Document created: 4 September 03
Air University Review, September-October
1975
A Study in the Theory of Strategy of Sir Basil H. Liddell Hart
Few men in any age have employed the rhetoric of strategy so well as did the late Sir Basil Henry Liddell hart. From his perspective as a former soldier with a rare sense of history an even rater access to the war ministries and the militaries of a score of nations, Liddell Hart over the course of half a century produced more than thirty major works on the history and theory of war.1 His thought reveals a developing logic which many have taken to be the definitive statement of military strategy. Moreover, the logic of Liddell Hart’s argument has not dated significantly since his death in 1970. As increased emphasis is placed today upon the war-fighting capabilities of both general purpose and strategic forces, Liddell Hart’s theory of strategy deserves renewed attention for the lessons that it yields.
This study will extract from the theory those reflections that relate to the employment of air power in general and of tactical air power in particular. Emphasis will he placed upon the strategy for employing ground attack tactical air power; in the development of Liddell Hart’s views on this matter, tactics will be discussed to some extent, for, as he himself frequently observed, the border between strategy and tactics is never precisely defined. Before discussing the strategic dimensions of employing fighter/attack aircraft, however, it is necessary first to establish a framework of concepts emerging from the work of Liddell Hart.
Liddell Hart was one of the most enthusiastic early proponents of air power. It can be seen from a close study of his work, however, that by the time he came to publish what is generally considered to be his most finished product (the second revised edition of Strategy of 1967), he had considerably muted his earlier enthusiasm for air as an instrument of military strategy. To fully appreciate the extent of this change, it is necessary first to consider some of his early views—views, one will note, which reflected the emerging nature of air warfare in World War I, in the sense that no distinction was then made between the strategic and tactical missions of aircraft.
A participant in the First World War, Liddell Hart was one of the foremost prophets of the early postwar period; he dearly grasped the significance of modern mechanized warfare, glimpses of which had emerged by narrow degrees in the latter part of that bloody conflict. 2 Although he is known to have become an outspoken advocate of the tank by 1921, his advocacy of fighter/attack aircraft is somewhat less well known. Part of the reason for this latter advocacy, one can conjecture, derives from his deep respect for the views of T. E. Lawrence, the famous Lawrence of Arabia, a man whom Liddell Hart took to be one of the few strategic geniuses of the twentieth century.3 Lawrence’s experience with a strategy combining attacks by his Arab irregulars with strikes by aircraft from the five Royal Air Force (RAF) squadrons in Allenby’s campaign against the Turks in Palestine (1916 to 1918) had convinced Lawrence that “a combination of armoured cam and aircraft could [in the future] rule the desert.” 4 Indeed, Lawrence’s feeling for the future of air power, amounting almost to a religious vision for him, led to his enlistment in the RAF in 1922, for reasons which Liddell Hart summarizes:
It may be near the truth to say
that T. E. went into the Air Force for the same reason that some of the most
thoughtful men of the Middle Ages went into a monastery. It was not a sudden
decision, but had been his intention since the last year of the War. . . - His
medieval forerunners went into a monastery not only in search of a refuge, but
in support of a faith. T. E. had the same dual motive in entering his modern
monastery. In his belief, the utilization of the air was the one big thing left
for our generation to do.” Thus everyone “should either take to the air
themselves or help it forward.”5
Since Lawrence was one of Liddell Hart’s few living heroes in 1921, since he and Lawrence frequently corresponded with one another, and since Lawrence’s views on warfare increasingly focused on his vision of the decisive future of air power, one can surmise that something of this vision would have rubbed off onto Liddell Hart Regardless of the genesis of Liddell Hart’s views, there is ample evidence that the potential of air power captured his imagination. He was to write (in 1923 and 1928, respectively):
The tactical methods of the
Mongol Army in the thirteenth century carry lessons of importance for
present-day students of war …Aeroplanes would seem to have the same qualities
[as the Mongol cavalry] in ever higher degree, and it may he that in the future
they will prove the successors of the Mongol horsemen.6
The wider role of mobility and
offensive power lies in the air. And the air appears to be cast for the
decisive role as the heirs of Alexanders “companion” cavalry.7
These comments are all the more striking when one considers the pre-eminent place in war’s history that Liddell Hart assigns to a small group of military strategists, Alexander and Genghis Khan included. These comments are, moreover, quite representative of Liddell Hart’s emerging views on the value of the airplane as an instrument of strategy, although the views were even then somewhat qualified. That qualification becomes clear when one considers his early assessment of the value of air:
Mobility: “they have a
tremendous superiority over all other arms”
Secrecy (or surprise and security): “save in exceptional conditions,
early warning of their approach is obtainable”
Co-operation: “they share the advantage of the tank”
Security: “they are, at present, most vulnerable save for the indirect
security afforded by their mobility. . . . Here lies the joint in the aeroplane’s
harness”
Concentration (of hitting power): “aircraft are difficult to assess”8
This evaluation can be further con-strained to what Liddell Hart called “the three essential elements of warfare—hitting power, protection, and mobility.” The airplane is then seen by him to he strongest in terms of mobility, weakest in terms of protection (and survivability), and of uncertain value in terms of hitting power. That assessment, it will be argued later in this study, continued unabated in Liddell Hart’s thought, through to the 1967 edition of Strategy. And the significance of such a fact lies in his failure to appreciate developments in technology sufficiently, which enhanced the survivability of the fighter/attack aircraft in hostile environments and increased the accuracy and magnitude of its firepower; these factors should have (but apparently had not) figured in Liddell Hart’s final published position on the value of tactical air.
