Big Serge Thoughts

1. The Rise of Shot and Sail

Endless ink has been spilled pontificating on precisely how and why Europeans came to rule the world in the modern era. There are a variety of what we might call grand, unified theories of European domination, ranging from the geographic determinism of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" to more mystical notions of "western civilization" and the ability of philosophical concepts to convert readily to hard power. In the modern political climate, with its trite anathematization of all things colonial and imperial , the topic has increasingly become toxic in its entirety - European hegemony is taken to be synonymous with western civilization, and vice versa.

If one can move past the ideologically charged caricatures of rapacious Europeans prowling the earth in search of loot and slaves, a moment of brief reflection might reveal how counterintuitive Europe's age of global empire was. In the late middle ages, Europe was both more politically fragmented, less populous, and significantly less wealthy than the imperial states of the east. Although the trope of the middle ages as a barbarous dark period have increasingly been left behind, there is little question that regions like China, Central Asia, India, and the Middle East enjoyed a higher level of political consolidation and state capacity, and were both more populous and richer than Europe in this period. Militarily, Europe was frequently on the back foot amid deep geopolitical penetration by the Ottomans and the Islamic statelets of North Africa.

Even more strange, however, is the fact that the key progenitors of European empire were poorer and more politically marginal states even within Europe itself. It was not the economic and technological powerhouses in Italy and Germany that spread European power to the ends of the earth, but relatively poor, unpopulous, and ancillary players like Portugal, the Netherlands, and England.

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Our purpose here is not to dwell at length about the European spirit, for good or ill, but instead to examine the evolution of the weapons system that won the earth for Europe: the full-rigged sailing ship armed with broadside cannon. The spiritual and intellectual content of European civilization is another matter entirely from the technical methods that gave it supremacy thousands of miles from its home shores. Europe was certainly not the only part of the world to possess gunpowder in the 16th and 17th centuries, but it was Europe that successfully married cannon to ship and produced the phenomenally powerful navies that ruled the waves in the age of shot and sail. It was these ships that gave Europe the means to rule the world, creating the economic basis which made possible the construction of ever larger fleets, empowering the entrenchment of greater state capacity, and prompting the systemization and professionalization of naval warfare.

The Advent of Empire: Portugal and the Battle of Diu

At a cursory glance, the first arrival of Portuguese ships in India must not have appeared to be a particularly fateful development. Vasco da Gama's 1497 expedition to India, which circumnavigated Africa and arrived on the Malabar Coast near Calicut consisted of a mere four ships and 170 men - hardly the sort of force that could obviously threaten to upset the balance of power among the vast and populous states rimming the Indian ocean. The rapid proliferation of Portuguese power in India must have therefore been all the more shocking for the region's denizens.

The collision of the Iberian and Indian worlds, which possessed diplomatic and religious norms that were mutually unintelligible, was therefore bound to devolve quickly into frustration and eventually violence. The Portuguese, who harbored hopes that India might be home to Christian populations with whom they could link up, were greatly disappointed to discover only Muslims and Hindu "idolaters". The broader problem, however, was that the market in the Malabar coast was already heavily saturated with Arab merchants who plied the trade routes from India to Egypt - indeed, these were precisely the middle men whom the Portuguese were hoping to outflank.

The particular flashpoint which led to conflict, therefore, were the mutual efforts of the Portuguese and the Arabs to exclude each other from the market, and the devolution to violence was rapid. A second Portuguese expedition, which arrived in 1500 with 13 ships, got the action started by seizing and looting an Arab cargo ship off Calicut; Arab merchants in the city responded by whipping up a mob which massacred some 70 Portuguese in the onshore trading post in full sight of the fleet. The Portuguese, incensed and out for revenge, retaliated in turn by bombarding Calicut from the sea; their powerful cannon killed hundreds and left much of the town (which was not fortified) in ruins. They then seized the cargo of some 10 Arab vessels along the coast and hauled out for home.

The 1500 expedition unveiled an emerging pattern and basis for Portugal's emerging India project. The voyage was marked by significant frustration: in addition to the massacre of the shore party in Calicut, there were significant losses to shipwreck and scurvy, and the expedition had failed to achieve its goal of establishing a trading post and stable relations in Calicut. Even so, the returns - mainly spices looted from Arab merchant vessels - were more than sufficient to justify the expense of more ships, more men, and more voyages. On the shore, the Portuguese felt the acute vulnerability of their tiny numbers, having been overwhelmed and massacred by a mob of civilians, but the power of their cannon fire and the superiority of their seamanship gave them a powerful kinetic tool.

When the Portuguese returned yet again in 1502, this time once again under Vasco da Gama, they were still thinking about the massacre at Calicut and looking for revenge. They started by burning an unarmed ship full of Muslim pilgrims returning from Mecca, before engaging in a sequence of fruitless negotiations with the Zamorin (king) of Calicut, and beginning a blockade of the city. An attempt to lift the blockade and drive the Portuguese out predictably turned into a disaster. Despite mustering a significantly larger fleet (over 70 vessels against the 16 in De Gama's armada) Calicut blundered into a disaster; the Portuguese took advantage of both their superior gunnery and favorable winds to remain at range and pummel the Malabar fleet, shattering it while taking only minor losses of their own.

The strategic situation in the Indian Ocean thus took the following shape. The Portuguese had originally aimed to establish a permanent trading post in Calicut, but relations had gone permanently sour (for obvious reasons), and they instead formed an alliance with Calicut's enemy to the south, the Sultan of Cochin (a kingdom centered on the modern day Indian state of Kerala). Holding permanent, fortified positions in India was of supreme importance to the Portuguese, not only for purposes of basing and protecting their trade, but also to anchor them amid the seasonal winds of the Indian ocean. The Indian monsoon has a charming and useful reliability, with strong winds blowing from Africa to India during the summer, before reversing in the winter. This pattern gave the Portuguese a reliable current to make the circuit to India in a year, but it also meant that once they had ridden the summer Monsoon in, they could not leave until the winds reversed late in the year. The seasonality of the winds meant, in essence, that Europeans could not simply come and go any time they wished, and made it paramount for the Portuguese to have safe harbors and solid bases. Eager to leverage Portuguese gunnery against his rivals in Calicut, the Sultan of Cochin was happy to provide just such a base of support.

The alliance with Cochin gave the Portuguese a permanent base in India which allowed them to devastate shipping around Malabar, and in December of 1504 they sunk almost the entirety of Calicut's annual merchant fleet as it was en-route to Egypt. The disaster at last prompted the Zamorin to seek outside help, and envoys were sent to Cairo to request assistance from the powerful Mamluk Sultanate, which was already growing very tired of Portuguese aggression towards the Arab merchants operating in India. In 1507, a Mamluk armada arrived on the coast of Gujarat, basing themselves in the port city of Diu.

The war for the west Indian coast would therefore be fought primarily between the Portuguese, operating out of their base in Cochin, and the Mamluks, who were supported by (and had come to the aid of) the Zamorin of Calicut, the Gujarati Sultanate, and the prosperous communities of Muslim traders operating all along the coastline. In March of 1508, the Mamluks managed to ambush and defeat a small Portuguese flotilla at the port town of Chaul, killing the son of the Portuguese viceroy, Dom Francisco de Almeida, and alerting the Portuguese to the fact that they now faced a serious adversary who would attempt to dislodge them from India altogether. Almeida called in all available ships to rendezvous at Cochin, and in December they set out for Diu, to crush the Mamluk fleet. After a cautious voyage up the coastline, they arrived near Diu in March, 1509.

