Air University Review, January-February 1986
Lieutenant Colonel David C. Rütenberg
THE tools of warfare deteriorate in the restful shade of peace. Tightly tarpaulined and unexercised, their finely tuned muzzles slowly oxidize and warp, first sacrificing only a fine measure of precision, then losing to corrosive pitting their edge in range, and finally completing the transformation from first-line protectors to unreliable and dangerous icons of historic battles. Then, when another call to arms suddenly wrests the unoiled weapon from its slumber and packs its chamber with explosive fury, it may just as likely strike at its user as its target.
Like the weapon, the warrior also experiences a kind of rusting of critical functions. Unchallenged by crucial strategic and tactical choices demanded in swirl and whoosh of combat, his skills and instincts are likely to soften. When tested in battle, they may prove dangerously deficient.
As professionals, we keep our weapons serviced for ready response and continually run our hardware through its paces to the limit of practicality. We try to keep the "gray matter" sharp and oiled, too, by distilling the realities of past wars and projecting experiences onto carefully constructed predictions of tomorrow’s battlefields. At the same time, we recognize the danger of misapplying the lessons of military history to combat scenarios and political conditions that may incorrectly describe the future battlefield. To prevent specific lessons from being overblown or misapplied, our entire experiential data base is fed into a giant, mystical leveling machine from which flows the essence of what we believe about how best to achieve victory through warfare. What emerges is called doctrine—a set of fundamental beliefs described by General Curtis E. LeMay as lying "at the very heart of warfare."1
But as basic as doctrine is, there are still more fundamental constants of warfare. Doctrine is neither universal nor timeless. Influenced by national goals, technology, geographical realities, and beliefs bout the efficacy and morality of war as a policy tool, basic military doctrine represents the marriage of national character and military objectives to the pure basics of armed conflict, the principles of war.2 It is upon the foundation of these time-honored principles—truth that vary only minutely from service to service, state to state, and age to age—that doctrines are built. The principles of war are so deeply seated in the warrior’s thought processes that they are applied to strategic and tactical planning automatically. The 1921 edition of U.S. Army Training Regulation 10-5, the first U.S. source to codify the principles of war, clearly described the process: "The correct application of principles to circumstances is the outcome of sound military knowledge, built up by study and practice until it has become an instinct."3
Such an imperative places a heavy burden on war practitioners to maintain the principles of war in as accurate and complete a form as possible. In fact, there could hardly be a more important responsibility for a peacetime military organization. Ill-conceived principles—useless baggage long ago proved faulty—must be purged from our doctrine. But even more important than culling out unworkable principles is aggressively discovering and refining any new principle that repeatedly surfaces to demand our attention. To fail to embrace and institutionalize such a principle, particularly when failures to recognize it have almost without exception resulted in military disaster, would constitute gross professional negligence.
That is why it is critical for the U.S. military to adopt a principle of synchronized support which holds that strategic and tactical operations must be planned and executed in synchronization with logistical and combat support operations. There is scarcely a ripple in the history of warfare that does not offer compelling evidence of this assertion’s inviolability. Nevertheless, failure to codify synchronized support as a bona fide principle has undermined its critical place of importance in military education and training. This educational void, in turn, has resulted in scores of battlefield failures.
Proof of this assertion abounds. General Dwight D. Eisenhower extended the challenge in the aftermath of World War II: "You will not find it hard to prove that battles, even wars, have been won or lost primarily because of logisitics."4 General Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, writing on Eisenhower’s major decisions, provided a glimpse of the Supreme Commander’s respect for support operations: "It is no great matter to change tactical plans in a hurry and to send troops off in new directions. But adjusting supply plans to the altered tactical scheme is far more difficult."5 In many major campaigns of World War II, providing offensive operations with logistical support proved not only difficult but virtually impossible because the principle of synchronized support was neglected during planning or execution.
For example, while most people are aware of the massive logistical preparations that preceded the Normandy invasion, relatively few appreciate how the subsequent breakout and charge across France was actually carried out. There is a popular notion that General George Patton drove his Third Army so rapidly that it outran fuel supplies and was prevented by a ponderously slow logistics tail from achieving early victory over the German Army. But official postwar accounts suggest instead that support for the Third Army’s breakout was superbly orchestrated by invasion planners.6 Knowing that over-the-shore operations could not simultaneously sustain both the Third Army’s advances and those of other vital units, these planners conceived Operation Chastity to capture calm-water ports south of Normandy at Quiberon Bay. After successful accomplishment of this operation, Patton’s advance would have been supported easily by Liberty ships’ transferring fuel and supplies to an excellent rail and road network leading directly to Paris.
