Some Principles of Maritime Strategy by Julian Stafford Corbett

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In conclusion, then, we have to note that the matured fruit of the
Napoleonic period was a theory of war based not on the single absolute
idea, but on the dual distinction of Limited and Unlimited. Whatever
practical importance we may attach to the distinction, so much must be
admitted on the clear and emphatic pronouncements of Clausewitz and Jomini.
The practical importance is another matter. It may fairly be argued that in
continental warfare--in spite of the instances quoted by both the classical
writers--it is not very great, for reasons that will appear directly. But
it must be remembered that continental warfare is not the only form in
which great international issues are decided. Standing at the final point
which Clausewitz and Jomini reached, we are indeed only on the threshold of
the subject. We have to begin where they left off and inquire what their
ideas have to tell for the modern conditions of worldwide imperial States,
where the sea becomes a direct and vital factor.

* * * * *

CHAPTER FOUR

LIMITED WAR AND MARITIME EMPIRES--

Development of Clausewitz's and Jomini's
Theory of a Limited Territorial Object, and Its
Application to Modern Imperial Conditions

* * * * *

The German war plans already cited, which were based respectively on the
occupation of Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine, and Jomini's remarks on
Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign serve well to show the point to
which continental strategists have advanced along the road which Clausewitz
was the first to indicate clearly. We have now to consider its application
to modern imperial conditions, and above all where the maritime element
forcibly asserts itself. We shall then see how small that advance has been
compared with its far-reaching effects for a maritime and above all an
insular Power.

It is clear that Clausewitz himself never apprehended the full significance
of his brilliant theory. His outlook was still purely continental, and the
limitations of continental warfare tend to veil the fuller meaning of the
principle he had framed. Had he lived, there is little doubt he would have
worked it out to its logical conclusion, but his death condemned his theory
of limited war to remain in the inchoate condition in which he had left it.

It will be observed, as was natural enough, that all through his work
Clausewitz had in his mind war between two contiguous or at least adjacent
continental States, and a moment's consideration will show that in that
type of war the principle of the limited object can rarely if ever assert
itself in perfect precision. Clausewitz himself put it quite clearly.
Assuming a case where "the overthrow of the enemy"--that is, unlimited
war--is beyond our strength, he points out that we need not therefore
necessarily act on the defensive. Our action may still be positive and
offensive, but the object can be nothing more than "the conquest of part of
the enemy's country." Such a conquest he knew might so far weaken your
enemy or strengthen your own position as to enable you to secure a
satisfactory peace. The path of history is indeed strewn with such cases.
But he was careful to point out that such a form of war was open to the
gravest objections. Once you had occupied the territory you aimed at, your
offensive action was, as a rule, arrested. A defensive attitude had to be
assumed, and such an arrest of offensive action he had previously shown was
inherently vicious, if only for moral reasons. Added to this you might find
that in your effort to occupy the territorial object you had so
irretrievably separated your striking force from your home-defence force as
to be in no position to meet your enemy if he was able to retort by acting
on unlimited lines with a stroke at your heart. A case in point was the
Austerlitz campaign, where Austria's object was to wrest North Italy from
Napoleon's empire. She sent her main army under the Archduke Charles to
seize the territory she desired. Napoleon immediately struck at Vienna,
destroyed her home army, and occupied the capital before the Archduke could
turn to bar his way.

The argument is this: that, as all strategic attack tends to leave points
of your own uncovered, it always involves greater or less provision for
their defence. It is obvious, therefore, that if we are aiming at a limited
territorial object the proportion of defence required will tend to be much
greater than if we are directing our attack on the main forces of the
enemy. In unlimited war our attack will itself tend to defend everything
elsewhere, by forcing the enemy to concentrate against our attack. Whether
the limited form is justifiable or not therefore depends, as Clausewitz
points out, on the geographical position of the object.