The Muslim strategy in the ensuing battle was shaped first and foremost by the human considerations that often intrude on the rational calculus of war. Although nominally a consolidated allied fleet, the Muslim armada was in fact a tenuous joint force comprised of Mamluk vessels under the command of Amir Hussain Al-Kurdi and the local Gujarati forces of Diu, under the command of the local governor, Malik Ayyaz. The relationship between the two was, in a word, less than amiable, and hobbled by mutual suspicion - conditions which are rarely conducive to sensible military planning.

Hussain argued from the jump that they ought to sail out and meet the Portuguese in the open sea, while they were still tired from their long voyage and had not had time to formulate a battle plan of their own. Ayyaz, however, saw this as a ploy - fighting in the open sea would allow the Mamluks to break away and flee back to Egypt if the fight went poorly, leaving Ayyaz and the people of Diu to face the wrath of the Portuguese and shoulder all the consequences. Ayyaz therefore insisted that they ought to instead wait in the shelter of the harbor and let the Portuguese come to them. Nominal tactical arguments were made for this plan, but the real purpose - from Ayyaz's perspective - was to prevent Hussain from abandoning him. Hussain then tried to override Ayyaz by simply ordering the entire armada to sail out, at which point Ayyaz had to scramble to override the order and call his own ships back. Thus, before the battle even began, the two Muslim commanders were fighting each other to a command stalemate.

These dynamics of mistrust pushed the Muslim fleet into the default strategy, which was to simply wait in the shelter of the city in a defensive position. There were certain tactical points to be made here, of course - the Gujarati artillery on land might be able to intervene in the battle, and the Muslim fleet might be safe from Portuguese maneuvering if it remained snug against the shore, but the larger problem was that Ayyaz and Hussain had ceded the initiative to a Portuguese enemy that was very eager to fight, and to fight aggressively.

In the end, the Muslim fleet deployed with its heavy ships - including the six carracks and six galleons of Hussain's fleet and four Gujarati carracks - anchored in a snug line close to the shore, under the ostensible protection of shore mounted cannon, while a cloud of lighter vessels, mainly comprised of small oared vessels and light galleys, loitered farther up in the harbor. The plan, as such, seems to have been to draw the Portuguese into a fight against the shoreline so that the light vessels could sail out and swarm them in the rear. It was not a commendable design, but given the paralyzing distrust between the Muslim commanders it would have to do.

The mood in the Portuguese fleet could hardly have been more different. Almeida was emphatic that the coming battle would be decisive, not just in the local, tactical sense but in a more grand and historic way. He told his captains that "in conquering this fleet we will conquer all of India", and made lavish promises of knighthoods, promotions, and rewards to every man in the event of victory.

The Portuguese battle plan hinged on tactical aggression, initiative, and superior gunnery. Almeida's flagship, the Frol de la Mar (Flower of the Sea) transferred most of its fighting men to other vessels and prepared to fight as a mobile artillery platform, to loiter in the rear of the battle where it could offer fire support and allow Almeida to coordinate the fight. The remainder of the Portuguese fleet was prepared to sail laterally across the face of the Muslim fleet and soften the enemy with cannon fire before wheeling in for boarding action.

As the sun rose on February 3, 1509, a small Portuguese frigate sailed down the line of the fleet as it loitered and waited to commence the battle. As it passed each ship, it briefly stopped and a herald came aboard to read a proclamation from the Viceroy. This gesture underscored that Almeida was not only fully prepared and eager to fight, but also convinced that he was about to win a world-historic victory. The proclamation read, in part:

Dom Francisco d'Almeida, viceroy of India by the most high and excellent king Dom Manuel, my lord. I announce to all who see my letter, that on this day and at this hour I am at the bar of Diu, with all the forces that I have to give battle to a fleet of the Great Turk that he has ordered, which has come from Mecca to fight and damage the faith of Christ and against the kingdom of the king my lord.

After reading the proclamation, the herald reiterated the previously promised rewards of titles and knighthoods, and gave universal permission to loot the enemy in the event of victory. Having dispersed this message to the whole fleet, Almeida's flagship fired a signal shot and the Portuguese began to spill into the harbor, sailing right past the shore batteries of the defender. To the great dismay of the Muslim fleet, the defensive fire from the shore guns had no great effect on the onrushing Portuguese armada. The lead Portuguese ship, the Santo Espirito, had its deck swept by fire which killed nearly a dozen men, but the line of Portuguese warships continued uninhibited and set on the static Muslim fleet.

The ensuing battle was shaped by a threefold Portuguese advantage in gunnery, armor, and tactical aggression, all of which were magnified by the disastrous decision by the Muslim commanders to moor their ships in a line with their sterns towards the shore - this rendered the Muslim fleet largely immobile and ensured that they could only fire their bow cannons, while the Portuguese vessels fired broadside volleys as they spilled into the mouth of the Diu harbor. The opening salvos of the Portuguese managed to sink a Mamluk carrack at the outset, and they continued to disgorge fire as they wheeled inward and slammed into the stationary Muslim warships, which remained largely immobile and fought like floating forts.

Portuguese fighting spirit was evidently extremely high, and their heavily equipped marines led ferocious boarding actions which, supported by the gunnery of the ships, slowly but surely overwhelmed the Muslim defenders. Hussain had some hope that his flotilla of light boats, which was loitering further up in the harbor, might swing the fight in his favor by swarming into the rear of the Europeans and boarding them from the stern, but this gambit was shattered by Almedia's flagship. The Frol del Mar had remained aloof from the close quarters fighting and was prowling in the rear, offering fire support as it went; when the cloud of little boats came charging into the battle at full row, they ran straight into the Frol, which unloaded its cannon on them. The lead boats were smashed, leading to a congested and fouled mess which blocked the other vessels from entering the battle. The utter failure of this attempted swarming on the flank left the larger Muslim vessels trapped helplessly against the shore, where they were slowly but surely overwhelmed.

By the end of the day, Diu had turned into the most overwhelming Portuguese victory imaginable. Every one of Hussain's 12 warships had been destroyed or captured, and of the 450 Mamluk personnel who had fought in the battle, a mere 23 had escaped - Hussain himself and some 22 men who had fled with him in a small boat. As for Hussain's erstwhile ally, Ayyaz, he played his cards brilliantly in the end - after watching the battle from the shore, he brought Almedia an offer of surrender, pledged vassalage to Portugal, and sent the victorious Portuguese fleet a sumptuous gift of food and gold.

In the grand scheme of things, Diu was not a particularly large or complex battle. The victorious Portuguese fleet had a mere 18 ships, of which only 9 were heavy carracks, and there were at most 800 Portuguese fighting men and sailors present. For our purposes, however, the battle presents two highly notable elements.

