The war, which had lasted not even 18 months, appeared to be over. The French were left in a strong position in southeastern India; all that remained was to assist their allies consolidate their hold. Chanda Sahib’s rival for the throne, Mohammad Ali Wallajah, had taken refuge at the impressive fortress of Trichinopoly in the southern Carnatic, but appeared open to a diplomatic solution.

The war had seen little direct confrontation between the French and British East India Companies. Their home governments were at peace, which ruled out any major naval confrontation—they were only permitted to fight each other in service to their Indian allies.1 Dupleix had been an active driver of events, however, while the British played only a supporting role in their allies’ designs. This changed after 1750. The rapid dissolution of the allied coalition threatened to leave the British position entirely at the mercy of French allies—something which alarmed Thomas Saunders, the new EIC governor in the Carnatic.

Yet the British position was not as bad as it appeared at first glance. So long as their candidate for the Carnatic held out, they maintained some leverage. The remainder of the Second Carnatic War would see the British exercise the same diplomacy and selective application of force that Dupleix had used so effectively. Although the French maintained the upper hand throughout, their British antagonists were able to stretch them thin and deny them a decisive victory, setting conditions for a future conflict in which sea power would come back into play.

As with the First Carnatic War, the Second was waged principally between alliance systems. The Europeans were not true imperial powers in India as they were in North America: they did not control vast territories in their own right, nor could they raise large armies from amongst their settlers. Colonies in India, such as they were, were limited to trade stations on or near the coast, with at most small patches of the surrounding countryside to support them. The French and British East India Companies therefore depended heavily on Indian troops to fight their wars: both the armies of their native allies and the sepoys they raised and trained in contemporary European tactics.

The stakes were nevertheless high for the European powers. The Carnatic was an important source of trade goods in its own right. It also controlled the sea lanes to Bengal, which had become the most valuable trade region in India—not to mention an important source of saltpeter, a critical ingredient for the manufacture of gunpowder. The outcome of this war would therefore have serious repercussions on strategy in the next global conflict.

To the Gates of Trichinopoly

Dupleix spent the first few months of 1751 negotiating with Wallajah to find some mutually-satisfactory solution, such as compensatory territory elsewhere in southern India. In the meantime, he sent a contingent of French troops to accompany the new Nizam to his realm on the Deccan Plateau—these were commanded by Charles de Bussy, Marquis de Castelnau, one of his most capable officers.

It was at this point that things started to go wrong for the French. While proceeding across the Deccan, Muzaffar Jung was attacked and killed by several of his own vassals. Bussy was able to fight off the attackers and take charge of the situation, securing the elevation of Salabat Jung, the late Nizam’s uncle. Wallajah was in the meantime stalling in his negotiations, collecting taxes from the winter harvest to rebuild his military strength while sending feelers to the British for renewed support. With the bulk of French troops tied up in the Deccan, Saunders saw his opportunity, and in March sent about 600 soldiers to reinforce Trichinopoly; Wallajah thereupon dropped all pretenses and openly defied Chanda Sahib’s authority.

Dupleix and the nawab resolved that Trichinopoly had to be reduced by force. Their expedition was delayed by several months—Chanda insisted on a detour to Arcot to raise more men—but eventually got underway in June. By this time, Saunders was able to gather another 1,600 European, Indian, and African troops under the Swiss officer Captain John Gingens, who was instructed to meet up with Wallajah’s field forces and intercept the enemy column.

There followed a strange standoff that reflected the highly uncertain political climate of the Carnatic. Gingens tried to occupy Volkonda, a strongly-fortified town on the road to Trichinopoly, but its governor was uncommitted and refused to admit them. He had good reason to be indecisive: Chanda Sahib and the French arrived soon after, bringing 8,000 Carnatic soldiers and 400 Frenchmen to face Wallajah’s 5,600 and 1,700 British-provided troops.

The armies faced off for two weeks, until on 19 July Gingens lost patience and tried to storm the walls. His first attempt failed and decided the governor against Wallajah, who that night agreed to admit Chanda Sahib’s forces. When Gingens renewed his efforts the following morning, his men were met by well-aimed musketry from the walls and French artillery from their flank. They recoiled with heavy losses, but the Carnatic and French troops pursued only sluggishly, allowing the British and their allies to escape to Trichinopoly.

Chanda Sahib’s army arrived before that city a week later. It was soon joined by Jean Law, nephew of the disgraced John Law (who had run France’s finances earlier in the century—it was he who consolidated the various royal monopolies into a single Compagnie des Indes, what we here call the French EIC). Law neveu had previous experience in India—he participated in the successful defense of Pondicherry in 1748—and had just returned from France. Dupleix assigned him to replace the ailing D’Auteuil as commander.

Trichinopoly was an impressive fortress, protected by a double wall roughly 6 km in circumference and a wide moat. The citadel, on a high rock, allowed the defenders to cover the approaches from the river. The allies did not have a large artillery train to batter through these works, but had a great advantage in numbers: Law therefore decided to blockade the place, spreading out through the surrounding countryside to seize its provisions and deny them to the garrison.

War on the Deccan

A second theater of operations had meanwhile opened in the Deccan. Bussy had gone with a majority of French forces—over 2,000 French and sepoys—to establish Salabat Jung as a faithful ally on the throne there. He was induced to accompany the new Nizam as far as Aurangabad (at the time the actual capital of the Deccan), fearing to be left alone in the viperous court. Bussy consented, and the princely procession arrived there at the end of June.

The grateful Nizam richly rewarded his French allies with huge sums of money and grants of land. He even offered to make Dupleix nawab of the entire Carnatic, effectively deposing Chanda Sahib (the governor demurred, thinking it impolitic to betray an important ally). Bussy meanwhile made himself Salabat Jung’s righthand man, gaining great influence over the court’s politics.

This partnership soon proved its value for both parties. Salabat thus far only held de facto control of the Deccan—the office of Nizam could only be formally granted by the Mughal emperor. Before his own entreaty for the title could be heard, his elder brother Ghaziuddin, a court official in Delhi, managed to get himself appointed successor. That autumn he marched south with a very large army, which was joined by another large army of his Maratha allies, commanded by the Peshwa Balaji Rao (the Peshwa was a hereditary office in the Maratha Empire: nominally something like a prime minister, but by this point held effective power).

Salabat immediately fell back to a more secure position near Hyderabad. Rather than wait to receive the enemy there, on Bussy’s advice he went on the offensive and attacked Pune, the Peshwa’s capital just 200 km southwest of Aurangabad and 500 km west of Hyderabad. This greatly alarmed Balaji, who attempted to block their way with an estimated 40,000 cavalry. Salabat’s army was much smaller, but he was augmented by Bussy’s contingent. The Frenchman had raised the number of European-trained native troops from an initial 2,000 to 5,000, in addition to his 500 European soldiers and ten field guns.

Since at least the rise of the Mughals in the 16^th century, their superb Central Asian cavalry had been dominant in Indian wars, forcing local rulers to adapt. The Maratha state, the greatest Hindu power on the Muslim-dominated subcontinent, responded by breeding a hardy pony suited to India’s rugged western mountains. These made superb light cavalry with the endurance to range long distances, but lacked the powerful charge of larger horses. The infantry, by contrast, was a decidedly subsidiary arm in India, not yet trained to European standards of drill and musketry.

The Nizam and his French allies set out on 31 October. On 20 November they met the Maratha army near Parner, 80 km northeast of Pune. Salabat Jung drew up his army to receive the Maratha charge, while Bussy placed his guns on a height on his flank, with the infantry placed in support. The engagement proved to be little more than a skirmish, as the rapid artillery drove back the Marathas tentative probes. The allies pressed on: they surprised the Marathas in their camp on 22 November, capturing most of their baggage, then over the next few days plundered several towns on the road to Pune.

By this point, Balaji Rao was desperate to halt the enemy advance. When the two armies met again on the 27^th near Malthan, their dispositions were largely the same; this time, however, the Maratha cavalry was ordered to drive its charge home. They managed to drive Salabat’s line back, capturing four elephants and several hundred horses before being driven back again by Bussy’s accurate flank fire.

Although the Deccan forces took much heavier casualties than the Marathas, these numbered in the hundreds, not thousands, and the battle was in no way decisive. Having failed to block their advance, Balaji employed his cavalry to better use by sending them to raid into Deccan territory. The capture of an important border fort drew the Nizam off, and after a few weeks of skirmishing, the two sides agreed to an armistice on 7 January 1752. At this, Salabat returned toward Hyderabad. His older brother Ghazziuddin was too strong to attack at Aurangabad, but neither was he in any position to advance against Salabat. The war went dormant for the next several months.

The Affair of Arcot

As Salabat Jung’s fortunes hung in the balance in the Deccan, Chanda Sahib’s final victory appeared but a matter of time. It was at that point that one of the most significant figures of these wars came on the scene: a young captain named Robert Clive, who more than anyone shaped British fortunes in India. He had first arrived in that country as a clerk for the EIC in 1744, and was one of the prisoners who escaped Madras amidst the confusion following its surrender to the French in 1746. He subsequently received a commission and rose through the junior ranks.

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Current operations against Iran are in a wholly different category. Unlike Russia in Ukraine, which was prepared to escalate to full-blown war with several combined-arms armies and months of supplies prepositioned, neither America nor Israel have any ground troops on hand; it remains to be seen whether any will be committed (as of yesterday, 24 March, Trump has offered a 15-point peace plan, expressing a wish to deescalate).

War at Stand-Off Distance

What do we call the conflict, then? Any continuing efforts at political subversion are extremely murky, leading outside observers to focus on the spectacular kinetics; unsurprisingly, almost all describe it simply as a “war”. The colloquial use of that term is not a problem in itself, but it is usually accompanied by unstated assumptions that can pose stumbling blocks.

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Almost all concepts and doctrinal terminology around warfare are oriented toward conflicts that take place a) largely on land and b) between near-peer adversaries. Failure to think through the relationship between military force and political objectives has led to many failures in past asymmetric conflicts, with Vietnam and Afghanistan being the most obvious. As appears to be true in the current case, military superiority leads planners to focus overwhelmingly on that one tool, even as the nature of the conflict precludes it as a means to victory.

This brings us back to the chain of combat. Military force always supports political goals, but the question is where they meet. In large-scale interstate warfare, military force can directly support the ultimate strategic objective, but not in low-level insurgencies, in which force is rarely applied above the lower tactical levels, where it shapes political efforts on a local scale. This leaves a broad middle wherein forces may mount higher tactical- or operational-level actions, but require other means (civil outreach, diplomacy, economic policy, etc.) in order to achieve war aims—I lump these under the inadequate umbrella term “small wars”, regardless of actual intensity.

Many such small wars are asymmetric (e.g. Vietnam, the counter-ISIS campaign), but not all. Periods of extensive cross-border raiding also match these criteria, as do protracted air campaigns. Such raids by land or air can project considerable force, but lack the persistence to maintain it; they cannot exercise that elusive concept of control. What, then, is the theory of victory in Iran following the initial decapitation strikes and the failure of a popular uprising to manifest itself?

Persistence By Other Means

We must always be extremely cautious when speaking of planning assumptions during ongoing operations, as we can only see a fraction of the total picture and there is plenty of incentive for misdirection from all sides. It is unclear to what extent there are ongoing covert ground actions to incite an uprising, or whether US/Israeli leadership is simply caught between failure to secure an early victory and a looming global economic crisis.

Judging by official statements around regime change, however, the second and third weeks of the campaign appeared to focus on removing the Iranian government’s ability to exercise basic control of its own territory. A number of strikes were made against local IRGC and Basij headquarters, culminating in a fresh round of decapitation strikes on senior leadership on 17-18 March. This would amount to a test of the century-old question, whether it is possible to exert territorial control from a stand-off distance.

Decisive victory absent ground troops has proven elusive ever since Douhet’s theories of airpower were dashed in the Second World War. While I remain highly skeptical that current efforts will fare any better absent substantial ground action, past failure is not necessarily a bar to future success. There is no inherent reason that sufficient numbers and sophistication of drones and missiles could not act as a substitute for the persistent presence of ground forces—even the mundane tasks of population control can be partially filled by police drones, as examples from China have demonstrated since COVID lockdowns.

The more immediate question is how countries will adapt to the updated reality of existing stand-off capabilities. As things look now, the war is the strategic equivalent of the tactical stalemates we see in Ukraine, where both sides hurl missiles and drones at each other without making substantive gains. Yet it also remains very much an asymmetric fight: it was only the thorough penetration of the Iranian government by Israeli intelligence allowed the initial decapitation strikes to begin with—efforts by Russia to do the same in 2022, against a closer-matched adversary, were not so successful.

The predictable response is that weaker powers will be encouraged to decentralize command-and-control and to deepen their leadership bench. This does not come without a cost, however, and could destabilize genuinely fragile regimes; domestic unrest just provides other avenues for outside powers to interfere—civil wars in Ethiopia and Libya have shown how the provision of cheap modern weapons can decisively tip the balance in domestic conflicts.

A final note: most countries lack the leverage over oil flows that Iran’s unique geography affords. This will only highlight the importance of disproportionate deterrence—an effect most easily achieved via nuclear weapons. The unintended consequences of this extended campaign against Iran’s nuclear program may be to push the adoption of such weapons ever closer toward international acceptance.

Thank you for reading the Bazaar of War. Most articles are free for all to read, but paid subscriptions are available to all who wish to support. Subscribers receive a pdf of the critical edition of the classic The Art of War in Italy: 1494-1529, and get exclusive access to monthly long-form pieces exploring selected topics in depth.

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-Francesco Guicciardini, History of Italy

Last piece, we looked at the factors that make strategy uniquely difficult. Aside from the inherent difficulty of spanning the civilian-military divide, it involves many different non-military elements (diplomacy, industrial production, economic policy, etc.) whose specialists have little experience working together; as such, there is no natural apprenticeship for either political leaders or generals. Strategy also demands that one both define one’s own objectives and carry them out, creating a difficult recursive problem when one factors in the enemy’s will. Taken together, this means that every strategic problem is unique.

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As Guicciardini noted, the subtleties and texture of a situation can profoundly alter the nature of a problem, radically altering one’s strategic calculations. Unlike tactical and operational case studies, history does not even provide a template for strategic decision-making. Guicciardini wrote in the 16^th century, a time when humanist advice on statecraft was gilded with glib allusion to classical antiquity—he held a dim view of his friend Machiavelli’s political idealism (the quote at the top refers to Piero de’ Medici’s hapless attempt to imitate his illustrious father Lorenzo’s example). In our own day, more recent history is invoked—World War II above all—as a guide to decision-making.

It is worth exploring just how different strategic decision-making can be even when the overall picture is superficially similar. Subtle differences in the larger political situation can completely alter a state’s choices, while superficially similar actions are usually driven by fundamentally different logic. Beyond that, what we uniformly call “strategy” encompasses a much wider set of activities than other levels of war—activities that extends far beyond the strictly military.

Strategic Tempo

Let us start with two scenarios that are very similar in their bare outline: 18^th-century Prussia and its 20^th-century successor Imperial Germany. Both were located in the middle of Europe, surrounded by hostile neighbors, and lacked terribly defensible borders. This compelled them to mobilize quickly and strike hard at the outbreak of a war. Once hostilities were underway, their primary concern was shifting forces to the most urgent theater while keeping their allies on board.

That was certainly the pattern during the Seven Years’ War and First World War. In the broadest terms, the two followed a similar course: after their initial effort to land a knockout blow failed (in Bohemia and France, respectively), there followed several years of shuttling forces between theaters. They also had to give attention to non-essential theaters to keep valuable allies in the war: Frederick the Great sent one of his most competent generals, Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, to Hanover to aid Great Britain, while the Imperial Germans sent armies to the southeastern front to shore up their Austrian allies.

Choosing how to allocate resources to different theaters is one of the most fundamental questions of strategy; yet the material differences between the two cases was enough to make them in essence two completely different questions. In particular, the tempo of these shifts determined the nature of the problem.

For Frederick the Great, shifting forces was something that could be done in a matter of weeks. After withdrawing from his failed venture into Bohemia, he marched west in autumn 1757 to confront a combined French-Imperial army in Saxony. He defeated them at Rossbach in November, then hurried east to confront the Austrians marching through Silesia, where he won another victory exactly a month later at Leuthen—a straight-line distance of 330 km. The following year, after being forced to raise the siege of Olmutz in Moravia, he marched over 500 km in 8 weeks to meet the Russians at Zorndorf, east of Berlin. Within two months, he marched back south to face the Austrians once more in Saxony.

In most of these cases, Frederick was coming to the aid of local corps and garrisons: he arrived amidst an ongoing campaign, he did not initiate an entirely new one. So, while these strategic movements were much larger than any operational maneuvers, they occurred on a similar timescale—strategic and operational decision-making were tightly intertwined, in other words.

How different that was from the inter-theater movements of the First World War. Hundreds of thousands of men and their equipment had to be loaded onto trains and transported over a thousand kilometers between East Prussia and Galicia and France, then offloaded and moved to the appropriate position on the front. This was an enormous undertaking that could realistically be done only between the fighting seasons. Substantial transfers could only be effected in the course of a campaign when two independent strategic objectives existed in the same theater—as, for example, during the concurrent battles of the Somme and Verdun (smaller transfers, on the order of several divisions or corps, were made more frequently between the Eastern and Western Fronts).