So far British experience is with him, but he then goes on to say the more
closely the territory in question is an annex of our own the safer is this
form of war, because then our offensive action will the more surely cover
our home country. As a case in point he cites Frederick the Great's opening
of the Seven Years' War with the occupation of Saxony--a piece of work
which materially strengthened Prussian defence. Of the British opening in
Canada he says nothing. His outlook was too exclusively continental for it
to occur to him to test his doctrine with a conspicuously successful case
in which the territory aimed at was distant from the home territory and in
no way covered it. Had he done so he must have seen how much stronger an
example of the strength of limited war was the case of Canada than the case
of Saxony. Moreover, he would have seen that the difficulties, which in
spite of his faith in his discovery accompanied his attempt to apply it,
arose from the fact that the examples he selected were not really examples
at all.

When he conceived the idea, the only kind of limited object he had in his
mind was, to use his own words, "some conquests on the frontiers of the
enemy's country," such as Silesia and Saxony for Frederick the Great,
Belgium in his own war plan, and Alsace-Lorraine in that of Moltke. Now it
is obvious that such objects are not truly limited, for two reasons. In the
first place, such territory is usually an organic part of your enemy's
country, or otherwise of so much importance to him that he will be willing
to use unlimited effort to retain it. In the second place, there will be no
strategical obstacle to his being able to use his whole force to that end.
To satisfy the full conception of a limited object, one of two conditions
is essential. Firstly, it must be not merely limited in area, but of really
limited political importance; and secondly, it must be so situated as to be
strategically isolated or to be capable of being reduced to practical
isolation by strategical operations. Unless this condition exists, it is in
the power of either belligerent, as Clausewitz himself saw, to pass to
unlimited war if he so desires, and, ignoring the territorial objective, to
strike at the heart of his enemy and force him to desist.

If, then, we only regard war between contiguous continental States, in
which the object is the conquest of territory on either of their frontiers,
we get no real generic difference between limited and unlimited war. The
line between them is in any case too shadowy or unstable to give a
classification of any solidity. It is a difference of degree rather than of
kind. If, on the other hand, we extend our view to wars between worldwide
empires, the distinction at once becomes organic. Possessions which lie
oversea or at the extremities of vast areas of imperfectly settled
territory are in an entirely different category from those limited objects
which Clausewitz contemplated. History shows that they can never have the
political importance of objects which are organically part of the European
system, and it shows further that they can be isolated by naval action
sufficiently to set up the conditions of true limited war.

Jomini approaches the point, but without clearly detaching it. In his
chapter "On Great Invasions and Distant Expeditions," he points out how
unsafe it is to take the conditions of war between contiguous States and
apply them crudely to cases where the belligerents are separated by large
areas of land or sea. He hovers round the sea factor, feeling how great a
difference it makes, but without getting close to the real distinction. His
conception of the inter-action of fleets and armies never rises above their
actual co-operation in touch one with the other in a distant theatre. He
has in mind the assistance which the British fleet afforded Wellington in
the Peninsula, and Napoleon's dreams of Asiatic conquest, pronouncing such
distant invasions as impossible in modern times except perhaps in
combination with a powerful fleet that could provide the army of invasion
with successive advanced bases. Of the paramount value of the fleet's
isolating and preventive functions he gives no hint.

Even when he deals with oversea expeditions, as he does at some length, his
grip of the point is no closer. It is indeed significant of how entirely
continental thought had failed to penetrate the subject that in devoting
over thirty pages to an enumeration of the principles of oversea
expeditions, he, like Clausewitz, does not so much as mention the conquest
of Canada; and yet it is the leading case of a weak military Power
succeeding by the use of the limited form of war in forcing its will upon a
strong one, and succeeding because it was able by naval action to secure
its home defence and isolate the territorial object.