Diu was a significant and early demonstration of the emerging European naval system as a tool for potent long range power projection. The ability of a European power - even a poor one like Portugal - to project military force thousands of miles from home, fighting and winning in the littoral of wealthy and vast foreign states, was an entirely new and shocking state capacity, and one which would obviously have earth shattering implications. The combination of massed cannon fire and heavy European infantry created a powerful tactical nexus, which could now be deployed and sustained with truly global reach. By the end of the 16th Century, the Portuguese would control a chain of forts and outposts stretching all the way from Lisbon to Nagasaki, and Portuguese sailors and soldiers would withstand decades of bloody warfare, repelling all attempts to dislodge them.

On a tactical level, however, Diu resembles a bridge between eras of naval combat. Although the workhorse vessel in the Portuguese fleet was the carrack, which was recognizable as a precursor iteration of the broadside warship, the fighting at Diu still centered on boarding actions. The Portuguese used their gunnery to great effect and sank large Mamluk vessels with cannon fire, but the cannonry was still largely utilized for softening up the enemy and supporting boarding parties. Most of the Muslim fleet was overwhelmed by the boarding actions of heavily armored Portuguese marines which, although tactically powerful, exposed the Portuguese to deadly bowfire - as a result, more than a third of the Portuguese who fought at Diu were wounded in a battle that they won decisively.

In this sense, although the Portuguese fought at Diu with recognizably advanced sailing ships capable of traversing oceans and operating thousands of miles from home, the combat itself was still a close order affair with gunnery operating in a supportive role. Notwithstanding the different design of the ships, the physics of this combat was not altogether different from that which was seen on the galleys at Lepanto.

Diu and Lepanto were fought on opposite ends of the 16th Century. For naval warfare, therefore, this century forms what we might call a historical estuary, where distinct eras blurred together. Lepanto was the swan song of a very old system of naval warfare involving close order combat between rowed galleys; Diu was fought with the prototype of broadside sailing ships, but they fought rather similarly to galleys. Lepanto was the last showing of an old form of warfare which had reached the point of obsolescence; Diu was the prologue to an emerging system of naval warfare that had not yet been fully developed. Cannonry, with the ship as a floating artillery battery, was clearly an extremely powerful weapons system, but the secret of its proper application had not yet been fully uncovered.

The Spanish Armada and the Birth of the Royal Navy

More than 4,000 miles from Diu, there sat a relatively poor and unimportant kingdom called England. In the mid-16th Century, England was a marginal and unimportant state in the grand turnings of European affairs. She had not yet consolidated control over Scottland, had no overseas possession apart from the port of Calais on the French coast, and her ability to project power or exert influence beyond her shores was minimal. Her role in the European system at this time was primarily that of a junior partner to the powerful Spanish and an antagonist to the French; during the reign of the notorious Henry VIII, England would fight three wars with France as an ally of Spain.

Relations between Spain and England reached a turning point with the onset of the English Reformation and the death of Henry VIII. Henry's successor, the young Edward VI, became the first English king to have been brought up as a Protestant, but he reigned for only six years before dying at age of just 15. The throne then passed to his aunt, the Catholic Mary I, who reversed many of the church reforms and attempted to reassert Catholic prerogatives in England. In 1556, Mary was wed to King Philip II of Spain, providing a powerful foreign backer of the Catholic cause in England, and under his auspices Mary joined yet another war against France, which ended in victory for Spain, at the cost of England's last possession on the continent when the French captured Calais in 1558. Mary died a few months after the loss of Calais and was in turn succeeded by Elizabeth I, who once more reversed the religious trajectory and favored the Protestants.

The whipsawing of the English religious balance of power, with the throne passing back and forth between Catholic and Protestant monarchs, of course has great importance in the story of England's political development. What is interesting for our purposes, however, is the way this was perceived in Habsburg Spain, which was the most powerful Catholic state in Europe and a preeminent advocate of the Catholic cause. From the Spanish perspective, the English reformation threatened to tear England out of Spain's orbit, robbing Spain of its influence over an ally that was usefully positioned on France's northern flank. The death of Mary I was particularly devastating, in that it cost King Philip his direct influence over the English crown and replaced Mary with the Protestant Elizabeth.

It was within this context that Spain began to contemplate plans for what modern readers will instantly recognize as regime change. The Spanish initially supported plots to have Elizabeth overthrown and replaced with her cousin, the Catholic Queen Mary of Scotland - in response, Elizabeth had Mary imprisoned, forced her abdication, and eventually ordered her execution in 1587. Elizabeth further responded to these Spanish intrigues by backing the rebellion of Philip's provinces in the Netherlands and commissioning privateers to attack Spanish shipping. From the Spanish perspective, England was on the verge of permanently slipping out of Spain's orbit, and the time had come for more direct measures. Thus, the scheme for the Spanish Armada (colloquially called the "English Enterprise" in Spain) was born.

The Spanish Armada represented a remarkably ambitious attempt to settle the question of the English reformation once and for all. The plan, as such, was to muster an enormous fleet in Spain, sail through the English Channel, link up with a Habsburg ground army in the Spanish Netherlands, and then amphibiously land the army across the Channel to march on London, depose Elizabeth, and replace her with a compliant Catholic monarch. On the whole, this was an unprecedented scheme for the early modern era, combining as it did a massive fleet operation, amphibious assault, overt plans for regime change, and operations at great distance from the Spanish fleet's home ports.

The Spanish initially had pretensions of maintaining the element of surprise, but given the sheer scale of the preparations involved (including not only assembling an enormous fleet in Spain but also staging the invasion army in the Netherlands) this proved impossible. By the summer of 1588, the famous Spanish Armada of 141 ships had been assembled in Lisbon (at this time, Portugal and Spain were in a state of personal union under Habsburg rule), and they set out for the Channel.

As the Armada entered the English Channel, it rounded a peninsula in Cornwall and was spotted on July 29 - the news of the Spanish arrival was then conveyed to London via a chain of beacons constructed for that purpose, and the English fleet readied itself at Plymouth to contest the channel. The following weeks of action would constitute, in many ways, the birthing operation of the Royal Navy, which had been formally founded by Henry VIII some 42 years prior.

The Spanish advantages were formidable. On paper, the English had more ships - around 220 against 117 in the main body of the Spanish fleet - however, of this large number a mere 34 English ships were purpose built warships in the royal fleet. The remainder largely consisted of armed merchantmen, few of which participated in combat. Thus, although the Spanish nominally had fewer hulls, they had a significant advantage in firepower, with up to 50% more guns. Furthermore, the complements of heavily armed Spanish marines on deck would give the Armada an insuperable advantage in close range fighting and boarding actions. All told, the Spanish had good reason to feel confident in a pitched fleet action, to say nothing of the danger that the English would face if the Armada succeeded in convoying the Hapsburg land forces over the Channel.

As the Armada worked its way eastward through the Channel in the final days of July, the English attempted in vain to engage them. The Spanish had adopted a crescent-shaped formation which protected their transport ships and barges by wrapping them in a tight perimeter of heavy galleons; given the danger inherent in grappling with these massive Spanish warships at close range, the English fleet under Sir Francis Drake was forced to snipe at them from range with cannon fire; this initial action failed to result in the loss of even a single ship on either side. English fortunes improved slightly on August 1 when several Spanish ships collided, setting one galleon adrift and allowing it to be captured by the English fleet. A second Spanish galleon was captured, albeit heavily damaged, when its gunpowder magazine exploded. On the whole, however, the Armada managed to reach Calais on August 7 entirely intact, where it anchored itself in the same defensive crescent formation to await a linkup with the Spanish ground forces.