In the vast struggle of the Second World War, distances between the Atlantic and Pacific theaters were even greater. American strategists had to make their decisions about force commitments based on availability of ship types: carriers, cruisers, and amphibious ships were desperately needed in the Pacific, whereas transports and their escorts were needed in the Atlantic. This meant that strategic decisions were in some ways slowed to the speed of industrial policy. The nature of strategic decision-making, in other words, is not indifferent to scale.

The Fixed and the Fickle

As the centrality of defense production in WWII indicates, there is much that a strategist must contend with outside of military force alone. The intensive diplomacy of 18^th-century coalitional wars, the mass mobilizations of the First World War, the shifting industrial targets of the Second, the fiscal and recruiting challenges of 16^th- and 17^th-century wars—all these constituted very different strategic problems.

But even when comparing strategic problems of a similar scope and scale, it is the variegated nature of the underlying political problem that shapes things the most. Slight wrinkles in the political landscape can completely upset calculations—something apparent when we look at multiple wars fought under very similar constraints, such as those induced by the particularities of a certain geography.

To use one obvious example, the modern state of Israel in the 20^th century faced a similar situation to the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Hasmonean kingdom before it. It was vulnerable to attacks via the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, and lacked much strategic depth to meet them. Yet none of the wars fought by any one of these states bears much resemblance to any other.

Even Israel’s wars don’t look like one another, as a result of a shifting political situation. The two closest are the Six Days’ War and the Yom Kippur War. The desperate situation leading up to the 1967 war caused Israel to launch a preemptive attack that ended in a stunning victory; that same victory made it politically impossible (either in the domestic or the international sense) to properly mobilize for the Arab attack in 1973.

Narrowing the Aperture

If it is impossible to study strategy in the abstract, if strategy itself encompasses a vast range of fields, then it is still at least possible to focus on one particular strategic problem. Studying a recurring geopolitical flashpoint, such as the Strait of Taiwan or the Strait of Hormuz, can be a useful starting point for decision-makers; but this carries the caveat that one must also be extremely sensitive to the subtle variations of political currents.

Strategists can also still learn from case studies. Even if the past does not serve as a template for present action, it can furnish a useful exercise: working through the similarities and differences between a past scenario and the present can help work through the subtler dynamics and draw out own’s own hidden assumptions. But as with anything relating to strategy, that requires deep thought and good judgment.

Thank you for reading the Bazaar of War. Most articles are free for all to read, but paid subscriptions are available to all who wish to support. Subscribers receive a pdf of the critical edition of the classic The Art of War in Italy: 1494-1529, and get exclusive access to monthly long-form pieces exploring selected topics in depth.

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You can also support by purchasing Saladin the Strategist in paperback or Kindle format.

Neither man had experience commanding troops in the field, and both made serious mistakes as a result of their micro-management. Yet they also had good reason to take the approach they did. Fighting a war is very different from winning it, and their generals—though professionals in tactics and operational art—did not always see the larger picture. Domestic political constraints, economic factors, and foreign relations had just as much an effect on the course of the war as battlefield victories. In the realm of strategy, the generals were just as much amateurs as the heads of state.

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In all of warfare, the leap from operational art to strategy is the hardest to make. Whereas operational art is in many ways an extension of tactics, dealing with the same sorts of considerations, strategy is different in both kind and scale. The problems it seeks to address are of a fundamentally different nature, as are the tools to effect it—yet by the very nature of the problem, it is almost impossible to train anyone to practice good strategy.

The Pointed Arch

In its broadest sense, strategy is the art of accomplishing major national objectives. This encompasses far more than military force alone: it extends to industrial production, economics, diplomatic relations, domestic politics, and so forth. It is the logical extension of synergistic cooperation in warfare, from combined-arms tactics, to joint operations, to whole-of-government strategy. Good strategy is therefore a collaboration of a broad base of subject-matter experts.

Yet unlike other levels of warfare, nothing prepares practitioners from these separate fields to work together. An infantryman is not trained in the specifics of artillery employment, but is trained from the very beginning to fight as part of a combined-arms team. Junior officers frequently gain experience working alongside other services well before they are expected to plan or conduct joint operations. By contrast, there are far, far fewer opportunities for a military officer to work with industrial policy, economic warfare, or diplomacy before he reaches the three- or four-star level. Strategy is like the rib vaulting in a Gothic cathedral: the separate elements only converge at the very top.

This is especially true in the age of modern communications, where strategic questions are only decided at the highest level as a matter of course. Whereas in earlier centuries, relatively junior officers and diplomats were routinely entrusted with strategic decisions when deployed in distant theaters, it is now extremely rare for generals, admirals, or ambassadors to be allowed the freedom to do the same on their own initiative—that is reserved for a Chief of Staff or National Security Council at a minimum. Practically speaking, this means there is no apprenticeship for the exercises of strategic decision-making.

Between Ends and Means

The difficulties run much deeper than mere structure or experience. Even if we restrict our view to high-intensity conflicts in which military factors overwhelm all others, there is an inherent difficulty to strategy that makes it more recondite than other levels. The reason for this comes down to two intertwined factors: the enemy’s will and formulating a theory of victory.

Unlike tactical and operational objectives, which are assigned by higher headquarters, strategic objectives are the responsibility of the same people responsible for achieving them—namely, political leaders and their military advisers. While war aims can be defined at the outset in accordance with stated national interest, they must also be reassessed as the conflict takes on lives of their own; reality forces a pragmatic compromise between “What do I want?” and “What can I accomplish?”.

This becomes much, much more difficult when human will is taken into account. Moral factors are critical at all levels of war, down to the individual fighter, but have the most potential to shape the outcome at the strategic level. Whereas it may be possible to force an enemy off a hill or to make a position logistically untenable through physical force alone, only in the most extreme circumstances can it squash resistance altogether. This, in effect, makes strategy a question of defining a theory of victory that is acceptable to the enemy.

Which greatly complicates the problem. Unreasonable demands early in a conflict can provoke an adversary to fight on long after he might otherwise have; equally, they might cow him into agreeing to a compromise he never would have otherwise entertained. The practical effect is that the exact same justification—sparing lives and resources—can be used for either approach. Nor does history provide much guidance. More-or-less predictable patterns of behavior may emerge over the long haul as strategic competitors train each other to calculate probable consequences from given actions, but it only takes one Napoleon to overturn all expectations of reasonable war aims.

It is this ineffable human element—more than technological change between wars—that causes strategists to “fight the last war”. Unlike tactical and operational concepts, which can be modeled according to varying parameters, strategic problems must be treated as unique problems unto themselves.

Moltke was really speaking of operational art when he described strategy as a “system of expedients”, but he may as well have been speaking of the highest level of interstate competition. It is an arena in which everyone is in some way an amateur; success only comes through a felicitous combination of worldly experience, judgment, and luck.

Thank you for reading the Bazaar of War. Most articles are free for all to read, but a subscription option is available to all who wish to support. Subscribers receive a pdf of the critical edition of the classic The Art of War in Italy: 1494-1529, and will have exclusive access to occasional pieces.

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It is understandable why. The ocean is enormous: twice as wide as the Mediterranean and several times as large, with open water to the south. The western rim is either rugged desert or the primitive states of sub-Saharan Africa, while the eastern rim is covered in impenetrable jungle, with only a few commercial ports giving access to the interior.

The most densely-populated region part of the littoral, the Indian subcontinent itself, is a land mass surrounded by water—not, like the Mediterranean, a body of water surrounded by several states. This meant that it was easier for the advanced, populous states of the region to attack one another overland, using naval power only as an auxiliary—a pattern that recurs throughout history, up through the India-Pakistan wars of the 20th century.

Even then, most maritime warfare was focused on control of commercial ports more than territorial conquest, with merchant ships playing a disproportionate role. This was as true in the era of European colonization as it was India’s more distant past: the Chola Empire of southeastern India relied on their merchant guilds for their conquest of parts of Sumatra and Malaya, a rare instance of territorial expansion over open water.

There have likewise been very few periods where two powers competed for mastery over the waters themselves. In those rare contests over sea lanes, the scope of the competition was usually limited—as when the Portuguese fought first the Mamluks and then the Ottomans for the waters between Egypt and western India. The most extensive by far was the protracted Dutch-Portuguese war which spanned the first six decade of the 17^th century, in which the two countries attacked each other’s trading ports around the ocean’s rim. Yet for the most part, the fighting remained isolated from affairs on land, and neither side had the manpower to truly dominate the ocean.

Only for a brief period in the mid-18^th century did naval campaigns on the Indian Ocean become seriously intertwined with major wars on the subcontinent. Between 1746 and 1783, the Carnatic region on India’s southeastern coast became the flashpoint for several much wider conflicts. Britain and France held several trading stations there in close proximity, and fighting on land drew in states from all over India, whose troops made up the vast majority of combatants. The war at sea expanded beyond the usual wartime commerce raiding to include a number of fleet actions and amphibious operations.

In short, these wars were more than competition between colonial powers. They are better seen as clashes between entire alliance systems, turning India and its surrounding ocean into a single integrated theater. The scope and scale of these wars was immense, and their outcomes were determined by a complex interaction land power, sea power, and diplomacy. This piece will cover the first five years of this period, encompassing the First Carnatic War and the beginning of the Second.

The Arrangement of Power

Britain and France were both relative latecomers to the eastern trade. The Portuguese had maintained a presence in India since their first arrival in 1498, gaining more than a century’s head start over their European rivals. The Dutch came next: although they chartered their East India Company two years after the English, in 1602, within three years they had established their first factories (trading stations) in India, and within a decade were building forts. By 1640, they established a foothold on Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka).

The English, by contrast, did not acquire their first factories until the 1610s and began building their first fort in 1640. The French arrived even later: they acquired their first factories in the 1660s and only gained permanent possessions beginning in 1673. Yet by the 1730s, the two were the ascendant European powers in the region. The British held Bombay on the west coast, the riverport of Calcutta in Bengal, and Madras (Chennai) in the Carnatic, as well as several smaller places. The main French possessions were Pondicherry in the Carnatic, the small port of Mahé in the southwest, and Chandernagore upstream from Calcutta.

This was a rare period of détente between their countries: following the near-constant warfare of Louis XIV’s reign, the two cooperated to maintain a peaceful balance of power in Europe. Relations began to sour after 1730 as the European alliance system repolarized, but as late as 1733, British and French merchants teamed up to forcefully expel a Swedish expedition trying to set up trade in southeastern India.

Ironically, this period of good feelings helped plant the seeds for the next war. Growing revenues from India, Canada, and especially the Caribbean convinced the French crown to invest more heavily in the colonies and rebuild its fleet. The two sides began calculating their available courses of action in the event of war.

The Royal Navy was the strongest in the world by this time, but did not have unlimited freedom of action. Its main naval adversary in the 1730s was Spain, with which it maintained a fierce rivalry in the Caribbean that led to all-out war in 1739. The island nation moreover relied on its navy for self-defense, preventing it from sending large squadrons to distant Asian waters. The French Marine Royale was a distant second, but made selective use of its warships and leaned heavily on the merchant marine to provide warships, giving it rough parity in the Indian Ocean.

The Indian Political Map

All the sea power in the world was useless without safe harbors to resupply and refit; all the sea power in the world was pointless without willing trade partners. European activity in the Indian Ocean therefore hinged on good relations with local princes who could provide both. Nearly all of India was under the nominal rule of the Mughal emperors in Delhi, who by 1700 had extended their authority almost to the tip of the peninsula. In reality, rule was delegated to a number of regional governors, who in the 1720s gained either formal or de facto independence. Five of these were particularly important.

The first was the Maratha state, a Hindu state which had recently fought a long series of wars to maintain its independence from Muslim Mughal rule. The Marathas controlled the west central coast, from around Portuguese Goa in the south up to Gujarat, although in the coming decades they would expand inland and northward at their neighbors’ expense. In northeastern India was Bengal, ruled by semi-autonomous nawabs who maintained close relations to the court in Delhi and continued to pay substantial tribute.

East of the Maratha state in India’s central highlands—the Deccan Plateau—was Hyderabad, ruled by a former provincial governor who adopted the ruling title Nizam. The Nizams of Hyderabad held a status similar to the nawabs of Bengal, but also held intermediate authority over the nawabs of the Carnatic state on the southeastern coastal plain. Finally, south of Hyderabad, occupying the south-central highlands and southwestern coast, was Mysore, another Hindu state that had recently become a tributary to Delhi.

Neither France nor Britain maintained more than a few thousand troops on the subcontinent at any point during this period, and with the exception of Bombay, their stations and forts were not owned outright, but leased or held by treaty. The Portuguese had been able to strong-arm a few ports in the early days of their colonial ventures, but the rise of the Mughals made this impossible by the time other Europeans arrived on the scene—an attempt by the English in the 1680s to seize towns by main force badly backfired, and they were forced to give up all their holdings except for Bombay and Madras.

And despite the superiority of European ships, they could not simply throw their weight around at sea either. Several attempts by the British, Dutch, and Portuguese to capture ports on India’s west coast were frustrated by the Marathas, who maintained a coastal-defense navy to enforce tolls on European merchantmen; this, in combination with several well-armed forts, was sufficient to defeat various European efforts.

Strategic Geography

As Britain and France headed toward war in the 1730s, this delicate interdependence of land, sea, and diplomacy occupied the minds of strategists. The ports that enabled sea power could only be secured with troops and local princes; alliances could only be forced with the credibility that troops and cash provided; garrisons were dependent on local help and resupply from Europe.

These calculations were further complicated by the bi-seasonal monsoon. A steady southwesterly wind provided fair sailing for ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope in spring; but by November, the monsoon reversed direction as rough winds blew out of the northeast. Ships that did not return to Europe at that time had to find shelter. There were few good harbors on India’s east coast that could protect ships during the winter monsoon, so the British usually retreated to Bombay.

The French had no such safe harbor: Mahé, their sole west-coast port, was small and indefensible. The Dutch possessed good harbors on Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), and both the Dutch and Portuguese held ports on India’s west coast, but these were not certain to be available in wartime—both powers had frequently been at war with France in recent decades. Accordingly, the French acquired Mauritius and Réunion off the East African coast (named Île de France and Île Bourbon, respectively). These bases gave their ships refuge in winter months and a secure supply base along the trade routes—located in open water more than 4,000 km from either the Cape Colony or Bombay, any amphibious attack against them would be extremely difficult.

Like French stations in India, these islands were under the control of the French East India Company, officially named the Compagnie des Indes. The notorious financier John Law had brought all royally-chartered trading companies—those of the East Indies, the Mississippi, China, etc.—under the aegis of a single Company of the Indies. After its spectacular bankruptcy in 1720, the crown rescued the Company and thenceforth exercised much greater control, subsuming its interests to national strategy.

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Examples abound. A term like “center of gravity” does not just describe an aspect of a combatant’s system, but implicitly posits a single and specific source of strength that can be attacked. Maneuver theory builds upon this, elevating “maneuver” from physical movement to a position of advantage into a more abstract sort of action against the enemy’s center of gravity.

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A number of other theories and doctrines have created elaborate theoretical constructs with terminologies to match: effects-based operations, network-centric warfare, and so forth. Less formally, John Boyd’s OODA loop, with its highly theoretical (and highly debatable) understanding of the dynamics of combat, has worked its way into the common lexicon.

By overloading common doctrinal terms with intellectual scaffolding, the effect has been more to obscure than to clarify. In all these cases, the theory itself is a matter of ongoing debate; we do not need to rehash those extensive arguments here, except to note that invoking them is liable to provoke a theoretical disagreement that distracts from the matter at hand. And even when two people largely agree on the underlying theory, they will often fiercely disagree over how those abstract concepts apply to reality

Anyone who has taken part in enough center-of-gravity analyses can readily attest to this. In that particular case, the doctrinal definition tries to render a question of judgment—what the focus of friendly efforts should be—into a matter of objective fact (more on this in a bit). More generally, excessive abstraction negates the very purpose of doctrinal terminology, which is to provide a commonly understood vocabulary for describing reality.

The Soviet Shadow

It was not always so. Doctrine up until the 1980s was far less bound up in theory. This is visible in the earliest expositions of AirLand Battle, the most elaborate doctrine of that era. Designed to defeat Soviet tank armies rolling across the North European Plain, it proposed an elaborate scheme to contain, isolate, and defeat them, using language that was remarkably concrete and straightforward. This changed in 1986, when AirLand Battle was formally made US Army doctrine with an updated version of FM 100-5 Operations, which introduced “center of gravity” into US doctrine. The Marine Corps followed three years later with FMFM-1, which articulated its own version of maneuver warfare.

The groundwork had already been laid even before these doctrines were published. Much of the growing interest in military theory was a product of late-Cold War paranoia, when fears of Soviet armor doctrine spurred a serious study of their military thought. American officers were much influenced by what they found, and began adopting the Soviet concept of an operational level of war in the 1970s—made formal doctrine with the 1982 version of FM 100-5.

Cognitive Capture

The official adoption of the “operational” was partly influenced by a 1980 paper by Edward Luttwak, which argued that the American military establishment suffered from a conceptual void. Failures to win decisive victories in Vietnam or Korea and the incremental progress in the European theater of WWII were said to spring not from material or organizational constraints, but rather from an intellectual misapprehension of the space between tactics and strategy.

This argument encapsulates two errors which were shared by military thinkers more broadly. The first is a misunderstanding of the semantic shift that “strategy” had undergone. The word originally denoted just the maneuvers of a campaign—what we now call the operational—but expanded to encompass the entirety of the war effort. Later theorists imagined that operational art only “emerged” from between tactics and strategy at the end of the 19^th century (a misunderstanding that originated with the Soviets themselves). In truth, we see “strategy” used during the American Civil War to refer to precisely those types of sweeping operational maneuvers that Luttwak insisted were lacking in American military art.