In the early 1920s, however, the unique mobility of the airplane was for Liddell Hart sufficiently impressive to justify his envisioning a virtually unlimited future for the impact of air power on strategy. Thus, he was to write in 1922:
In view of the transcendent value of aircraft as a
means of subduing the enemy will to resist, by striking at the moral objective,
the question may well be asked: Is the air the sole medium of future warfare?
That this will be the case ultimately we have no doubt, for the advantages of a
weapon able to move in three dimensions over those tied to one plane of
movement are surely obvious to all but the mentally blind. 10
It has been seen, then, that by the early-to mid-1920s Liddell Hart had arrived at a vision of the future of air power which was, to say the least, optimistic. The crucial stages in the evolution of his thought after the mid-1920s, however, did not prove to be so kind to air. To understand the reasons for that development, one must first explore the nature of his theory of strategy.
The theory of strategy that Liddell Hart developed reflects his general approach to scholarship. It is broad in scope, articulate, brilliantly insightful, but (at least on first reading) unorganized and vague. To remedy this latter quality, it is helpful to supply an organized outline of Liddell Hart’s theory before considering its application. Moreover, such an outline will facilitate a further discussion of his evolving views on air power, insofar as few central themes in his strategic theory were late products of his thought. All of the main ideas discussed here were already emerging in Liddell Hart’s writings in the 1920s.
Three main themes form the backbone of the theory: (1) the nature of strategy itself; (2) the relationship of strategy to both grand strategy and tactics; and (3) the concept of the indirect approach. Since these themes are central to one’s understanding Liddell Hart’s thought, they will be discussed in detail before proceeding.
The first main theme, the nature of strategy, captured what Liddell Hart
took also to be a first principle of human nature: namely, that the dimension
in which wars are really won or lost is essentially a psychological dimension.
Wars reflect conflicts that grow out of human relationships, and human
relationships are but a manifestation of the influences which human beings
exert, one upon the other. So far as a study of war is concerned, then, the
central truth implied by this state of affairs is that “the real target in war
is the mind of the enemy commander, not the bodies of his troops.”11
This simple idea serves Liddell Hart as a springboard for a biting critique of the “pseudo-Clausewitzian” conception of strategy, which he took to be the prevailing wisdom of the military strategists of the First World War. 12 This “pseudo-Clausewitzian” view suggests that strategy can be reduced to the art of employing battles to gain the “objects of war” (shortly to be defined). The emphasis, indeed the single-minded concentration of this view, is placed upon closing with, engaging, and destroying the enemy in pitched battle, which is (as Liddell Hart interprets the “pseudo-Clausewitzian” view) taken to he the logos of the general’s art.
It is important at this point not to misconstrue what Liddell Hart is
saying. He is not denying the importance (frequently critical) of battle for
winning wars, nor is he denying that one often gets at the mind of the enemy
commander through the bodies of his troops. Instead, he is exploring the fatal
attraction that the vision of pitched battle has had for many otherwise sober
minds: an attraction which easily leads one to the view that the prime canon of
strategic doctrine should be the destruction of the enemy’s main forces on the
battlefield. What Liddell Hart is arguing is that while engaging the enemy in
battle may often be an option selected by strategy, it should not be allowed to
become the option which dictates strategy. He thus concluded that “the true aim
[of strategy] is not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic situation so
advantageous that if it does not of itself produce the decision, its
continuation by a battle is sure to achieve this.”13
The tone of this conclusion is captured in the word “dislocation.” The aim of strategy (and hence its defining nature) is to achieve a dislocation of the enemy, a situation that equates to psychological paralysis of the enemy’s forces. This psychological paralysis can be expected to result in a decisive diminishing of the enemy’s capacity to resist the application (or, in-deed, even the threatened application) of force, and this—argued Liddell Hart—is the indispensable service that the military commander can offer his leaders, carrying out strategy in the service of the state.