For our ideas of true limited objects, therefore, we must leave the
continental theatres and turn to mixed or maritime wars. We have to look to
such cases as Canada and Havana in the Seven Years' War, and Cuba in the
Spanish-American War, cases in which complete isolation of the object by
naval action was possible, or to such examples as the Crimea and Korea,
where sufficient isolation was attainable by naval action owing to the
length and difficulty of the enemy's land communications and to the
strategical situation of the territory at stake.

These examples will also serve to illustrate and enforce the second
essential of this kind of war. As has been already said, for a true limited
object we must have not only the power of isolation, but also the power by
a secure home defence of barring an unlimited counterstroke. In all the
above cases this condition existed. In all of them the belligerents had no
contiguous frontiers, and this point is vital. For it is obvious that if
two belligerents have a common frontier, it is open to the superior of
them, no matter how distant or how easy to isolate the limited object may
be, to pass at will to unlimited war by invasion. This process is even
possible when the belligerents are separated by a neutral State, since the
territory of a weak neutral will be violated if the object be of sufficient
importance, or if the neutral be too strong to coerce, there still remains
the possibility that his alliance may be secured.

We come, then, to this final proposition--that limited war is only
permanently possible to island Powers or between Powers which are separated
by sea, and then only when the Power desiring limited war is able to
command the sea to such a degree as to be able not only to isolate the
distant object, but also to render impossible the invasion of his home
territory.

Here, then, we reach the true meaning and highest military value of what we
call the command of the sea, and here we touch the secret of England's
success against Powers so greatly superior to herself in military strength.
It is only fitting that such a secret should have been first penetrated by
an Englishman. For so it was, though it must be said that except in the
light of Clausewitz's doctrine the full meaning of Bacon's famous aphorism
is not revealed. "This much is certain," said the great Elizabethan on the
experience of our first imperial war; "he that commands the sea is at great
liberty and may take as much or as little of the war as he will, whereas
those that be strongest by land are many times nevertheless in great
straits." It would be difficult to state more pithily the ultimate
significance of Clausewitz's doctrine. Its cardinal truth is clearly
indicated--that limited wars do not turn upon the armed strength of the
belligerents, but upon the amount of that strength which they are able or
willing to bring to bear at the decisive point.

It is much to be regretted that Clausewitz did not live to see with Bacon's
eyes and to work out the full comprehensiveness of his doctrine. His
ambition was to formulate a theory which would explain all wars. He
believed he had done so, and yet it is clear he never knew how complete was
his success, nor how wide was the field he had covered. To the end it would
seem he was unaware that he had found an explanation of one of the most
inscrutable problems in history--the expansion of England--at least so far
as it has been due to successful war. That a small country with a weak army
should have been able to gather to herself the most desirable regions of
the earth, and to gather them at the expense of the greatest military
Powers, is a paradox to which such Powers find it hard to be reconciled.
The phenomenon seemed always a matter of chance-an accident without any
foundation in the essential constants of war. It remained for Clausewitz,
unknown to himself, to discover that explanation, and he reveals it to us
in the inherent strength of limited war when means and conditions are
favourable for its use.

We find, then, if we take a wider view than was open to Clausewitz and
submit his latest ideas to the test of present imperial conditions, so far
from failing to cover the ground they gain a fuller meaning and a firmer
basis. Apply them to maritime warfare and it becomes clear that his
distinction between limited and unlimited war does not rest alone on the
moral factor. A war may be limited not only because the importance of the
object is too limited to call forth the whole national force, but also
because the sea may be made to present an insuperable physical obstacle to
the whole national force being brought to bear. That is to say, a war may
be limited physically by the strategical isolation of the object, as well
as morally by its comparative unimportance.

* * * * *

CHAPTER FIVE

WARS OF INTERVENTION--
LIMITED INTERFERENCE IN UNLIMITED WAR

* * * * *

Before leaving the general consideration of limited war, we have still to
deal with a form of it that has not yet been mentioned. Clausewitz gave it
provisionally the name of "War limited by contingent," and could find no
place for it in his system. It appeared to him to differ essentially from
war limited by its political object, or as Jomini put it, war with a
territorial object. Yet it had to be taken into account and explained, if
only for the part it had played in European history.

For us it calls for the most careful examination, not only because it
baffled the great German strategist to reconcile it with his theory of war,
but also because it is the form in which Great Britain most successfully
demonstrated the potentiality for direct continental interference of a
small army acting in conjunction with a dominant fleet.

The combined operations which were the normal expression of the British
method of making war on the limited basis were of two main classes.
Firstly, there were those designed purely for the conquest of the objects
for which we went to war, which were usually colonial or distant oversea
territory; and secondly, operations more or less upon the European seaboard
designed not for permanent conquest, but as a method of disturbing our
enemy's plans and strengthening the hands of our allies and our own
position. Such operations might take the form of insignificant coastal
diversions, or they might rise through all degrees of importance till, as
in Wellington's operations in the Peninsula, they became indistinguishable
in form from regular continental warfare.

It would seem, therefore, that these operations were distinguished not so
much by the nature of the object as by the fact that we devoted to them,
not the whole of our military strength, but only a certain part of it which
was known as our "disposal force." Consequently, they appear to call for
some such special classification, and to fall naturally into the category
which Clausewitz called "War limited by contingent."

It was a nature of war well enough known in another form on the Continent.
During the eighteenth century there had been a large number of cases of war
actually limited by contingent--that is, cases where a country not having a
vital interest in the object made war by furnishing the chief belligerent
with an auxiliary force of a stipulated strength.

It was in the sixth chapter of his last book that Clausewitz intended to
deal with this anomalous form of hostility. His untimely death, however,
has left us with no more than a fragment, in which he confesses that such
cases are "embarrassing to his theory." If, he adds, the auxiliary force
were placed unreservedly at the disposal of the chief belligerent, the
problem would be simple enough. It would then, in effect, be the same thing
as unlimited war with the aid of a subsidised force. But in fact, as he
observes, this seldom happened, for the contingent was always more or less
controlled in accordance with the special political aims of the Government
which furnished it. Consequently, the only conclusion he succeeded in
reaching was that it was a form of war that had to be taken into account,
and that it was a form of limited war that appeared to differ essentially
from war limited by object. We are left, in fact, with an impression that
there must be two kinds of limited war.

But if we pursue his historical method and examine the cases in which this
nature of war was successful, and those in which it was unsuccessful, we
shall find that wherever success is taken as an index of its legitimate
employment, the practical distinction between the two kinds of limited war
tends to disappear. The indications are that where the essential factors
which justify the use of war limited by object are present in war limited
by contingent, then that form of war tends to succeed, but not otherwise.
We are brought, in fact, to this proposition, that the distinction "Limited
by contingent" is not one that is inherent in war, and is quite out of line
with the theory in hand--that, in reality, it is not a _form_ of war, but a
_method_ which may be employed either for limited or unlimited war. In
other words, war limited by contingent, if it is to be regarded as a
legitimate form of war at all, must take frankly the one shape or the
other. Either the contingent must act as an organic unit of the force
making unlimited war without any reservations whatever, or else it should
be given a definite territorial object, with an independent organisation
and an independent limited function.

Our own experience seems to indicate that war by contingent or war with "a
disposal force" attains the highest success when it approaches most closely
to true limited war--that is, as in the case of the Peninsula and the
Crimea, where its object is to wrest or secure from the enemy a definite
piece of territory that to a greater or less extent can be isolated by
naval action. Its operative power, in fact, appears to bear some direct
relation to the intimacy with which naval and military action can be
combined to give the contingent a weight and mobility that are beyond its
intrinsic power.

