The Conduct of War, 1789-1961:
A Study of the Impact of the French, Industrial, and Russian Revolutions on War and Its Conduct

J.F.C. Fuller

New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961; Pp. 352.

Review © 2003 Branislav L. Slantchev

This is doubtless an eccentric book by a great military thinker (but not a very good historian). Fuller was a foremost military strategist, and perhaps in no small degree responsible for some of the ideas behind modern tank warfare. But he was also a fascist (associated with Moseley's Union of British Fascists in the 1930s) and had a somewhat limited understanding of the political processes that were central to his profoundly Clausewitzian views of war.

The book is really organized around the famous Clausewitz dictum that war is politics by other means. Fuller, who emphasizes time and again the profundity of this insight, makes short shrift of Clausewitz's other theorizing, ridiculing it for its idealism and lack of consistency (e.g., "in spite of his twenty years' experience of Napoleonic warfare, Clausewitz had but a vague understanding of it," p. 60). The latter can perhaps be excused by the author dying before completing the manuscript, but the former is a serious charge, and Fuller is quite right about it. The conclusion that "of all Clausewitz's blind spots, the blindest was that he never grasped that the true aim of war is peace and not victory; therefore that peace should be the ruling idea of policy, and victory only the means toward its achievement" (p. 76) is dead on right, albeit frequently forgotten and just as frequently ignored by policy makers.

This idea has been analyzed and carried to its natural conclusion in the bargaining theory of war, which views warfare not simply as policy by other means, but as a process by which the warring sides arrive at a mutually acceptable agreement that ends it. Fuller ridicules Clausewitz who argues that "philosophically there can be 'no other reality' in war than 'the overthrow of the enemy" and notes that "almost everywhere we find that this does not happen." This is empirically true but deserves a deeper probe than Fuller's jesting that the "common-sense reply is, that one side or the other gives up fighting when it has had enough of it" (p. 62).

Not only is it less than straightforward to decide what "enough" is, but we have to come to grips with the puzzle of why states engage in costly fighting in the first place. Fighting destroys resources, and it is by no means clear that it is an efficient way to resolve differences of opinion. Bargaining, in which fighting plays an informational and compellent role, is one way to tackle this question, but we are still in the infancy of this line of research.

Starting with the idea that war is an instrument of policy, Fuller then naturally wants to see how it has been used (and abused) as such. In particular, he is keen on examining limited war; that is, war with restricted goals, as opposed to the absolute war aimed at obliteration of the opponent. Fuller here comes very close to the bargaining view of war when he argues that the main goal of war is to compel one's opponent to do one's bidding, not destroy that opponent. Of course, when the technology is such that in order to compel one has to render the opponent defenseless first, war becomes a contest of attrition out of necessity.

Fuller examines three revolutions, the French, the Industrial, and the Russian, and traces their impact on the conduct of war. While his arguments about the relative importance of offense and defense, or the unity of command (can be either good or bad, depending on circumstances) are interesting, they are not the most important ones. For Fuller democracy is something aking to mob rule: "The motive force of democracy is not love of others, it is the hate of all outside the tribe, faction, party or nation. The 'general will' predicates total war, and hate is the most puissant of recruiters" (p. 41).

The major impact of the French Revolution is that it unleashed the horror of mass warfare. War would never again be a "gentlemanly" contest or the sport of kings which supposedly spared the noncombatants (which, by the way, is wrong: just look at the terrible destruction wrought by the Thirty Years War among many). It would now be the instrument of the beatly democratic tribes whose sole unifying power was hate of the outsider. I do not know where Fuller got this ridiculous idea, but he is wrong on just about all accounts, mostly because his grasp of history is limited to reading a few books.

Instead of railing against democracy, Fuller should have paused to think what it means to have a democratic government mobilize its state for war. WIth or without conscription, its citizens have to be the soldiers, the ones to do the dying. It is definitely not far-fatched to think that people would be reluctant to do the dying voluntarily unless they are convinced that their country (or, rather, families) is in grave danger. In other words, a democratic government may have trouble persuading its citizens to die, something which an authoritarian regime can easily do by the means of coercion at its disposal.

Following this line of argument would open up possibilities for an extremely interesting investigation into the importance of propaganda and psychological warfare (just recall how the British managed to rouse American public opinion during the First World War by their skillful anti-German propaganda). But it will definitely not lead to Fuller's blanket statement that is dubiously based on sociological in-group/out-group theories.

The problem with mass warfare, of course, is that it makes war an eminently unsuitable instrument of policy. The propaganda that may be necessary to push a polity into fighting may make it devilishly difficult to terminate hostilities with anything else but a complete surrender of the opponent. Here Fuller may be onto something when he blasts democracy, but this is a different line of argument that should be pursued elsewhere.

The second revolution is the Industrial one, with its steam engine, steel production, internal combustion engine, and, most importantly, the railroad and the telegraph. Most historians would probably agree with Fuller's assessment about the profound impact industrialization had on the conduct of war. It made rapid mobilization and concentration of forces possible, it made mobile warfare attractive, and by increasing the deadliness of fighting, it reduced the value of war as instrument of policy (something that Bloch argued a long time ago too).