One is led by this final view of strategy to consider the second main theme in the theory: namely, the relationship of strategy to both strategy in its more comprehensive form (grand strategy) and strategy in its operational application (tactics). It has already been suggested that strategy should aim at a dislocation of the enemy, a paralysis of his will to resist. This definition of strategy is, one must note, conceptually limited, in that it considers strategy in a vacuum—strategy solely in relation to itself. The complex web of possibilities open to the military strategist begins to be fully appreciated only when one considers strategy in a richer context, in the context of its relationships to both grand strategy and tactics.
Grand strategy is viewed by Liddell Hart as the consciously devised plan for combining all of the instruments of national policy (one of which is the military) to achieve national objectives. In this sense, then, grand strategy both sets the objectives and structures the proper mix of instruments (military, diplomatic, economic, and so forth) to achieve those objectives. Grand strategy can thus be viewed as “policy in execution” (Liddell Hart’s phrase), and from the relationship of grand strategy arises his second definition of strategy as “the an of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy.”14 It should he further noted that grand strategy has priority over strategy; hence policy should govern strategy, and not the reverse.
Similarly, Liddell Hart contends that tactics should not be allowed to dictate strategy. The tactical level can be viewed as the level at which strategy becomes operational. It follows from the logic of his argument that the aim of strategy at the border of tactics is to bring about battle under the most advantageous circumstances. If circumstances can be made so undeniably advantageous that the enemy perceives no chance of his winning, so much the better, he argues.
From this threefold relationship, then, emerges Liddell Hart’s completed definition of strategy, delineating priorities and attributes in the following way:
(highest priority)
Strategy in relation to grand strategy is the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy, in the service of the state.
Strategy in relation to itself is the art of achieving a situation so advantageous that if it does not of itself produce the decision, its continuation by battle is sure to achieve this.
(lowest priority)
Strategy in relation to tactics is the art of bringing about the battle under the most advantageous circumstances possible.
Given this definition of strategy, one can then proceed to the final major theme in Liddell Hart’s theory, what he calls the indirect approach. This phrase is the most difficult aspect of his theory to understand, due to the ambiguity which surrounds it. The core meaning of the indirect approach is simply doing the unexpected, throwing the enemy off balance. In this sense, the indirect approach is a mere rephrasing of the classic principle of surprise. Liddell Hart himself notes this fact when he writes that “the strategy of indirect approach is, indeed, the highest and widest fulfillment of the principle of surprise.”15 The full meaning that he attaches to the indirect approach, however, is wider than mere surprise. From his comments, one can infer that the indirect approach involves three vital phases. First, the strategist should have as full an understanding of his enemy as possible—of his strengths and weaknesses—so as to identify the weakest points in the enemy’s strategy, force structure, and operational doctrine. Second, the strategist should have an empathic, almost intuitive, turn of mind, which enables him to put himself in the place of the enemy. Only by identifying from the enemy’s point of view what is perceived as expected can one begin to envision the possibilities for doing the unexpected. And third (and perhaps most important, since this is the most often ignored aspect of the indirect approach), the strategist should be keenly aware of the intricate relationships that exist among grand strategy, strategy, and tactics. The indirect approach cuts across all three categories; hence the strategist should insure to the best of his ability that pursuit of the indirect approach in one category does not subvert the achievement of ends necessitated by other categories, particularly those of higher priority.
The indirect approach is most often manifested at the level of strategy in what Liddell Hart calls a “distracting” move preceding the “dislocating” move. The most frequent kinds of distracting moves in modern mechanized warfare normally involve an unexpected attack of a logistical nature: e.g., an attack on command and control facilities or on lines of communication. It is important, however, to avoid the mistake of identifying the indirect approach too closely to such moves, as some recent military writers have tended to do. 16 For the indirect approach offers strategic opportunities as varied as the complexity of the environment in which modern warfare occurs. That most strategies of indirect approach in this century have had a logistical motive does not entail that all strategies of indirect approach in the future he so limited.