But Chastity was not carried out. Viewed as merely a logistical operation, it was not appreciated as important by Patton’s VIII Corps commander, who was charged with its execution.7 Because of this violation of the principle of synchronized support, the Third Army predictably ran out of gas (despite heroic efforts to restore synchronization via a fuel truck cavalcade known as the Red Ball Express) because it was forced to share fuel and transport resources with northward-moving Allied forces. Tragically, it was for lack of the same resources that the Allies stalled in the fall of 1944 and allowed the Germans to reconstitute for the Battle of the Bulge.8 It is not difficult to project that appreciation for the principle of synchronized support could have shaved a year off V-E Day, placing it long before Russian forces were even close to Czechoslovakia or Berlin. The long-term implication of such an adjustment on the subsequent world power balance is obvious.
Many Allied commanders learned the hard way. But an appreciation for the value of synchronized support came more easily for the German leadership, who no doubt learned from their World War I experience with the disastrous Schlieffen Plan. With foot-columns marching at a record-setting forty kilometers per day, the railroads carrying supplies and munitions could not be repaired fast enough to keep pace with troop advances. Similarly, the 6000-truck motor fleet was stretched far beyond its limits, and horse-drawn wagons soon carried more self-sustaining fodder than ammunition and supplies for prosecuting the actual battle.9
In contrast, German blitzkrieg tactics in World War II were masterfully synchronized with logistical realities. The lightning-war tactic combined tremendous striking power with the capability to support short, stabbing thrusts within 600 miles or so of the German border. Predictions of a 50 percent vehicle loss rate led to the planned use of captured transports and fuel. Further advantage was gained by incorporating mobile supply and repair teams into the fast columns.10 The system worked until synchronization was woefully abandoned in the depths of Russia.
The Second World War provides an abundance of lucid illustrations—both positive and negative—of the principle of synchronized support. Consider the tyranny of logistics in North Africa; the dearth of supply at Bataan; and the shiploads of scrambled munitions and supplies clogging French ports while hedgerow fighting units were strapped for ammunition. The unrelenting parade of lessons led Britain’s Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell to admit: "I have soldiered for 42 years, and the more I see of war, the more I realize how much it all depends on . . . what our American friends call logistics."11
Synchronized support, though, has been a determinant of victory or defeat for much longer than Wavell’s forty-two years in Her Majesty’s service. It was this principle that Phillip and Alexander the Great applied to make the Macedonian army the lightest, fastest, most mobile force of its day, able to make lightning strikes before defenders could react. It was primarily Alexander’s ruthless trimming of the army’s support element that made the difference; without the burden of massive numbers of pack animals, Alexander could move virtually at will over inhospitable terrain, using speed and mobility to gain tactical advantage. There is further evidence that synchronized support—whatever Alexander may have called it—was a key Macedonian principle. Examples include his exploitation of alliances along the march to provide magazines of provisions in desolate regions, his use of the Macedonian fleet for reprovisioning, his division of the army into smaller units capable of better supporting themselves through plunder, and his careful consideration of harvest seasons in planning marches.12
Later, the Roman approach to synchronization would reflect the dual operational needs of maintaining control over a vast empire while sometimes having to travel long distances in hostile territory. Accordingly, support depots were established along the Roman road network at intervals of one day’s march (sixteen miles), but legionnaires also carried enough supplies and engineering expertise to operate autonomously for up to thirty days.13
The Macedonian and Roman armies illustrate well-synchronized operational and support concepts that synergistically maximized striking power. It would be a grievous mistake, though, to conclude from these examples that synchronization somehow takes place automatically as leaders deploy their forces and plan campaigns. If that were, true support structures would not have grown so bulbously out of proportion during the seventeenth century. Nor would armies have become transformed into giant locusts with objectives not of victory but of mere survival via plunder and destruction of the land. With the elements of warfighting so desperately out of balance, the stage was set in the early nineteenth century for the entrance of a visionary leader who could resynchronize the support structure to match a new military strategy of destroying enemy field armies through mass, maneuver, and concentration of force.