In the dead of night on August 7, the Spanish fleet anchored off Calais was awakened by the alarms and bells of their lookouts. Eight burning hulks were drifting slowly towards the Spanish formation. These were eight large fireships - stripped down English hulls packed with gunpowder, pitch, pig fat, and any other flammable material on hand, then set ablaze and cut adrift at a distance from the Spanish anchorage. As the wind and current naturally drove them in at the Spanish, the Armada fell into a panic. Much of the Spanish fleet cut their anchors and scattered in a mad scramble to evade the path of the drifting fireships. While none of the Spanish vessels was burned, the fireship attack at Calais served the critical function of scattering the Armada and compelling it to break its tight crescent formation, which it had worked so hard to maintain ever since it entered the Channel.

The broader problem for the Spanish was that, by cutting anchor and scattering in a mad panic, the Armada had been driven eastward by the prevailing winds - it was now not only disorganized, but it would have to fight powerful currents if it wished to either return to anchor at Calais or regain its crescent formation. It was in this state of disorder, as the Spanish were scattered by the fireships and carried out by the wind, that the English fleet chose to attack. They closed in on the morning of August 8 as the Spanish attempted to sort themselves out near the town of Gravelines, some 20 kilometers up the coast from Calais.

The Battle of the Gravelines is one of those historical oddities where it appears at first blush that very little happened. The Spanish had left their home port in July with 141 vessels in their armada, and at Gravelines the British managed to sink just five. This would appear to be a fairly inconsequential battle then, judging by the loss calculus. In fact, Gravelines marked a crucial turning point in naval warfare, and created a tactical pivot around which the English began their rise to rule the waves.

As the Spanish Armada attempted to reconstitute its formation following the disorientation of the fireship attack, the English fleet sailed in to have a fight. Drake had discovered, upon studying the captured galleons in the channel, that Spanish ships were not laid out for efficient reloading of their guns, with the Spanish cannon tightly spaced together and the gun decks clogged with supplies. This was because the Spanish, like the Portuguese at Diu, still favored a tactical methodology inherited from their long experience with galley warfare. Spanish cannons were intended for softening up enemy vessels as a prelude to boarding action, and the vessel itself was thought of fundamentally as an infantry assault craft.

The Spanish therefore had a damnably difficult day at Gravelines, as Drake's ships constantly stayed at the edge of grappling range, firing volley after volley at the Spanish fleet and constantly evading the enemy's attempts to board them. While little of the tactical detail of Gravelines is documented, a few things are known for certain. First, we know that five Spanish ships were sunk and another six suffered significant damage. No English ships were lost. Furthermore, the battle ended at approximately 4 PM because the English fleet had expended most of its powder and shot; in contrast, recovered Spanish wrecks revealed large supplies of unused munitions. This supports the general sketch of the battle as one where the English were prepared to fight at range the entire time, while the Spanish struggled in vain to execute boarding actions.

Although the fighting at Gravelines sank only a small fraction of the Armada, the entire operation had been successfully scuttled. The Armada was scattered and disordered, had missed its rendezvous with the ground forces, and was now driven much farther to the east than it had intended. Returning to Calais would mean battling not only the English fleet, but also the winds. The Armada could not sail west back into the channel, it could not facilitate an amphibious invasion of England, and it could not defeat the English Navy. That left only one course of action, which was to return to Spain by sailing north and circumnavigating the British Isles. The Spanish rounded northern Scotland on August 20 and soon ran into yet another disaster, when the gulf stream carried them much closer to the Irish shore than they had anticipated. A series of strong winds drove many of their ships into the shore - particularly those that had been damaged in battle or by the long voyage - and claimed another 28 ships.

The Spanish Armada had set out with lofty strategic goals, preparing itself for the triple lift of fighting a major fleet action, facilitating an amphibious landing, and affecting regime change in England. Expectations were high, and the Spanish crown had mobilized impressive resources. Because the strategic intention was fundamentally to eradicate Protestant rule in England and resuscitate the Catholic monarchy, Philip II had even been granted the right to raise crusading taxes and grant indulgences to his men. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Armada represented the second front in a broader Spanish war for Catholicism. They had been victorious in the Mediterranean front against the Turks at Lepanto, but faltered in the English channel, and the costs were high. Of the 141 ships that were mobilized in July, a third were lost to combat and storms. The proportional loss of men was even higher, with many perishing from disease and accident along the way: 25,696 men set out, and 13,399 returned.

In the larger picture, the battle at Gravelines proved to be a tactical turning point in naval combat. The Spanish, influenced by their long experience fighting galley battles with the Turks in the Mediterranean, had continued to view their ships as infantry assault craft, with cannon batteries serving as supplemental weapons designed to support and facilitate boarding actions. Tactically, the Spanish attempted to fight Gravelines in a manner very similar to the way the Portuguese fought at Diu - firing limited salvos with their heavy cannon before boarding with their heavy infantry. In contrast, the English fleet used its ships as floating and highly mobile artillery batteries. The results vindicated the English model.

Going forward, the English would aggressively pursue ship designs which facilitated gunnery-centric combat. Most importantly, the English fleet would pioneer so-called "race built" ships. The word "race" is here a deformation of "raze", and implied "razing" the fore and aft castles, creating a much sleeker vessel. The fighting castles, which continued to feature prominently on Spanish galleons, were useful in boarding actions, but they made ships top heavy and reduced maneuverability. By scrapping the fighting platforms altogether, English race built ships attained the familiar sleek shape and streamlined deck that gave them an insuperable advantage in ranged combat.

The English capital ships, which by the end of the 16th Century constituted the most powerful warships in the world, were essentially an admixture of four important technological changes:

1. Wheeled cannon carriages which rolled back into the ship upon firing, allowing for faster reloading.

2. Water tight porthole covers which could allow cannon banks to be placed on lower decks closer to the waterline.

3. Race built ship designs to make ships more maneuverable and less top heavy.

4. Full rigging, with three or more masts bearing square rigging.

While the English did not invent all of these important innovations, they were the first European Navy to pursue the systematic adoption of all four, and in doing so they cemented the superior combat power of ships deployed as mobile artillery batteries, rather than infantry assault craft. It was a warship built in 1514 for Henry VIII that first demonstrated the possibility of cutting gunports in the hull and placing banks of cannon close to the waterline, and it was Sir John Hawkins - Queen Elizabeth's Treasurer of the Navy - who began cutting the fighting castles off of English ships to create the maneuverable race-built design.

The naval revolution which found its pivot at Gravelines is a profound example of the way that weapons systems can intervene in history, and even outweigh the larger structural factors of state power. Spain was a much more powerful, wealthier, and more populous state than England, with an exceptional military pedigree. It did not matter - the English had fully accepted the logic of the agile floating artillery battery in a way that the Spanish, who were accustomed to boarding fights in the Mediterranean, had not.