This points to the second, more serious, error: placing too much importance on intellectual frameworks. The reason that operational maneuver was not always exercised to its fullest potential in WWII had more to do with other factors: material constraints, risk calculation, overriding strategic priorities, etc. Commanders were aware of the possibility of more ambitious operations, and sometimes even entertained them, but decided that the benefits were not worth the costs (it should also be noted that those exceptional instances of operational maneuver that were undertaken didn’t always accomplish what they claimed).

This focus on the mental aspects of warfare was part of the spirit of the age. This was around the time when John Boyd was giving lectures on his theory of decision cycles—the OODA loop—which singled out mental processes as the primary driver of the dynamics of combat. This later formed a core argument in support of network-centric warfare, a doctrine that advocated for tighter informational networks to connect sensors, weapons, and commanders.

In 1997, Israeli general Shimon Naveh published In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory, which claimed to apply general systems theory to military operations. The book was a work of intellectual fraud which even plagiarized entire sets of endnotes.1 Happily, Naveh’s writing was so contorted that few even claim to have read him, and very little military theory since has approached his level of obscurantism; but it does seem to have popularized two buzzwords: “cognitive” and “systems thinking”.

Both terms proved popular among network-centric advocates (although the theory itself predated Naveh’s book), and the “cognitive domain” quickly became unofficial doctrine in the military establishment at large. It even worked its way into the current joint doctrine, which defines operational art as a “cognitive approach”—a gross reworking of an existing term that adds nothing of value.

The German School

Abstract concepts and excessive theorizing are not entirely new problems. Our use of the words “tactics” and “strategy” comes from an 18^th-century milieu which loved applying classical terms to contemporary warfare, often to the detriment of clear thought. Jomini was notorious for imputing an elaborate system to Napoleon. Clausewitz himself used “center of gravity” in a more abstract sense, applying his original concept—a straightforwardly physical metaphor for large troop concentrations—more generally to such things as popular will or alliances (it is worth noting that he never finished reworking these sections of On War).

Given the high esteem which Clausewitz enjoyed in Prussia, it comes as something of a surprise how decidedly anti-theoretical that military tradition was. German officers made little use of abstract concepts, writing more about the practical aspects of training, maneuvers, and combat—their perspective could be summarized by Moltke’s description of strategy as “a system of expedients”. Their interest in Clausewitz lay more in the substance of his arguments than for his theoretical elaborations.

It is telling how they refashioned many of his terms to suit their own ends. Their use of the word Schwerpunkt (center of gravity) is a good illustration. All the way through World War II, German officers viewed it in very concrete terms: the Schwerpunkt was simply the main effort, where the most forces were naturally concentrated. Where a commander should place his center of gravity was a matter of judgment, but its actual identity was a straightforward matter of observable fact (in complete contrast to current understandings of the term).

The genesis of the operational level is another example. The concept of strategy was always somewhat open-ended at the top—from its adoption in the 18^th century, some writers extended its bounds to the entire war effort—but its main focus was emphatically on the maneuvers of a single army in a single theater. Writing in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, when a single decisive campaign was usually enough to decide the entire war, Clausewitz redefined strategy as the use of tactics to win the entire war (although his actual usage did not necessarily reflect that definition).

This posed some awkwardness for later officers and theorists. The term straddled a yawning gap between the highest-order decision-making in a war and the much more limited maneuvers of a single field army—already becoming apparent after the Franco-Prussian War, itself a rapid war of just one campaign. In the following decades, German officers used Clausewitz’s definition of strategy to apply to the overall war effort, while pragmatically adopting the word operativ—which became operational in English—to maneuvers in the field. Terminology followed needs, with theory trailing distantly, if at all.

Form and Substance

Imperial Germany’s circumstances were very different from the present. No NATO country has fought a full-scale, long-duration war since Korea, allowing the weeds to grow thick. For all that, the theorizers often get much right. The maneuverist school injected much-needed vigor into the US military by arguing for speed, initiative, and decentralized control, even if their theoretical edifice was built on shaky foundations. Network-centric partisans were completely correct in their advocacy for more integration of information systems, as recent experience has shown.

This only goes to show that theoretical constructs are completely unnecessary in the first place. At best, they waste huge amounts of time and energy on fruitless debate. At worst, they lead to eventual disasters such as Ukraine suffered in summer 2023, when on American advice they attempted the sorts of bold maneuvers that material reality simply precluded.

The Ukraine War has done much to bring people back to earth. It is once more respectable to speak of attrition as a viable strategy, contra maneuverist dogma. Commentary focuses more on the concrete than the abstract (even using more direct terms like “axis” and “front” that had long fallen out of fashion). Completely separately, there has been growing pushback against the worst excesses of theory.

Institutional inertia is nonetheless strong, and it is easy to fall back on bad habits. I propose a few rules of thumb:

1. Doctrinal terms should be straightforward and objective, not intertwined with theoretical concepts. Their purpose is to establish a common basis for discussion, they should not provoke debate all on their own.

2. “Concepts” as a whole should be treated with suspicion outside of narrow bounds. Sophisticated thought grows from thorough knowledge and careful analysis, not appeals to abstraction.

3. The degree to which higher-order concepts are even practicable comes from competence at lower levels—“brilliance in the basics” is a good guideline, as always.

Thank you for reading the Bazaar of War. Most articles are free for all to read, but a subscription option is available to all who wish to support. Subscribers receive a pdf of the critical edition of the classic The Art of War in Italy: 1494-1529, and will have exclusive access to occasional pieces.

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2 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Michael

This did not mark the end of the dynasty—indeed, the Abbasids survived for several more centuries—but it did mark the end of centralized Arab power. Unlike the Umayyads, whom the Abbasids had replaced a century before, no strong actor swept onto the stage to take up the mantle of jihad. Instead, there followed a gentle fracturing of the Muslim world, as regional governors began to assert varying levels of autonomy while still acknowledging the nominal authority of Baghdad. The Abbasids themselves periodically launched expeditions into Anatolia—and in their absence some border states continued to raid on their own initiative—but the overall pressure on Byzantium’s eastern frontier had eased considerably.

Nevertheless, the view from Constantinople was not so rosy. Even as things improved in the east, turmoil engulfed the west. Invaders from Tunisia continued to overrun Sicily, where the last Byzantine holdout fell in 902. On mainland Italy, the Franks encroached upon Byzantine territory in the south. Arab pirates in Crete continued to plague the shipping lanes through the Aegean.

The biggest threat by far was the expansion of Bulgaria. Although not especially large, its strong position near the Byzantine capital made it a constant source of agony. The net result was that when a threat did rear up on the eastern frontier, the Byzantines were comparatively less prepared to meet it than in previous centuries.

The most aggressive such threat to arise was the Hamdanid dynasty, which came to power in Aleppo in the 940s. The Hamdanids controlled little more than Syria and Mesopotamia, and never approached the strength of the Caliphate in previous centuries—they certainly posed no danger to Constantinople. Yet under their scion Sayf ad-Dawla, they attracted ghazis from all over the Islamic world to participate in annual summer raids which threatened to damage the empire at a delicate time.

In sum, the Hamdanids were a difficult foe, if not quite an existential threat. Byzantine generals of the eastern frontier were forced to adapt their sometimes-limited resources to the challenge, refining the operational techniques pioneered by previous generations. This resulted in a systemization of their operational art which, backed by growing economic might, permanently ended the Arab threat to Anatolia.

A Byzantine Renaissance

Indeed, despite the acute perils that continued to plague the empire into the 10^th century, Byzantium’s position was incrementally improving. Territorial losses in Europe notwithstanding, their lands were subjected to considerably less turmoil. In the decades following the devastating sack of Amorion in 838, Arabs incursions tailed off, no longer striking so far west. And for decades before that, raids had largely spared the lowlands of western Anatolia, allowing the empire’s richest provinces to prosper. Commercial links were meanwhile being reforged with Western Europe, which was an increasingly valuable trade partner.

It is thanks to this rising prosperity that we know about Byzantine operational art in great detail. Unlike the early centuries of the Islamic conquests, which were truly a dark age for artistic and literary production all around the Mediterranean, the improving conditions of the 10^th century were accompanied by the cultural efflorescence of the so-called Macedonian Renaissance (named after the ruling imperial dynasty). Increasing literacy allowed generals to pass down the lessons they had learned to their successors and subordinates, lending institutional solidity to the army.

A number of manuals written in the 10^th century detail these techniques. Although specific to their period, they represent the refinements made over several centuries of the Arab-Byzantine wars. Moreover, they bear the mark of strategy that was apparent from a much earlier period. This piece will look at the methods detailed in the manuals and how they were applied in several campaigns of the mid-10^th century.

Straddling East and West

The two fundamental strategic difficulties of the eastern frontier were distance and logistics. We have already seen how the semi-arid environment of the Anatolian plateau prevented the Byzantines from keeping large numbers of troops concentrated at any one point, while their best troops had to be stationed around the capital for political reasons. This compelled them to distribute their border forces across military districts called themes, from which they could unite for a specific campaign.

The Arabs, by contrast, could muster their armies in very fertile regions that allowed much higher concentrations of men and beasts. Tarsus in Cilicia, Hadath and Marash in northern Syria, and Melitene between the Anti-Taurus and Taurus Mountains all served as bases of operations for their raids.

This asymmetry guaranteed that the initial Byzantine response to an invasion was bound to be weak, but would gather strength over the following weeks as thematic armies linked up with one another and the imperial army marched out to join them. Although effective in repelling most incursions, it also allowed raiders plenty of time to wreak havoc.

The problem of time was exacerbated by flareups on the western frontier. The peace established between Byzantium and Bulgaria in 816 had mostly held through the 9^th century, with only occasional quarrels. Relations improved in 864 when Khan Boris was baptized into Eastern-rite Christianity, bringing his people into the faith. Proximity often brings conflict of its own, however, and by the end of the century the two were often at war: for several years in the 890s, and again from 913 to 927.

These wars took substantial manpower away from the eastern frontier. Periods of active hostilities required the transfer of cavalry from Anatolia, while even peacetime troop levels had to be elevated—especially after the treaty of 896, which brought the Bulgarian border as close as 100 km from Constantinople. Substantial numbers of troops were needed to defend the Aegean coast against raids from Crete. Expeditions were intermittently sent to Italy, to defend Byzantine territory in the south against restive Lombards and raids from Muslim Sicily.

Developments in the Arab World

The balance of power in the east was in flux throughout this time. The turmoil which engulfed the Abbasids in the 860s led to the de facto independence of Egypt in 868 under its governor Ahmed ibn Tulun. Over the following decade he expanded his control to Syria and Cilicia. The Caliphate was occupied at this time by the Zanj Revolt, a major slave uprising in southern Iraq, giving Ibn Tulun free rein to deploy the resources of Egypt against Byzantium.

The Byzantines were as yet undistracted by the Bulgars, so things initially went in their favor. In 878 they recaptured Loulon, the fortress guarding the major pass of the Cilician Gates and the Arabs’ last toehold in Anatolia. They also made frequent raids in the territory of Melitene and attempted to take the city several times, although these efforts came to naught.

All this changed after war broke out with Bulgaria in the 890s. The Byzantines endured a horrendous defeat in the summer of 896, when the Bulgars smashed their field force, opening the road to Constantinople. The emperor was left with little choice but to sue for peace, agreeing to a humiliating treaty that formally ceded most of Thrace. The following year, a somewhat revivified Caliphate reasserted its authority over the borderlands, and in 898 brought nearly all of Syria back under its direct control.

The coincidence of Byzantine reversals with buoyed Arab fortunes reignited the war in Anatolia. Beginning in 897, the Abbasids launched a number of raids by land and sea, culminating in a major expedition in 904 that sacked Thessalonica, the second city of the empire. The Byzantines retaliated with an expedition beyond the Taurus which destroyed a large Arab field army, and the two sides agreed to a truce which held for the next several years.

Abbasid raids picked up again from 909 on a near-annual basis, but outbreaks of rebellion in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Azerbaijan forced them to renew an uneasy truce in 917. This was felicitous timing for Constantinople, as hostilities with Bulgaria had broken out yet again in 913. The war was not going well: the Bulgarians briefly besieged the capital in the first year of the conflict and soon occupied much of the empire’s European territories. The peace with the Arabs allowed the Byzantines to concentrate a large army on the western front, where it was thoroughly defeated that same year.

The Byzantine Counter-Offensive

The Bulgarian war dragged on for another decade until a treaty was signed in 927. The emperor agreed to renew tribute payments and recognize the Bulgarian monarch as a coequal in return for restoration of the prewar borders. This ultimately proved to be well worth the cost: the treaty held for the next four decades, long enough for the Byzantines to win their war in the east.

This process began with a general named John Kourkouas, who led several campaigns to the east immediately following the peace. The Byzantine army had not performed well in previous decades of fighting with the Bulgarians; coupled with Arab successes around the turn of the century, this suggests that several decades of peace in the second half of the 9^th century had been bad for the army.

In 923, John was appointed commander of the tagmatic armies (the professional forces stationed around the capital), and appears to have immediately reformed and reenergized the military establishment. He began leading campaigns against the Arab borderlands even before the peace was signed with Bulgaria; one such area, the neighborhood of Melitene, became the focus of several campaigns and was to be the first major reconquest of the 10^th century.

Melitene was a well-judged target for reconquest. The city occupied a narrow plain on the upper Euphrates, fertile land that had long attracted Byzantine raids. Sandwiched between the Taurus and Anti-Taurus Mountains, it was a bite-sized chunk that could be reasonably absorbed in the space of a few dedicated campaigns, while the Taurus furnished a shield against Muslim counteractions from the south. The region moreover had a sizable population of Armenian Christians, who were largely sympathetic to the empire.

For all that, Kourkouas’ initial design was not conquer this region, but merely to bring it under tribute. Several campaigns won mixed success, and intermittently forced the emir of Melitene to recognize Byzantine suzerainty. But Abbasid reinforcements from beyond the Taurus and counterraids into Anatolia—one of which sacked Amorion (just a shadow of its former glory after the vicious sack in 838)—prevented Kourkouas from securing his gains.

It became apparent that no vassal relationship with a Muslim emir could endure so close to Abbasid territory; Kourkouas therefore resolved to conquer Melitene outright. Early in 934, he marched over the Anti-Taurus Mountains and the city capitulated in May. All Muslims were forced to convert or go into exile to ensure the loyalty of the populace, and the region was brought directly under Constantinople’s rule.

The fall of Melitene marked a major shift in Byzantine fortunes. The outcome of wars with the Bulgarians and Arabs since the 890s had been dismal. Kourkouas’ conquest was not just a major triumph of Byzantine arms, but the first major recovery of territory beyond Anatolia since the beginning of the Arab conquests. It had more immediate benefits as well: the territory served as a buffer on Anatolia’s eastern flank and served as a jumping-off point from which the imperial army could threaten the Abbasid heartland.

Rise of the Hamdanids

The timing was particularly unfortunate for the Abbasids, who were undergoing an especially turbulent period. Just weeks before the city fell, the ruling caliph was murdered in a palace coup, which led to another splintering of the fragile Caliphate in the 930s. Baghdad was subjected to vicious infighting as ministers jockeyed for power and the caliph was reduced to a puppet.

Amidst this chaos, regional governors began to break away. The year after Melitene’s capture, Egypt fell out of Baghdad’s orbit for good, and within a few years its governor again extended control over Syria. In Persia, a number of regional dynasties competed for control of the Iranian plateau. In northern Mesopotamia, one dynasty, the Hamdanids, maintained a state of semi-autonomy.

The Hamdanids were a military family that had furnished several governors of Mosul. They had long resisted centralized control, and used the collapse in Baghdad’s authority to gain more autonomy and extend their dominions; at the same time, they backed one faction in the internecine strife to gain influence over what remained of the Caliphate. After a brief period of ascendance in which they effectively gained control of the government, the family was shut out of power in 943, when a powerful Persian dynasty marched on Baghdad.

The reigning emir of Mosul, Nasir ad-Dawla, came to terms with the new hegemon and received guarantees for his own territory, but the new balance of power frustrated the ambitions of the cadet branches of his house. His talented younger brother Ali, who had received the epithet Sayf ad-Dawla (Sword of the State) for his earlier military victories in service to the caliph, now turned his attention westward to carve out a state of his own. With his brother’s backing and the support of local Bedouin, he captured Aleppo without a fight in 944. He then fought a series of campaigns for control of Syria with the Egyptians, with whom he established a stable modus vivendi by 947. A treaty between the two powers left him the ruler of nearly all Syria north of Damascus plus western Mesopotamia, and the overlord of the Emir of Tarsus, who controlled Cilicia.

This vast new territory extended the entire length of the Byzantine frontier, making Sayf ad-Dawla the de facto leader of the holy war. His reputation and charisma were a great boost to Muslim morale. Syria and Mesopotamia had suffered greatly at the hands of John Kourkouas, who conducted a series of aggressive campaigns in the 940s that sacked a number of important cities. Kourkouas fell victim to Constantinople’s court politics and was dismissed from service in 944, just as Sayf ad-Dawla was moving on Aleppo, giving the new Emir of Aleppo a golden opportunity to make a name for himself.

