. His Bases of Air Strategy: Building Airfields for the RAF, 1914–1945 was recently published in Shrewsbury, En-gland, by Airlife Publishing Ltd. He was the recipient of the Kansas Governor’s 2000 Aviation Honors Award and the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize of the American Military Institute for his significant contributions in the field of military history.
Dr. Mark P. Parillo (BA, University of Notre Dame; MA and PhD, Ohio State University) is an associate professor of history at Kansas State University and a faculty member of its Institute of Military History and 20th Century Studies. He previously served as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Alabama, Ohio State University, and Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Parillo is the author of The Japanese Merchant Marine in World War II and the editor of We Were in the Big One: Experiences of the World War II Generation, which was recently published. He also serves as an editor of H-War, a moderated electronic discussion group for scholarly dialogue on matters of world military history at <"http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~war."
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
[ Back Issues | Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor ]