Venice is a great case-study for the practice of grand strategy. A tight-knit oligarchy ruled a commercial empire for nearly six centuries, able to chart a course years and decades in advance.🧵

https://twitter.com/bazaarofwar/status/1783940378279698729

If grand strategy is the use of a country’s resources to protect & further its interests, who defines its interests? Even *formulating* grand strategy involves political wrangling—much easier in a small state where everyone’s livelihood depends on the sea.
dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/grand-strate…

Among the most promising military applications of AI is staff work. Tons of routine products—intel summaries, orders, etc.—can be generated much faster by machine. Does this mean staffs will reverse the historic trend and begin to shrink?

No: they’re about to explode in size.🧵 In the Napoleonic era, a divisional or corps staff was never more than a dozen soldiers, whereas today it’s pushing toward a thousand for formations of about the same size. Part of a general trend in tooth-to-tail ratios.

Africa saw a lot of fighting in both World Wars, but nowhere near the scale or importance of the main theaters.

Secondary theaters are usually a drain on the weaker side, so it’s interesting to compare Germany’s performance in both. 🧵

https://twitter.com/bazaarofwar/status/1778627012954915182

The North Africa campaign of WWII is the much more famous of these. It saw the exploits of three of the most famous commanders of the war—Rommel, Montgomery, and Patton—as well as some of the most dramatic back-and-forths. But what were Axis objectives there?

The Crusades are fascinating in the way they pitted two very different military systems against each other: Western heavy cavalry v. Turkish horse archers—each probably the best in the world at the time. This drove a lot of innovation at the tactical and also operational level.🧵

https://twitter.com/bazaarofwar/status/1770633419199811875

The Crusaders’ great strength was the mounted charge: a line of heavily-armored knights lowering their lances and advancing as one. This was extremely effective especially against the more lightly-armored soldiers they encountered in the East.

The focus of my latest was on what it will take to keep forces mobile in the face of long-range precision fires, ubiquitous drones, and persistent ISR.

Although the particular focus was on armor, the question is just as apt for logistics and support vehicles.

https://twitter.com/bazaarofwar/status/1743341907453865991

This was partly in response to an interesting RUSI paper on the future of armor in the British Army, looking at the survivability of individual platforms. Equally important is to look at how armor fits in with the entire combined-arms scheme.
static.rusi.org/heavy-armoured…

OTD in 1813 the armies of the Sixth Coalition converged on Napoleon at Leipzig, the decisive showdown of the Napoleonic Wars.

With a nearly 2-to-1 overall advantage, Allied victory was almost assured—the real challenge had been cornering him there. Thread. The Sixth Coalition was formed in March 1813 when Prussia and Sweden declared war on France, encouraged by Russia’s successes the previous year. This forced Napoleon, who was rebuilding his shattered army, to scramble to defend eastern Germany.

The most decisive battle of the past 500 years was fought OTD in 1759, on a windswept Canadian plain by fewer than ten thousand men. It decided the fate of the Americas and shaped world events for centuries to come.

Thread on the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. What became known as the Seven Years' War was formally declared by France and Britain in 1756, although fighting had broken out in the North American colonies two years earlier. British colonials began by pushing over the Appalachians to seize French forts, but were repulsed.

A few stories from the past week have shown just how much drones are transforming warfare. It’s not their increased lethality or even their improved targeting for ground-based systems, but one of the biggest command-and-control revolutions of the past century. Thread. The first is an article on Ukraine’s use of drones for indirect fire control. This alone is nothing new—it’s been apparent since last March that guided artillery, far more than ATGMs, has been the most effective weapon of the war.
19fortyfive.com/2023/04/artill…

Military strategy is supposed to be guided by war aims determined by political figures—this has largely been true for Western nations in the past 200 years. But far more often, the demands of strategy determine the war aims themselves. Thread.
bazaarofwar.substack.com/p/theories-of-… Consider the case of the Japanese in World War II. In 1942, their aims were to complete the conquest of China and Southeast Asia. But in response to this, the US imposed an oil embargo which crippled their ability to keep fighting.

What is operational art? Most people today would say something about connecting tactics to strategy.

WRONG!

This is an innovation introduced in 1982, which clouded an otherwise clear concept and led to 4 decades of pointless doctrinal bickering. Thread.
bazaarofwar.substack.com/p/the-levels-o… The 1982 version of FM 100-5 Operations introduced the operational level of war, which it defined as using "available military resources to attain strategic goals within a theater of war."

Most criticisms focus on the use of the word 'level'. But that's not the real problem.

The concept of strategy has undergone three distinct evolutions from its original meaning of 'generalship'. Each was associated with a different level of war.

