Chapter 10

Force Strategy

by Hugh M. Lewis

The evolution of strategic emphasis of the force strategies has been the direct spin-off of the results of the evolution of technological civilization in which an ever increasing capacity of destructive force potential has been steadily realized. There exists four elementary force strategies: continental strategy, maritime strategy, aerial strategy and nuclear strategy in the order of the evolution of the respective strategic emphasis. The evolution of strategic emphasis has been toward an ever increasing strategic value of destructive force potential, while the tactical value of the unpredictable human element of control has been steadily decreasing. The evolution of these strategies has caused an intensification of the temporal dimension of warfare and an extensification of the geographical dimension to encompass virtually the whole globe. The evolution of destructive forces potential has been increasing exponentially. It has only been in the past century that a major part of the evolutionary process has occurred, despite nearly five millennia of recorded warfare. The major shift of strategic emphasis has been mostly recent and new, while the ages old military behavior patterns have been slow to catch up.

War is becoming increasingly dangerous to human survival, in which an ever increasing percentage of the human population has become susceptible to its adverse effects. Strategies founded on force invariably focus on geography. These strategies are plotable on the map. Critical terrain features, core areas such as command control centers, transportation modes, installations, industrial and population centers, constitute prospective objectives. Groups of nations may contain subordinate core areas. Choke points owe their importance solely to strategic position, while all other features have a transitory value. Cities have a great innate value, figuring prominently in strategy as pawns of the game of military strategy.

Continental strategy is the oldest and most practiced force strategy. It has been in practice since mankind first staked claims of territorial sovereignty. Study of land warfare comprises the greater portion of all military thought. While control of geography is the objective goal of the other force strategies, terrain is the initial starting point of continental strategy, the point of departure in its conception of warfare. While the other force strategies look beyond the immediate geographical area in terms of the whole earth, terrain forms the limitations of continental strategy, always representing problems needing to be solved despite the enemy. Continental strategy tends to compartmentalize the globe in terms of theaters. Conception of the strategic sense is based primarily on the nature of geography. Land power will force a decision leading to lasting control by the physical military occupation of key terrain features and population centers.

The nature of land warfare affects the perspective of continental strategy. While the other force strategies realize conflict in a series of separate encounters by either opponent retaining the decision of when and where to utilize force and by conflict occurring only when it is mutually acceptable or by accident, continental strategy seeks to make tactical contact from the beginning to the end of the war with encounters occurring in a more predominantly sequential pattern of conflict. There is no clear distinction between what is functionally tactical and what is operationally strategic as with the other strategies. Emphasis is toward the more hierarchical-subordinate relationship between tactics and strategy in command.

The third governing factor of continental strategy is derived partially from these first two factors and consists of the predominating conventional and traditional military mentality which infects most land forces. Strategic focus of attention is on the tactical conflict with the enemy forces as directly, decisively and immediately as possible in continental strategy. It is the theme of Clausewitz that the primary objective must be the destruction of the enemy military force in battle and this objective of destruction is to be sought primarily through tactical conflict, attempting as much as possible to unite all engagements into a single continuous and decisive battle. Therefore tactical conflict is the chief concern of strategic attention, to which all other considerations must be of secondary concern.

This influence of Clausewitz has pervaded all subsequent attention in continental strategy.

Continental strategy contains much simpler theory than the other force strategies, founded on the basic concepts of tactical warfare to which all other considerations must be subordinated. Air and naval forces exist primarily to support the needs of land forces in the attainment of the ultimate objective, direct control of the land. The soldier is the only one who cannot perform his role alone and unsupported. This need for security affects the soldiers concepts of organization for the soldier must control the functions of his support. It is continental strategy of all the elementary force strategies which must deal most directly with the unpredictable element of human resistance, which thus complicates the realization of continental strategy more than with any of the others.

Halford J. Mackinder emphasized the geographic importance of land opposed to the air or the sea in strategic realization of world domination. He believed that central Eurasia was the hub of the universe. The original Pivot Area is the Heartland consisting of Eastern Europe and Asia constituted the Marginal Crescent. Eurasia and Africa became the World Island. The rest of the globe constituted the insular Crescent. He postulated that whoever controlled East Europe would command the Heartland, whoever controlled the Heartland would rule the World Island and that whoever controlled the World Island would dominate the earth. Such is the finalized form of expression of the means toward world domination through elementary force strategy.

Maritime strategy is the direct extension of continental strategy, one step removed from dependence on the terrain to the relative freedom of the seas, through which force potential achieves a transcendent and "purer" form of expression over continental strategy. Maritime strategy depends on overcoming and controlling the natural aqueous portions of the earth in its projection of force potential for world control. Maritime strategy lends itself naturally to greater strategic calculation and determination, being divorced from much of the tactical uncertainties involved in the realization of continental strategy. The conflict at sea more closely resembles in its simplicity a conflict of strategic calculation than a battle of tactical willpower and resistance, which on land often dominates the final strategic decision. On the oceans this tactical human element is one step removed from strategic consideration making strategic determination more amenable to analytical planning. As such maritime strategy presents a fairly clear pattern of theory. This theory consists of two parts: control of the sea and extension of this control to establish indirectly control of the land.

Though it had been the working objective of the maritime strategies of many nations centuries previous, the first part of this strategy, the control of the sea lanes, had not been described in any direct and complete form until Corbett. Establishment of control of the seas means control of everything that moved by the seas in relative governing degrees. It usually meant decisive defeat of any opponent navy and policing of the seas of all piracy. The second part has not been described completely until the middle of the twentieth century even though its importance had been well understood a long time beforehand. It was prior to World War 11 such control usually meant an indirect process exerted mainly through economic avenues with reinforcing social and political measures. Its principle tool was the blockade. The injection and sustained support of land forces into strategically important land areas was only of intermittent and secondary importance in maritime strategy, not a primary objective in itself. Military accomplishment of a complete maritime strategy, with the technical realization of the second part of the strategy by the utilization of land forces, did not occur until World War 11.

Mahan is renowned for bringing popular recognition to the role of sea power as an alternative basis of national policy and as a primary means of world domination. Control of the oceans would determine control of decisions ashore. A nation must dominate sea lanes and critical choke points and then project its forces ashore. The prerequisites for its strategic realization are home and overseas operating ports, a powerful navy backed up by a powerful merchant marine fleet, a central strategic location combining accessible coastline with good harbors and easily defensible shores, and finally a people with an affinity with the sea and for commerce. A power strong enough to command the high seas can dominate the earth. Such is the ultimate expression of world domination by the elementary maritime force strategy.

While these first two elementary strategies evolved from the dependency of occupation--for continental strategy the occupation of terrain and the land as of primary importance and for maritime strategy the occupation of the oceans as of primary importance--as a basis for establishing permanent control of the world, aerial strategy evolved in a fundamentally different, more indirect fashion. While occupation involves direct control by an immediate human tactical application of military forces as a permanent condition of control, aerial strategy is dependent on the destructive force of weapons primarily and directly as a substitute for this human factor of control, and hence the human element, with all its implications of imperfection, unpredictability and resistance, is one step further removed than with either continental or strategic from the employment of force in strategic determination. While its practical foundations have been well incorporated into continental and maritime systems, itself having origins in the evolution of such siege weapons as slings, arrows, catapults, artillery, airplanes and missiles, it is unique in that it has only occurred very recently in the history of the evolution of strategic emphasis and in that it exists so far primarily as a theory rather than as time tested doctrine.

Aerial strategy is in its essence an artillery problem, though involving vastly larger factors of force potentials and distances of expression. It involves more the indirect utilization of "purer" destructive force. The fundamentally problematical nature of this strategy, in which the human determinant is minimized, lends itself well to strategic planning, to mathematical quantification of force potentials and to technological refinement toward definitive and more predictable preparations and outcomes. In this sense it represents a much purer form of force strategy with a much simpler model of conflict. It is inherently less dependent on tactical results than on strategic preparation and superiority of force potentials. It is much less of an art than a science. Its implementation on a global scale was not feasible nor even imaginable until the invention of the airplane. For aerial strategy, which aims more at cumulative, indirect and indecisive strategic results, success is more dependent on prewar preparation than on wartime execution of strategy.

Giulio Douher, prior to World War 1, became convinced that the airplane meant a radical revolution in the nature of warfare. Of al the aerial strategists he most clearly put his ideas into print, forming an aerial theory serving as a valid point of departure for modern air warfare strategies. this original theory formed the basic structure of beliefs and prejudices concerning warfare which have influenced the behaviors of a very considerable portion of world society. These beliefs are: air power unaided can be decisive, given a free hand air power can make protracted warfare obsolete, control of the enemy and destruction of the enemy's population and industrial centers are the principal mission of air power, all other roles are strictly secondary. Nevertheless there are several fundamental problems associated with the air theory which have cause recurrent debate. What kind of control is desired? Under what circumstances will destruction or the threat of destruction acquire the necessary degree of control? The appearance of the atomic bomb, unanticipated by the early aerial strategists suddenly confirmed and radically altered this aspect of warfare in strategic emphasis and in the focus of strategic attention.

Alexander De Seversky proposed a theory based on the premise that complete air superiority over the globe is feasible. His view of the globe is based on a polar orientation visualizing a Soviet-American confrontation across the Arctic Circle. Circular eclipses of the maximum radii of the range of bomber forces around each nation, the Soviet Union, and the United States overlap in the general area of strategic contest and decision centered on the North Pole. Only zones out of the area of decision can be defended.

While early aerial strategy had been founded on the proclaimed revolutionary affects of the airplane, its foundation have become shaken in light of more recent experience. Only with the advent of the nuclear bomb has the aerial strategy been so completely transformed and accepted that it has caused a major evolutionary shift of strategic emphasis to pure nuclear strategy.

Nuclear strategy has transcended general aerial strategy in being based more purely on strategic destructive force potential, minimizing the atomic bomb and not the airplane. Nuclear strategy is a specialized instance of aerial strategy and as such is a purer form of strategy, the critical decision being attained in strategic preparation and direction rather than in tactical execution. The values of destructive force potential and of human vulnerability and irrationality factors have become so pronounced in this elementary form of strategy as to make the implications we cannot ignore. While the nuclear bomb has drastically altered the scope of warfare, lending credibility to aerial strategy, nuclear strategy has completely altered the scope of strategic consideration. Nuclear strategy is the newest and most rapidly evolving force strategy and has achieved a comprehensiveness over the other force strategies in its doctrines of triad deployment, while it has sacrificed the flexibility of control, an increasing divergence from the more geographical occupationally dependent strategies. It does not have the tactical element of the man on the sense with a gun as the ultimate arbitrator of destruction and control. Dependence on pure destructive force, quantifiably measurable, as the primary determinant of control of human willpower has lead to a dead end in the evolutionary development of force strategy.

Nuclear strategy aims not so much at executing war as a means of obtaining control, but at preventing war from occurring, derived from a mutual and general acceptance of nuclear war as an unacceptable dead end for strategy. Nuclear strategy leads directly to concepts of deterrence a preeminent element of the superpower's grand strategies. War has become the least attractive strategic alternative. The strategic problem is then to convince the opponent and ourselves that this is so. Deterrence is essentially psychological restraint, positive and negative, based on naked threat of destruction. The goal of deterrence is to induce stability, a state of equilibrium, reinforced by political, economic and social sanctions. Stability reflects the ability to cause unacceptable punishment should deterrence fail. The concept implies that neither side enjoys a rational first strike.

In order for deterrence to be successful, its threats must be made to appear credible to rational analysis. If they are not credible they may produce an opposite effect. Enemy capabilities are transient and not entirely tangible. Intentions must be measured subjectively against temperament and willpower. The calculations of intentions, capabilities and vulnerabilities can never be absolutely precise.

While defense implies fundamentally physical expression, deterrence is fundamentally nonphysical (or psychological). Thus deterrence opens the way for many possibilities of the subtle influences of psychological origin, hitherto precluded by the concept of defense, in the realization of nuclear strategy. Temporary irrationality, giving rise to miscalculation, misinterpretations, and the inadvertent, undue and not completely conscionable influences of a host of fears, suspicions, doubts, uncertainties and prejudices will eventuate in the final outcome of nuclear strategy. Deterrence can never be completely defensible from irrationality. It would be the height of folly to believe deterrence can ever be insured complete stability in the balance of terror which now reigns sovereign over the international political realm. Nuclear strategy is by far predominantly preparatory. Irrationality can never be adequately planned against. Such a defense can never be completely incorporated into nuclear preparations for deterrence. The essential irrationality of war achieves its highest expression in the dilemma of nuclear deterrence, in the so called rationality of irrationality (an inherently illogical self contradiction) with its underlying dependency on supra national terrorism which makes of the whole humanity unwilful but unwitting hostages. The hostage, the bomb, the terrorist, these are the signs of modern times-the epitome of human folly.

Deterrent strategy follows two extremities of thought, each founded on the opposing strategic concepts of counter force and counter value. Pure counter force implies the offensive destruction of all enemy strategic forces regardless of collateral damage to industry or population. Counter force attempts to achieve a preemptive first strike on which the doctrine of maximum deterrence is predicated. This doctrine presupposes that the initiative be retained in the maintenance of overwhelming numerical superiority of nuclear weapons systems and in their diversification of delivery. Total war capabilities in the most modern sense are considered imperative to the deter minor as well as major enemy provocations, necessitating minimum general purpose forces and opposing limited war capabilities. This has been made the basic, extremely militaristic and paranoid doctrine, the objective of technological evolution of the two nuclear superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, except that general purpose forces have not been minimized, but rather, in distinct contradiction, have been increased as much ad is feasibly possible. Pure counter value is antithetical implying a defensive second strike massive retaliation against population and industrial centers, instead of against strategic force capabilities, on which the doctrine of minimum deterrence is predicated. This is the direct extension of the aerial strategy. Minimum deterrence presumes that nuclear war would end in disaster for all opponents, a situation resembling "two scorpions in a bottle" and that therefore a counter value strategy involving only a few missiles (50) would guarantee perpetual stability. Overkill capabilities are excessive waste. Advocates of this doctrine admit that mutual deterrence would encourage limited wars in which larger scope for lesser conflicts would be needed.

Nuclear war may have several potential causes, deliberate initiation, accidental initiation, miscalculation, misunderstanding, catalysis or irrationality. A doctrine of minimum deterrence does allow enough flexibility of deterrence to cover all possibilities, being founded on the probability of enemy intention. Here is its essential weakness. In preparation for nuclear war the effect of the law of diminishing returns must be considered, in which there should exist an optimum level of force potential, beyond which the supplementary value of increased potential steadily decreases. Maximum deterrence ignores this optimum level in the acquisition of ever increasing force potential, mutually aggravating the possibility of nuclear war and destabilizing the essential value of mutual deterrence.

There exists a need for compromise solution, on which a satisfying strategy transcending the weaknesses of the basic doctrines. Counter force and counter value strategy imply an offensive-defensive relationship which may be applied in varying degrees of combinations or in a wholly unadulterated manner. Four such solutions have been outlines, which are in ascending order of force intensity, finite deterrence, mostly finite deterrence, counter force as deterrence and credible first strike possibilities.

Finite deterrence, while still emphasizing counter value strategy, affords a better buffer zone than minimum deterrence by striving for more convincing capabilities covering a multitude of contingencies requiring increasing requirements. It holds that sufficiency of deterrence is assured by between 500 and 1000 warheads, while deliberately underplaying its defense posture and abstaining from war fighting repertories to avoid a reciprocal fear of surprise attack. Credible first strike possibilities include calculated preemption and preventive war capitalizing on counter force capabilities of all kinds. This doctrine is predicated on the near certainty that most of the enemy's retaliatory forces could be effectively neutralized simultaneously. While minimum and maximum deterrent doctrines are the more realistic applications that have occurred, while each is more realistic in its fighting stance, both fail to transcend the inherent weaknesses and neither offer an effective compromise between counter value and counter force.

Mostly finite deterrence adds adaptability to the concept of minimum deterrence augmenting available retaliatory forces and charging significant elements with the defense of civilian population. While counter value still prevails, even though counter fore is feasible against weaker opponents, controlled war strategies can be accommodated avoiding excessive collateral damage. Counter force as deterrence introduces genuine war fighting capabilities as an insurance enhancing opportunity for restrained reprisals and more credible escalation threats, improving flexibility and versatility of targeting, enhancing active damage limitations measures. Blackmail and nuclear provocation can be handled with more facility. While these two limited doctrines are still biased toward both extremes, they come closer to assimilating a common compromise doctrine transcending the limitations of either extremity.