How did Bonapate do it? Alexander, he slashed baggage allowances to move armies more quickly; he eased the foraging burden by splitting his armies into parallel forces, each feeding to its left and therefore standing in better position to converge quickly on enemy forces; he set up great artillery parks and supply bases through which flowed thousands of rounds of ammunition; he elevated the quartermaster to a chief of staff who issued march orders; and he lessened reliance on the countryside by codifying food requisitioning procedures.14
Carl von Clausewitz, who has explained much about Napoleonic warfare, appears to have largely missed the real impact of these actions. To him, Bonaparte’s seemingly magical qualities allowed him to employ "an army which did without magazines, lived off the country, paid no attention to considerations of supply and sometimes seemed to grow wings in its marches from one European capital to another."15
Clearly, no soldier or historian properly schooled in the principle of synchronized support could propagate such a fantasy. Yet, until we better understood the real nature of war in Southeast Asia, our own U.S. leadership expressed bafflement by attributing near-mystical qualities to an elusive enemy that refused to be interdicted. For nearly four years, Operation Rolling Thunder sought to strangle the insurgency in the South by cutting off the flow of logistical support from North Vietnam. The effort was unsuccessful because it was countered by a Vietcong strategy that embodied the principle of synchronized support—General Thanh’s "tactical defensive."16 Under this concept, the timing and tempo of offensive operations were precisely regulated by the availability of resupply, thus preventing our interruptions of the pipeline from affecting the enemy’s ability to control the battlefield.
Interdiction, of course, has always been a major strategy of U.S. forces. It was the lure of being able to reach deep into the enemy’s industrial and rear-echelon sources of power that made air power a worthy military option. But where within the current set of war-fighting principles is interdiction justified? A meaningful principle of war not only aids in the formulation of offensive strategies but allows better understanding of the enemy, his strategies, and his absorptive capacities. A complete set of principles would have to demand that the planner evaluate the effect of offensive operations on the enemy’s support synchronization. It is instructive to note that, despite the massive role of interdiction in all modern wars, none of the classical principles of war mention, justify, or in any way account for this strategy. With a principle of synchronized support, the objective of interdiction would be clear—preventing enemy forces from synchronizing their operations and support capabilities.
If persuasive examples of the critical importance of synchronized support emerge from virtually every conflict, from ancient times through the present, why is there no such principle presently on the books? Two basic tendencies appear to have merged to mitigate against recognition. The first involves the maintenance of a certain collegiate mystique about the nature of strategy formulation. The second reflects a deeply ingrained tendency to resist becoming enamored with material aspects of war at the expense of moral factors. Both can be illustrated by examining literature concerning the development of the principles of war.
Historian James A. Huston observed: "Everybody likes to talk about and analyze strategy. Some ‘mystic’ quality about strategy and strategic decisions seems to arouse spirits of all to a sense of intellectual contest."17 Too often, we fall prey to the trap of looking at battles as a gigantic board game, with commanders seemingly able to move their forces and resources about at will—feinting, encircling, massing, and thrusting toward their objectives. Problems of supply, transportation, protection, construction, and medical support are viewed as irritations that detract from the lofty exercise of strategic thought. Consider this excerpt from a 1952 Air War College research paper examining whether or not the French principle of administration should be worthy of consideration as a U.S. principle of war:
If "administration" means good logistical support to the armed forces—food, clothing and weapons of war, along with evacuation and care of the sick and wounded—we are forced to assume logistics in this discussion. If this support is impossible, the operation will not (or should not) be undertaken. Lack of logistical support in battle can have serious consequences indeed, but beyond the point of adequate logistics support, logistics in itself is no longer a factor in the outcome of the campaign.18
True, the prosecution of war and the exercise of command could be made considerably less perplexing by assuming proper support. Unfortunately, the study of strategy and tactics in isolation from the combat support considerations that energize and/or limit them is irrevocably destined to produce an incomplete, one-dimensional view of warfare. Lieutenant General W. B. Palmer recorded the result as he observed our combat performance in Korea:
Scrutinize all recent historic examples with a most critical eye and you will find that our training of future commanders has not prepared them to cope with their logistic problems as skillfully as they cope with tactical problems in fact, many of them have displayed ignorance and inadequacy which, if continued, can only result in an indefensible proportion of waste, extravagance, and paralysis.19
