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

intellectual theme that is hidden within the story. Lawrence’s account manifests a deliberatelyconducted analysis of a dominant conceptualization of war which he was equipped withthrough his education at Oxford to determine the validity of this frame of reference for theenvironment he found himself in. It depicts strategic theory as a conceptual lense which isrelevant and adequate only in a specific context.As Lawrence noted ‘in military theory I was tolerably read, my Oxford curiosityhaving taken me past Napoleon to Clausewitz and his school, to Caemmerer and Moltke,and the recent Frenchmen[…] Clausewitz was intellectually so much the master of them, andhis book so logical and fascinating, that unconsciously I accepted his finality….my interesthad been abstract, concerned with the theory and philosophy of warfare especially from themetaphysical side. Now, now in the field everything had been concrete…I began to recallsuitable maxims on the conduct of modern scientific war. But they would not fit, and itworried me’ 21 .Lawrence could not find a concept suitable to the Arab revolts and the sociopolitical-militarycontext in any of the works Jomini, Foch, Moltke, Clausewitz, etc. All theseauthors had in common a focus on the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces by only onemethod, battle 22 . This would not do for the Arab irregulars fighting the stronger Turks.There were no nations in war, no mass mobilization was possible. Its whole character wasdifferent and therefore the concept for victory too should be different. ‘Ours seemed unlikethe ritual of which Foch was priest’, he noted 23 . So Lawrence started to consider the ‘wholehouse of war’ in its structural Lawrence went back to the 18 th pre Napoleonic era of limitedwar and naval war fighting concepts.He decided to use the vastness of the desert against the Turks. Constantly guardingevery single important object was infeasible for the Turkish army, no matter how vast theirnumber. Lawrence’s cards would be speed and time, not hitting power 24 . The Turkish armywas like a plant, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. Incontrast, the Arabs would be an idea, an influence, a thing intangible, invulnerable, withoutfront or back, drifting about like a gas, vapor. He opted for a war of detachment, not ofcontact. The time, place and object, the decision of what was critical would always be his 25 .According to Lawrence, the character of operations should be like naval war, in mobility,ubiquity, independence of bases and communications, ignoring of ground features, ofstrategic area’s, of fixed directions, of fixed points. Tactics should be “tip and run”, notpushes but strokes. One should never try to improve an advantage. One should use thesmallest force in the quickest time at the farthest place 26 . The Arab attacks would focus ondestroying the ‘minerals’ of the Turkish army. The army was dependent on rail transport, sothe death of a Turkish bridge or rail, machine gun or charge of high explosive was moreprofitable than the death of a Turk. At the same time he would “arrange the mind” of the“crowd” – the local population – his own troops, and that of the enemy. There may behumiliating material limits, but no moral impossibilities, so the scope of diathetical activitieswas unbounded, he noted 27 .21 T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Wordsworth Editions, (Ware, Hertfordshire, 1997),p.177.22 Ibid, p.178.23 Ibid, p.179.24 Ibid, p.185-186.25 Ibid, pp.182-184.26 Lawrence (1936), pp.188-190, as quoted in Gat, pp 154-155.27 Lawrence, p.185.49