And so, the 16th Century presented three landmark naval battles which proved the passing of the age and the future of war at sea. At Lepanto (1571) the Holy League and the Turks fought a classical galley battle centered on boarding actions. At Diu, the Portuguese used solidly built sailing ships, but their cannons were utilized to support a galley-like boarding assault. Finally, at Gravelines (1588) the Spanish attempted to fight somewhat similarly to the Portuguese at Diu, but were utterly unable to either grapple with or return the fire of the more agile and relentlessly cannonading English fleet. The embrace of heavily armed ships optimized for broadside firing - the so-called "Great Ships" - gave the English the first recognizable Capital Ships on the seas and became the embryo of their eventual naval supremacy.

The Line Arrives: The Dutch and English Wars

The Dutch Republic and England fought three major wars at sea between 1652 and 1674. Curiously, these wars failed to make a lasting impression in either the English popular memory or the broader historiography of Europe and warfare. They are a point of interest in the Netherlands, but beyond Dutch shores they are little known and little regarded.

This fact is rather strange, because it was in these Anglo-Dutch Wars that naval warfare in the age of sail reached its mature and recognizable form, particularly through a series of radical and important innovations made by the Royal Navy - innovations which were frantically and aggressively copied by the Dutch. The Royal Navy's eventual ascension to total global naval supremacy - the backbone of Britain's century of global empire - was forged in decades of intense and close quarters naval combat with the Dutch. Perhaps it is little wonder, then, that one particular historian of the field, named Alfred Thayer Mahan, found these wars to be uniquely important and dwelt on them at great length.

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2. Back to the Bloodlands: Operation Krepost

On Tuesday, August 6, the Russo-Ukrainian War took an unexpected twist with the beginning of a brigade-level Ukrainian assault on Kursk Oblast, across the border from Ukrainian Sumy. The decision by Ukrainian command to willingly open up a new front, at a time when their defenses on critical axes of the Donbas are failing, is both aggressive and fraught with peril. The sensational spectacle of a Ukrainian offensive into prewar Russia in a region that is operationally remote from the critical theater of the war has whipped the peanut gallery into a frenzy, and most commentators and observers seem to have fled straightaway to their base narrative instincts. Russian "doomers" have been quick to denounce the affair as a catastrophic failure of preparedness by the Russian Ministry of Defense, accelerationists have trumpeted the immateriality of Russian red lines, while the more disillusioned pro-Ukrainian commenters have despaired of the operation as a wasteful sideshow which dooms the Donbas line to defeat.

People form opinions very rapidly in the current information ecosystem, and the prospect of excitement often leads them to throw caution to the wind despite the orgy of misinformation and deception that surrounds such events. It is worth noting, however, that only two weeks have passed since the beginning of an operation that apparently nobody was expecting, and we should therefore be cautious of certainty and carefully distinguish between what we think and what we know. With that in mind, let's take a careful survey of the Ukrainian operation as it stands and attempt to parse out both the strategic concept of the assault and its possible trajectories.

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The sudden and unexpected eruption of combat in Kursk oblast has, of course, raised comparisons to the 1943 Battle of Kursk, which is often incorrectly called the "biggest tank battle of all time." For a variety of reasons, that famous battle is a poor comparison. Germany's Operation Citadel was a constrained and unambitious operation against a fully alert defense, characterized by a lack of both strategic imagination and strategic surprise. The current Ukrainian endeavor may lay on the opposite end of the spectrum - highly imaginative, and perhaps dangerously so. Nevertheless, the return of German military equipment to the environs of Kursk must raise eyebrows. The current battlefield around the town of Sudzha is precisely the spot where, in 1943, the Soviet 38th and 40th armies coiled for a counteroffensive against the German 4th Army. Russia's southwestern steppe tastes blood again, and the fertile earth opens wide to accept the dead.

Krepost: Strategic Intentions

Before we talk about the strategic concept behind Ukraine's operation in Kursk, let us briefly ponder what to call it. Repeating the phrase "Ukraine's Kursk Operation" will rapidly become tiresome and dry, and calling it "Kursk", or "The Battle of Kursk" is not a good option - both because it raises some confusion as to whether we mean the city of Kursk or the larger oblast around it, and because there has already been a Battle of Kursk. Therefore, I am suggesting that for now we simply refer to the Ukrainian assault as Operation Krepost. Germany's 1943 offensive towards Kursk was codenamed Operation Citadel, and Krepost (крепость) is a Slavic word for a fortress or citadel.

Ukraine has made repeated forays across the Russian border throughout this war - generally suicidal thunder runs into Belgorod Oblast which met with disaster. Krepost, however, stands apart from previous episodes in several ways, chief among them being the use of regular AFU brigades rather than the paramilitary fronts stood up by the GRU (that is, the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate, not Steve Carell's character in the Despicable Me franchise).

For previous expeditions towards Belgorod, the Ukrainians opted to use thinly veiled irregular formations like the "Freedom of Russia Legion" and the "Russian Volunteer Corps". These are the sort of sheep dipped units that can be useful in certain contexts by allowing states to maintain a token façade of plausible deniability - a good corollary might be Russia's own use of unmarked special forces in the 2014 annexation of Crimea. In a time of active war, however, these paramilitaries came across as exceptionally lame. Whatever the "Freedom of Russia Legion" called themselves, they were obviously forces stood up by the Ukrainian government, using Ukrainian weaponry, fighting Ukraine's war. The paint job fooled nobody, and absurdities like the "Belgorod People's Republic" did not exist beyond a few bad memes on twitter.

It is notable, however, that the Kursk incursion has been undertaken not by forces disguising themselves (however poorly) as independent Russian paramilitaries but by Ukrainian forces operating as themselves - that is, as regular Ukrainian army brigades. Committing core AFU assets to a ground incursion in Russia, especially during a time of general operational crisis in the Donbas, is something entirely different than flinging a disposable paramilitary battalion at Belgorod.

But why? The obvious thing that stands out about Kursk is how operationally remote it is from the critical theater of the war. The center of gravity in this conflict is the Donbas, and Ukraine's line of defenses around the cities of Pokrovsk, Kostyantinivka, Kramatorsk, and Slovyansk, with crucial flanking axes in the land bridge and on the Oskil River line. The frontier of Kursk Oblast, where the Ukrainians are now attacking, is more than 130 kilometers away from the subsidiary battles around Kharkov, and more than 200 kilometers away from the main theater of the war. Given the scope of this war and the pace of advances, Kursk may as well be on the moon.

In short, the Ukrainian operation in Kursk bears no possibility of being supportive of the other, critical fronts of the war, and even in the most generous range of outcomes it has no potential to exert a direct operational influence on those fronts. Parsing through the strategic intention behind Krepost, therefore, in that it has no immediate operational bearing on extant fronts. A variety of opportunities have been proposed, which we will review and contemplate in turn.

1) The Atomic Hostage

Sixty kilometers from the Ukrainian border lies the small city of Kurchatov (named after Igor Kurchatov, the father of Soviet nuclear weaponry) and the Kursk Nuclear Powerplant. The proximity of such an obviously significant - and potentially dangerous - installation so close to the scene of the fighting led many to immediately presume that the nuclear plant is the objective of Krepost.