Sayf ad-Dawla already had some experience fighting the Byzantines. He likely participated in the campaigns for Melitene in the 930s, and led armies against them in Syria and Armenia before his rise to independent power. He spent the early 940s caught up in intramural conflicts, but just a month after taking Aleppo he defeated an incursion by Kourkouas’ successor into Syria. The following winter, during a break in the war in the Egyptians, he led the first of many raids into Anatolia. It was not until 948, however, that the war picked up in earnest.

The Manuals

Before examining these campaigns, it is worth looking at the military writings of this period. These give us the fullest picture of what campaigns looked like in the 10^th century, filling out the bare outlines that are sketched in the historical accounts. Four in particular are worth describing shortly.

The first of these was the Taktika, written by Emperor Leo VI sometime around the year 900. This was composed the height of the brief Abbasid resurgence which began in the 890s, during which Arab forces were striking Anatolia on a near-annual basis. Leo was renowned as a scholar (as suggested by his epithet “the Wise”), and drew heavily on older Byzantine writings. Large sections of the Taktika were copied verbatim from the Strategikon, composed around the year 600 by Emperor Maurice or one of his generals (for more on its contents, see here and here).

One of the most remarkable sections of the Stragikon is the series of short ethnographies of the empire’s enemies, describing their patterns of life and fighting styles in order to effectively plan campaigns against them. It was written the eve of the Islamic conquests, and thus did not include the Arabs, so Leo updated this section for the 10^th century (he does not say how to fight the Bulgarians, averring that it would be impious to fight fellow Christians, but does describe how to fight another people just like them).

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A swarm of honeybees, for instance, is guided to a food source by scouts that know its location; the rest of the bees follow by maintaining certain spacing with their neighbors (not too close, not too far) and largely matching their velocity. This combines directed intelligence with decentralized control, allowing the swarm to maneuver around obstacles while maintaining its coherence and objective.

When defending the hive, bees follow different rules. Certain kinetic, visual, and chemical signals may prompt an individual bee to sting a nearby object. This releases a pheromone that triggers other bees to do the same in an escalating cycle. Once past a certain threshold of pheromone concentration, the remainder become less likely to sting in order to prevent too many from sacrificing themselves—absent any further cues, the target is assumed to be neutralized.

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It is easy to imagine how UAVs could behave similarly: a handful of piloted scouts that seek out targets, followed by a mass of undirected drones that autonomously maintain spacing with their neighbors and respond to attack signals. As things stand now, however, plenty of factors militate against this behavior. The type of cheap and disposable drones that would be ideal for true swarms have short range, making it inefficient to use them to hunt out potential targets. Clustering them too tightly together would make them vulnerable to fragmentation weapons, while keeping them dispersed to the point that they had to coordinate via radio signal would make them vulnerable to jamming.

These are all technical problems, and it is entirely possible that they will be worked out. In the meantime, guided FPV drones work effectively enough at the individual unit level—where they serve other functions besides—that there is little incentive to create buzzing clouds of machines that roam the landscape like Africanized honeybees.

Stigmergic Targeting

The closest we see to swarms at present are the many drones that individually hit a single target—“swarming” about as much as artillery shells do when firing for effect. Even then, it is rare for drones to attack all at once: their attacks are sequential, spread out over minutes or hours. This slow, sequential pattern does loosely resemble another insect phenomenon: stigmergy.

This refers to the use of pheromones to coordinate action over greater distances, like ants laying down a chemical trail for others to follow, which grows into a heavily-trafficked two-way thoroughfare between the nest and a food source. Honeybees use stigmergy even more efficiently: because they move in three dimensions, they can follow pheromones directly to the source, instead of being stuck to the path the first one took.

FPV drones attacking high-value targets, such as armored vehicles, exhibit a sort of stigmergy. They all fly individually to the destination, whereupon they emit signals of their own: BDA for previous attacks and location updates for those that follow. These provide both attack cues and a cutoff threshold once the target has been destroyed. Although this intelligence is far more sophisticated than the type of chemical signals emitted by insects, it allows individual drone teams to make their own attack/wave-off decisions.

Drone Packs

There are nevertheless several examples of multiple drones acting in concert. These are usually more sophisticated, involving more advanced drones and complex attacks. Some of the clearest cut occurred over the skies of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020, when decoy drones triggered a response from radars or SAMs, which were then targeted by loitering drones.

This evolved from Israeli tactics explored in the 1980s, when decoy drones opened the way for manned aviation to attack Syrian ground sites; itself an outgrowth of the manned decoys used by the Wild Weasels over Vietnam. Work is now being done to make these tactics platform-neutral, executable by a flight of same-type drones: whichever one first encounters an enemy system first would engage it with a frontal fixing attack, while the others sweep around to attack from other directions.

In all such cases, tactics resemble less a swarm than a pack—like hyenas barking at a lion while their companions snap at his flanks. Pack animals’ behavior is far more sophisticated than insects, involving greater awareness of what one’s neighbors are doing. Wolves and whales herd their prey toward their peers, while chimpanzees are even more sophisticated, flushing out prey into ambush positions.

In a certain sense, all human tactics on a short enough timescale resemble pack behavior—think contact drills executed along predesigned templates, with no deliberate planning and only minimal communication. This is the obvious analogy for drone attacks, wherein fast-moving missiles shorten the decision-making cycle, requiring statistically-optimized responses.

True Swarms

There is still a plausible use for UAV swarms; as with honeybees protecting their hive, it exists on the defense. Drone escorts forming a protective bubble around helicopters, proposed in the last piece, would effectively function as a swarm. Individual units would have to fly autonomously, with enough spatial awareness to maintain appropriate distance from the helicopters while ensuring that intercepts do not result in collateral damage.

In the event of hostile fire, they would have to estimate how many should respond in order to get a sufficient probability of kill without prematurely exhausting themselves, like bees escalating only up to a certain point. After every such engagement, the escorts would have to rearrange themselves to maintain all-around coverage with clear intercept lines.

I anticipate that we will see the rapid development of defensive swarms in the not-too-distant future. Just as naval ships no longer protect themselves with heavy armor and point defenses, but instead distribute air, missile, and subsurface defenses among several escort vessels, it is easier for air and ground platforms to disaggregate their own defenses. Drone swarms can be used to protect armored vehicles, radar sites, and any number of other high-value targets. The rate at which this is done may well determine how soon mobility is restored to the battlefield.

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Operation Absolute Resolve

We of course must be cautious in drawing direct lessons from the operation. As a one-off mission that had the benefit of surprise and overwhelming air superiority, US forces had the means to clear a path for the assault package with EW and kinetic strikes. Opposing forces were badly trained, badly deployed, and not even positioned to use the weapons they did have—Russian-made S-300s and Buks were not even tied in to the Chinese-made early-warning radar.

After penetrating Venezuelan airspace, there remained the challenge of protecting the helicopters as they flew over the dense urban landscape of Caracas. Here too, any takeaways must be heavily qualified. The Venezuelan possesses no MANPADS more advanced than third-generation Iglas, which can be defeated by modern flare cocktails. And even with such primitive defenses, the defenders managed to hit the lead CH-47 several times with gunfire, although this was not enough to force a wave-off.

What is more interesting is the role drones played in protecting the raid force. The helicopters appear to have been preceded by a wave of one-way attack drones that neutralized potential threats, and were escorted by drones that struck sources of ground fire. Reactive fire is no protection against the passive targeting of MANPADS, of course, and higher-generation weapons would still pose a danger when facing a stronger opponent.

A Sketch of a Concept

Contemplating such a high-stakes operation against even a modestly capable adversary is enough to make any mission planner blanch. However, that is not to say that a helicopter insert would be entirely out of the question in a less-defended sector. This where I think the future of assault support lies: inserting long-range ground-based fires into the enemy’s unprotected flank or rear in support of major offensives elsewhere. Although extremely risky, this could help redress the imbalance that modern weapons impose on the battlefield.

The threat profile for such a mission might look rather similar to what we saw in Caracas. The main air defenses would presumably be suppressed or otherwise occupied during the frenetic opening phase of a conflict, where a pulse of combat power would help neutralize any remaining threat. Even the most remote flight paths would face some sporadic ground fire or MANPADS, of course, although the number of higher-generation MANPADS is bound to be limited—and at any rate, short-range systems cannot provide dense coverage along all avenues of approach. That is only a mitigating factor, of course, and helicopters would still need some sort of hard-kill protection. For that, drone escorts could function like APS on a tank, providing a close screen that intercepts any incoming missiles and suppresses any ground-based gunfire.

We can imagine what a scheme of maneuver might look like: a wave of one-way strike drones clears a corridor for the assault package, which consists of rotary-wing closely screened by a large number of interceptors, and protected on the flanks by orbiting attack drones to suppress any ground-based gunfire.

Operation Absolute Resolve serves as a very loose proof-of-concept for this, showing how it is possible to employ large numbers of drones in close coordination with a few helicopters embedded in a much larger air campaign, with all the deconfliction headaches that entails. Employing hard-kill systems so close to rotary-wing platforms introduces yet another degree of technical complexity amidst even more congested airspace. Yet all the elements are there, and it may show a way forward.

Thank you for reading the Bazaar of War. Most articles are free for all to read, but a subscription option is available to all who wish to support. Subscribers receive a pdf of the critical edition of the classic The Art of War in Italy: 1494-1529, and will have exclusive access to occasional pieces.

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My interest in this book was how it describes grand strategy as something that naturally flows from domestic politics in a way that other levels of war do not. Rahe notes in the introduction how ancient political philosophers discussed Sparta’s uniqueness in terms of the politeuma (the structure of the ruling order) and paideia (upbringing of those members), and proposes doing the same as a means of understanding her foreign policy in the turbulent 5^th century. Below are my notes/synopsis followed by a discussion.

Synopsis

Prologue

The opening section frames the challenge of understanding the Spartan state:

• Disagreement among ancient philosophers about the nature of its constitution: whether it was a tyranny, extreme democracy, monarchy, oligarchy, etc.

  • Relationship between different offices created some ambiguity, as did relations between the rich and poor

• Debates continued into modernity: was it a model for liberty, or did it contain the seeds of fascism.

• Difficulties compounded by the secretiveness of the Spartans, philosophers’ idealizations of the state, the later time periods at which many of them wrote.

• Enough can nevertheless be extracted from these accounts to shed light on how these domestic concerns shaped grand strategy

Paideia

This chapter looks at the upbringing of Spartan youth, designed to make them capable of serving a state which stood out as completely unique among other Greek poleis.

• Total focus on producing skilled warriors who exhibited homonoia—like-mindedness/spiritedness

  • Prohibition on learning any trades, infanticide of the weak or deformed

  • Ultimate purpose was that those who made it through would receive a kleros (grant of public land) and be admitted to full citizenship—which entailed a strict conformity in outward appearance

• Elite unity and military prowess were needed to keep down the helots, the descendants of the Achaean Greeks enserfed by the Spartans’ Dorian ancestors—the basis of their agricultural wealth

  • Spartans were a small minority in their homeland, dependent on allies elsewhere in the Peloponnese (the perioikoi) in times of war

• Constant threat of war and the high stakes of defeat compelled the Spartans to instill a high level of courage and fear of the gods in their young via the agoge

  • This began at the age of seven, when boys were taken from their home and enrolled in a “herd” of peers

  • Education consisted of rigorous exercise, dance, and songs designed to physically condition them and build group spirit

  • Given short rations that forced them to steal food: were expected to endure inevitable punishments for theft

• Poetry/song fostered group feeling and served a didactic purpose: many songs were about discipline in the face of danger and valorized fighting skill

• Final test of the agoge came around the age of 20, living for a year on his own resourcefulness in the countryside, killing any helots who violated curfew

• Passing this final test allowed entry into one of several sussitia, the dining clubs to which all Spartan citizens belonged, and which served as their residence up to the age of 45.

• Three ablest initiates of each class were each tasked with choosing 100 peers who served as the royal bodyguard

• Institutionalized pederasty: boys were expected to court older men who acted as surrogate fathers while going through the agoge

  • Relations with women were much more furtive: marriages were made through ritualized bride-abduction, wives were only seen at night

  • Taken together, these were intended to reduce private loyalties and make the community the Spartiate’s primary loyalty

• This intense collectivization made Spartans notoriously avaricious within the confines of their own home (after the age of 45) or when abroad

• Nevertheless, Spartan paideia created a class that was renowned for its courage, unwilling to shirk combat in the presence of fellow Spartans

Politeia

This section looks at the political makeup of Sparta, emphasizing that the formal distinction between state and society did not exist, with attendant consequences for their understanding of offices and parties.

• How the attempt to suppress faction and social distinction led to men to seek honor through battle

• Sparta’s founding myth:

• The two kings: led the army out in battle, conducted sacrifices on campaign, conducted foreign policy

  • Great power to influence men with endowments of property—playing to Spartans’ private avarice

• Ephors, or overseers: board of five members over the age of 45 elected for one year, only eligible for a single term in a lifetime

  • Had to give an accounting for their deeds to oncoming ephors at the end of their term

  • Enforced standards within Sparta: sumptuary laws, censoring the arts, physically examining the young men, oversaw the treasury and payment of taxes

  • Had the power to try and condemn kings, a power frequently wielded—only three kings in the 5^th century were not tried for a crime

  • Accountability to their successors created a balance of power with the kings, especially when both kings were aligned on policy

• The Gerousia, or elders: body of twenty-eight men over the age of 60 who tried cases and whose consent was necessary for any law to be passed or war declared; generally consulted on administrative matters

  • Candidates canvassed for support, indications that factions split between the two kings in promoting certain ones

  • Contemporaries observed that a council of old men had the greatest interest in stability, least moved by passion to make rash decisions

• The three formal offices created a mixed constitution: monarchy (two kings), oligarchy (ephors), aristocracy (Gerousia), while retaining democratic assemblies of the citizens; contributed to enforcing strict social regimentation

Conquest

This chapter covers Sparta’s expansion in the Peloponnese, from the state’s origins in the myth-shrouded Dorian invasion to the conquest and subjugation of the Messenians.

• Legend of the descendants of Heracles, who had been expelled from their kingdoms in the Peloponnese in the aftermath of the Trojan War and recovered their patrimony with the aid of the Dorians—another Hellenic tribe not native to the region

  • Explains the origins of the two royal dynasties (said to be Heracliads) and how the Dorians came to rule the native Achaeans of the Peloponnese

  • Also explains traditional hostility to Argos, then preeminent power in the region

• Archaeological evidence of major settlement at Sparta only emerges in later 10^th century, which then expanded to all of Laconia

• Conquest of Messenia, in the southwestern Peloponnese, in the later 8^th century: reducing its population to bondage, creating the basis for a narrow Spartan elite

• Military revolution: close-order hoplite warfare, appearing to radiate from Argos around the time of the Messenian wars

  • Reduced the status of the mounted aristocracy, created an imperative for a close-knit warrior class composed of all Spartan citizens

• Second Messenian War: revolt of the helots, eventually defeated by Sparta

  • Dating is uncertain, but occurs sometime around a Spartan defeat by Argos in 669—the two were undoubtedly related

Politics and Geopolitics

This section shows how Spartan grand strategy was shaped by wars with Argos and Messenia.

• Discussion of the timeline of the establishment of Spartan governing institutions

  • Possible establishment of the ephorate on the verge of the First Messenian War.

  • Origins of the agoge in early Dorian tribal history

• Geographical difficulties in the expansion from Laconia

  • Shaped the particular nature of Spartan dominance in Messenia, encouraging the establishment of colonies to enforce rule

  • Geography limited further expansion to the north, leading to defeat by Tegea

• Failures to expand led to shift in policy toward neighbors, trying to make them allies instead of helots—perioikoi who would fight alongside them

• Sparta’s reputation for ousting tyrants and installing friendly oligarchic regimes by late 6^th century

  • This reflected a change in policy from conquest of neighbors to forming alliances with them against Argos. Kings emphasized their common “Achaean-ness” over Sparta’s Dorian roots.

• Sum total of these changes made Sparta a “satiated power” wishing to preserve a tenuous status quo:

  • Resulted from lack of manpower to conquer neighbors—Spartiates never numbered more than 10,000

  • Sparta formed alliances with every major in the Peloponnese except Argos

  • Development of network of cart roads (built on a single gauge) linking those cities

Conclusion

The conclusion draws all the strands together, defining Spartan hegemony by the late 6^th century as “a grand alliance designed to keep their Argive enemies out, the helots down, and the Arcadians, above all others, in.” The fatal flaw was that this only worked if the Peloponnese was an isolated world—setting the stage for the conflicts covered in Rahe’s next 5 books.

Discussion

Rahe is something of a throwback, in that he takes political philosophy seriously—before publishing any books on the ancient world, his scholarship focused on republicanism and early modern political theorists. Political philosophy has been out of fashion for several generations, but has benefitted from its time out in the cold. Archaeology has given us a better sense of the material conditions of ancient societies, giving us much more context to contemporary accounts of their political institutions.

This is especially useful in the case of Sparta, which was obscure in its origins, secretive in its conduct of affairs, and utterly unique in its society and institutions. Rahe convincingly shows how particular strategic challenges shaped the Lacedaemonian constitution, and how that in turn shaped their approach to the outside world.