Perhaps just as importantly, the revolution gave rise to the proletarian class, and Marx's pseudo-scientific theory of class struggle as the engine of progress. Fuller takes exception of the proletariat as a vanguard of progress by basically saying that the workers are too stupid to replace the skilled and the educated (he's probably right about that). The importance of Marxism is in its relationship with Clausewitz: according to the author revolution and war have essentially the same aims, "the means alone differ" (p. 85) because class struggle leads to the collapse of the inner front, and so it is just another means to secure victory. The difference is that for Clausewitz the inner front exists only during wartime, while for Marx peace is the opportunity to establish this front, which will be activated during the capitalist interstate war. (Showed manifestly to be untrue during both world wars where the British and German proletariats were keen on slaughtering each other quite in opposition to the supposed brotherhood they shared.)

In his discussion of the American Civil War Fuller's account of the causes (economic) is essentially correct, although his denounciation of Sherman's tactics is misguided. It is true that the scorched earth policy pursued by Sherman was painful in the extreme, but this was its point. Far from representing "moral retrogression" (p. 107), it is a tactic that inflicts maximum pain on the opponent's supporters depriving him of means of subsistence and sources of supply. Moreover, since the families that got devastated were the ones whose sons were fighting in the war, the message was clear "the only possible way to end this unhappy and dreadful conflict... is to make it terrible beyond endurance" (p. 109). It may appear barbaric to the gentleman, but in a mass war, it is one possible way to wage it.

It is also strange (and Fuller is correct about this) that military planners failed to draw the obvious inferences from both the American Civil War and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05: Frontal assaults against entrenched defenders are futile, and envelopment instead of front breach is a better strategy (p. 104).

The idea of the inner front directly leads to the third revolution: the Russian communist coup d'etat of 1917. Of course, the First World War ended when the inner front of Germany collapsed due to the economic blockade. However, it was Russia who became the first victim one year prior to the amristice. Fuller examines Leninism as the military revolutionary extension of Marxism (which it was) but then goes on to raise fear of Communism to alarming heights, even going so far as to suggest that it would have been better for Germany to win the war (or at any rate not to have been punished at Versailles than allow the revolution to triumph in Russia). It is worth quoting Fuller here:

"In times past, war was waged to change the enemy's policy, and not to change his government --- the policy maker. Its aim was to change the government's mind, and should the government be overthrown, there would be no stable authority to negotiate a peace with. The world was then still sane, and the idea of creating a social anarchy in an enemy's country would have been considered contrary to common sense" (p. 179).

The attack of the inner front is treated as the worst of the worst in the sense that it not only departs from Clausewitz's dictum by rendering war an end in itself instead of an instrument, but because it is dangerous due to the lethal democratic passions it awakens: "War by propaganda is pre-eminently a democratic instrument, fashioned to dominate the mass-mind" (p. 179). The sad result of WWI was the collapse of the German and Austro-Hungarian monarchies, which for Fuller meant one thing: "chaos was planted in Europe" (p. 182).

The problem, according to Fuller, was communism in its Leninist interpretation. It was apparently an insiduous and unholy perfect implementation of Clausewitz's ideas: war was instrument of policy, but so was peace, which is just another form of warfare. The difference was the lack of morality in Leninism, which "eschewed it, and thereby reduced war to a purely animal struggle in which no punches were barred" (p. 203). To distinguish between the three competing creeds, according to Leninism, peace is warfare by other means; according ot Nazism, peace is preparation for war; and according to Democracy, peace is the absense of war.

It is odd to seek morality in war to begin with, but labeling pragmatism immoral is just a confusion of the obvious: every sane government would be liable because "selling" one's goals in moral shrink-wrap does not make them shiny diamonds. At least the Communists were straight about theirs. Besides, it is not true that they were immoral, they simply abandoned Christian morality, anything from "non-human and non-class concepts" or, as Lenin said, "We do not believe in an enternal morality" (p. 203). In other words, they substituted a class morality, which has the same claim to legitimacy as any other. A Christian may find this repugnant, I find both to be equally (in)valid.

Versailles was bad, really bad, and Fuller is right about insisting on calling it the Carthaginian Peace. If anything else, this peace along with the Great Depression were among the primary causes of the Second round of fighting. Fuller traces the rise of Hitler to the now familiar economic, social, and political problems that Germany faced during the 1920s and 1930s. With a twist.

There is one very revealing quote about Hitler's racial beliefs: "I know perfectly well... that in a scientific sense there is no such thing as race... [but] I as a politician need a conception which enables the order which has hitherto existed on historic bases to be abolished and an entirely new and anti-historic order enforced and given an intellectual basis... And for this purpose the conception of race serves me well" (p. 228). In other words, just another type of morality, like religion, Communism, or democracy. This puts Nazism on the same level as the other creeds, which is where it belongs. Its main problem was that it did not serve Hitler well when he attacked the Soviet Union.