Given, then, this notion of the indirect approach, Liddell Han concludes
that an understanding of strategy can profit from a study of history:
“Throughout the ages, effective results in war have rarely been attained unless
the approach has had such indirectness as to ensure the opponent’s unreadiness
to meet it.” 17’
There are many other aspects of Liddell Hart’s theory that could profitably be considered. The three major themes which have been discussed, however, form the conceptual framework within which the remaining minor themes are developed. Thus, this brief discussion can suffice for an examination of the next stage in the evolution of his view of air power: namely, his treatment of strategic bombardment.
It is impossible to establish finally and authoritatively why a man changes his views, short of finding some explicit statement to that effect by the man himself.18Yet a change definitely did occur in Liddell Hart’s views from the 1920s to the 1960s with respect to the value of air power as an instrument of strategy. It is important, for more than academic reasons, to reflect on why he changed his views. For, as will be argued, Liddell Hart’s relative depreciation of the value of air power in his later thought results not from the logic of his theory but from a failure to apply that logic properly.
To establish this claim, one can begin by considering Liddell Hart’s views on the strategic bomber offensives of the Second World War. He himself in the early twenties had begun exploring the possibility of massive air strikes against the industrial and political infrastructure of a country. He then wrote:
But the air has introduced a
third dimension into warfare, and with the advent of the airplane new and
boundless possibilities are introduced. Hitherto war has been a gigantic game
of draughts. Now it becomes a game of halma. Aircraft enable us to jump over
the army which shields the enemy government, industry, and people, and so strike
direct and immediately at the seat of the opposing will and policy.19
This statement reflects the outrage suffered by Liddell Hart’s intellectual and moral sensitivities at the indecisive campaigns of the First World War. His emerging theory of strategy was to a certain extent a reflection of that outrage, and his incisive critiques of the casualty intensive approaches which led to trench warfare chastised the lack of imagination which (in his view) had kept the Allied commanders from using the indirect approach. In this context, the airplane—with its ability to leap the trenches and strike directly at the protected heart of the enemy—seemed to offer the perfect innovation needed to adapt the indirect approach to twentieth century warfare. Thus, Liddell Hart was to write in one of his earliest histories of the First World War:
The year 1915 witnessed the dawn
of another new form of war which helped to drive home the new reality that the
war of armies had become the war of peoples. From January onwards, Zeppelin
raids began on the English coast and reached their peak in the late summer of
1916, to be succeeded by aeroplane raids. The difficulty of distinguishing from
the air between military and civil objectives smoothed the path for a
development which, beginning with excuses, ended in a frank avowal that in a
war for existence the will of the enemy nation, not merely the bodies of their
soldiers, is the inevitable target. 20
Liddell Hart’s news on tactical aviation’s limited but suggestive successes in World War I tended to balance his views on offensive bombardment, at least through the early 1920s. The doctrinal debates in Great Britain and the United States on the proper employment of air power, however, were rapidly narrowing in favor of the long-range bomber offensive, to he strategically employed independent of ground forces. 21 Liddell Hart’s emphases had largely followed suit. 22 The reasons for this are not hard to surmise. A sudden, massive, devastating strike at the enemy’s industrial centers seemed to constitute the strategic ploy which could indirectly paralyze the enemy’s will at the outset of a war, thus destroying his ability to resist, in a way consistent with the logic of Liddell Hart’s theory. He had recognized this in 1930 in writing: “As the submarine was primarily an economic weapon, so was the aeroplane primarily a psychological weapon.”23 Destruction of the enemy’s will could thus offer a way to avoid the indecisive, bloody pattern of warfare set by the First World War.
Liddell Hart never went to the extremes that some of the advocates of air power tended toward, and thus he never argued for the exclusive use of air power in long-range bombardment, at the cost of the fighter pursuit, close air support, and interdiction missions. Moreover, he modified his early advocacy of industrial bombardment and by 1941 had come out in public in opposition to an air strategy based primarily on long-range bomber offensives. The reasons for this change in his view derive more from his strategic theory than from any moral concern, although the latter did play some pan in his thought. His argument, quite simply, was that a strategy of long-range bombardment was ahead of the technology of the day. For the bombing strategy to succeed, it would have to accomplish the sudden and simultaneous delivery of massive firepower at a large number of points, so as to shock the enemy into surrender. Instead, the strategy that was adopted (constrained more by technology than by doctrine) involved a bombing campaign spread out over months, slowly rising in intensity. It amounted not so much to a decisive indirect approach as it did to an extended siege coupled with long-range interdiction. And concerning both siege and long-range interdiction, Liddell Hart’s position is quite clear. With respect to the siege, he argued:
Unless there is opportunity and favourable
prospect for a quick surprise assault, a siege is the most uneconomic of all
operations of war. When the enemy has still a field army capable of
intervening, a siege is also the most dangerous for until it is crowned by
success the assailant is progressively weakening himself out of proportion to
his enemy. 24
And with respect to interdiction, he contended that the effects of such a campaign are inversely proportional to the distance between the targets interdicted and the front. The greater the distance, he argued, the slower are the effects of the interdiction on the campaign.
