Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984

Civil-mtaryRelations and the Cult o f the OiTensive, 1914 and 1984c Jack Snyder I Military technology should have made the European strategic balance in July 1914 a model of stability, but offensive military strategies defied those technological realities, trapping European statesmen in a war-causing spiral of insecurity and instability . As the Boer and Russo-Japanese Wars had foreshadowed and the Great War itself confirmed, prevailing weaponry and means of transport strongly favored the defender. Tactically, withering firepower gave a huge advantage to entrenched defenders; strategically, defenders operating on their own territory could use railroads to outmaneuver marching invaders. Despite these inexorable constraints, each of the major continental powers began the war with an offensivecampaign. These war plans and the offensive doctrines behind them were in themselves an important and perhaps decisive cause of the war. Security, not conquest, was the principal criterion used by the designers of the plans, but their net effect was to reduce everyone’s security and to convince at least some states that only preventive aggression could ensure their survival. Even if the outbreak of war is taken as a given, the offensive plans must still be judged disasters. Each offensive failed to achieve its ambitious goals and, in doing so, created major disadvantages for the state that launched it. Germany’s invasion of Belgium and France ensured that Britain would join the opposing coalition and implement a blockade. The miscarriage of France’s ill-conceived frontal attack almost provided the margin of help that the Schlieffen Plan needed. Though the worst was averted by a last-minute railway maneuver, the Germans nonetheless occupied a key portion of France’s industrial northeast, making a settlement based on the status quo ante impossible to negotiate. Meanwhile, in East Prussia the annihilation of an over-extended Russian invasion force squandered troops that might have Robert Jervis, William McNeill, Cynthia Roberts, and Stephen Van Evera provided helpful comments on this paper, which draws heavily on the author’s forthcomingbook, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1984). Jack Snyder is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department, Columbia University. Znternntionul Security, Summer 1984 (Vol. 9, No. 1) 0162-2889/84/010108-39 $02.50/1 0 1984 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology. 108 Civil-Military Relations I 209 been decisive if used to reinforce the undermanned advance into Austria. In each case, a defensive or more limited offensive strategy would have left the state in a more favorable strategic position. None of these disasters was unpredictable or unpredicted. It was not only seers like Ivan Bloch who anticipated the stalemated positional warfare. General Staff strategists themselves, in their more lucid moments, foresaw these outcomes with astonishing accuracy. Schlieffendirected a war game in which he defeated his own plan with precisely the railway maneuver that Joffre employed to prevail on the Marne. In another German war game, which actually fell into Russian hands, Schlieffen used the advantage of railway mobility to defeat piecemeal the two prongs of a Russian advance around the Masurian Lakes-precisely the maneuver that led to the encirclement of Sazonov’s Second Army at Tannenberg in August 1914. This is not to say that European war planners fully appreciated the overwhelming advantages of the defender; partly they underrated those advantages, partly they defied them. The point is that our own 20/20 hindsight is not qualitatively different from the understanding that was achievable by the historical protagonists. Why then were these self-defeating, war-causing strategies adopted? Although the particulars varied from country to country, in each case strategic policymaking was skewed by a pathological pattern of civil-militaryrelations that allowed or encouraged the military to use wartime operational strategy to solve its institutional problems. When strategy went awry, it was because a penchant for offense helped the military organization to preserve its autonomy , prestige, and traditions, to simplify its institutional routines, or to resolve a dispute within the organization. As further discussion will show, it was not just a quirk of fate that offensive strategies served these functions. On balance, offense...