These theories are highly reductive and unsupported, and act as if the powerplant is the object in a game of tag - as if Ukraine can "win" by reaching the plant. It's not immediately obvious that this is the case. There's plenty of hand-wringing about Ukraine "capturing" the plant, but the question then remains: to do what with?

The implication would seem to be that Ukraine might use the plant as a hostage, threatening to sabotage it and initiate some sort of radiological disaster. This, however, would seem to be both impractical and unlikely. The Kursk plant is currently in a state of transition, with its four older RBMK reactors (similar to those used at Chernobyl) being phased out and replaced with new VVER reactors. The plant features modern biologic shields, a robust containment building, and other protective mechanisms. Furthermore, nuclear power plants do not explode in the sense that is often feared. Chernobyl, for example, experienced a steam explosion due to particular design flaws which do not exist in currently operable plants. The idea that Ukrainian soldiers could simply flip a bunch of switches and detonate the plant like a nuclear bomb are not realistic.

It is theoretically possible, one supposes, that the Ukrainians could try to bring in colossal amounts of explosives and send the entire plant sky high, spreading radioactive material into the atmosphere. While I am certainly no great admirer of the Kiev regime, I cannot help but doubt the willingness of the Ukrainian government to intentionally create a radiological disaster which would irradiate much of their own country along with swathes of central Europe, particularly because the Kursk region is part of the Dnieper watershed.

The powerplant story sounds scary but is ultimately too phantasmagorical to take seriously. Ukraine is not going to intentionally create a radiological disaster in close proximity to their own border, which would likely poison their own primary river basin and turn them into the most intensely hated international pariah ever seen. Even for a country at the end of its strategic rope, it's hard to give credence to a harebrained scheme that uses critical maneuver assets of the regular army to capture an enemy nuclear plant and rig it to blow.

2) Diversionary Front

In another formulation, Krepost is construed as an attempt to draw Russian resources away from other, more critical sectors of front. The idea of a "diversion" as such is always appealing, to the point where it becomes something of a trope, but it's worth considering what this might actually mean in the context of the relative force generation in this war.

We can begin with the more abstract problem here - Ukraine is operating at a serious disadvantage in total force generation, which means that any widening of the front will disproportionately burden the AFU. Extending the frontline with an entirely new - and strategically isolated - axis of combat would be a development that works against the outnumbered force. This is why, in 2022, we saw the Russians contract the frontline by hundreds of kilometers as a prelude to their mobilization. The idea of extending the front becomes a shell game for the Ukrainians - with fewer brigades than the Russians to cover more than 1000 kilometers of frontline, it becomes questionable as to just which army is being "diverted" in Kursk. For example, the spokesman for the 110th Mechanized Brigade (currently defending near Pokrovsk) told Politico that "things have become worse in our part of the front" since Ukraine launched Krepost, with less ammunition coming in as the Russians continue to attack.

The more concrete problem for Ukraine, however, is that the Russians formed an entirely new Northern Army Group covering Belgorod, Kursk, and Bryansk and is in the process of raising two additional army equivalents. To the extent that Krepost forces the deployment of Russian reserves, it will draw from forces organic to this northern grouping, and not the Russian formations currently attacking in the Donbas. Ukrainian sources are already taking a dour mood, noting that there has been no drawdown of Russia's grouping in the Donbas. Thus far, the identified Russian units fighting in Kursk have essentially all been drawn from this northern grouping

More to the point, Krepost seems to have meaningfully denuded Ukrainian strength in the Donbas while affecting the Russians very little. A recent piece in the Economist featured interviews with several Ukrainian troops fighting in Kursk, all of whom said that their units had been "pulled, unrested, from under-pressure frontlines in the east with barely a day's notice." The article goes on to quote a source in the AFU's general staff who notes that the Russian units scrambling into Kursk are coming from the northern army group, not the Donbas. A recent New York Times piece, which triumphantly announced the redeployment of Russian forces, admitted that none of Russia's troop movements are affecting the Donbas - instead, it is deploying resting units from the Dnipro axis.

And this is Ukraine's problem. Fighting an enemy with superior force generation, attempts to divert or redirect the fighting ultimately threaten to become a shell game. Russia has approximately 50 division equivalents on the line against perhaps 33 for Ukraine - an advantage that will stubbornly persist no matter how they are arranged on the line. Adding 100 extra kilometers of front in Kursk is fundamentally contradictory to the AFU's fundamental interests at this juncture, which hinge on economizing forces and avoiding overextension.

3) Bargaining Chip

Another strand of thought suggests that Krepost may be an effort to strengthen Ukraine's position for negotiations with Russia. An anonymous Zelensky advisor allegedly told the Washington Post that the point of the operation was to seize Russian territory to hold as a bargaining chip which could be swapped in negotiations. This view was then corroborated by senior advisor Mykhailo Podolyak.

If we take these claims at face value, we perhaps have arrived at the strategic intention of Krepost. If Ukraine indeed intends to occupy a swathe of Kursk Oblast and use it to bargain for the return of prewar Ukrainian territory in the Donbas, then we must ask the obvious question: have they lost their minds?

Such a plan would instantly founder on two insurmountable problems. The first of these would be an obvious misread of the relative value of the chips on the table. The Donbas - the heart of Russia's war aims - is a highly urbanized region of nearly seven million inhabitants, which - along with Russian annexed Zaporozhia and Kherson - forms a critical strategic link to Crimea and grants Russia control over the Sea of Azov and much of the Black Sea littoral. The idea that the Kremlin would consider walking away from its aims here simply to bloodlessly recover a few small towns in southwestern Kursk is, in a word, lunacy. It would, in the luminary words of President Trump, be "the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals."

If Ukraine thought that seizing Russian territory would make Moscow more amenible to peace talks, they badly miscalculated. The Kremlin responded by declaring an Anti-Terror Operation in Kursk, Byransk, and Belgorod Oblasts, and Putin - far from appearing humiliated or cowed - projected anger and defiance, while Foreign Ministry officials have suggested that the Kursk operation now precludes negotiations.

The other problem with trying to hold Kursk as a bargaining chip is, well, that you have to hold it. As we will discuss shortly, this will be very difficult for the AFU. They managed to achieve strategic surprise and make a modest penetration into Kursk, but there are a variety of kinetic factors that make them unlikely to hold it. For something to be useful as a bargaining chip, it must be in your possession - this would therefore compel Ukraine to commit forces to the Kursk front indefinitely, and hold it to the bitter end.

4) Pure Spectacle

Finally, we come to the more nebulous option - that Krepost was conceived purely to scandalize and embarrass the Kremlin. This is certainly the sensationalized solution that much of the commentariat has converged on, with plenty of vicious delight in the reversal of fortunes and the spectacular reverse uno of Ukraine invading Russia.

This all plays well with foreign audiences, of course, but it ultimately does not matter much. There's no evidence that the Kremlin's grip on the conflict or the commitment of Russian society to support the war are wavering. This war has seen a long sequence of nominal Russian "embarrassment", from the 2022 withdrawals from Kharkov and Kherson, to the Ukrainian air strikes on Sevastopol, to drone and terror attacks deep inside Russia, all the way to the bizarre mutiny of the Wagner PMC. None of these things have detracted from the central objectives of the Kremlin's war, which remain the capture of the Donbas and the steady exhaustion of Ukraine's military resources. Did the AFU throw a grouping of its dwindling strategic reserves into Kursk Oblast purely to scandalize and embarrass Putin? Possibly. Would it matter? Highly unlikely.