Thus, Liddell Hart was not so much arguing that the offensive bombing campaign would produce no strategic results as he was that it lacked the element of indirectness to produce decisive results. The siege was spread over time; the interdiction took time to be translated to effects on the battle. Even given these drawbacks, however, the bombing offensive might still have been strategically justified, for he recognized that “under the new conditions of warfare, the cumulative effect of partial success . . . may bee greater than the effect of complete success at one point.”25 But the crucial factor that precluded its being realized was an incongruence of grand strategy with strategy. The aim of grand strategy, implicit throughout the war and explicit after the Casablanca Conference of 1943, was unconditional surrender, which ruled out the possibility of a negotiated settlement to the war. Thus, there was no practical way (according to Liddell Hart) for the weakening of the will of Germany’s population to be translated into German policy. His conclusion from this fact was the following:
In a long-range war, such as a
purely air war, it is inherently impossible for the people who suffer it to
make an effective protest against continuing to suffer it. In that fact lay the
fundamental weakness of the cross-Channel bombing match as a means of attaining
our war aim. It was too much like pushing people into a steep-walled pit,
telling them that you were going to pelt them with stones so long as they
stayed there, while offering them no means of climbing out.26
Hence, while the essentially tactical successes of the long-range bombing offensives of World War II may have been real, their success as a strategy, according to Liddell Hart, was not realized. Moreover, by the time the technology had become available in the 1950s and 1960s to translate the timely shock of such offensives into an indirect strategy, strategic superiority was rapidly disappearing from the international scene. Liddell Hart had in fact anticipated many subsequent discussions of nuclear deterrence when he wrote in 1925:
Moreover, though in Europe an air
blow would be decisive, its achievement would probably depend on one side being
superior in the air, either in numbers of aircraft or by the possession of some
surprise device. Where air equality existed between the rival nations, and each
was as industrially and politically vulnerable, it is possible that either
would hesitate to employ the air attack for fear of instant retaliation. 27
Dreams one is committed to die hard. Liddell Hart’s intellectual youth had involved the construction of scenarios in which air power—in the form of bomber offensives—was seen to offer an instrument by which a strategy of indirect approach could be realized for modem mechanized war. That vision for him had died. 28 But there remain the successes of tactical aviation in World War II, and his views on some of those successes now deserve attention.
In the era immediately following World War II, Liddell Hart’s respect for the potential of tactical air power remained high. With respect to this potential, he was to write in 1947:
Although air power fell short of
the decisiveness anticipated—except for its incidental use in conveying the
atomic bomb—it wrought a greater change in warfare than any previous
development had done….While the air force did not supersede the older forces,
it superimposed itself on them—and took the leading place, though riot
attaining sovereignty. 29
However, air power was no longer viewed by Liddell Hart as a weapon to build one’s strategy around, so much as it was valued for its tactical flexibility. 30 He spoke highly of the use of tactical air in close support of ground forces in North Africa and in Normandy, as he also did concerning the use of tactical air in various interdiction operations. But even the value of these roles had been further restricted in his views, by the time he published the revised edition of Strategy. There, he viewed air power as essentially a superartillery, to be molded to the roles it could play in support of mechanized ground forces. 31 The point is not that Liddell Hart had utterly failed to appreciate the value of the fighter/attack aircraft operating in conjunction with ground forces, for he did recognize the value of this role. It is simply that he no longer envisioned any truly independent role for air to play outside of supporting ground forces, to the extent that a strategy might fully exploit the use of air. Interdiction missions with their largely logistical motives remained a possibility, it is true, but one can infer from his comments that even they had lost their aura of freshness and thus their element of surprise, making them unlikely candidates around which to devise a strategy of the indirect approach.