Germany could have won if only Hitler realized that all he had to do was treat the non-Russians well: "cross the Russian frontier as a liberator, and terminate collectivization" (p. 262). However, the racial ideology with the concomitant stupid Lebensraum policy that postulated that all inhabitants of the USSR were Untermenschen (subhuman) deprived him of a most potent ally while simultaneously providing Stalin with the best rally-around-the-flag slogan: "For the Motherland (and for revenge)!" Where Communism failed to inspire, German atrocities did with remarkable strength. The racial ideology that helped propel the German state to dizzying success within a decade, was ultimately the reason for its ignominious downfall.

Before delving into the conduct of World War II, Fuller analyzes Douhet's punishment strategy, which prescribed relentless bombing of civilian targets and industrial centers (pp. 240-2). The following pages offer a trenchant critique of the notion that one can win a war by air, and instead present Fuller's idea about strategic paralysis which relies on rapid penetration by armoured vehicles in a decisive attack under aerial cover, aimed at disrputing or destroying the enemy's organizational capability by attacking the command centers and lines of communication. In other words, Blitzkrieg. Fuller's account of Guderian's implementation of the idea (pp. 256-9) is limited, but illuminating.

Leninism and Nazism: "both were totalitarian, embraced all forms of war, and their aims in war were not, as hitherto, only to compel their antagonists by force of arms to accept a policy repugnant to them, but also to change their national structures, ideologically, economically, and socially" (p. 248). So, WWII was an ideological war, which admitted nothing but "unconditional surrender," the big problem, according to Fuller, of the Allies' policy.

Why? Because the end result was the destruction of Germany and the emergence of Communism as the dominant force in Europe.

Fuller, however, is wrong. First, the "unconditional surrender" was really a phrase, nothing more as the rather 'conditional' Italian surrender demonstrated. Also, despite the Japanese capitulation with really no terms (Fuller waxes eloquent about allowing them to keep the Emperor, a topic which has gotten just as tiresome as it is wrong), the Americans managed to exclude the Soviets from the postwar settlement in the Pacific. Moreover, they managed to deny the Russians a whole lot of very legitimate requests in Europe.

Second, Fuller's bizarre militant pro-fascist anti-Communism is at times unsettling because it gets so many things wrong. So Roosevelt as a dupe because he had a 'hunch' (p. 275) that Stalin was interested only in security and would demand nothing more than adequate reassurances. This, of course, was bad news for the Poles, but then when it comes to the Russians and the Germans, everything is bad news for the Poles. FDR and Churchill both recognized that Stalin had strong reasons to demand the cordon sanitaire around USSR's western borders. After all, his country had been invaded four times in the last 40 years from there (World War I, the anti-Bolshevik intervention, the Polish invasion, and World War II).

Unfortunately for everyone involved, a non-communist Eastern European country would almost certainly be anti-Russian, so the only way to ensure friendly governments was to make them communist, something FDR knew but Truman, with his grade-school understanding of international politics, never did. To argue that the Soviets would continue past Berlin and up to the Atlantic is preposterous, not after having lost 30 million, utterly devastated, quite dependent on American supplies, and with most of their industrial production far from the border. To think that they could occupy and hold entire Europe against American wishes is fantastic. Fuller is thus wrong on both accounts.

So it was not the case that the Americans did not understand war as an instrument of policy, or, as Fuller alleges, "They did not know how to wage war, and in consequence they did not know how to make peace. They looked upon war as a lethal game in which the trophy was victory" (p. 308). Rather, it was the same militant anti-Communism that Fuller shares that caused people like Truman and his coterie of fervent anti-Soviets to design the militarized peace that became the Cold War. By misinterpreting Soviet intentions (messianic, true, but with nothing to actually effect them, and therefore profoundly defensive), they provoked the very fear that animated Russian policy after the war and caused them to react aggressively, justifying American suspicions. A self-perpetuating vicious circle, from which only a unilateral decisive break was possible.

Curiously, Fuller spends very little time on the nuclear revolution, and basically says that since war has now become so destructive, it is useless as an instrument of policy (i.e. Bloch all over again). Of course, this neglects (a) that people thought that the deadly technology would impede wars before they fought the two world-wide conflicts, and (b) that one can still wage war with conventional forces under the nuclear umbrella. The only thing that is perhaps sure under MAD is that neither side would attempt to fight a limited war that might challenge the security of the other sufficiently to provoke a nuclear escalation. On this account at least, Fuller may be excused because most of the nuclear warfare ideas were to come in the 1960s from people like Brodie, Schelling, and Wohlstetter.

Overall, a fascinating and controversial book full of the author's brilliant strategic insights and just as brilliantly misguided historical interpretations. Still, Fuller's ideas can be found in many modern strategies under one guise or another, which makes the book a worthwhile reading. Also, his treatment of Clausewitz is classic albeit short and limited.

March 24, 2003

---

@book{fuller-61,
    title={The Conduct of War, 1789-1961},
    author={John Frederick Charles Fuller},
    year=1961,
    publisher={Rutgers University Press},
    address={New Brunswick}
}