If, then, we would unravel the difficulties of war limited by contingent,
it seems necessary to distinguish between the continental and the British
form of it. The continental form, as we have seen, differs but little in
conception from unlimited war. The contingent is furnished at least
ostensibly with the idea that it is to be used by the chief belligerent to
assist him in overthrowing the common enemy, and that its objective will be
the enemy's organised forces or his capital. Or it may be that the
contingent is to be used as an army of observation to prevent a
counterstroke, so as to facilitate and secure the main offensive movement
of the chief belligerent. In either case, however small may be our
contribution to the allied force, we are using the unlimited form and
aiming at an unlimited and not a mere territorial object.

If now we turn to British experience of war limited by contingent, we find
that the continental form has frequently been used, but we also find it
almost invariably accompanied by a popular repugnance, as though there were
something in it antagonistic to the national instinct. A leading case is
the assistance we sent to Frederick the Great in the Seven Years' War. At
the opening of the war, so great was the popular repugnance that the
measure was found impossible, and it was not till Frederick's dazzling
resistance to the Catholic powers had clothed him with the glory of a
Protestant hero, that Pitt could do what he wanted. The old religious fire
was stirred. The most potent of all national instincts kindled the people
to a generous warmth which overcame their inborn antipathy to continental
operations, and it was possible to send a substantial contingent to
Frederick's assistance. In the end the support fully achieved its purpose,
but it must be noted that even in this case the operations were limited not
only by contingent but also by object. It is true that Frederick was
engaged in an unlimited war in which the continued existence of Prussia was
at stake, and that the British force was an organic element in his war
plan. Nevertheless, it formed part of a British subsidised army under
Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, who though nominated by Frederick was a
British commander-in-chief. His army was in organisation entirely distinct
from that of Frederick, and it was assigned the very definite and limited
function of preventing the French occupying Hanover and so turning the
Prussian right flank. Finally it must be noted that its ability to perform
this function was due to the fact that the theatre of operations assigned
to it was such that in no probable event could it lose touch with the sea,
nor could the enemy cut its lines of supply and retreat.

These features of the enterprise should be noted. They differentiate it
from our earlier use of war limited by contingent in the continental
manner, of which Marlborough's campaigns were typical, and they exhibit the
special form which Marlborough would have chosen had political exigencies
permitted and which was to become characteristic of British effort from
Pitt's time onward. In the method of our greatest War Minister we have not
only the limit by contingent but also the limit of a definite and
independent function, and finally we have touch with the sea. This is the
really vital factor, and upon it, as will presently appear, depends the
strength of the method.

In the earlier part of the Great War we employed the same form in our
operations in North-Western Europe. There we had also the limited function
of securing Holland, and also complete touch with the sea, but our theatre
of operations was not independent. Intimate concerted action with other
forces was involved, and the result in every case was failure. Later on in
Sicily, where absolute isolation was attainable, the strength of the method
enabled us to achieve a lasting result with very slender means. But the
result was purely defensive. It was not till the Peninsular War developed
that we found a theatre for war limited by contingent in which all the
conditions that make for success were present. Even there so long as our
army was regarded as a contingent auxiliary to the Spanish army the usual
failure ensued. Only in Portugal, the defence of which was a true limited
object, and where we had a sea-girt theatre independent of extraneous
allies, was success achieved from the first. So strong was the method here,
and so exhausting the method which it forced on the enemy, that the local
balance of force was eventually reversed and we were able to pass to a
drastic offensive.

The real secret of Wellington's success--apart from his own genius--was
that in perfect conditions he was applying the limited form to an unlimited
war. Our object was unlimited. It was nothing less than the overthrow of
Napoleon. Complete success at sea had failed to do it, but that success had
given us the power of applying the limited form, which was the most
decisive form of offence within our means. Its substantial contribution to
the final achievement of the object is now universally recognised.

The general result, then, of these considerations is that war by contingent
in the continental form seldom or never differs generically from unlimited
war, for the conditions required by limited war are seldom or never
present. But what may be called the British or maritime form is in fact the
application of the limited method to the unlimited form, as ancillary to
the larger operations of our allies--a method which has usually been open
to us because the control of the sea has enabled us to select a theatre in
effect truly limited.[5]

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