These deterrent doctrines have reflected the evolution of a subtle shift from minimum toward maximum deterrent capabilities. The original doctrine was and has to be one of massive retaliation of counter value strategy. The nuclear arsenal was small and had limited means of deployment. As the arsenal has gradually increased in size and deadliness, so too has deterrent doctrine gradually shifted toward preemptive first strike and a counter force strategy. No single doctrine has perfectly reflected the changing strategic situation, nor has any perfectly implemented. As the general trend has remained unaltered, optimum strategic capability has already been attained on the present and past foundations of nuclear doctrine--any further nuclear proliferation will tend to be destabilizing, as counter force and counter value strategy become ever more inextricably intermixed in practice as well as in theory.

These foundations of nuclear deterrence must be altered before the current trend leads to an inevitable dead end and before any successful nuclear strategy can be implemented. To be successful it must be based on an effective compromise doctrine transcending the limitations of current doctrine, on planning decisively for peace as well as planning for decisive war.

The bomb is not a precise instrument of surgical application but it is rather a blunt indiscriminate weapon of mass destruction. The ultimate results of mass destruction are inestimable and incapable of being adequately provided for by any strategic analysis. Nuclear strategy is a "pure" cumulative force strategy, dependent for success on the cumulative effects of a vast number of separate nuclear explosions. As such nuclear strategy is almost totally dependent on prewar preparation and is an all or nothing gamble of force potential, with minimal influence of subsequent wartime adjustments to the final outcome once the original decision for war is made. Nuclear war is inherently indecisive and unstable. Any strategy dependent on the bomb for its success must be in effect be an indecisive and unstable strategy. All planning to gain decisive victory with the bomb either by technological surprise, nuclear predominance or preemptive first strike must produce a destabilizing influence to a peaceful balance and fail to achieve its original purpose. In the face of the probable indecisiveness of nuclear war, instead of planning for decisive nuclear war, we must plan decisively for no war at all.

The dead end of nuclear strategy is the result of a stagnation of strategic attention, a failure of strategy to keep pace with the inevitable shifting of strategic emphasis necessitated by technological evolution. This failure is a recurrent process of history, leading inevitably to total war escalating from its indecisiveness and is evidenced by two intentionally neglected directions of strategic evolution. This failure has been justified as contributing to the stability of inherently unstable current nuclear doctrine, but reflects instead its limiting inadequacies and are the seeds of virtual doomsday. The efficacy of the foundations of current doctrine of nuclear strategy have gone unquestioned.

One direction requiting more attention is toward evolving and improving nuclear defense, both active in the form of anti-ballistic missiles, lasers and early warning detection systems, and passively in the form of civil defense programs, private and public blast and fallout shelters, central and integrated aid systems, organized communications and transportation enhancing the survivability of a nation's population. No arguments of the relative overall ineffectiveness of such defenses can justify the unalleviated suffering of even one person caused indirectly by the deliberate neglect of such improvements. When such justification is sounded the rationality of its advocated doctrinal basis is questionable, as in the competency of the authorized leadership. National defense must be honestly defensive in order to be effective and not just in name only as a disguise for offensive programs. Leaders who sell to their people assured destruction in war without any guarantee of protection from their own war making efforts must be subject to question.

The further removed from human population centers in nuclear warfare, the less will be its indecisive outcome and the more useful would be its implementation from a purely strategic standpoint. A complete divorce of the effects of nuclear war from humanity would in fact be both undesirable and impossible, contributing the most powerful influence towards its future deterrent value, while the restructuring of it doctrinal basis for deployment so that nuclear warfare would occur only between uniformed combatants only would enable future nuclear warfare to be both decisive and sequential in effect. This can only be achieved by a progressive series of steps in which nuclear weaponry and their means of deployment are removed from the presence of civilization to the more remote regions within mankind's reach, which is ultimately to the depths of outer space. Deployment in the vast void of outer space of an invulnerable and accurate strategic force of optimum deterrence value, based on recognition of overkill capacity and strategic situational flexibility, based on a reverse compromise concept of relinquishing the initiative, of no first strikes, and of a pre counterbalance second strike retaliation minimizing collateral damage. This would serve as a most stable and credible deterrent doctrine of future nuclear war. Strategic emphasis has shifted very subtly and must shift deliberately from the current earthbound deterrent doctrine of triad toward a monad in the frontiers of space. Failure to recognize and exploit this wave of future development would be a lost opportunity for strategic success. Instead of being ignored as a remote fate in the back of everyone's mind, nuclear annihilation must become a remote and slight possibility at the forefront of everyone's strategic attention.