Liddell Hart, in short, seemed to have at worst rejected and at best understated the strategic flexibility of the modern fighter/attack aircraft. Thus, one might ask: Why did Liddell Hart underrate the potential of fighter/attack aircraft? How might fighter/attack aircraft be strategically employed in a manner consistent with his theory of the indirect approach?
As has already been noted, there will never be a definitive answer as to why Liddell Hart’s views on air power in general and tactical air power in particular had changed. Indeed, the change may be more of degree than of substance, in that his early works were concerned more with the future of war (and hence tended to be speculative), while his latter works were concerned more with the lessons of war (and thus tended to dwell on the past). Even given this possibility, however, there are still sufficiently intriguing hints scattered throughout his writings to suggest at least nine fundamental reasons why Liddell Hart may have felt that tactical air power could not serve as a primary instrument around which to build a strategy. Those reasons, each of which is discussed at some point in his writings, are the following:
1.The fighter/attack aircraft
lacks flexibility in the nature of the munitions to be delivered.
2. The fighter/attack aircraft lacks sufficiently precise accuracy in
placing munitions on ground targets.
3. The fighter/attack aircraft lacks discrimination in placing munitions on
ground targets.
4. The fighter/attack aircraft lacks surprise.
5. The fighter/attack aircraft lacks survivability in hostile defensive
environments.
6. The fighter/attack aircraft lacks sufficient flexibility in combat
operations.
7. The fighter/attack aircraft lacks an all-weather, day-and-night capability.
8. The use of fighter/attack aircraft for combat support engenders undue
caution on the pan of ground commanders.
9.The fighter/attack aircraft lacks the ability to capture or control territory
or troops.
In assessing these views, one might initially note that the first seven relate to existing levels of technology, in that they reflect the three basic features of air power that Liddell Hart had discussed in the early 1920s: hitting power, protection, and mobility. He had then maintained that protection and firepower were the weakest aspects of the aerial weapon. There is sufficient cause to believe that he never changed from these early views.
Considering first the related issues of precision and discrimination in weapons delivery, one finds the following. Liddell Hart’s basic concern in these issues was whether tactical air could reasonably be expected to hit a maneuvering target with any reasonable accuracy while not simultaneously hitting friendly forces in the immediate combat vicinity. This concern surfaced at numerous points in his writings and with other factors led him to the following conclusions:” An air force is a super-guerrilla instrument. It has thus a natural tendency to lead, strategically, to attrition warfare—the gradualness of which carries an ever-extending devastation and damaging aftereffects.” 32 This comment partly reflects his view that weapons delivered at high speed at small, often camouflaged, maneuvering targets, in the face of defensive ground fire, would necessarily be inaccurate, thus leading to the tendency to make up for this inaccuracy with massive increases in explosive firepower. Hence, discrimination between friendly and enemy forces would be sacrificed, and aircraft could not, therefore, be used in any truly close combat support role.
The limitations of using air in support of ground forces in close contact with the enemy were clearly expressed in this view. What Liddell Hart did not sufficiently anticipate, however, was the development of tactical delivery doctrine and a generation of guided bombs, allowing quantum leaps to be made in improving upon the accuracy of air-delivered munitions. Such munitions could indeed be limited in size and still provide the necessary accuracy and, given proper air-to-ground coordination, discrimination to facilitate the accomplishment of close air support missions.
Similar observations can be made concerning the other technology-related factors. Surprise, for instance, is facilitated by the speed with which an aircraft can be directed to a target, as well as by the ability to engage targets under adverse environmental conditions—once again, capabilities related to levels of technological advance. Flexibility (which Liddell Hart took to mean such things as combat radius and time over target) and, to a great extent, survivability are heavily influenced by the airplane’s being tied to its airfields. Liddell Hart had observed in 1934 that “the large ground organization of a modern air force is its Achilles’ heel.”33 Once again, however, technological advances (in shelters for aircraft, vertical or short takeoff capabilities, and so forth) can enhance flexibility and survivability, in ways which he did not apparently consider. And the same sort of argument can be raised concerning the capability of modern aircraft to survive in hostile defensive environments, given systems to suppress defenses.
The main observation of these comments, in short, is that the first seven reasons are expressions of circumstantial limitations, limitations which can be ameliorated to a considerably greater extent than Liddell Hart allowed for. There is nothing in the logic of his theory to suggest that any of the first seven reasons necessarily limits the ability of tactical air to function as an instrument that one could build a strategy around.
