12/30/2023 0 Comments Verdun ww1 definitionIndeed, in his chapter Craig credited Delbrück with proving that “History showed that there could be no single theory of strategy, correct for every age.” ( Makers (1943), p. Delbrück wrote in an era when it was a German military pastime to misread or rewrite Clausewitz in order to confirm a bias for fighting short wars decided by one campaign that concluded with a single battle. The concept is theoretically incoherent, inaccurate for historical description, and dangerous in application, whether it comes from Delbrück, Craig, Weigley, or anyone else. There is no good reason to think that there are only two forms of strategy, or that they are annihilation and exhaustion. The problem is that the whole idea is nonsense. Ever since, American military theorists, doctrine writers, historians, and most other students and practitioners of warfare have operated in a world where the two basic forms of strategy are annihilation and attrition and/or exhaustion. xxi-xxiii)Īlthough Weigley meant this as a critique of American performance in Vietnam, Americans in and around the military adopted his argument as something of a how-to manual. Weigley identified “the strategy of annihilation, which seeks the overthrow of the enemy’s military power and the strategy of attrition, exhaustion, or erosion, which is usually employed by a strategist whose means are not great enough to permit the direct overthrow of the enemy and who therefore resorts to an indirect approach.” Americans, according to Weigley, “made a promising beginning” with strategies of attrition, but that strategic option went away and “the strategy of annihilation became characteristically the American way of war.” ( AWW, pp. In his introduction, Weigley discusses Clausewitz’s conception of war and cites Craig to draw on Delbrück, but changes the terminology of the “two kinds of military strategy” that Craig had attributed to Delbrück. That came later, in 1973, when military historian Russell Weigley came out with The American Way of War. 272-274).Īt first, Delbrück’s theory, even with Craig’s endorsement, did not gain much traction with American military professionals and historians. This strategy of exhaustion Delbrück also called a “two-pole strategy,” the two poles being “battle” and “maneuver,” “between which the decisions of the general move.” Delbrück claimed Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon were strategists of annihilation, while Pericles, Gustavus Adolphus, and Frederick the Great were examples of strategists of exhaustion. In the second type, “the battle is no longer the sole aim of strategy.” Belligerents could avoid pitched battle and fight in other ways. Its sole aim was the decisive battle.” Delbrück also called this “one-pole strategy,” with battle being the pole. In telling this story, Craig drew special attention to what he called “the most striking of all of Delbrück’s military theories…which held that all military strategy can be divided into two forms.” These forms were the “strategy of annihilation” and the “strategy of exhaustion.”Īccording to Craig’s summary of Delbrück, the first supposedly came from Clausewitz, and posited that “the aim of war is the complete destruction of the enemy’s forces and that, consequently, the battle which accomplishes this is the end of all strategy…. Later, and especially during World War I, Delbrück became a prominent critic of contemporary German military affairs. His magnum opus was the four volume History of the Art of War in the Framework of Political History. By Craig’s account, Hans Delbrück was an innovative military historian who applied scholarly approaches to a field dominated by practitioners in the late nineteenth century. The book would come to have wide influence, identifying the most important strategic thinkers and establishing the categories by which we were to understand and talk about their thinking.Ĭhapter 11 was “Delbrück: The Military Historian,” written by Gordon A. Early in World War II, Princeton University Press published the first edition of Makers of Modern Strategy, edited by Edward Mead Earle. It is long past time to kill the idea that the basic strategic approach is between annihilation and exhaustion or attrition.įor Americans, the problems started with a single chapter in an edited collection of essays.
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