Upon what foundation is such training and education built? It is constructed primarily on military doctrine and the principles of war. That is why it is imperative that synchronized support be recognized as the critical principle it has repeatedly proved to be. Once the principle has been acknowledged, meaningful operational doctrine that folds strategic, tactical, and support planning together can be formulated. Significantly, a new AFM 1-1, released in March 1984, introduced a new principle of war called "logistics." Though well meaning and certainly a significant step forward, the term logistics is hollow and useless to a commander as a principle of war. It reminds the decision maker to consider logistics but does not indicate what to consider about it. In contrast, the principle of synchronized support expresses the essential characteristics of all successful military operations: the concentration of balanced operational and support power on common objectives. By internalizing this principle into our strategic thinking, we may even find the mystique of successful strategy (and the "fog and friction" of combat) to be considerably less perplexing than we suspect. As Soviet Colonel G. Mokrousov wrote in Voyenny vestnik (Military Herald) recently:
During the Great Patriotic War both senior chiefs and subordinates had great respect for those commanders who fought skillfully, but also organized with inspiration political work, reconnaissance, camouflage, engineer support, technical support, logistical support, and security; that is, they had respect for those commanders who comprehensively supported combat operations. As a rule, such commanders won on the battlefield, and their subordinates units suffered fewer losses.20
The second factor militating against recognition of a principle of war involving support is the overextension of a valuable element of espirit referred to today as the "warrior spirit." Misapplication of this concept leads to a self-defeating disdain for support considerations. The problem is not new. In 1918, French General Ferdinand Foch, Commander of the Allied armies, wrote a tract titled The Principles of War. In it, he attempted to rally a neo-Napoleonic fighting spirit by emphasizing the moral factors of war (quality of troops and command, energy, passion, etc.) while condemning military schools for teaching the materiel factors. "The worst possible results came from theories of this nature," Foch admonished. "Thus came these exclusive studies of ground, defenses, armament, organization, administration, all more or less scientific but dealing only with the physical side of war!"21 After such words from the Allied Commander, any prudent soldier would indefinitely suspend any thoughts of expressing appreciation for logistical and support matters.
From this example, we can glean a sense of the mortal competition that still seems to prevail between moral and materiel factors or between warriors ("teeth") and support ("tail"). We must recognize this friction because it is crucial that we eliminate it from our military force. Throughout the study of warfare, the synchronization that fighting forces have been able to maintain between their strategies, tactics, and combat support capabilities has proved to be a reliable, constant, and irrepressible determinant of military success or failure.
Where do we stand today? Can we confidently say that our combat support structure is synchronized closely with our strategies? If our force as mobile and deployable as our strategies call for? Are our weapons systems and support infrastructures designed for the austere, bare-base, and flexible brand of warfare that our doctrine and war plans envision? If not, we could be cultivating a twenty-first century Schlieffen Plan, Maginot Line, or Rolling Thunder. Such can be prevented only if we make certain that strategies and tactics are in phase with physical capabilities of our force structure. General LeMay described the many pieces that must be counted:
When I speak or air strength, I am not speaking only of airplanes. I am speaking of airfields, fuel supplies, depots, stockpiles of aircraft parts, weapons and weapon stockpiles, control and communication centers, highly trained and skilled manpower—and airplanes. These constitute airpower.22
The U.S. military—because of our geographical separation from likely combat zones, our defensive stance, our limited resources, and our wide range of deployment possibilities—must synchronize its operational plans and support concepts more skillfully than any other military force in history. Our doctrine, and the principles on which its is based, must be written to drive planners and decision makers in this direction. We must begin by adopting synchronized support as our twelfth principle of war.
Gunter AFS, Alabama
Contributor
Lieutenant Colonel David C. Rütenberg (B.S., Duke University; M.S., University of Southern California) is Editor of the Air Force Journal of Logistics, published at the Air Force Logistics Management Center, Gunter AFS, Alabama. He has served as a faculty member at Air Command and Staff College, logistics program director for airborne generators and drone aerial recovery systems as Sacramento ALC., Hq AFISC remotely piloted vehicle (RPV) action officer, ADWC RPV/missile safety officer, and maintenance officer on Bomarc and Mace systems. Colonel Rutenberg is a graduate of Squadron Officer School and Air Command and Staff College.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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