The eighth reason (the engendering of undue caution in ground commanders) is suggested in Liddell Hart’s discussion of the Salerno Campaign in World War II. He contends that the German commanders at Salerno felt “that the Allied High Command’s habit of limiting the scope of its strokes to the limits of constant aircover had been the defender’s solution, by simplifying the multiple problems of the defence.”34 This implies that an undue caution is engendered by depending on supporting air cover, thus foreclosing strategic options. Liddell Hart recognized the value of air cover, and he was not advocating the adoption of a strategy which threw ground forces into an environment dominated by enemy air. At the same time, however, he recognized that military genius, in the sense of innovative strategy, often requires audacious action (a phrase he uses): “History shows that rather than resign himself to a direct approach, a Great Captain will take even the most hazardous indirect approach—if necessary, over mountains, deserts, or swamps, with only a fraction of his force, even cutting himself loose from his communications.”35 To this could now be added the phrase, “even cutting himself loose from his sup-porting air cover. It is surely no argument against tactical air power to suggest that reliance on air power can dull the capacity for audacious action. There is little reason to believe that any commander who could not be a Great Captain wig supporting air cover would be likely to become one without such support. Audacity on the part of combat commanders is, in short, logically independent of the air power issue.
Finally, there is the argument that air power can control neither ground nor armies; hence (the conclusion is advanced) air power cannot be a primary instrument of strategy, in the sense that the doctrine supporting the achievement of one’s objectives would necessarily consider the capability and force structure of one’s fighter/attack aircraft. This thesis is suggested as follows:
While air-mobility could achieve such direct strokes by an overhead form of
indirect approach, tank-mobility might achieve them by indirect approach on the
ground avoiding the “obstacle” of the opposing army. To illustrate the point by
a board-game analogy with chess—air mobility introduced a knight’s move, arid
tank-mobility a queen’s move, into warfare. This analogy does not, of course,
express their respective values. For an air force combined the vaulting power
of the knight’s move with the all-ways flexibility of the queen’s move. On
the other hand, a mechanized ground force, though it lacked vaulting power,
could remain in occupation of the “square” it gained. 36
The argument as stated may indeed turn out to be a straw man. There are other suggestive passages, however, which give the careful reader at least a small residue of doubt that Liddell Hart did violate his own views on physical control of territory, in the sense that he concluded that the lack of such a capability degraded the role of tactical air power. To draw such a conclusion ignores the coordinated aspect of modern combat doctrine, in which air, tank, and infantry can be deployed in a mutually supporting role. Moreover, even when employed by itself, tactical air power can play a crucial role in isolating the battlefield-itself a form of “control of territory.”
It has not been the purpose of this essay to analyze exhaustively the thought of B. H. Liddell Hart. Instead, it has concentrated on revealing how modern tactical air power has features intimately consistent with the thrust of his strategic views. It is hoped that the value of these ideas will lie in the consequences that could follow from their adoption as premises, as, for instance, in the further refinement of a NATO strategy, using to the maximum the potential of tactical air.
United States Air Force Academy
Notes
1. The major works by B. H. Liddell Hart consulted in preparation of this
study are the following: Paris or the Future of War (1925), The
Real War (1930), The British Way in Warfare (1932), T. E.
Lawrence in Arabia and After (1934), Through the Fog of War (1938), Dynamic
Defence (1940), The Current of War (1941), This Expanding War (1942),
Thoughts on War (1944), The Revolution in Warfare (1947) The
Tank, 2 volumes (1959), The Liddell Hart Memoirs, 2 volumes (1965,
1966), Strategy, 2nd Revised Edition (l967), History of the First
World War (1970), History of the Second World War (1970). Of
these works, the two judged to be most valuable for purposes of this
study were Thoughts on War and Strategy.
2. For an authoritative discussion of Liddell Hart’s role in the doctrinal
birth of modern mechanized warfare, see “The Advocates of Mechanized
Landpower,” chapter five of Robin Higham’s The Military Intellectuals in
Britain, 1918-39 (1966).
3. Liddell Hart’s admiration for Lawrence was unqualified. He wrote: “Military history cannot dismiss him as merely a successful leader of irregulars. He is seen to be more than a guerrilla genius—rather does he appear a strategist of genius who had the vision to anticipate the guerrilla trend of civilized warfare that arises from the growing dependence of nations on industrial resources.” T. E. Lawrence, p. 438.
