Rules of Combat - The Development of Warrior Tactics

It makes us feel dramatic to say something like that, but why? Entrepreneurship requires us to roll the dice with our futures. We sacrifice our time, our opportunities, often times our savings, all for the chance to put our business in the world and compete. If you want to win in war, you have to be a warrior. The same is true of business. They think of it as the sort of thing selfish pricks would say about themselves, the kind of people who need to justify how poorly they treat others. Warriors put themselves on the line for the people they serve. A warrior is completely focused, disciplined, and aggressive not out of selfishness, but on behalf of others.

Every general has a president to report to, and in your case, your president is your client, your boss, or your customers. They are the country you represent when you go to work, and if you want your country to win, you need to understand these three laws of war. Every movement comes with risk. Leaving your job for something else, investing your money in a new business, even rolling out a new feature or service for your existing business—all of it invites the unknown into your life.

This is about discipline. Taking a chance on something because you find it interesting, not because you see the advantage it gives you, is an undisciplined move. As obstacles arise—and they inevitably will—your interest will fade, you will find it hard to maintain the discipline required to carry on, and you will ultimately fail.

Imagine you have a secure job—steady income, enjoyable work, benefits for your family—and your friend launches a startup. He asks you to come work with him, and you get excited. The demands of large-scale conflicts have led to reliance on a few big units rather than on a lot of little ones. For example, the Marines have only three active-duty divisions, the U. It is no wonder that the U.

Add in the traditional, hierarchical military mindset, which holds that more is always better the corollary belief being that one can only do worse with less , and you get massive approaches to little wars. It is ironic that the U. The Army has incrementally increased the number of brigades — which typically include between 3, and 4, trigger-pullers — from less than three dozen in to almost 50 today. Yet the evidence is there. For example, beginning in late in Iraq, the U.

Then again, perhaps the best example of a many-and-small military that worked against foes of all sizes was the Roman legion. Flanking has quite a pedigree. Flanking also formed a basis for the march up Mesopotamia by U. But something odd happened this time. Instead, Iraqis largely waited until their country was overrun and then mounted an insurgency based on tip-and-run attacks and bombings.

Thus did war cease to be driven by mass-on-mass confrontation, but rather by a hider-finder dynamic. In a world of networked war, armies will have to redesign how they fight, keeping in mind that the enemy of the future will have to be found before it can be fought. To some extent this occurred in the Vietnam War, but that was a conflict during which the enemy obligingly and quite regularly massed its forces in major offensives: This is the path being taken by the Taliban in Afghanistan and is clearly the concept of global operations used by al Qaeda.

At the same time, the U.

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Indeed, when it finally improved its position in Iraq, the change was driven by a vastly enhanced ability to find the enemy. The physical network of small outposts was linked to and enlivened by a social network of tribal fighters willing to work with U. These elements, taken together, shone a light on al Qaeda in Iraq, and in the glare of this illumination the militants were easy prey for the small percentage of coalition forces actually waging the campaign against them.

Think of this as a new role for the military. All that is left is to think through the operational concept that will guide them. Terrorists, knowing they will never have an edge in numbers, have pioneered a way of war that allows them to make the most of their slender resources: This is a form of attack undertaken by small units coming from several directions or hitting many targets at the same time. Such attacks have persisted even in post-surge Iraq where, as Gen. Perhaps the clearest example of a terrorist swarm was the November attack on Mumbai, apparently mounted by the Lashkar-e-Taiba group.

The assault force consisted of just 10 fighters who broke into five two-man teams and struck simultaneously at several different sites. It took more than three days to put them down — and cost the lives of more than innocents — as the Indian security forces best suited to deal with this problem had to come from distant New Delhi and were configured to cope with a single threat rather than multiple simultaneous ones. In another sign of the gathering swarm, the August Russian incursion into Georgia, rather than being a blast from the Cold War past, heralded the possibility that more traditional armies can master the art of omnidirectional attack.

In this instance, Russian regular forces were augmented by ethnic militias fighting all over the area of operations — and there was swarming in cyberspace at the same time.

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Indeed, the distributed denial of service attack, long a staple of cyberwarriors, is a model form of swarming. And in this instance, Georgian command and control was seriously disrupted by the hackers. Simultaneous attack from several directions might be at the very cutting edge in conflict, but its lineage is quite old.

Traditional tribal warfare, whether by nomadic horse archers or bush fighters, always featured some elements of swarms. The zenith of this kind of fighting probably came with the 13th-century Mongols, who had a name for this doctrine: But swarming was eclipsed by the rise of guns in the 15th century, which strongly favored massed volley fire. Industrial processes encouraged even more massing, and mechanization favored large flank maneuvers more than small swarms.

