Militaries as Learning Organizations

So far, I have been looking at the functions of imperial militaries and the challenges involved in performing them very abstractly, as timeless realities equally relevant to Sargon of Akkad and Xi Jinping.

In their book Hope Is Not a Method, former US Army Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan and strategic planner Michael Harper identify the three key elements in what they call “the learning challenge” as “the right culture, the knowledge itself, and access to the knowledge.”^[364] Unfortunately, the learning cultures and structures of all imperial militaries before the last few hundred years are black boxes to historians, but the stories our sources tell about their wars suggest that the best an­cient and medieval armies, like the best modern ones, did excel at involving eve­ryone, not just the top brass, in the educational process. In 56 bce, for instance, when Julius Caesar sent his Mediterranean-style galleys against the big sailing ships of the Veneti tribe in Brittany, he discovered, to his horror, that “[o]ur ships were unable to harm theirs by ramming them (they were so strongly built) or, because of their height, to aim missiles at them with any success. For the same reason, it was difficult to board them with grappling irons.”^[365] But his sailors did not wait for their baffled superiors to tell them what to do: rigging up long poles with hooks on the end, they grabbed the ropes tying the yardarms to the masts on the Veneti's ships and then rowed away hard, pulling down the sails.

On a larger scale, the strategist Edward Luttwak made a convincing case in the 1970s that the Roman Empire's grand strategy evolved through three stages (of relying on client kingdoms, preclusive frontier defenses, and defense in depth) be­tween the late first century bce and the late third ce,^[366] even though Roman writers say next to nothing about such strategic pivots. This suggests (to me, at least) that learning was probably driven by men on the ground, from Hadrian's Wall to the headwaters of the Euphrates, as much as by the emperors and senatorial elite on whom our ancient texts focus.

However exactly they did it, imperial militaries have constantly adapted to their changing environments, producing a series of what analysts have recently taken to calling “Revolutions in Military Affairs” (RMAs). The analyst Andrew Krepinevich defines these as “compris[ing] four elements: technological change, systems devel­opment, operational innovation, and organizational adaptation,” and leading to “a dramatic increase—often an order of magnitude or greater—in the combat poten­tial and military effectiveness of armed forces.” They happen “when the application of new technologies into a significant number of military systems combines with innovative operational concepts and organizational adaptation in a way that funda­mentally alters the character and conduct of conflict.”^[367]

Spectacularly one-sided victories, such as that of the US-led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War, seem to come about when one military has mastered the opera­tional art required to exploit the latest RMA while its opponent has not,^[368] but with just a few exceptions from the classical Mediterranean, we only have enough evi­dence to trace this process in the last few centuries. However, it is clear enough that ever since empires began, those that spearheaded RMAs or adapted to them quickly prospered, while those that did not, did not.

The first RMA to be associated with ancient empires, and perhaps the one that made them possible, was the invention of discipline. War among hunter-gatherer bands and horticultural tribes is notoriously anarchic, relying much more on

Table 4.1 More Than 2 Million Years of Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMAs)

ambushes than battles. Fighters tend to come and go as they please, closing for the kill only when they heavily outnumber an enemy and running away when they do not. But the Vulture Stele, a famous limestone relief carved at Lagash in what is now Iraq around 2450 bce, shows something very different. Apparently disciplined in­fantry with helmets, spears, and large shields advance in dense ranks behind their king Eannatum, trampling dead enemies. An accompanying inscription says that Eannatum had won a pitched battle against the city of Umma after it had occu­pied some of Lagash’s farmland.

While Caesar’s Tenth Legion would probably not have been very impressed by the discipline of Eannatum’s army, genuine soldiers—the kind of man who would rather die than disgrace his regiment—probably began replacing wilder warriors on the battlefields of the Middle East in the later third millennium bce. Empire­making would have been impossible without soldiers who had internalized enough discipline and esprit de corps to be willing to get right up close to other men who were trying to kill them, and we should not be surprised that Mesopotamia, the most developed, urbanized, and organized region in the world at the time, was where they made their appearance. Any city that did not follow Lagash’s lead in creating a somewhat-disciplined military would become its victim, which must have set off an organizational race. By the 2330s, Sargon of Akkad—often praised or blamed as being the first man to create a true empire—could even boast of the

“5,400 men I made to eat before me each day,”^[370] apparently referring to a centralized standing army. His subjects provided food, wool, and weapons so Sargon's troops could train full-time.