4. Ibid., p. 307.
5. Ibid., pp. 414-15.
6. Thought on War, pp. 131-32.
7. Ibid., pp. 28-29.
8. The Current War, pp. 33-34.
9. Paris, p. 70.
10. Ibid., pp. 53-54.
11. Thoughts on War, p. 48.
12. It is appropriate to speak of pseudo-Clausewitzian strategy, for although Liddell Hart criticizes Clausewitz’s views on strategy at some points (for instance, chapter nineteen of Strategy), on other occasions he suggests that Clausewitz’s insights were profound but misunderstood (see Thoughts on War, p. 33).
13. Strategy, p.339.
14. Ibid., p. 335.
15. Thought on War, p. 238,
16. “Lightning-war objectives ordinarily involve effecting a swift and locally powerful thrust through a suspected weak point in the enemy defenses to destroy control or logistical facilities in the rear. It is this tactic Liddell Hart calls the ‘indirect approach.’” In Colonel Wesley W. Yale, General I. D. White, and General Hasso E. von Manteuffel. Alternatives to Armageddon (1970), p. 39.
17. Strategy, p. 25.
18. A careful study of Liddell Hart’s writings does not reveal any explicit attempt at comparing his later views on air power with his earlier views.
19. Paris, pp. 36-37.
20. The Real War, pp. 80-81.
21.This study does not attempt to retrace the doctrinal debates of the 1920s and 1930s. To place Liddell Hart’s views in perspective, however, a number of sources were consulted. For the development of air doctrine in Great Britain, see Robin Higham’s The Military Intellectuals in Britain, op. cit., and Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder’s 1947 Lees Knowles Lectures (Cambridge University), published at Air Power in War (1947).
For the development of air doctrine in America, see Raymond R. Fluegel’s unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, United States Air Power Doctrine: A Study of the Influence of William Mitchell and Giulio Douhet at the Air Corps Tactical School( 1921-1935 (University of Oklahoma, 1965) and the United States Air Force Historical Study Number 100, History of the Air Corps Tactical School, 1920-1940 (1955). See, also, Robin Higham’s Air Power: A Concise History (1972) and Air Marshal Sir John Slessor’s Air Power and Armies (1936).
22. Liddell Hart discusses his role in the British doctrinal debate in volume one of his Memoirs. The highlights of that role are as follows. An extensive review of existing military doctrine led him in 1925 to adopt a view favoring an independent use of air power. He first presented this view in an article entitled “The Napoleonic Fallacy: The Moral Objective in War,” published in March 1925, where he argued in favor of long-range bomber offensives. He expanded this theme in his first major book, Paris or the Future of War, published in July 1925. This book had an immediate impact on the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Hugh Trenchard, largely (the author believed) because it reinforced already established views. Sir Hugh saw that the book had wide circulation in the RAF and the new Staff College. Further, Sir Geoffrey Butler, Liddell Hart’s former supervisor in history at Cambridge, had by then become Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Samuel Hoare. It was through Sir Geoffrey that Paris came to Sir Samuel’s attention.
23. The Real War, p. 113.
24.Strategy, p. 51.
25. Ibid., p. 346.
26. This Expanding War, p. 262.
27. Paris, p. 55.
28. It would be interesting to speculate how Liddell Hart might have responded to the bombing offensives against Hanoi in December 1972, had he not died two yean earlier.
29. The Revolution in Warfare, p. 29.
30. Liddell Hart had written in The Revolution in Warfare: “The inherent drawback to an air force as the prime means to victory is that while tactically it is the most rapid in operation and sudden in shock, strategically it is less fitted to produce a swiftly decisive effect.”
31. Liddell Hart’s comments on air power in Strategy invite three observations: (1) He gave considerably less space to air power in Strategy than in his previous works; (2) his discussion of air power was considerably more reserved in Strategy than it had previously been; and (3) he did not sustain any single discussion of air power in Strategy. The strongest statement concerning air power appears on page 359, where he wrote: “Air-power promised new scope for producing such paralysis of armed opposition—besides its capacity to evade opposition and strike at civil objectives in the enemy country.” Unfortunately, he did not elaborate on this point.
32. The Revolution in Warfare, p. 26.
33. Thoughts on War, p.54.
34. History of the Second World War, p.474.
35. Thought on War, p.64.
36. Strategy, pp. 358-59.
Captain Michael O. Wheeler (USAFA; Ph. D., University of Arizona) is an Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Philosophy, United States Air Force Academy. He has served as an intelligence officer, Hq Tactical Air Command, and in Thailand. Other assignments were the Directorate of Plans on the Air Staff and with the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs, State Department. Captain Wheeler is a graduate of Squadron Officer School, Air Command and Staff College, and Industrial College of the Armed Forces.
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.
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