The evolution of deterrent doctrine toward a ever increasing force potential is the specialized instance of a more general evolution toward "purer" force strategy, toward more indecisive and cumulative results. While the strategic complexity of the problem has been drastically simplified to a analytical considerations, the immediate tactical influence of the human toward sequential decisiveness has been gradually divorced from strategic influence. Nuclear strategy as a pure force strategy presumes its destructive power to be adequate even though it is indiscriminate. In this sense nuclear strategy represents absolute strategic control. Yet the power of discrimination has been adversely and irreplaceably removed from strategic control. After whatever devastation and destruction may be inflicted upon the world, if the strategy is to achieve final tactical control, it must present as an inevitable prospect a man on the scene with a gun, which remains the absolute determinant of tactical force control. Here in lies the limiting weakness of nuclear strategy, and of all force strategy in general, its failure to adequately assess human valuation and maintain a permanent consideration of control. There would be no improved subsequent condition of peace after nuclear holocaust only the foundations for future war.

The contrast of values between destructive force potential and human vulnerability are in no other for strategy more clearly evident than with nuclear strategy. In continental strategy this divergence is minimal, while the unpredictability element of human resistance to control strategic determination is maximized. As it progresses through maritime, aerial and nuclear strategies this human resistance factor is gradually minimized while destructive force potential has been maximized in the evolution of force strategy.

None of the strategic valuations directly address a successful grand strategy. There is a need for a unifying grasp similar to the doctrine of flexible response. None of the media described offers a panacea, none are mutually exclusive. While the force strategies are elementary in theory in reality none occur today independently of one another. All overlap and are functionally interdependent. None alone is successful. Armies depend on sea lift and air lift, naval bombardment and close air support. Navies need armies and air forces for defense of ports and ships and for extension of power ashore. Air forces depend on land and sea force to provide supply bases and airports and for protection of its lines of communication. Nuclear strategy requires flexibility to meet transitory conflict situations necessitating land, air, and sea forces in order to effectively deter escalation to nuclear war. While each of the elementary force strategies have a substantial content of validity, as far as their limiting premises are theoretically comprehensive and realistically generally applicable, directly coinciding with reality to varying extents that they are theoretically practicable and from components of a comprehensive theory, these elements of validity are the basis of controversy in the extension of human qualitative judgment. This human element of irrational, limited prejudices based on limited presumptions is the source of difficulty serving as intellectual points of departure into irrational argument. Contention for each developing strategic situation causes contention of ideological foundations. All elementary strategies form limited theories. These limitations are determined by the different presumptions implicit in each.

There exists no generally accepted comprehensive strategy. Such a strategy would have to transcend the limitations of the elementary strategies to be applicable to any conflict situation, any time and any place, absorbing within its conceptual framework the realities of the existing ones, transcending all previously known limitations, starting on a broader more unlimited theoretical basis. It must be applicable under all conditions. It must at the same time not be so vague as to be formless and unusable as a basis for intellectual discipline in the practical evolution of a plan of strategy, designed to meet a particular situation of reality. Each of the elementary force strategies has limiting weaknesses that need to be uncovered where the underlying assumption does not fit the realities of the actual situation.

The general evolution of force strategies has been toward "pure" force expression. This evolution of strategic emphasis was based on an underlying assumption that destruction can be equated to control of human will and valuation. This evolutionary process has lead to a dead end. This underlying presumption forms the general limiting weakness in force strategy. In order for a comprehensive strategy to be theoretically formulated and successfully realized grand strategy it must transcend this general limitation, putting force strategy into its proper perspective. This necessitates consideration of the other two general classes of elementary grand strategy, power and value strategy.

1. From "Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control" by J.C. Wylie. Copyright 1967 by Rutgers, pages 39-55

2. From "Grand Strategy: Principles and Practices" by John M. Collins. Copyright 1973 by the Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD. , pages 167-169 and 82-86. A comprehensive approach to the understanding of strategic concepts.

Military Dimensions