Discipline, like most of the early RMAs, subsequently spread to or was reinvented in every part of the world, reaching Mesoamerica by the second century ce, southern Africa by the fifteenth, and Oceania in the eighteenth. The second RMA, though, was geographically more limited, because it depended on an animal that was not available everywhere: the horse.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of horses in the history of empire. They should perhaps have had a chapter of their own in this book. The first people to find a military use for horses, though, were not the imperialists of the Middle East, but herders in what is now Kazakhstan. Horses were first domesticated here, around 4000 bce, and by 2100 bce, herders had bred bigger, leggier beasts (al­though still much smaller than modern breeds) and worked out how to yoke them to small, light chariots.

Chariots exposed Middle Eastern armies' limitations as learning institutions. The great powers of Egypt and Babylon were slow to adopt them, while smaller, marginal groups such as the Kassites, Hyksos, and Hittites were nimbler. Starting around 1700 bce, chariot-users consistently defeated and sometimes overthrew the great empires. However, when the richest empires did finally embrace this RMA, their wealth and centralized institutions allowed them to field thousands of chariots at a time. Many historians would say that Egypt's New Kingdom (conventionally dated ca. 1550-1077 bce) was in fact the world's first true empire, built on the back of its chariots.

Chariots dominated the Middle East's imperial wars after 1600 bce, reaching China around 1000 bce and India around 400 bce; when Caesar invaded Britain in 55 bce, the natives there, too, were riding chariots into battle. However, chariots did not spread beyond Eurasia, for the very good reasons that there were no horses to yoke to chariots in the Americas, Australasia, or Oceania, and while horses could be exported across the Sahara, the disease environment there was too hostile to them to make this worthwhile.

Two further RMAs drove chariots back off Eurasian battlefields during the first millennium bce. One (RMA number three on my list) was the rise of mass, iron­armed infantry armies and a quantum leap in the logistical sophistication needed to support them. Assyria at times fielded over 100,000 men in the ninth century, and across the next few hundred years it gobbled up every nearby empire that did not rise to the same level. Some historians would say that the first state to warrant the label “empire” was in fact Assyria, particularly after the centralizing reforms of Tiglath-Pileser III in the 740s bce. By 450 bce, similar mass armies and impe­rial states were established in China, and before 300 bce India's Mauryan Empire was fielding masses of infantry, too. Some scholars would put the fifteenth-century Aztec and Inca empires in the same category, while others see classical empires of this kind as being purely Eurasian.

Another breakthrough, RMA number 4, followed soon after: the coming of true cavalry. By 900 bce, steppe herders were breeding horses strong enough to carry a man on their backs all day long, and in the eighth century, Scythian and Cimmerian mounted raids became a fact of life along Assyria's northern borders. The Assyrian military learned quickly, hiring steppe cavalry and training their own imitations, but no agrarian empire ever completely got the measure of the steppe nomads. Horses were far more abundant than people in Inner Asia, and when a warlord could corral enough riders into attacking a single target (or when a paymaster from one of the established agrarian empires could hire enough cavalrymen to use against his enemies), they were irresistible. In 612 bce, Scythian cavalry played a major role in overthrowing the Assyrian Empire, and mounted bandits terrorized the northern Middle East for decades thereafter.

My fifth RMA was the creation of true fleets. Empires had been using ships in war for many centuries, but only around 520 bce did the Persian Empire start hiring and building specialized war galleys by the hundreds and using a navy to project power in novel ways. Although Persia's military organizations are now remembered chiefly for being defeated by the Greeks, they should really be known for their ca­pacity to learn. By 500 bce, Persia had not only the world's first genuine navy but also the first bureaucracy able to support perhaps a million soldiers and sailors, as well as the first army to integrate cavalry fully with infantry. The genius of Alexander of Macedon, who destroyed the empire in the 330s-320s, lay in combining Persian cavalry tactics with Greek infantry procedures.

Surprisingly, perhaps, military learning in the Roman and Han empires of the last few centuries bce and first few ce was limited to perfecting older RMAs rather than generating new ones (although, as Otto von Bismarck supposedly said, fools learn from experience, but wise men learn from other people's experience).^[372] But like almost every agrarian empire, neither ever really learned to control the in­creasingly sophisticated nomadic empires on the steppes, and the first and early second millennia ce saw a steady, long-term decline in the size and wealth of settled empires in the face of Inner Asian raiders. This was only reversed in the mid-second millennium ce as part of a cluster of RMAs even more remarkable than that of the mid-first millennium bce.