It's very common, particularly on social media, to see a sort of reveling in the great reversal of Ukraine liberating Russia, and battlefield updates frequently make reference to the AFU "liberating" Kursk oblast. This is, of course, very childish and meaningless. Once one extracts oneself from the spectacle, the entire enterprise seems obviously disconnected from the larger logic of Ukraine's war. It's not at all clear how occupying a narrow slice of the Russian frontier correlates to Ukraine's self-professed war aims of regaining its 1991 borders, or how widening the front is supposed to promote a negotiated end to the settlement, or - for that matter - how the little town of Sudzha could be a fair trade for the Donbas transit hub of Pokrovsk.

Ultimately, we have to acknowledge that Krepost is a very odd military development - an overmatched force, already heaving from the strain of a grinding, 700 kilometer front, voluntarily opened a new, independent axis of combat which has no possibility of operationally synergizing with the war's critical theaters. There is some satisfaction to be derived from bringing the war into Russia and scandalizing the Kremlin. Perhaps Kiev hopes that simply unsettling the situation will cajole the Russian military into making a mistake or redeploying out of position, but so far the Kursk axis has not denuded Russian strength in other theaters. Perhaps they really do think that they can seize enough ground to bargain with, but to do that they will need to hold it. Or perhaps they are simply losing the war, and desperation breeds strange ideas.

History will probably conclude that Krepost was an inventive, but ultimately far-fetched gambit. The crude calculus on the ground shows that the existing trajectory of the war simply doesn't work for Ukraine. Russian progress across the contact line in the east has been steady and relentless throughout the spring and summer, and the devastating Ukrainian failure in 2023's counteroffensive showed that banging away against alert and entrenched Russian defenses is not a good answer. Faced with the prospect between slow strangulation in the east, Ukraine has attempted to unlock the front and introduce a more kinetic and open pace.

On the Ground

The biggest problem with the more fanciful and explosive theories of Operation Krepost are fairly simple: the results on the ground are not very good. The attack has been both limited in scale and constrained in its advance, but the shock and surprise of the operation has allowed the narrative to spin out of control, both on the part of exuberant Ukrainian supporters and the usual doomposters in the Kremlin orbit, who have been bemoaning and expecting imminent Russian defeat for years at this point.

Let's begin with a brief sketch of Krepost, the units involved, and the state of the advance. We should begin with a note about the composition of the Ukrainian assault grouping, and what this tells us about the state of the AFU.

Very soon after Krepost began, the Ukrainian ORBAT began to materialize in a jumbled mess. The basic problem, to put it in the most elementary terms, is that there are far too many brigades represented in the operation. There are currently no less than five mechanized brigades (22nd, 54th, 61st, 88th, 116th), a territorial defense brigade (103rd), two Air Assault Brigades (80th and 82nd) and a variety of attached battalions - something like a dozen total brigade equivalents. To put it bluntly, there are very clearly not twelve brigades (30,000 personnel) in this section of front - we have a puzzle on our hands.

The mysterious ORBAT grows ever moreso when one considers the astonishing variety of vehicles that have been spotted (and destroyed) in Kursk. The list includes at minimum the following assets:

• KrAZ Cougar

• Senator

• Oshkosh M-ATV

• Kozak-2

• Bushmaster

• Maxxpro MRAP

• Stryker

• BTR-60M

• BTR 70/80

• VAB

• Marder 1A3

• T-64

• BAT-2

• BREM-1

• Ural 4320

• AHS Krab

• Buk

• M777

• Grad

• 2S1 Gvodzika

• 2k22 Tunguska

• 2S7 Pion

• M88AS2 Hercules

• BMP1

• PT-91

• BTR-4E

• MTLB

That is a long list. But what does it mean?

There is a disconnect between the number of brigades and different vehicle types identified in Kursk and the actual size of the AFU grouping. What this suggests is that the Ukrainians stripped down the motor pools from a variety of different brigades and concentrated them in a strike package to attack Kursk, rather than deploying these brigades as such.

The situation would appear to be highly similar to the Second World War German practice of forming Kampfgruppen, or Battle Groups. As the Wehrmacht became more and more overstretched, German commanders became accustomed to forming improvised formations comprised of sub-units stripped from the line as necessary: take an infantry battalion from this division, steal a dozen panzers from that division, commandeer a battery from that regiment, and voila: you have a Kampfgruppe.

In the voluminous masses of World War Two literature, Kamfgruppen were often taken as evidence of Germany's wonderful improvisational powers, and the ability of their cool-headed commanders to scrape together fighting power from threadbare resources. There's nothing specifically incorrect about that, but this tends to miss the larger point - Kampfgruppe did not become a phenomenon until late in the war, when Germany was losing, and their regular order of battle (ORBAT) was becoming shredded. Cobbling together mutant formations can help you stave off disaster, but it is not a superior option to deploying organic brigades as such.

We appear to have a Ukrainian Kampfgruppe in Kursk, with elements of a variety of different brigades - bringing with them a whole hodgepodge of different vehicles - forming a grouping that is likely not more than 7-8,000 men. Above and beyond the progress that they are making in Kursk, this does not suggest anything good about the state of the AFU. To launch this offensive, they had to strip down units that were actively fighting in the Donbas and rapidly shuttle them to Sumy to accumulate in an improvised strike group. It is a threadbare grouping for a threadbare army.

In any case, the basic shape of the Ukrainian offensive is fairly clear. The mechanized elements (including the mech and air assault brigades) formed the critical maneuver assets, while territorial defense troops from the 103rd provided flank security on the grouping's northwestern flank.

The Ukrainian grouping was able to achieve something approximating total surprise - a fact that was surprising to many, given the ubiquity of Russian reconnaissance drones in theaters like the Donbas. In fact, the terrain here was highly conducive for Ukraine. The Ukrainian side of the border on the Sumy-Kursk axis is covered with a thick forest canopy which gives the Ukrainians the rare opportunity to conceal the staging of its forces, while the presence of the city of Sumy only 30 kilometers from the border provides a base of support. The situation is highly similar to Ukraine's Kharkov operation in 2022 (the AFU's most impressive achievement of the war), in which the city of Kharkov and the forest belt around it provided the opportunity to stage forces largely undetected. These opportunities do not exist in the flat, mostly treeless Ukrainian south, where Ukraine's 2023 offensive was heavily surveilled and bombarded on approach.

In any case, with strategic surprise achieved, the Ukrainian force managed to get the jump on the thin Russian defense and penetrate the border in the opening hours. Russian defenses in these regions consist mainly of obstacles like ditches and minefields, and do not feature well prepared fighting positions. The nature of these barriers suggests that the Russians were primarily focused on impeding and interdicting raids, rather than defending against an earnest assault. At the outset, elements of the 88th managed to pin the Russian rifle company stationed at the border crossing and take a substantial number of prisoners. The now famous pictures circulating which show many dozens of surrendered Russians comes from this border checkpoint, located literally on the state border.

