Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

Attack enemy’s plans as best policy. Next best disrupt his alliances. Next best attack hisarmy. Attack cities only when there is no alternativeEmploy Cheng and Ch’I 37 maneuvers to quickly and unexpectedly hurl strengths againstweaknesses.And the desired outcome for Sun Tzu is, in Boyd’s words, ‘to subdue the enemy withoutfighting and avoid protracted war’.Western commander by contrast, according to Boyd have been more concernedwith winning the battle. In order to make the argument that the approach of Sun Tzu hasoften been superior to this Western approach, Boyd then explored several selected exampleswhich not only bolster Boyd’s argument but also illustrate in some detail what such anapproach entails in terms of force structure, the employment of maneuver, movement, massand shock. He described the battles of Marathon (490 B.C.) of the Greek against thePersians, the Battle of Leuctra (371 B.C.) which saw combat between the Thebans and theSpartans, the Battle of Arbela (331 B.C.) in which the Persian King Darius was defeated byAlexander, and the Battle of Canae (216 B.C.).The forces available to commanders such as Hannibal consisted of light troops,heavy troops and cavalry. The successful commanders combined these in patterns ofmaneuver with the light troops to ‘unmask the enemy’s disposition and hide one’s own realstrength and confuse the enemy’. Heavy troops in turn and in synergetic fashion would‘charge and smash thinned-out/scattered or disordered/bunched-up enemy formationsgenerated by the interaction with light troops’. Alternatively, they would ‘menaced enemyformations to hold them in tight, or rigid, arrays thereby make them vulnerable to missiles ofswirling light troops’. Thus, according to Boyd, ‘light and heavy troops in appropriatecombination pursue, envelop, and mop-up isolated remnants of enemy host’. The ideaunderlying this pattern for winning was to ‘employ maneuver action by light troops withthrust action of heavy troops to confuse, break up, and smash enemy formations’ 38 . Anadditional idea, also in line with Sun Tzu, was the deliberate employment of unequaldistribution of forces, as the basis to achieve for local superiority at the decisive point, andfor decisive leverage to collapse adversary resistance 39 .However, Boyd notes, these battle arrangements and maneuvers do not provideinsight on how they play upon ‘moral factors such as doubt, fear, anxiety’ 40 . For this he turnsto Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes and Napoleon’s mass armies. Genghis Khan’s establishedfour “key asymmetries”:superior mobilitysuperior communicationssuperior intelligencesuperior leadership.Guarding and exploiting these asymmetries to the fullest enabled the widely separatedstrategic maneuvers, the baited retreats, the hard-hitting thrusts and swirling envelopment heis remembered for. These movements uncovered and exploited an adversary’s vulnerabilitiesand weaknesses. Rapid unexpected threatening movements in conjunction with propaganda37 This refers to the use of ‘the orthodox and the unorthodox’ methods of employing troops, asdiscussed in chapter 3.38 Ibid, p.16.39 Ibid, pp.19, 24.40 Ibid, p.24.188