Probably no other RMA was as transformative as the gun (number six). Chinese alchemists had been experimenting with gunpowder since the ninth century ce and were making crude bombs by 1044. A relief carving in Sichuan dating around 1150 possibly shows a true gun (that is, a tube containing gunpowder that explodes with enough force to shoot out a bullet at lethal speed), but the oldest actual gun comes from the site of a Manchurian battle fought in 1288. Early guns were slow to load and wildly inaccurate, and their main use in fourteenth-century China was against such big, static targets as city walls and slow-moving ships. While both of these were abundant, as was the case in the civil wars against the ruling Mongol dynasty in the Yangzi Valley, Chinese gunners made rapid advances; but after the 1360s, the end of these wars meant that fast-moving steppe nomads once again became the China's main enemies. Fourteenth-century firearms were not much use against them, and the Ming dynasty shifted its military investment back toward walls and horse archers.

Innovation did not stop, though, in Europe. Probably no invention in history has ever spread as quickly as the gun, which had reached Italy by 1326; and be­cause European wars continued to involve sieges and ships, innovation actually accelerated. Artillerymen switched from stone to iron cannonballs, learned to “corn” powder to make it explode more fiercely, and started casting lightweight cannons with short, thick barrels to take advantage of the first two innovations. In 1494, armed with just a few dozen of these, Charles VIII of France blasted holes in the walls of Italian cities that had resisted attackers for centuries. “No wall exists, however thick, that artillery cannot destroy in a few days,” Machiavelli concluded.^[373]

By then, another RMA (number seven), the oceangoing ship, was offering the possibility of empires that linked multiple continents. Like the gun, these were pioneered in China—which, by 1400, had ships that could potentially have sailed anywhere in the world—but were perfected in Western Europe. In 1420, Portuguese sailors discovered Madeira; in 1473, they crossed the equator; in 1487 Bartolomeu Dias showed that they could sail around the bottom of Africa into the Indian Ocean; and in 1492 the Italian Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean. Equipped with ships and guns, sixteenth-century Iberian imperialists established toeholds in Africa and Asia and completely destroyed the Aztec and Inca empires in America. Dutch, French, and English imitators soon followed them.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an eighth RMA—the invention of the new kinds of national debt that I mentioned earlier—pushed the sixth and seventh RMAs in unexpected directions. For the first time since the age of ancient empires, European governments mobilized forces hundreds of thousands strong. On land, enormous armies were equipped with constantly improving arquebuses and muskets and new volleying tactics, spewing out such walls of fire that they could now reliably defeat nomadic cavalry and get their long Inner Asian frontiers under control. At sea, bigger fleets of ships, able to carry more and better cannon and using them in new, line-ahead formations, accomplished much the same thing. They even managed something that had never before been possible, learning to command the oceans in the sense modern naval strategists use that expression, of preventing hos­tile merchants and navies from going to sea at all.^[374] These developments shifted the global balance of power decisively in Europe's favor, and, within Europe, tipped it toward Britain and France.

What really distinguishes the mid-second millennium ce cluster of RMAs from that of the mid-first millennium bce, though, is that it was merely the prelude to even more remarkable breakthroughs. By the time of the Carnatic and Bengal Wars in 1750s India, RMAs six through eight had given European empires the ability to project power into most parts of the planet that lay within reach of a coast­line, but modern militaries' massive logistical and organizational needs had also made them ponderous and brittle. This opened the way for a ninth RMA: People's War. “In 1793,” said Clausewitz (who lived through it), “a force appeared that beggared all imagination. Suddenly war again became the business of the people.” What he meant was that—beginning as a weapon against imperialism in 1770s North America and then turning into a weapon of imperialism in 1790s France— revolutionary regimes discovered that they could substitute mass and enthusiasm for professionalism and logistics. “The full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance,” Clausewitz observed; “The resources and efforts now available for use surpassed all conventional limits; nothing now impeded the vigor with which war could now be waged.”^[375]

As Clausewitz saw it, People's War created a “remarkable trinity,” in which governments, militaries, and the people as a whole worked together, making it pos­sible to wage “absolute war”—defined as “[w]ar untrammeled by any conventional restraints... [and] broken loose in all its elemental fury” “Once barriers—which in a sense consist only of man's ignorance of what is possible—are torn down,” he noted, “they are not easily set up again.”^[376] A million Frenchmen volunteered to fight in 1793, and Napoleon's mastery of the art of using the new armies came close to turning Europe into a French Empire.