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Now again, in an age of global interdependence replete with advanced information technologies, even quite small teams of fighters can cause huge amounts of disruption. There is an old Mongol proverb: This point was made by the great British strategist B. Liddell Hart in his biography of T. Lawrence , a master of the swarm in his own right. Now, swarming is making a comeback, but at a time when few organized militaries are willing or able to recognize its return. For the implications of this development — most notably, that fighting units in very small numbers can do amazing things if used to swarm — are profoundly destabilizing.

The most radical change is this: Standing armies can be sharply reduced in size, if properly reconfigured and trained to fight in this manner. In the future, it will take a swarm to defeat a swarm. Almost 20 years ago, I began a debate about networks that blossomed into an unlikely friendship with Vice Adm. Art Cebrowski, the modern strategic thinker most likely to be as well remembered as Alfred Thayer Mahan, the great American apostle of sea power.

I thought that networking implied a wholly new kind of navy, one made up of small, swift vessels, many of them remotely operated. The Historical and Theoretical Development of Strategy and Tactics The historical roots of strategy and tactics date back to the origins of human warfare and the development of large-scale government and empire.

The dense tactical infantry formation of overlapping shields called the phalanx, for example, existed in an early form in ancient Sumer c. The development of strategy and tactics parallels to some extent the growth, spread, and clash of civilizations; technological discoveries and refinements; and the evolution of modern state power, ideology, and nationalism.

Early Strategy and Tactics. The Mediterranean basin saw the dawn of modern military strategy and tactics. Philip combined infantry, cavalry, and primitive artillery into a trained, organized, and maneuverable fighting force backed up by engineers and a rudimentary signaling system.

His son Alexander became an accomplished strategist and tactician with his concern for planning, keeping open lines of communication and supply, security, relentless pursuit of foes, and the use of surprise. Hannibal was a supreme tactician whose crushing victories taught the Romans that the flexible attack tactics of their legions needed to be supplemented by unity of command and an improved cavalry.

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The Romans eventually replaced their citizen-soldiers with a paid professional army whose training, equipment, skill at fortification, road building, and siege warfare became legendary. The Byzantine emperors studied Roman strategy and tactics and wrote some of the first essays on the subject. The Middle Ages saw a decline in the study and application of strategy — with the exception of the great Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan.

Medieval tactics began with an emphasis on defensive fortifications, siegecraft, and armored cavalry. The introduction, however, of such new developments as the crossbow, longbow, halberd, pike, and, above all, gunpowder began to revolutionize the conduct of war. The Emergence of Modern Warfare. Gustav II Adolf, king of Sweden r.

I call this “going underground.”

His disciplined national standing army — differing from the common use of mercenaries — was organized into small, mobile units armed with highly superior, maneuverable firepower and supplemented by mounted dragoons his creation armed with carbine and saber. Frederick II the Great of Prussia r. In the Seven Years' War , Frederick faced a coalition whose various forces almost surrounded Prussia. Using a strategy of interior lines, Frederick — supported by a highly disciplined army and horse artillery his creation — would quickly maneuver, assemble a superior force at some decisive point along the line of encirclement, and, with massed howitzer fire, strike hard against an enemy flank before moving to another point.

With Napoleon I, however, the age of modern warfare was born.

Military strategy

The French Revolution had produced a mass patriot army organized into loose divisional formations. Napoleon carefully planned his campaigns and quickly maneuvered his troops by forced marches to a selected field of battle. His battles began with skirmishing and cannonading, followed by an overwhelming concentration of forces in shock bayonet attacks against enemy flanks in turning and enveloping movements designed to utterly destroy opposing forces.

Because of the greater complexities of warfare, a rudimentary general staff began to emerge under Napoleon. Theory and Technological Change. Napoleonic strategy and tactics were closely studied by the first great theorists of war, the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz — and the French general Antoine Jomini — Clausewitz's On War —34; Eng. Jomini, on the other hand, emphasized occupying enemy territory through carefully planned, rapid, and precise geometric maneuvers.

Whereas Jomini's theories had influence in France and North America, Clausewitz's teachings in particular were influential on the great Prussian military strategists of the 19th century, Helmuth von Moltke — architect of victory in the Franco-Prussian War — and Alfred von Schlieffen — creator of the Schlieffen plan defense against Russia and envelopment of France , which Germany applied in a modified form at the beginning of World War I.

The 19th century was an era of far-reaching technological change that vastly altered the scope of tactics and strategy, an alteration seen in what has been called the first total war, the U. Railroads and steamships increased the volume, reach, and speed of mobilization and of conscription. The consistent support of war industry became critical.