Elsewhere, I’ve argued that grand strategy is inherently an expression of domestic politics in a way that strategy is not. Popular opinion might sway the conduct of a war (i.e. strategy), but that is usually seen as an unwelcome intrusion on the efficient pursuit of national priorities; defining those national priorities is another matter, the very essence of politics itself. What is unique about Sparta is the degree to which all of society was organized around a very particular grand strategic vision. By the end of the 6^th century, it combined an extremely high state of military readiness with an extreme reluctance to go to war, born out of the precarity of their very social structure.

In the fixed course of its grand strategy and the way that a quasi-republic was able to suppress fractiousness, Sparta resembles nothing so much as Venice—its opposite by nearly every other measure. Both states promoted a certain egalitarianism within the ruling class by directing all their political energies into exercise of one sort or another: the Spartans through a rigorous military regimen, the Venetians with an elaborate system of annual and quarterly elections which absorbed the time and energy of anyone with political ambitions. Both systems were also explicit gerontocracies, closing off most higher offices to anyone younger than 60, with the explicit intention of making policy more cautious and conservative. Taken together, the program political homogeneity and conservatism served both states fairly well, seeing them through the turbulence of the 5^th century BC and 16^th century AD, respectively, even if it left them unable to chart a new course over the longer run.

That is not to say that even a society as uniform as Sparta’s did not have disagreements over foreign policy. Their strict foreign policy framework still left room for differences of opinion on particular questions of whether to go to war and how to wage it. Rahe moreover emphasizes in his chapter on the Spartan politeia that parties and faction before the 19^th century operated very differently from the formal party system most Western democracies have today. An analogy might be America’s current divide over China, which cuts across party lines: some see China primarily as a military threat, while another, guided by specific business interests and general economic interdependence, prefer a less adversarial approach.

Overall, I found the The Spartan Regime an illuminating framing of Sparta’s grand strategy in the Classical Age and a useful tool for thinking about the formulation of grand strategy in general. I look forward to reading Rahe’s following books on the Persian and Peloponnesian wars.

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Operational art is deceptively subtle. It is easy to look at the sweeping arrows on a campaign map and admire the elegant maneuvers of a successful offensive, or imagine how the losing side might have done things differently. Effecting those maneuvers is not so easy. Strategic prerogatives, tactical reality, logistical limitations, and the nature of the ground all impinge on a general’s freedom of action, while enormous amount of staff work goes into synchronizing the movements of large bodies of troops over great distances in the face of enemy resistance.

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Material constraints shape the broad patterns of a given theater, defining the bounds within which an individual commander can work. There are three principal factors at play:

1. Mobility afforded by the terrain and infrastructure

2. Density of forces

3. Logistical means vs. requirements

It is worth sketching out the various permutations.

Open Ground

Most wars are fought on ground that affords free movement: terrain that allows tactical mobility with sufficiently dense road/rail network for operational mobility. This offers the best chance at decisive victory and the worst risk of catastrophic defeat; all else being equal, militaries concentrate their greatest efforts in these geographies, relegating more difficult terrain to the status of secondary fronts/theaters (indeed, favorable operational conditions alone can make a particular theater a strategic priority). Within such theaters, however, much depends on the quantity of troops and the efficiency of their supply.

1. The Billiards Table

In the “classical” style of warfare that prevailed from antiquity through the 18^th century, armies were small relative to the area in which they operated. Whether marching as a singular body or as several dispersed corps, they had plenty of room to maneuver freely around the enemy. There are some examples of this in modern warfare too, such as the armies which invaded Iraq in 2003 or fought in the North African desert campaigns of the 1940s.

The better the logistical apparatus of such an army, the tighter and swifter its movements can be. Logistics both furnishes the means and defines the objectives of maneuver: it enables the forward flow of supplies, and also presents the enemy with a target for exploitation. This gives “classical” warfare its characteristic pattern of rapid movements followed by a positional fight in the form of a siege or battle. The reason that Hannibal gave battle at Cannae, for instance, after evading superior Roman armies for over a year, was that he had just captured a major supply depot there and was forced to defend it.

When armies are more tightly tied to their lines of communication by a series of depots and magazines, the capture of one can unseat their entire position. Alternatively, simply occupying a position across these lines, as Napoleon did with his Ulm maneuver, can be sufficient to compel an army to surrender.

An army that lacks such efficient organization—premodern armies that lived entirely off the land, or modern armies that lack trucks—resemble more indistinct blobs. They are forced to sprawl out over a wide area to forage or draw supplies, and their movements are slow and shambling. This greatly reduces operational effectiveness, foreclosing complex maneuvers, as seen during certain phases of the Thirty Years’ War: fighting devolved into campaigns of devastation and counter-devastation, as armies struggled to raise contributions from provinces that had already been bled dry.

Such deficiencies can be exploited by more efficient armies. The Crusaders of the later 12^th century developed a system of responding to invasions with tightly-disciplined marches from one castle or fortified camp to another. This forced the enemy army to remain concentrated as they approached, preventing it from dispersing to forage; and since the invaders lived entirely off the land, they soon had to retreat for lack of forage unless they could quickly bring about a decisive battle.

Something similar happened during the fall of the Philippines in 1941. MacArthur had dispersed his supplies around Luzon in anticipation of fighting the Japanese on the beaches, but lacked the transport to shuttle them back after his plan failed. Once his army reconcentrated on the highly defensible Bataan Peninsula, it quickly ran out of supplies and was forced to surrender.

2. The Crowded Front

As the density of troops in theater increases, there starts to emerge a front: a rough line that divides the theater in two, defining fixed rear areas. A front need not be continuous, and large detachments may even be able to penetrate it; but for various reasons, both tactical and logistical, they cannot remain there long—such a virtual front was formed by the Rappahannock River in the Eastern Theater of the US Civil War.

The solidity of a front increases with force density—this refers less to troop numbers than to combat power (an admittedly vague measure). Longer-ranged and more lethal weapons allow fewer troops to hold the line, as we see in Ukraine, where the 1000+ km front is held by just a few hundred thousand on each side. Higher density at any rate presupposes high logistical capacity, but an army’s ability to exceed static requirements greatly shapes the tempo of operations.

So long as the supply train can keep up with advancing troops, the dynamics are not too dissimilar to “classical” operations. Instead of discrete bodies of troops, large concentrations break through the enemy line, work around the flanks of his major positions, attack his logistics, and cut off his retreat. It is only during the initial phase that things differ markedly from the classical model: operational planning consists less of movement than of synchronizing tactical engagements to effect a break-in.

When logistics can meet, but not exceed, these high demands, movement of the front grinds to a halt. The classic example is the Western Front in World War I: rail lines fed the artillery’s prodigious appetite for ammunition, but armies lacked the capacity to push beyond the railheads to exploit breaches in the enemy’s lines. As already mentioned, very similar dynamics took place in the heavily-fortified northern theater of the War of the Spanish Succession, where rivers and canals played the role of railroads: they could ferry enormous quantities of gunpowder and provisions to the front, but advancing past the enemy’s defensive line usually required taking several adjacent fortresses to secure these avenues. A combination of tactical and logistical limitations likewise shapes Ukraine today: although the nature of the fighting itself is very different from WWI-style trench warfare, similar operational-level dynamics emerge for identical reasons.

The Roman-Persian frontier in Late Antiquity fell somewhere in the middle. The northern plains of Mesopotamia were fertile enough to sustain large concentrations, making it a risky proposition to advance too far into enemy territory without reducing the intervening fortresses, even if smaller armies could still live off the land. Campaigns in this theater therefore consisted mostly of sieges of frontier forts, but allowed some large-scale incursions deeper into enemy territory.

3. The Desolate Frontier

At the opposite end of the spectrum, certain geographies make logistical sustainment difficult no matter what, limiting troop densities by default. Although smaller armies may still be able to conduct complex maneuvers like their better-supplied counterparts, it is harder for them to accomplish anything decisive. The difficulty of keeping fixed positions in supply makes them relatively less important, which in turn makes it difficult to force the opposing army into a major engagement.

Only rarely, as in the Arab-Byzantine frontier from the 7^th to the 10^th centuries, does such a theater become the principal one in a war. At the peak of the Abbasids’ incursions, very large armies indeed crossed the frontier, but the inhospitable country required them to march in dispersed columns and to keep on the move.

Such dynamics are mostly a phenomenon of pre-motorized warfare. Once logistics no longer relied on forage-hungry draft animals, the nature of the country mattered only insofar as it affected mobility. The closest analogue in the modern world is situations where both sides are subject to the tyranny of distance, where transport is a major constraint. This somewhat describes Axis forces operating at the end of their logistical tether in North Africa, where supplies were bottlenecked by the port capacity of Tripoli, and again by the limited number of trucks in the vast distances. Perhaps a better example is the remoter parts of the Eastern Front in that same war: in 1942, Army Group A pursued the Soviet North Caucasian Front into the empty Caucasian Steppe, supported by a wholly inadequate road and rail network.

Constricted Terrain

Geography is not always so cooperative: mountains, forests, and swamps severely restrict cross-country mobility. These types of terrain leave more room for operational maneuver than one might suspect, as even on open ground most operational movement is confined to major roads and rail lines—provided there is a sufficient number of passes/paths, an attacker can usually advance through even the most difficult terrain. But the ground nevertheless does significantly alter the dynamics.

Constricted terrain poses an apparent paradox: it is easy to defend tactically, but difficult to defend operationally. Passing columns are extremely vulnerable to ambushes from concealed positions, but the lack of lateral communications makes it very difficult for the defender to reinforce a sector where the enemy is attacking in strength.

This is especially true when an obstacle is long but narrow, acting more like a river than a theater unto itself. So long as an attacker can conceal which axis he has reinforced, he stands a good chance of breaking through and dislodging the entire defensive line. Frederick the Great was constantly able to break into the Bohemia with several columns marching on converging axes—even if the Habsburgs could successfully defend the principal axis, another Prussian corps would inevitably get through and endanger their rear.

It is also what Rosecrans did in southeastern Tennessee during the Tullahoma Campaign of 1863. His opponent, Confederate general Braxton Bragg, held a 50-km frontage along central Tennessee’s Highland Rim. This was barren country that could not support large concentrations, and Bragg’s 50,000 men were furthermore spread thin guarding four major gaps. Rosecrans feinted toward the western end of Bragg’s line, then broke through in strength further east. This imperiled the rail line to the Confederate base of operations at Tullahoma, and Bragg was only able to squeeze out of the trap because heavy rains slowed the Union advance. Despite his escape, Lincoln called the campaign “the most splendid piece of strategy [i.e. operational art] I know of.”

When mountains or jungles constitute a deep obstacle, it is correspondingly more difficult for the attacker to win a decisive victory. There is no open ground to the immediate rear to exploit, making it correspondingly harder for parallel columns to complete an envelopment. The attacker can only concentrate his forces on nodes where several routes converge—predictable points which the defender can fortify or withdraw from in good time.

This explains Rosecrans’ failure to destroy Bragg in the subsequent Chickamauga Campaign, in which he pursued the Confederates through the much wider Cumberland Plateau to Chattanooga. Crossing 75 km of mountainous terrain in several columns, he was unable to bag any significant concentration of Confederate troops, and was left scrambling to re-concentrate his own army in the face of a Confederate counterattack. The ensuing Battle of Chickamauga was a bloody Union defeat; although only a tactical defeat, not operational—Rosecrans was left holding onto Chattanooga—it precipitated his relief a month later.

Armies can mitigate these disadvantages with specialized units that have better tactical mobility. Japanese jungle fighters were able to outflank one British position after another throughout the Malayan Campaign, and in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, Azerbaijani special forces crossed the mountains to attack Shusha from the rear, disrupting the Armenians’ defenses there. Success in such cases is still highly contingent: in both examples, the attacker faced an unprepared and demoralized enemy, while the Japanese were further aided by the ability to conduct occasional amphibious landings.

Dense and Constricted

These sorts of maneuvers are only practicable with a relative low force density. Above a certain number of troops, however, operational movements resemble more the cumbersome advances of high-density, low-logistical-capacity fronts on flatter terrain. Individual mobility corridors can be defended in strength, exploiting their inherent tactical defensibility to make breakthroughs necessarily slow, leaving the defender enough time to reinforce critical sectors even by circuitous lateral routes.

This was the case in the Italian theater of World War II. The front spanned the entire width of the peninsula, forcing the Allies to fight the length of the Apennines. The Germans occupied the high ground overlooking all mobility corridors to the north, forcing their enemies to painstakingly evict them from one position after another. Despite every advantage in manpower, equipment, and logistics, it took the Allies nearly two full years to break into the northern plains. Korea likewise saw the front shift up and down the mountainous spine of the peninsula from 1951 to 1953.

Likewise, in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, it took the Azerbaijanis five weeks of intense fighting to advance the 45-km straight-line distance from Jabrayil to Shusha—and only with the aid of reinforcements from the stalled northern front.

These dynamics are also shaped by the depth of the obstacle. In the shallower but wider mountains of northern China, Zhili and Fengtian forces stalled out for several weeks in 1924 until the latter managed to break out into the plains below.

When large-scale logistics are not practicable, things usually default to a defensive victory, as attackers rarely wish to risk getting bogged down in major fighting in difficult terrain. This explains the dearth of large-scale fighting in the Alps throughout history—when an attacker unable to overwhelm the relatively small garrisons of mountain fortresses, he usually withdrew.

To do otherwise is to risk the fate of the Ottomans on the Caucasus Front of World War I. Although their Third Army was able to maneuver around Russian positions and appeared on the verge of a crushing envelopment, it could not sustain itself once winter set in, and ended up suffering over 90% casualties—many of which suffered frostbite or froze to death.

Conclusion

The above is only a sketch of the major conditions that shape operational dynamics—there are many other factors at play. Strategic prerogatives exert their own influence, and the list of material factors is far from exhaustive. This nevertheless serves as a useful template for evaluating campaigns and making sense of generals’ decisions. It will be a point of departure for future Dispatches which look more deeply at certain dynamics and individual case studies—including one in the not-too-distant future on the Tullahoma-Chickamauga campaigns mentioned above.

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Medieval Arab writers sometimes used the marketplace itself as a poetic device to describe the crowded give-and-take of actual combat—one wrote of Richard the Lionheart’s advance down the coast during the Third Crusade: “Their troops continued to advance in close order while the market of war was densely thronged.”

Our own expression economy of force implies a need to properly allocate resources as a business might. Economic logic governs all aspects of warfare, and is part of the inspiration for the name of this account.

Yet warfare is also governed by another logic that runs directly contrary. That is the logic of decisiveness: concentrating all available force at a critical time and place; ignoring restraints and straining every nerve to achieve some final victory. This logic recognizes that it is better to lavish resources than to fall short of the objective. This is the logic expressed by Guderian’s saying Klotzen, nicht kleckern—hammer, don’t tap—or realized in the HE race of the infantryman.

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It is not too much of a stretch to say that the tension between these two logics runs through all of warfare.

Attrition and Decision

The competing frameworks largely—but not entirely—align with attrition vs. decision. In a purely attritional contest, strategy can be reduced to an optimization problem: distributing forces to maximize loss ratios. Geographic objectives only count insofar as they can secure a favorable exchange, less the cost to take them. Likewise, in a war that can be decided in a single action, it makes sense to throw everything into the culminating engagement, to leave no reserve whatsoever.

In reality, the contrast is less dramatic. A French victory at Austerlitz was by no means guaranteed to be decisive, while the Germans had a hard time estimating loss ratios in a deliberately attritional battle such as Verdun. The fractal nature of warfare adds to this uncertainty: a crushing victory such as Cannae or Agincourt may be decisive within the scope of a single campaign, but have virtually no strategic impact beyond it.

The Cavalryman vs. the Logistician

Much also depends on the personality of the commander. It is the age-old clash of the cavalryman with the logistician, the field commander with the higher headquarters. Drive on to Egypt, as Rommel did, or secure the Mediterranean supply lines, as Kesselring would have preferred?

A leader like Napoleon favored decisiveness because he was confident that he could win critical battles in the most adverse conditions. Compare that to Louis XIV, who was far more cautious. Delicate court politics compelled him to give high commands to loyal favorites who sometimes made mediocre generals, and to curb the ambitions of his best marshals. He was also sensitive to the perennial vulnerability of France’s northern frontier, inclining him to a fortress strategy that did not lend itself to dramatic victories.

A version of this dilemma even exists at the grand strategic level, such as we see with the US-China rivalry. National power derives from economic strength, which in turn demands efficiency. Yet economic efficiency is an outright liability in strategic competition—something we see now with Western nations outsourcing their industrial bases to China. The uncertainty inherent to any contest is amplified by how much it hinges on the effects of not-yet-invented technology. The coordination problem is more difficult because long-term decisions must be made by planners who do not agree on the basic shape of the problem.

Caution on the Brink

Apprehending the dominating logic of a situation can be difficult; following it to its logical conclusion is another. So bold a commander as Napoleon exhibited great caution in the course of his greatest failure—his invasion of 1812. After failing to trap the Russians at Smolensk, he pressed on past his logistical support in pursuit of his decisive battle. When he finally got it at Borodino—his last chance to destroy the enemy army—he was surprisingly tentative. The emperor rejected Davout’s suggestion of a strong flank attack at the beginning of the battle, and refused to commit the Imperial Guard at the culminating point despite the urgent appeals of his generals, not wishing to risk his last reserve so far into enemy territory.

Whether or not those alternatives would have worked, Napoleon’s uncharacteristic caution guaranteed defeat. His supply situation was simply unworkable, ensuring that an unfavorable correlation of forces got even worse: when he next faced the Russians during the retreat, he was hopelessly outnumbered.

The Opening Gambit

Napoleon’s problem in Russia is an extreme case of the dilemma that faces any combatant at the beginning of a war: try to eliminate the enemy in one stroke, or take a more deliberate approach, securing advantages that can be built upon? The former offers the temptation of a quick and relatively low-cost victory; but if it fails, it risks sacrificing the best troops and equipment, leaving the attacker much worse off in the attritional phase that follows.

This choice was rarely so binary, especially in the modern era—high state capacity makes a loss in the opening battle far less catastrophe. The two logics are not even necessarily mutually antagonistic. After the initial German offensive in France ground to a halt in 1914, they were left occupying lots of high ground that put them in an excellent position for the war of attrition that followed.

The interplay between the two can nevertheless be difficult to fully appreciate. The Germans failed to properly exploit their position of 1914 by going on the defensive in the west, continuing to believe that a decisive victory must be won in that theater—even the Verdun offensive, expressly intended to bleed France out, followed the logic of decision. This delayed their ultimate victory in the east, leaving them unable to concentrate their full forces on the Western Front until after the United States entered the war.

Complex Tradeoffs

The shifting logic between the economic and the decisive can create complex tradeoffs that depend on varying time horizons and outcomes. Operation Barbarossa is a good example of this; and as with Napoleon’s invasion, Smolensk proved a key decision point during an invasion of Russia.

The Battle of Smolensk, which concluded in September 1941, revealed that Soviets reserves were much deeper than German intelligence had originally believed. Moreover, the heavy combat whittled away German front-line strength over the course of that battle, taking an especial toll on the mechanized infantry necessary for fast-moving breakthroughs.

Hitler therefore faced a choice between securing economically-valuable lands in Ukraine and the Caucasus which might shift the balance in a long-term war of attrition, and continuing to press for a quick victory with a drive on Moscow that year (he insisted that Moscow was no more than a geographical point, but his actions suggest he believed otherwise—justified by the city’s role as a political and transportation hub whose loss would seriously disrupt the Soviet war effort). In the end, Hitler attempted to split the difference: he sent a Panzer group to help encircle the Soviet armies around Kiev, securing one of the richest breadbaskets in Europe, then continued the push on Moscow in October.

However, a third option was also available: the reduction of Leningrad. This was not as straightforwardly appealing, as it represented a complex blend of economic and decisive rationales. The biggest bottleneck on German efforts in the first years of the war was not manpower or war production, but available combat power. The rapid advance outstripped supply lines, making it difficult for replacements to reach the front—it was a logistics problem, not a resource problem.

The capture of Leningrad promised to ease that bottleneck. It was the last remaining Soviet naval base in the Baltic, and its reduction would open up shipping routes across that sea while giving the Germans a supply base for Army Group North. That in turn would open up a new axis of advance on Moscow, or at least the northern groupings of Soviet armies. However, capturing the city would itself cost blood and time, as would administering its civilian population and opening the port to supply shipments. That investment would not pay off until the following year, and moreover lay at the opposite end of the front from the economic objectives in the south.

In sum, an attack on Leningrad would require an immediate concentration of forces to take the city, which, even if successful, would represent a cost in the balance of forces in the near term. That might pay off in the medium term by allowing a decisive concentration, but if it failed, Soviet war production would inexorably tilt the balance in the long term. The interplay of conflicting logics across time horizons makes it impossible to gauge whether it would have been worth it (as it happened, Hitler’s decision to blockade the city and starve it into submission tied down considerable German manpower for over two years).

In the Event of Failure

It is very difficult for a leader to fluidly shift between these two logics, especially when that requires cutting losses and pivoting to an entirely new course of action amidst thick fog of war. Much of what characterized the greats such as Napoleon or Frederick was precisely their ability to manage this emotional rollercoaster most of the time.

There is no reliable way to discern the prevailing logic of a situation—and even when the tide is shifting, one is always tempted to hold out hope that a gambit will pay off. This underscores the importance of careful preparation: developing a thorough estimate of the situation; evaluating the tradeoffs among different eventualities and judging how to balance them; carefully setting phase lines, decision points, and branch plans; constantly updating the initial estimate and reevaluating assumptions; and being willing to fully act on one’s judgment.

As always, there is no substitute for knowing lots and thinking hard.

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The great siege of 717-18 represented a high-water mark of early Islamic expansion, the closest any Muslim army came to taking Constantinople until the Ottoman Turks seven centuries later. Despite its failure, the Umayyad Caliphate kept up the pressure over the next three decades with a series of aggressive near-annual raids. This long offensive masked deeper problems among the Umayyads, however, who in 750 were swept aside by a new dynasty: the Abbasids.

The Caliphate reached its apogee under Abbasid rule from Baghdad. Although their territory was not as extensive—Spain and North Africa fell away—they were richer and militarily stronger, and continued to push their borders eastward into Central Asia. Along the Byzantine frontier, the Abbasids continued their predecessors’ strategy of regular cross-border raids paired with occasional deep incursions into Anatolia.

But Byzantium was also growing stronger, having recovered somewhat from the shocks of the previous century. Its economy adjusted to the loss of Syria, Egypt, and North Africa, and the Anatolian frontier grew more resilient against hostile incursions, while the state bureaucracy got better at employing the empire’s diminished resources. Finally, the army learned to fight this new enemy, developing techniques to blunt the effectiveness of their incursions.

This changed the balance of power in the Abbasid period. While the Islamic Caliphate remained measurably stronger than their Christian opponents, their relative advantage diminished. And if Byzantine adaptations did not by themselves improve the empire’s material conditions, they lay the groundwork for an economic turnaround following the Umayyad collapse, when the population grew, settlement patterns expanded, and trade and agricultural output both increased.

Part 1 of this series looked at the first century of the Arab-Byzantine wars from the perspective of strategy. It gave particular emphasis to the Arab side of things—whereas Byzantine strategy was focused above all on survival and damage mitigation, Arab objectives varied considerably according to immediate circumstances and the wider political situation.

This installment, which covers the second century of the conflict, also examines Arab strategy, considering how it changed in an age when outright conquest was mostly out of reach—the Abbasids never managed to lay siege to Constantinople—but when that potential still guided both sides’ decision-making. But the main focus shifts to the Byzantines, who were getting better at deflecting the blows aimed their way. It looks less at strategy itself, and more at how they effected it—namely, their operational art. We start to see certain techniques used in combination to blunt Arab offensives.

The origins of this method undoubtedly lay in the first century of the wars, but its evolution is invisible to us, hidden by the silence of our sources. But we see an undeniable strategic coherence guiding Byzantine operational art, which was refined and systematized into formal doctrine in the final phase of the conflict (to be covered in Part 3). They learned to frustrate Arab offensives effectively enough that they could not just survive, but grow; this lay the foundation for their own revival even as the Abbasid threat collapsed under its own weight, torn apart by the same combination of centrifugal forces and internal conflicts that overcame their predecessors.

Constantine V

We left off in the previous piece with the succession of Constantine V to the throne in 741. His father, Leo III, had had a long and successful reign: he defended Constantinople during the great siege of 717-18 then fended off a storm of Arab incursions over the following three decades, personally leading the army to victory at Akroinon in 740. This final action of Leo’s reign broke, but did not quite end, the last great Umayyad offensive.

No sooner had Constantine been installed as emperor than he faced a challenger to his rule. Artavasdos had been one of his father’s most trusted lieutenants: as commanding general of the Armeniacs theme, he had aided Leo’s usurpation in 717, and continued to serve him in high civil and military office. Leo further rewarded his friend by giving him a daughter in marriage, which gave Artavasdos influence within the imperial family. He also enjoyed support from much of Constantinople’s aristocracy, owing to his stance in an ongoing religious dispute.1

In the summer of 742, Constantine marched out to press home the advantage against the Arabs and establish his credibility as newly-enthroned emperor. When he reached the Anatolian plateau, Artavasdos assembled his own thematic troops across the emperor’s line of communication and attacked, forcing Constantine to take refuge in Amorion. Artavasdos was proclaimed emperor by his troops, and after spreading the rumor that Constantine had been killed, entered Constantinople in triumph. There followed two years of civil war as Constantine gathered provincial troops and eventually laid siege to Constantinople, taking it at the end of 744.

The Umayyads exploited this to raid Anatolia, which had been left bare of provincial troops. They too were soon wracked by domestic strife, however: the same year that Constantine returned to power, the ruling caliph was assassinated, setting off another round of civil war—the Third Fitna. Even as Byzantium was beginning to recover, reconsolidating around a core of lands in the Balkans and Anatolia, the Caliphate had expanded well beyond what could be centrally controlled: it faced problems on its distant frontiers even as internal tensions mounted.

This was a boon to Constantine. Despite the inauspicious start to his reign, he was able to go on the offensive for the first time in two generations. He had recently reformed the army in response to Artavasdos’ revolt: recognizing the danger of strong provincial armies, he transformed the imperial bodyguard into a stronger permanent force, which became the core of the imperial army, and reorganized the themes around the capital into smaller units. The imperial army could thereby be reinforced by thematic troops for offensive campaigns, and could in turn support the defense of the themes when called upon.

With this new force, Constantine invaded northern Syria in 746. He captured Marash, razed the walls, expelled the Muslims, and resettled its Christian population in Thrace. Byzantine naval power was also on the ascendant: the following year a fleet annihilated an Arab force at harbor in Cyprus.

Abbasid Revolution

A winner was meanwhile emerging from the Arab civil war. The Abbasids, an influential Arab clan, leveraged discontent within the eastern Islamic lands to content Damascus’ rule, and in 750 gained control of the Caliphate. They established the seat of their dynasty in Iraq, where a few years later they founded their new capital of Baghdad.

Although the Abbasids would soon concentrate their energies against Byzantium, Constantine was able to maintain the initiative during the chaos of their early years. In 751, he campaigned in the narrow plains between the Taurus and Anti-Taurus Mountains, where he captured Melitene (modern Malatya), marching off with prisoners and loot after razing its walls. Four years later he did the same to Theodosiopolis (modern Erzurum) in the Armenian highlands.

Like his earlier sack of Marash, these were not campaigns of conquest. Rather, Constantine was adopting the Arab strategy of destroying enemy frontier fortifications and depopulating the region, making it vulnerable to further raids. All throughout these years, the Arabs of Syria launched raids of their own into Anatolia—the war was assuming the character of two-way devastation. The two sides agreed to a truce in 757, giving them freedom to take care of pressing demands elsewhere: the Abbasids to consolidate their rule, the emperor to turn to matters in Europe

The Grand Strategic Picture

Asia Minor was the most important theater for the Byzantines, but not the only one. In the Balkans, the Bulgars had been expanding from their heartland around the Danube and began making inroads into Thrace.

Italy was a third major theater: although Constantinople still controlled large area around Rome, enclaves along the coast, and all of Sicily, they were steadily losing ground to the Lombards, a Germanic people that had invaded the peninsula in the 6^th century.

Constantine had to prioritize his efforts between the two, and spent the remaining two decades of his reign focused on the Bulgars—their presence near the capital made them the far greater threat. His resettlement of Christian populations from Marash and Melitene in the Balkans was designed to support garrisons along the frontier, and he was soon able to take the offensive. These campaigns met with mixed success, but the frontier settled along the Balkan Mountains, which run across the northern third of modern Bulgaria.

The Arab-Byzantine truce ended after just a few years, and the Arabs took advantage of the war in Bulgaria to launch semi-regular raids across the Anatolian frontier. Their biggest success came in 770, when they took a border fortress in Cilicia and sacked Laodicea in Cappadocia. This period shows how the Bulgarians could play the part of spoiler: although they never seriously threatened Constantinople itself, their proximity often distracted emperors at inopportune moments.

The Balance of Power

The fighting picked up after 775, which saw a double changing of the guard. Both Constantine V and Caliph Mansur died that year, succeeded by their sons Leo IV and Mahdi. As new rulers, each had a strong incentive to establish his credibility against his greatest foe. Mahdi struck first, with an expedition in 776 that reached as far as Ancyra. Leo was not able to put together a response until 778. Both sides prepared expeditions that summer, but the Byzantines got underway first. They crossed into northern Syria where the enemy was still assembling and inflicted a defeat, spoiling Muslim plans.

Mahdi retaliated with a major incursion the following summer. This raid of 779 furnishes us with our first clear account of the Byzantine operational methods that would later be enshrined in doctrine. A very strong Arab force reached as far as Dorylaeum in western Anatolia. Leo, unprepared to meet the onslaught head-on, sought to evict it by other means. He ordered his thematic generals to strongly garrison all the fortresses in the region, bringing in all the food and fodder they could and burning the rest. He then detailed some 3,000 soldiers—most likely entirely cavalry—to shadow the invaders.

Although only a fraction the size of the enemy (who brought 30,000 regular soldiers plus a large number of volunteers), this corps had a disproportionate effect. By threatening to fall upon any isolated detachments or foraging parties, it forced the Arabs to remain concentrated; yet so large a concentration could not long remain static in arid country which had been stripped of what little it had. After two weeks, the Arabs began their retreat to the frontier. They tried to seize Amorion on the way back, but were quickly dissuaded by its strong garrison and left Anatolia empty-handed.

Both Byzantine and Muslim sources comment on the details of this campaign—one of the latter makes the unusual remark that the invaders neither captured any fortresses nor encountered an army, suggesting that Leo’s strategy was indeed something novel. It was to be a template for Byzantine defensive strategy in the following two centuries.

Harun al-Rashid

As if to compensate for this failure, the Arabs set themselves much less ambitious objectives the following year, capturing a fortress in the mountains near the Cilician Gates. This was led by Mahdi’s son Harun—known to future generations as Harun al-Rashid, whose reign witnessed the height of Abbasid splendor and was semi-mythologized in the Arabian Nights. This modest success was intended to establish his military reputation and prepare the way for his rule.

It was followed in 782 by an expedition on an altogether larger scale. Harun led an enormous army into Anatolia, perhaps the largest yet—one chronicler gives the extremely precise number of 95,793 men. The Caliphate was at peace on all other frontiers, and could draw volunteer warriors from a vast area—the chronicles enumerate the enormous quantities of coin that Harun brought with him to pay his soldiers.

The timing could not have been worse for Byzantium. The immediate cause for the expedition was domestic strife that the Abbasids hoped to exploit. Leo had died in 780, and his widow Irene deposed packed their son Constantine VI off to a monastery, assuming direct rule herself. This by itself did not set back its military capacity—in 781, a force headed off an Arab raiding party at a mountain pass, preventing them from penetrating Anatolia. But a general she had appointed to command in Sicily proved disloyal, and she dispatched a large expedition to bring the traitor to heel.

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Saladin the Strategist examines the eponymous general’s military career, from his first campaigns through the Battle of Hattin and his showdown with Richard the Lionheart. It explores the lessons he learned in his early years, his adaptation to failure, and the development of his operational art leading up to the most lopsided battle in recorded history. Written from the perspective of a command staff, it is a study in decision-making in medieval warfare.

For more on the book, here is my interview with History in Story.

The Art of War in Italy, 1494-1529 is a critical edition of F.L. Taylor’s classic study of the birth of modern combined-arms warfare. Italy was the laboratory for Europe as French, Spanish, German, and Italian armies underwent dramatic transformations in a 35-year period of intense warfare. Written by a veteran of the equally-transformative First World War, this volume examines the changes to infantry, cavalry, artillery, siegecraft, tactics, and strategy in the gunpowder era. It is an excellent introduction to the Italian Wars in particular and to the pike-and-shot era more generally, and stands as an excellent case study in the evolution of combined arms writ-large.

You can read the introduction here, which gives more background on the author’s experience of WWI and how that shaped his understanding. Paid subscribers also receive a free pdf of the book, in addition to access to all monthly long-form pieces.

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For subscribers, Part 2 on the Arab-Byzantines wars will be out very shortly.

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The theory of comparative advantage says otherwise. Labor and capital are limited resources. They are also largely immobile, whereas finished goods are highly mobile. Producers must therefore compete for market share with international rivals in the same sector, and also with domestic producers in other sectors for labor and capital.

An example. If English clothmakers are more efficient than both Portuguese clothmakers and English winemakers—that is to say, if they have both an absolute and a comparative advantage—then English entrepreneurs will naturally favor clothmaking over wine. Would-be Thames valley vintners will get a greater profit by converting their riverfront property into textile mills.

What is more interesting is how Portuguese winemakers also benefit from this. Even if they are less efficient than their competitors in England, so long as they are more efficient than Portuguese clothmakers—meaning they have a comparative advantage, but not an absolute advantage—then they can make the best use of Portuguese labor and capital. Portugal can therefore export wine to England in exchange for cloth. English vineyards, which have to compete with the domestic textile industry for labor, are undercut by Portuguese producers and driven out of business.

These dynamics help explain industrial patterns in the later 20^th century, as developed economies continued to dominate more sophisticated manufacturing while textile manufacturing moved to poorer countries. Measured just in terms of man-hours, the first world remained far more efficient at producing both, but fierce domestic competition drove up labor costs to the point that it became unprofitable to manufacture low-end goods at home.

The Marketplace of War

There are many analogues between economists’ idealized models of perfect competition and the ruthless competition of flesh-and-blood warfare. This is most apparent in asymmetric warfare. Terrorism and insurgencies work by exploiting their comparative advantage in low-level attacks and intelligence gathering. Although first-world militaries are far better at these tasks—this much is evident from greatly skewed body count ratios alone—they are far better off investing in technology and advanced training. For the insurgents’ part, even supposing they could acquire more advanced equipment, it would be far too expensive to acquire them in sufficient numbers to be tactically effective (hence the Afghan phenomenon of warlords collecting “prestige weapons” that were rarely risked in combat).

This logic also applies to peer warfare, and neatly explains Soviet maritime strategy. Throughout the Cold War, the US had an absolute advantage in quality of both surface and subsurface vessels. But whereas any surface fleet would have been swept from the ocean relatively quickly, submarines had the potential to be far more effective. The Soviets consequently exploited this comparative advantage in submarines and built many more than the US, which exploited its own advantage in airpower to build more carriers.

War is not merely an optimization problem, of course. Even when distinct advantages tilt the balance in a certain direction, the synergies of jointness and combined arms require a broad range of assets; and even when those synergies are absent, there still remain certain tasks that can only be performed by a certain asset type—militaries must be far more “diversified” than a simplistic model would suggest (as are, in fact, real-world economies). Hence, America pioneered nuclear submarines, while the Soviets eventually built a substantial surface fleet.

The Optimization Trap

But what if things circumstances change all of a sudden, leaving a country with an entire industrial defense base unsuited for new conditions? This is behind the dynamics described at the end of last piece: when one arm or service proves to be especially effective, militaries come to depend on it too much. American airpower is a conspicuous example. This capability, developed in response to late Soviet armored superiority, and which proved its worth over Iraq in 1991, would be a positive liability in a future war if the United States were unable to gain air superiority.

(Reliance on airpower is also cited as a reason for America’s failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam, but that is mere blame-shifting. Whatever the weaknesses of US counterinsurgency, none of these conflicts were in any sense a military defeat: in all three, American leaders failed to appreciate the political question, either inadequately addressing it or setting completely unrealistic goals.)

Ukraine is an apt illustration, where capable IADS have prevented either side from gaining air superiority. If American forces were in similar straits fighting China, they would be hard-pressed to compensate via other means. Most discussion therefore focuses on the need to rebuild the defense base to a level that can produce at scale. But it is also worth looking at how these dynamics can play out when resources remain constrained.

Entrenched Tactics

Overdependence on a single arm was a problem as far back as the Middle Ages, when most Western European armies were built around a core of heavy cavalry. There were many reasons for this: social structure favoring a semi-professional warrior class, the relative difficulty of training effective infantry, the tactical advantage that European metalworking conferred to armored knights, the particular geography of Western Europe, etc. So powerful was the charge of European heavy cavalry that many armies were organized entirely around it; tactics and even campaigns were designed to optimize the chances of using it.

This caused problems during the Crusades, when those same armies encountered a very different sort of opponent. The Turkish armies they fought were also highly specialized, built around lightly-armored horse archers. These proved deadly for the more cumbersome Western armies, which had trouble coming to close quarters with the mobile Turks, especially on the open plains of Syria and Mesopotamia. Clouds of mounted archers could swirl around Crusader marching columns, dispersing in the face of a charge and reforming to counterattack until the Christians were completely worn down. Against this, what could the Crusaders do?

The natural solution would have been for Crusaders to adapt light cavalry tactics of their own. And indeed, they hired many local horsemen as auxiliaries, but these could only help on the margins, not produce the highly-competent and motivated cavalry that Crusading warfare required.

Unlike modern militaries, medieval armies had no centralized training. Feudal levies were raised from the semi-professional warrior class, which was taught how to fight by their local lords. Knightly combat, characterized by heavy mounts, armor, and massed lance charges, was moreover a class signifier, which the feudal aristocracy which commanded armies was loath to abandon. Force structure was therefore a product of the wider culture, not a result of accumulated bureaucratic decisions, yet the effect was the same.

This meant that adaptation had to come at other levels of war—mostly the higher tactical and operational. Crusader armies adopted highly-disciplined march formations: hollow rectangles of infantry which sheltered the cavalry from enemy arrows. Spearmen in the outside line formed a solid wall, while archers and crossbowmen shot back at enemy cavalry. If the pressure got too intense, the knights would charge out through friendly lines and drive the enemy back. (This likely did require additional training, especially for Crusader infantry, which appears to have been better trained than their cousins back in Europe).

This could only frustrate Turkish tactics, not deliver victories. But it allowed them to safely execute limited marches between castles or fortified camps, giving them flexibility to develop things at the operational level for an attack.1 Even then, it remained difficult to take the offensive at either the tactical or operational level—all the more so since they lacked the resources to endure a heavy loss. Their strategy accordingly became increasingly defensive: they relied on their own cohesion, reinforced by the existential threat they faced, to outlast the unity of the Muslim world, which faced strong centrifugal forces. As it happened, this did not work: Saladin was able to keep his empire united long enough to annihilate the Crusader army at Hattin and contain the ensuing counteroffensive of the Third Crusade.

This pattern is evident everywhere in all time periods: deadlock in one area shifts competition to other levels and domains. The higher and wider this goes, the more costly it ultimately proves. The Crusades as a whole were an enormous mobilization of resources: two centuries during which countries from all over Western Europe and the Islamic world poured resources and manpower into a narrow strip along the Mediterranean’s eastern shore. Even larger were the Arab-Byzantine wars, fought for three centuries without any major strategic victories, until Arab strength fractured under the growing weight of Byzantine power. Modern warfare compensates for shorter duration with much greater intensity: World War I is the archetype of a tactical and operational stalemate causing both sides to deliberately try to bleed the other out.

Shifting the Playing Field

The combination of rapid technological change with heavily-entrenched tactical systems makes modern warfare more uncertain than ever before. It is impossible to tell whether an existing comparative advantage will simply disappear: 2022 showed that masses of armor could no longer simply punch through a capable defense. Although Russia has had enough of a resource advantage to keep the war going, it has been unable to restructure its forces mid-war to effect a breakthrough—pushing the conflict into the realm of strategic attrition.

In general, the more entrenched a country’s tactics are—whether because of legacy equipment, limited industrial capacity, or cultural reasons—the harder it is to adapt. The natural response, then, is to look straight to those other levels and domains from the outset.

When it comes to China and Taiwan, this is why many American defense analysts recommend not trying to actively contest an invasion: better to simply give Taiwan the weapons it needs to hold out (porcupine strategy) and impose a distant blockade on China, hoping to choke off its energy and food supply before an invasion can succeed. Likewise, many raise the possibility that China could blockade Taiwan until it capitulates, rather than risk a difficult and costly amphibious assault.

This does not preclude advancements at the tactical level—China continues to develop its amphibious capabilities while America looks to counter them. But the greater the complexity of a tactical system, the more inflexible it is once the missiles begin to fly. That makes it a practical necessity for planners to expand their operational and strategic capabilities well beyond the bounds of an envisaged conflict.

Thank you for reading The Bazaar of War, please like and share to help others find it. A lot of time and research goes into creating these pieces — you can help support with a paid subscription.

This gives you access to monthly long-form exclusives which examine the deeper dynamics behind selected historical episodes (preview them here). You also receive the critical edition of the classic The Art of War in Italy: 1494-1529.

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The same held true at higher levels of war. J.E.B. Stuart served as Robert E. Lee’s eyes and ears, giving him critical intelligence for his bold maneuvers; yet Stuart’s daring ride around the Union army during the Pennsylvania campaign famously left Lee blind on the eve of Gettysburg. So too on the Union side: Sheridan’s insistence on chasing after Stuart during the Overland Campaign, instead of scouting and screening for the main army, deprived Meade of a superb opportunity to get around the Confederate flank—forestalling Lee’s defeat an entire year.

Modern Cavalry

The cavalier spirit made a remarkably seamless transition to the tank. Rommel and Guderian embodied it better than anyone: their dashing thrusts across northern France in defiance of orders turned what would have otherwise been an impressive victory into a total triumph. There has been much post-hoc analysis that tried to turn this into some kind of “Blitzkrieg doctrine”, but that is to imagine an intellectual edifice in the place of instinctive disposition, as if a Border Collie has a grand plan when it herds sheep.

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This was more obvious on the Eastern Front, where the cavalier instinct often led directly to disaster. Guderian, as one of two Panzer corps commanders in Army Group Center, undermined Bock’s planned double envelopment of three Soviet armies at Smolensk. Unlike Hermann Hoth, the more reliable commander of 2^nd Panzer Group who faithfully played his role as the left pincer, Guderian diverted forces to secure bridges for the drive on Moscow before completing the encirclement; this made the eventual German victory much costlier and allowed many Soviet troops to escape.

Rommel, too, kept pushing on and on across North Africa, stretching his lines of the support to the breaking point instead of pulling back to consolidate. He was not completely blind to higher strategy—he acknowledged the importance of taking Malta in order to hold the Axis position in Africa—but whenever faced with a choice between the two, he always broke in favor of chasing one more victory instead of consolidating.

Interarm and Interservice Cooperation

Clash of opposing temperaments have always been an inherent part of combined-arms warfare. If cavalrymen are far more aggressive than the infantry, infantry commanders are similarly maddened by the artillery’s comparative caution. So too with joint warfare: in amphibious operations, squadron commanders’ concern for their expensive and fragile vessels makes them anxious about the weather, tides, and enemy—too anxious, in many a ground commander’s eyes.

That is not to say that the only difference between arms and components is in tolerance for risk. A cavalryman favors a fast and aggressive approach because cavalry is particularly suited to such attacks; what an infantry or artillery commander favors in a given situation depends on how they can best be employed. Everyone wants a chance to use the weapon in his hands; no one wants to be stuck guarding an unimportant flank during the main attack.

At its worst, this tension can lead to completely divergent objectives, like the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy in World War II. Instead of pursuing mutually-supporting operations, the Army threw its efforts into China while the Navy fought a separate war in the Pacific. The task of a joint or combined-arms commander is therefore to corral his subordinates’ natural dispositions toward a larger objective.

In the United States, these difficulties prompted examination of the institutional barriers to joint cooperation. The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act took operational authority away from service chiefs, giving it instead to designated joint theater commanders who reported directly to the Secretary of Defense. The intent was to make them less likely to fall prone to their own service’s particular biases and avoid the breakdown in interservice cooperation that had bedeviled joint task forces in the past. The Gulf War in 1991 was the first real test of this concept, and its stunning success validated by every measure.

What is more interesting is how it won that victory. A successful joint campaign is not a compromise among the various components; far more often, one of the available choices is the correct one. During the planning for Desert Storm, the different services advocated radically different courses of action, like hounds pulling their owner in three separate directions. The Army envisioned a large-scale ground invasion of Kuwait. The Air Force suggested a prolonged bombardment. Some in the Navy and Marine Corps even favored an amphibious landing.

The Air Force’s plan was the correct one, and by no small margin: the six-week air campaign eviscerated the Iraqi army and spared the coalition many casualties. To be sure, the other services had some influence on the final plan— an amphibious demonstration tied down several Iraqi divisions and a ground invasion delivered the coup de grâce—but these were mere adjuncts to what was fundamentally an Air Force plan.

The concept of operations was only the starting point, however; a study of the detailed planning and execution that followed gives us a more fraternal impression of interservice relations. This was only possible because the separate components already had a high degree of interoperability, which included the beginnings of a joint doctrine. Command over Air Force, Navy, and Marine aviation was exercised by a Joint Force Air Component Command, separate from their individual service hierarchies.

The degree of jointness has only increased in the decades since. Joint doctrine has been further articulated, while systems acquisition has placed a heavy emphasis on interoperability. Serving in joint billets is now an important part of officers’ career progression, and, following the example of Desert Storm, operational command of all combat forces is exercised by domain-specific commands—air, ground, and maritime (and eventually, perhaps, cyber).

Hybrid Torpor

It is tempting to view this as an inevitable progression toward the seamless integration of military capabilities. The increasing jointness and interarm cooperation at lower and lower levels, combined with the natural centralization of control that technology enables, gives the joint commander ever more influence over the tools he wields. Doctrine and concepts could be developed entirely jointly, while individual arms and services are relegated to the role of mere force providers.

Even if that were possible, it would hardly be desirable. Desert Storm was successful precisely because the Air Force vigorously advocated for its own distinct style of fighting at the expense of other services’ preferences. If it were treated as a mere force provider, it would lose the driving ethos which guides their training and tactical development. Breeding a herding dog with a hunting dog produces offspring that can neither herd nor hunt; it is likewise impossible to have good cavalry without the cavalier’s spirit.

If this leads to occasionally imperfect alignment between a commander and his various subordinate arms, services, and components, it is also a source of creative tension—“better a subordinate who has to be reined in than prodded forward.” There is no straightforward organizational solution to managing this tension; only human judgment can find the balance between giving his forces reckless independence and stifling their initiative.

Yet there is another subtler and longer-term balance that must be maintained: that between components. When a command comes to rely too much on one, the others begin to wither—this has arguably been the case with American air power since 1991, just as it was with French artillery after 1918 or heavy cavalry in the Middle Ages. The next piece will look at the longer-term balance among components.

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Strategy, as a Westerner would understand it, instead consisted of series of regular raids designed to compel capitulation: to force the enemy tribe to pay tribute, make some more symbolic performance of obeisance, or abandon their hunting grounds altogether.

There is an obvious comparison to the endemic warfare that existed among nomadic tribes of the Eurasian steppe, which can be extended to their relations with sedentary neighbors—Imperial China, Russia, and Persia all come to mind. The nomads followed a similar strategy: through constant raiding, they could gain pastureland by forcing their neighbors to abandon their farms along the border, or force the imperial capital to pay tribute in return for peace. Only in very rare cases such as the Mongols could they subdue a state outright; and even, their campaigns of conquest were preceded by years of regular raids.

But similar dynamics also existed between sedentary societies. Premodern empires often existed in a semi-permanent state of war with their neighbors: low-grade raiding and counterraiding by border troops, punctuated by occasional large-scale operations or truces. Although territory could and did change hands, there was far less chance of a catastrophic defeat or victory between powers of sufficient size.

Such was the state of affairs that existed between Byzantium and various Arab powers for over 300 years. From the time of the first Islamic conquests until the Byzantines finally pacified the border area in the 10^th century, warfare predominantly consisted of raids on an occasionally enormous scale. The intensity of the fighting ebbed and flowed, punctuated by occasional truces, but any peace was only temporary; for the better part of those three centuries, war was the rule, not the exception.

Strategy on an Open Frontier

This raises the question of how political leaders viewed strategy in these wars. This is not as obvious as it might seem. The Arabs’ ultimate aim was nothing short of Constantinople itself. The magnificent capital of the Roman Empire’s eastern remnant held a particular significance for Muslim ghazis. It was the seat of the greatest empire of late antiquity, and its conquest would destroy the only remaining state that could seriously challenge Muslim power—according to one hadith, the first soldier to enter its walls would automatically be granted admission to paradise.

But the capital was distant—400 miles as the crow flies from the mountainous border—and the intervening highlands of Asia Minor were not conducive to territorial conquest. Low population densities made it hard to sustain several large garrisons through winter months, for which the Arabs may well have lacked the manpower in the first place. With no real intermediate objectives that could serve as a springboard to their ultimate goal, the Arabs gradually adopted a two-pronged strategy: to lunge for Constantinople when circumstances were favorable, and otherwise to raid enemy territory year after year.

These annual raids were major undertakings, composed of ghazis from all over the Islamic world. A commander who was successful in one expedition would attract even more warriors to his banner in the future, drawn by the anticipation of loot and glory; this in turn increased the commander’s clout within the fractious politics of early Islam.

It was this combination of personal motivations with higher strategy that strongly resembled Eastern Woodlands warfare. However self-interested individual commanders might be, the cumulative effect of their actions served political leaders’ strategic interests: attritting the enemy over time, and occasionally forcing them to pay tribute during truces.

Yet there were also crucial differences. Constant depredations might force the local peasantry to vacate their land, just as Indian tribes could force rivals to abandon their traditional hunting grounds, but unlike hunting grounds, land on the frontier had little value in itself—at best this strategy of devastation eased the passage of future expeditions. The religious dimension of the conflict also expanded its scope. The Arabs could not be satisfied with even the most favorable peace short of complete submission, making the war an all-or-nothing affair with Constantinople as the ultimate prize.

Byzantine strategy was far more defensive-minded. The much-reduced Eastern Roman Empire was in desperate straits throughout the first two centuries of this period, under severe pressure from all directions—mere survival was the goal. Its military culture was more centralized and less tribal than the Arabs, their strategic objectives were paradoxically more similar to the Native Americans: defeating incursions while launching counterraids of their own to win much-needed truces and occasional tribute payment from the Arabs.

The Byzantines were ultimately able to go on the offensive and win a complete victory. But their triumph was a product of endurance, of maintaining cohesion through the worst of the tempest and gradually recovering their strength while their enemies crumbled. And when they did finally win in the 10^th century, it was a victory of a very conventional sort, won by marching into enemy territory and sacking his cities. The Arab-Byzantine wars thus represent a fascinating superposition of familiar interstate dynamics and a completely alien style of warfare.

Many of the details of the earliest centuries are lost to us. They were a dark age in every sense: chaotic, violent, and mostly lost to the light of history. Our best sources were not even written until the 9^th century, and they present often confused and contradictory accounts. Nevertheless, we can see clearly enough the strategic logic that governed both sides throughout the entire span of the wars. This piece will examine the dynamics established in the first century of the wars, while Part 2 will look the operational art employed in later centuries, a period for which we have more detail.