It took Napoleon's rival imperialists nearly two decades to learn to wage their own versions of People's Wars, but the balance of power that resulted made 1815— 1914 one of the most peaceful centuries in Europe's history. However, this balance prevailed only within the continent; across the oceans, the imbalance of power between Europe (and its settler colonies) and the rest of the world widened still further.

In the 1860s, a tenth RMA, of mechanization and automation, began in Europe and North America, making the West versus the Rest imbalance so large that Britain and France took direct control of more than one-third of the world's landmass (and all of the Old World's oceans). However, like many earlier RMAs, it also shook up the status quo. When one empire mastered the new methods faster than another, as in Germany's Wars of Unification between 1864 and 1871, short and bloody fighting could produce shockingly decisive results; but when two or more empires had learned them roughly equally well, as in the First World War, the fighting be­came so long and bloody that it drove the people to walk away from Clausewitz's trinity, bringing down most of Europe's empires.

Military historians often subdivide my tenth RMA into multiple smaller RMAs, marked by machine guns, infiltration tactics, tanks, aircraft, Blitzkrieg opera­tions, and countless other developments. When looked at on a timescale like this chapter's, though, it makes more sense to see a continuous era of modern military growth between the 1860s and 1940s, in which creative destruction played an even bigger part than in the corresponding era of modern economic growth. The true rupture, and eleventh RMA, came not with some specific type of mechanization, but with the invention of thermonuclear weapons in 1952. As late as 1948, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff calculated that if they dropped their entire arsenal of133 atomic bombs on Soviet cities, they would kill 3 million people—a horrific number, but just one-eighth of what the Soviets had lost fighting Germany between 1941 and 1945. Nuclear/atomic/fission bombs threatened to make war deadlier, but not to transform it. Thermonuclear/hydrogen/fusion bombs, however, changed every­thing. The first fusion bomb had a blast equivalent to 700 Hiroshimas. It could kill everyone and level every building within three miles of ground zero. Six miles out, clothes would burst into flames and bodies would be tossed through the air at fatal speeds. Even 11 miles away, anyone in the open air would suffer second-degree burns and radiation poisoning. By the late 1950s, the Soviets had hundreds of these bombs and the Americans thousands. The US Department of Defense calculated that the opening days of a war would kill 75 million Americans, 100 million Soviets, and 115 million other Europeans; but by the mid-1970s, when there were tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and the Soviets attained parity with the Americans, the first strikes might have killed everyone on earth.

Terrified of stumbling into a nuclear war, the Soviet and American empires (if this is the right term for them) had to find ways to compete without actually waging war. One was to use proxies, mostly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which had the advantage of driving the final nails into the coffins of Western Europe's colo­nial empires, which had already been shaken to their foundations by World War II. Another method, though, was to struggle for hearts and minds, trying to repeat the 1918 achievement of breaking the enemy's trinity by driving wedges between the people, the army, and the government. Some historians, though, argue that the last of my RMAs, computerization, in fact played the decisive role in bringing down the Soviet Empire. One theory holds that in 1982, when Israel used American-made computerized weapon systems to destroy 17 of Syria's Soviet-made surface-to- air missile sites and shoot down 92 of its Soviet planes for the loss of three (or six, depending who was counting) of its own, Moscow flew into a panic and joined an arms race that quickly bankrupted it, leading directly to the revolutions of 1989. Other historians, however, emphasize a wider range of factors, both military and non-military.^[377]

Whatever the truth, the outcome has been an extraordinary quarter-century in which the American Empire (again, if that is the right label) has been the sole su­perpower, with a full-spectrum dominance of land, sea, air, outer space, and cy­berspace without parallel in history. However, as Clausewitz would probably have warned American governments, mastering an RMA does not automatically trans­late into political success. As I write, American military power has neither deterred nor destroyed Islamist terrorism and insurgency; China has begun challenging America's all-important naval domination of the West Pacific; and North Korea is threatening the first use of nuclear weapons since 1945. What American military organizations can do to impose their government's will remains to be seen.^[378]

6.