Battlefield C3I Throughout History

Throughout History Book Review Martin Van Creveld. Command In War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. T h e problem of commanding and controlling armed forces and of instituting effective communications with and within them is as old as war itself. Yet until comparatively recently this crucial aspect of warfare has received little systematic attention from military historians, partly no doubt due to the patchiness of surviving documentation and the difficulty in reconstructing how command was actually exercised. Martin Van Creveld makes a convincing, though circumspect , argument in support of the value of historical analysis to demonstrate the continuity of basic command dilemmas and to deepen our understanding of contemporary problems stemming from the tremendous impact of modern weapons, means of communication, and changes in the structure of command . As the author puts it, “Military history may be an inadequate tool for commanders to rely on, but a better one has yet to be designed.” As in one of his previous books, Supplying War: Logistics From Wallenstein To Patton, Van Creveld boldly pursues a central theme through several centuries , summarizing major developments and illustrating some of them by a handful of very detailed and thoroughly documented case studies. He is well aware of the limitations of his methodology: he deals with only armies and land operations; he examines them from only one side and sometimes from a single commander’s standpoint; he largely excludes ”friction” in the form of political and other kinds of interference; and he selects short campaigns which may not be fully representative of their era. In this book he also takes enormous historical leaps: from Jena in 1806 to Sadowa sixty years later, thence to the First World War, and, virtually bypassing the Second World War, concludes with one phase of the Vietnam War (1965-1968) and the start of the ArabIsraeli War of 1973on the Sinai front. Reservations will be noted later about some of these examples, but in general they constitute absorbing reading for military historians and serve the author’s purpose adequately in demonstrating that, for all the modern developments affecting warfare, there Brim Bond is a Professor at the Departinent of War Studies, King’s College, University of London. f!itertiafioiinI Security, Spring 1987 (Vol. 11, No. 4) Q 1987by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 125 International Security I 126 remain some persistent methods and options in the exercise of command and control. Some historians will surely wince at Van Creveld's extension of "the Stone Age of Command" up to about 1800, but he makes a convincing case that the concept of "strategy" as established by Napoleon and Clausewitz hardly existed before their day for the simple reason that strategic command was all but impossible to exercise. For thousands of years before that, the acquisition of intelligence and the speed at which military units could communicate with each other was essentially limited to the endurance and pace of the horse. Improved physical communications and the evolution of a primitive divisional system in the late 18th century were exploited to the full by the military genius of Napoleon whose aim was to move his self-sufficient army corps independently and bring them together on the battlefield in order to destroy the enemy. As the description of the Jena campaign shows, for all his calculations and intelligence about the enemy's movements, Napoleon made a potentially disastrous error about the location of Prussia's main army, yet still secured a decisive victory thanks to the energy and initiative of his corps commanders. These operations provide an excellent illustration of the comparative decentralization and flexibility of Napoleon's command system and his ability to accept, and even take advantage of, the limitations of the available means for controlling a battle once the fighting had begun. This lesson is brought out even more brilliantly in the campaign chosen to illustrate the revolutionary repercussions of the advent of railways, the telegraph , and breech-loading rifles: namely the Prussian triumph over Austria in Bohemia in 1866. Moltke, the Prussian Chief of Staff, was reasonably successful in exercising remote control over his two widely separated armies by telegraph from Berlin...