A New Enemy

The eruption of Islam out of Arabia came on the heels of the most destructive conflict of late antiquity. Between 602 and 628, the Eastern Roman Empire and Sassanian Persia fought a war that sprawled across the Near East. The Persians held the upper hand for most of that span, overrunning Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia, while even participating in the Avar siege of Constantinople (the Avars were a tribal confederation from the trans-Danubian steppe).

The Romans ultimately emerged victorious, but by that time both empires were exhausted. Their lands had been devastated, treasuries emptied, and armies blunted. Mesopotamia was hard hit by a nasty outbreak of the plague in the last year of the war. Neither was prepared to meet the armies of a self-proclaimed prophet who was then consolidating power among the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula.

The first sign of trouble came immediately after the war’s end. A Muslim war band was sent to Syria in 629, but was defeated by Roman forces east of the River Jordan. More expeditions followed Mohammad’s death in 632, when a new Caliph—leader of all Muslims—sent probing armies into Syria and Mesopotamia. They increased their efforts as they won several battles in both theaters, culminating in two crushing victories in 636: at the Yarmouk, an eastern tributary of the River Jordan, where they destroyed a very large Roman force, and at Qadisiyyah in Iraq, where they defeated an army guarding the approaches to the Persian capital.

Roman losses at the Yarmouk were especially bad, compelling them to withdraw their field army to the more defensible line of the Taurus Mountains—the garrisons of northern Syria were left to fend for themselves. That same year the Arabs took Aleppo and Antioch, the two great metropolises of northern Syria, and the following year conquered up to the southern foothills of the Taurus.

Geography of the Borderlands

The Taurus Mountains stood at the center of what became the Arab-Byzantine frontier, separating the highlands of Anatolia and Armenia from the plains of Syria and Mesopotamia. Anatolia was Byzantium’s defensive redoubt over the next few centuries, occupying the western two-thirds of modern Asiatic Turkey. Although the surrounding coastal lowlands are very fertile, the vast interior plateau is a high semi-desert, suitable for grazing but only limited agriculture. Turkey’s eastern third, which is considerably more mountainous, was the heartland of classical Armenia—by this point a geographical term, not a political one, as Armenia had long since been partitioned between the Roman and Sassanian Empires.

The Taurus Mountains hug the southern coast of Anatolia, jagging northeast just short of where it meets the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. From there, the mountains follow a thousand-kilometer arc, turning southeast along their final stretch to join the Zagros Mountains (which run along Iran’s modern border with Turkey and Iraq).

At the western end of this arc, where the mountains separate from the shore at the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean, is a region called Cilicia. This was one of the most agriculturally-productive regions in the empire (as it remains today), partitioned from the northern Syrian plains by the north-south-running Amanus Mountains. The sections of the Taurus Mountains around Cilicia are the highest of the entire range, and can be crossed at only a few passes.

East of Cilicia, the Taurus mountains are much lower and easier to cross, with several river valleys, including the Euphrates, cutting through them. Beyond them, however, the Anti-Taurus Mountains run in a parallel arc from Cilicia all the way to Mount Ararat, forming a second barrier between Syria and the Anatolian plateau. The Anti-Taurus are not a single ridgeline, but rather a jumble of interlocking ranges; although a number of passes run through them, they made the eastern routes into the Byzantine heartland circuitous and difficult.

Early Incursions

The Arabs did not begin probing the line of the Taurus until the 640s, and even then fighting elsewhere dominated their attention. They were still preoccupied with the Sassanians in Iraq, who soon began launching counterattacks from their own redoubt beyond the Zagros Mountains. In 640, an Arab army crossed the Euphrates to conquer Roman Mesopotamia, while another began the conquest of Egypt. Constantinople sent an expedition to Alexandria late in 645 which tried pushing up the Nile Delta, but it was forced back the following year after tough fighting. With Egypt secure, Arab forces began pushing into North Africa.

Nevertheless, there were some large-scale raids north of the mountains. The Muslim governor of Syria, named Mu’awiyah, began launching raids in the 640s, and would eventually prove one of the Byzantines’ most dangerous antagonists. The first of these, in 641, reached the Amasia in northern Anatolia. Another expedition in 644 forced the town of Caesarea to pay tribute, then devastated the country around Amorion in western Anatolia.

A second expedition to Amorion in 646 gives some indication of how dire the Byzantines’ military situation had gotten. As the army passed through Cilicia en route to Anatolia, it discovered that all the border fortifications in the Amanus Mountains and Cilicia itself had been abandoned; after the expedition safely returned, these were destroyed. A final raid in 649 or 650 struck southwestern Anatolia, carrying off thousands of captives and plentiful loot. The mere fact that armies were able to penetrate so deep, seemingly at will, indicated that the Byzantines were desperately short of manpower and cash.

The Arabs’ other major objective was Armenia. An excursion in 641 reached a pass over the eastern Taurus range, but the first serious raid came in 642, penetrating deep into the highlands. Several more raids were launched over the next few years, from both Mesopotamia to the south and the Iranian plateau to the east.

This proved even more challenging for Constantinople. The Armenian highlands were physically distant from the capital and culturally unique, and the mountainous landscape fragmented political control amongst an aristocracy jealous of its independence. The emperor appointed an Armenian patrician, Theodore Rshtuni, to oversee the defense of the region, and occasionally reinforced him imperial troops.

By Land and By Sea

Parallel to the raids across Anatolia were raids off its coast. Egypt had been an important naval base, and its conquest had furnished the Caliphate with a large fleet. The Byzantine expedition of 645-46 may have alerted the Arabs to the importance of the sea, as they soon began sending out expeditions of their own. In 648 the fleet sailed up to Syria, whence it carried troops across to Cyprus. They devastated the island exacted tribute, then the following season used the fleet to reduce a few coastal holdouts in Syria.

This was paused in 650, when Mu’awiyah agreed to a truce so that the Caliphate could complete its conquest of Persia. The Syrian governor took advantage of the peace to subvert the Armenians (whose precise legal status with regard to the empire is ambiguous). Rshtuni threw off his allegiance to Constantinople and agreed to pay tribute, whereupon the emperor marched out to confront him in 651. This expedition failed to completely subdue the rebels, and Mu’awiyah used it as a pretense to resume the war the following spring.

Muslim arms reached a high-water mark over the next few years. Mu’awiyah sent an army to expel the remaining Byzantine forces from Armenia, bringing the country wholly under his allegiance. Rshtuni’s submission did him no good, however, as a few years later the Arabs took direct control over Armenia and sent the unfortunate prince into captivity in Damascus. In 653 Mu’awiyah led a raid into Anatolia in person which reached as far as the Bosporus, within sight of Constantinople itself. The fleet was also active that year, raiding Rhodes and Crete.

Victories at sea, paired with his glimpse of the splendid Byzantine capital, opened Mu’awiyah’s eyes to the promise of joint operations. Any attempt on Constantinople would require naval support just to reach its walls, which in turn required gaining superiority over the still-powerful Byzantine fleet. This came in 654 or 655, when the Arabs annihilated a Byzantine fleet that had sailed out in strength to confront them. With nothing obstructing either the sea-lanes or the entrances into Anatolia, Mu’awiyah seemed poised to launch a campaign against Constantinople itself.

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Elsewhere I’ve proposed a taxonomy of conflicts that classifies them according to the highest level at which military force can accomplish decisive aims. In large interstate conflicts, the military can achieve strategic outcomes, winning the war outright on its own. Economic warfare, diplomacy, and effective propaganda might augment the effort, but are decidedly secondary to the effective use of arms—this is what we ordinarily think of as full-scale war.

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At the opposite end of the spectrum are the low-level insurgencies in which neither side employs force above the low tactical level: government forces because they can never pin down the enemy, the insurgents because they face suicidal odds. Military force is merely one instrument among many, and far from the most important. The greater part of both the insurgent’s and counterinsurgent’s work lies in building legitimacy and winning popular support; violence is just a means to either delegitimize the government or to deliver security, mere preconditions for their respective goals. The biggest mistake a government can make is to view it primarily as a military matter: “giving the military responsibility for counterinsurgency is as sensical as defining ‘combined arms’ as a task for the artillery.”

Small wars, then, occupy the vast middle between these two poles: conflicts in which military force plays a major role, capable of accomplishing higher tactical or operational aims, but is unable to decide the matter by itself.

Characterizing Small Wars

This definition is admittedly not wholly satisfying. It is rather abstract, resists intuition, and encompasses a wide spectrum of violence—anything from the Vietnam War down to the many colonial wars that were little more than large-scale policing actions.

It is also at least somewhat dependent on circumstance. Vietnam saw extremely heavy fighting that could have been decisive had the US chosen to invade North Vietnam, a decision which only larger political considerations foreclosed. The Sri Lankan civil war ultimately was won through military force, but that was only after a long ceasefire during which the government won over some Tamil leaders, isolated the others from external support, and built up popular support within rebel-controlled areas.

A common thread running through all these examples is their inherent open-endedness. If they by definition exclude the possibility of a decisive military victory, the lower intensity of the fighting also removes the biggest material and political motivators towards a negotiated settlement. Whereas two states usually face strong pressure to find a compromise to end a war that goes on too long, low-level asymmetric conflicts can persist indefinitely.

A major reason for this is that most—although certainly not all—small wars are but single clashes within a wider competition. This is most obvious with proxy wars. The French and American wars in Vietnam and the Soviet war in Afghanistan were ultimately decisive within those country’s respective borders, but were mere episodes within the Cold War. Colonial wars of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, although often decisive against a particular adversary, were often parts of broader pacification campaigns in response to widespread political dissatisfaction (the Herero wars in German Namibia, various uprisings in India).

Even mostly self-contained small wars usually take place amidst irreconcilable domestic disputes. Sri Lanka’s civil war was really four distinct periods of hot conflict amidst a wider period of unrest—very different from America’s full-scale civil war that settled the matter once and for all.

Wars Small and Little

The nature of the fighting in all small wars bears comparison to a very similar term: the “little war” that was a constant feature of warfare in earlier centuries. Little war was not a separate category of conflict, but referred to the regular skirmishing and raiding between large armies in the major wars of the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries.1 It aimed to frustrate enemy preparations, impose friction, and test the enemy’s strength during the lulls in the action.

Little war, like small wars, consisted of mostly low-level combat. Little war, like small wars, only rarely accomplished anything decisive on its own. There is a natural comparison between the operational role of little war to the grand strategic role of small wars, and also of the nature of combat in both.

This comparison only takes us so far, of course—the reverse is not always true. Korea and Ukraine are both examples of proxy wars within the framework of wider geopolitical competition, yet are undeniably full-scale wars. Other periods of protracted competition consisted of wars that were very large in scale—the Habsburg-Valois wars of the 16^th century, for instance, or the wars of Louis XIV.

Yet even so, extended competition seems to invite low-level conflict. The long Habsburg-Ottoman rivalry is more the rule than the examples from Western Europe. The former took place over several centuries and were often mammoth in size, yet the great majority of actual fighting consisted of skirmishing and marauding throughout the Balkan borderlands—much of which happened even during periods of official peace.

So too with the Arab-Israeli wars. Four major conflicts were fought during the quarter century between 1948 and 1973. But the most frequent type of hostilities were border clashes, like the artillery duels on the Golan Heights or War of Attrition along the Suez, or raids by Palestinian insurgents (which didn’t even rise to the level of “small war”).

The next Dispatch for paid subscribers, which will be out later this week, will look at another such period of protracted warfare: the three centuries of Arab-Byzantine wars. In it, we will look at how the strategic priorities of both sides shaped the outbreak of warfare and the nature of the fighting itself.

Thank you for reading the Bazaar of War. Please like and share if you enjoyed, it helps more people find this. You can also support with a paid subscription, supporters receive the critical edition of the classic The Art of War in Italy: 1494-1529 and get access to exclusive pieces.

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Among many reasons for these failures, the piece highlights the lack of coordination at the division and corps levels in these operations. To that end, it proposes the creation of four types of division in the US Army, each organized around a specific function: a recon-strike division to create the initial penetration, an assault division to exploit it, a consolidation division to secure the gains, and a sustainment division to ensure continuity of operations.

Although the piece makes an interesting argument for how operations should be sequenced to achieve effects at tempo, I believe the focus on designing units around function instead of capability also reflects a misguided trend in Western defense circles. This is seen in many proposals for restructuring the US and European militaries, and is already seen in the USMC’s Marine Littoral Regiments.

The attraction is clear enough. Purpose-built units give higher-level commanders off-the-shelf tools to accomplish specific tasks, while giving individual units the opportunity to study the operational problem and gain experience training as a whole. However, there are many even greater downsides. Their design embeds a lot of assumptions that cannot be validated, creating the risk trapping units in dead ends as technology continues to advance at a rapid clip and new needs arise. The MWI piece on breakthrough units, as a clear articulation of a common perspective, presents a good occasion to examine the broader problem.

Breaking the Line

Assuming that a modern ground force can indeed break through a near-peer’s defensive lines without wholly relying on airpower, two difficult questions arise: the scale at which breakthroughs can be accomplished and the balance of forces for each effort. Both are highly variable.

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Tailoring individual divisions to the phases of a breakthrough reduces such an operation to a corps function, to be accomplished either by individually or online with other corps. This is very much akin to the ground campaign in Desert Storm, when VII Corps penetrated Iraqi lines and enveloped enemy forces facing the three corps on its right.

Yet that is just one example. In the second Iraq War, two much smaller corps advanced in parallel through the country, breaking through Iraqi defenses at the division level or below. In 1944, three entire army groups swept across Europe. While the latter involved many corps-sized breakthroughs, it also required the same at other echelons. Optimization at one scale does not necessarily translate to others.

But let us suppose that these objections can be answered. A second difficulty is gauging the proportion of combat power necessary for each phase. This was a problem that vexed Soviet planners in the Second World War. Typically, the initial breakthrough would be created through attacks in one or two echelons, followed by a mobile group (usually a tank formation) which pass through the breach to attack the enemy’s depth. The aim was that the initial attack should be so successful that this exploitation force could glide cleanly through without suffering any delay or loss of momentum fighting through the remnants of enemy defenses.

This was a tricky balancing question. It took lots of trial and error to discover that forward echelons had to be much stronger than the mobile group with comparatively more tanks, while restricting their breakthroughs to a fairly narrow frontage. There was also the question of force composition: the Soviets consistently underestimated the quantity of artillery needed both to effect a penetration and to form a suitable mobile group.

The Limiting Factor

But the biggest problem plaguing the Soviets was straightforward material quantity. Only in the later years of the war did they have sufficient equipment to accomplish the tasks they set for themselves. Anticipating future material requirements in periods of rapid technological change is always difficult. Armies at the beginning of World War I scrambled to increase the number of machine guns and heavy artillery at the front. German divisions underwent a 12-fold increase in the number of machine guns between 1914 and 1918, while the French army increased its total heavy artillery by more than eight times.

The same phenomenon is evident today. Fighting in Ukraine has revealed just how woefully inadequate NATO assumptions were regarding drone requirements, and the rate of ongoing change will no doubt invalidate current estimates by the time of the next big war (to say nothing of the needs of different operating environments). But while both sides in Ukraine have experimented with many different permutations of force structure, force structure itself has been no substitute for quality and quantity of drones. To put it more generally:

Material capacity is the limiting factor, not force structure.

Designing a unit around a specific function is pointless without the right equipment and personnel, whereas a military with the right equipment and personnel can find many workable. Procurement is slow and difficult. It is easy to stand up a drone brigades, but difficult to supply the millions of drones at all echelons needed to fight a major war. It is easy to optimize a Marine Littoral Regiment for a specific problem set, but hard to acquire the missiles, radars, and surface connectors necessary to deny access in the Western Pacific.

Implementing Force

After basic material requirements, there is another fundamental question: how to employ them. Developing effective tactics and techniques for new weapons requires lots of experimentation, which in turn demands a certain flexibility in command relationships.

To use the 1940 example cited in the MWI article, German Panzer divisions went through many iterations in the prewar years. These divisions were not designed for a single specific purpose, however, but rather to make the most effective use of the tools at their disposal. Tanks of the interwar years were imagined in a variety of roles—trench breakers, infantry support vehicles, or as a type of substitute cavalry. Early iterations of the Panzer division envisioned closer cooperation between tanks and infantry, before experimentation showed that radios and motorized supporting units could allow them to maneuver independently.

These general-purpose units were the solid building blocks out of which larger operations were constructed. 1^st Panzer Division, which formed the tip of the spear at Sedan, was not a purpose-built breakthrough unit, but a standard Panzer division reinforced with the requisite infantry, engineers, and artillery to break across the Meuse. It and its sister divisions then continued to develop the exploitation across northern France—their role was not limited to penetration.

So it is with any operation. Every scenario is always unique, and the devil is always in the details. Trying to front-load the planning process by embedding likely scenarios into force structure only ties their hands, and is no substitute for well-trained, well-equipped, versatile units.

Turning an Obstacle into an Advantage

A certain adaptability in command relationships are therefore paramount not just for experimenting with new tactics, but also in the actual conduct of operations. This is a tremendous challenge for all militaries, but presents a great opportunity for those which are quick to embrace it. Interoperable systems, common doctrine across services and arms, and a flexible command culture could prove far more important than attempts to tackle the problem from too far out.

Thank you for reading the Bazaar of War. Please like and share if you enjoyed, it helps more people find this. You can also support with a paid subscription, supporters receive the critical edition of the classic The Art of War in Italy: 1494-1529 and get access to exclusive pieces.

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