The first occurred in Late Antiquity, when strategy became associated with the overall battle.
bazaarofwar.substack.com/p/the-levels-o… It also carried some sense of the campaign, but this did not really extend so far as an entire campaign plan - it was more the maneuvers outside of battle that gave an army the jump on the enemy.

https://twitter.com/bazaarofwar/status/1622430209310851073

Tactics, strategy, logistics, lines of operation/communication all entered common usage during in the second half of the 18th century. Together with the mid-17th c., this period basically invented modern strategic language.

https://twitter.com/bazaarofwar/status/1630403282379186176

This ferment originated in France in reaction to her defeat in the Seven Years' War.

The Count of Guibert, who elaborated the concept of grand tactics, laid the intellectual groundwork for fast, decisive warfare - he was a major influence on the armies of the French Revolution.

I just published "The Levels of Warfare, Part 2: The Birth of Tactics and Strategy"
bazaarofwar.substack.com/p/the-levels-o… It's striking how *late* the concepts of tactics & strategy were applied to warfare. It was not until the outbreak of the Seven Years' War in the 1750s that tactics caught on.

Although it’s anyone’s guess whether the conflict on the Sino-Indian border will escalate, it’s one of the few places in the world where the defender could exploit a reverse-slope defense. Thread.

https://twitter.com/htTweets/status/1625843522191634433

A reverse slope defense is simply when the defender positions himself at the bottom of a slope. This protects him from long-range direct fire weapons and forces the attacker to trickle into the kill zone. Wellington used it to great effect against the French in Spain.

One thing that distinguishes larger insurgencies/small wars is operational-level actions, unlike the isolated tactical actions of “pure” insurgencies.

One example I mentioned was the Tamil Tigers, who did just that with the siege of Elephant Pass. Thread.
bazaarofwar.substack.com/p/the-chain-of… During the third phase of the Sri Lankan Civil War in the late 90s, the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) recovered lots of territory occupied by the Tamil Tigers (LTTE). Among the most important was the Jaffna Peninsula on the northern end of the island.

Most of the German Navy spent World War I bottled up in the North Sea, but one ship had an outsized impact: the SMS Königsberg.

This one light cruiser tied up a squadron of British Royal Navy vessels off East Africa in the first year of the war.

https://twitter.com/bazaarofwar/status/1587135635290210304

The Königsberg had just begun a deployment to East African waters in summer 1914. The British intended to seize the entire coast in the event of hostilities, but she managed to slip out of her port at Dar es Salaam just before war was declared.

I just published 'The Chain of Combat, Part 1: Classifying War'. In it I introduce a concept for classifying different types of conflict, based on the relative unity and coherence of combat operations.
bazaarofwar.substack.com/p/the-chain-of… Insurgencies, small wars, and large interstate conflicts often get lumped together under the label 'war', even though they are governed by fundamentally different dynamics. Violence serves a completely different purpose in an insurgency than it does in a major war.

The Danzig crisis of the 30s leading to world war in 40s.

The siege of Danzig in 1734 was the centerpiece of the war of the Polish Succession, followed a few years later by the War of the Austrian Succession, a massive concatenation of conflicts fought on 4 continents. The war broke out between the supporters of two rival claimants to the Polish throne: Louis XV of France supported his father-in-law Stanislas Leszczynski, elected king by the Polish nobles, while the Austrians, Russians, Prussians, and Saxons supported August III.

Rommel’s Western Desert campaign is a great example of premature culmination, famously reaching the end of its logistical tether before achieving its objectives.

But culmination is a broad concept, including far more than just logistics—in his case, intelligence assets. The basic story is familiar: after arriving in Tripoli in 1941, Rommel attacked immediately and drove the British back a thousand miles across the desert, showing a preternatural instinct for hitting them where they were most vulnerable.

If new weapons have shifted things in favor of the defense, is there any prospect of the offense regaining the advantage?

Follow-up to yesterday’s thread, looking at what will drive successful offensive operations in the near future.

https://twitter.com/bazaarofwar/status/1564716318993125379

The Iron Triangle

Any new weapon is a compromise between mobility, protection, and firepower. If the last favors the defense, then the first two favor the offense. This is true for individual systems, but holds more generally for the composition of the entire force.

CASTLE DOCTRINE

Advances in weaponry have the paradoxical effect of shifting the advantage to the defense: crossbows & castles, cannons & star forts, artillery & trenches.

We’re now seeing the same with UAVs & guided artillery. What does this mean for the near future? Thread. In every age, attacking forces must expose themselves to the defenders' fire in order to close with the enemy. Longer-ranged, more accurate, and more lethal weapons make it easier to kill soldiers in the open, shifting the incentive to stay put behind protection.