The dual effect of strategic surprise, along with images of a large batch of captured Russian personnel, let the narrative on the attack break all containment. In the following days, a host of misinformation began to circulate implying that the Ukrainians had captured the town of Sudzha, some 8 kilometers from the border.

In fact, it quickly became clear that the Ukrainian advance on Sudzha had already begun to bog down with the rapid scrambling of Russian reinforcements into the area. Ukrainian forces spent most of August 7th and 8th consolidating positions to the north of Sudzha and working to envelope the town, which sits at the bottom of a valley. They eventually captured the town, but the delay cost them precious days and allowed the Russians to move reinforcements into the theater.

The opening days of the operation were very difficult to get a handle on, largely because the Ukrainians flung motorized columns up the road as far as they could, leading to inflated claims as to the depth of the Ukrainian advance.

It has now become clear that the initial Ukrainian advance hinged on both their mobility and strategic surprise, but both of these factors had been exhausted roughly by day five of the operation. By Friday, August 9, Ukrainian advances had largely stopped as the Russians established effective blocking positions, including in the towns of Korenevo and Bol'shoe Soldatskoe. Many of the furthest Ukrainian penetrations, furthermore, turned out to be isolated mechanized columns which had punched as far up the road as possible before either turning back or running into ambushes (the results of one such encounter are seen in the video below), such that the Ukrainians reached several positions that they never actually controlled.

Put it all together, and what you get is a fairly confined and modest Ukrainian breach into Russian territory, running from the approach to Korenevo (still firmly under Russian control) in the west to Plekhovo in the east - a span of just over 40 kilometers (25 miles). Sudzha is under Ukrainian occupation, but their positions have not extended far beyond it - the total depth of the penetration is some 35 kilometers at the farthest point.

Having captured Sudzha, but failing to break out on either of the main axes out of the area, Ukraine now faces a very unpleasant tactical reality. Their brief glimpse of an open and mobile operation has dissipated, and Kursk is calcifying into another front, with all the attendant difficulties. They now occupy a modest salient within Russia, with the town of Sudzha (population 6,000) at its center.

With progress stalled, the AFU is currently working to solidify and extend the flanks of the salient. The focal point at the present moment appears to be the inner bend of the Seim river, which winds across the border and runs along a course some 12 kilometers inside Russia. The Ukrainians recently struck several bridges across the Seim with the intention of isolating the southern bank. If their ground advance can push to the Seim south of Korenevo (through a front currently defended by the Russian 155th Marine Infantry brigade) they stand a reasonable chance of cutting off and capturing the Seim's southern bank, including the villages of Tektino and Glushkovo.

All of this is reasonably interesting, in terms of the tactical minutia, but it does not have much bearing on the two important strategic questions for Ukraine: namely, whether their operational successes in Kursk are worth the tradeoff in the Donbas, and whether their gains are worth the losses they are suffering. We'll take up the latter question first.

The basic problem for the Ukrainians, tactically speaking, is that the fighting in Kursk leaves them highly exposed to Russian strike systems, for a variety of reasons. The Ukrainian position around Sudzha is a road-poor region, connected to the rear area on the Ukrainian side of the border by only a handful of exposed roads which offer no concealment. This leaves the Ukrainian logistical tail highly vulnerable to strikes by Lancets and FPV drones. Furthermore, attempts to properly support the advance require the AFU to bring precious assets close to the border, exposing them to attack.

Ukrainian's strikes on the Siem bridges are a good example of this. In theory, dropping the bridges and securing the south bank of the Siem makes good sense as a way to secure the western flank of their position around Sudzha, but the strikes on the bridges involved bringing forward precious HIMARS launchers, which were detected by Russian ISR and destroyed.

Trying to provide air defense for the Ukrainian salient is likely to be similarly cost prohibitive, as it entails parking the AFU's dwindling air defense assets in close proximity to the Russian border. We have already seen the Russians capitalize on this, with a successful hit on a European-provisioned IRIS-T system.

By creating a front within Russia itself, the Ukrainians have voluntarily accepted a long and exposed logistical tail, while fighting within the shadow of Russia's own base of material support. The results have been largely disastrous thus far. A running total of 96 strikes on Ukrainian vehicles and positions have been recorded and geolocated in Kursk thus far, and Ukrainian vehicles losses are on par with the opening weeks of the Ukrainian offensive at Robotyne last summer.

Unlike Robotyne, however, there is not even a strong theoretical case to be made for incurring heavy losses on this axis of advance. Even a generous sketch of the coming weeks leaves Ukraine at an impasse in Kursk. Suppose they push through to the Seim and force the Russians to abandon the southern bank, capture Korenevo, and carve out a 120 kilometer front in Kursk - what then? Is this a fair trade for the Toretsk-New York agglomeration, or Pokrovsk, where the Russians continue to steadily advance?

Krepost thus threatens to turn into another Volchansk, or Krinky - an isolated attrition pit disconnected from the crucial axes of the war. Control over Sudzha does not exert any leverage over Russia's ability to sustain the fight in the Donbas or around Kharkov, but it does create another vacuum that will suck in precious Ukrainian resources, banging away on a road to nowhere. If you had suggested a month ago that the Russians could contrive a way to draw off and pin the maneuver elements of no less than five Ukrainian mechanized brigades, along with a variety of disparate support elements, this would have been viewed as a beneficial move for them - yet this is precisely what the AFU has voluntarily done with Krepost.

Krepost ultimately reflects a growing Ukrainian frustration with the trajectory of the war in the east, where the AFU has grown weary of the industrial slugfest with its bigger and more powerful neighbor. By flinging a secretly assembled mechanized package at a lightly defended and previously ancillary sector of front, they briefly managed to reopen mobile operations, but the window of mobility was far too small and the gains far too meager. It has now become clear that the decision to divert forces to Kursk has undermined the already precarious defense of the Donbas. Ukraine hold Sudzha and may very well clear the south bank of the Seim, but if it comes at the expense of Pokrovsk and Toretsk, that is a trade that the Russian Army will be happy to make.

The AFU is expending carefully husbanded and scarce resources in the pursuit of operationally inconsequential objectives. The exhilaration of taking the fight to Russia and being on the attack again can certainly work wonders for morale and create a spectacle for western backers, but the effect is short lived - like a broke man gambling away his last dollar, all for the momentary thrill of chance.

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3. The Passing of the Age: The Battle of Lepanto

White founts falling in the courts of the sun,

And the Sultan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;

There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,

It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,

It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,

For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.

They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,

They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea

So begins GK Chesterton's poem Lepanto - an ode to the colossal battle fought between the Ottoman Navy and a coalition Christian armada off the coast of Greece in 1571.

Lepanto is a very famous battle, and one which means different things to different people. To a devout Roman Catholic like Chesterton, Lepanto takes on the romanticized and chivalrous form of a crusade - a war by the Holy League against the marauding Turk. At the time it was fought, to be sure, this was the way many in the Christian faction thought of their fight. Chesterton, for his part, writes that "the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss, and called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross."

For historians, Lepanto is something like a requiem for the Mediterranean. Placed firmly in the early-modern period, fought between the Catholic powers of the inland sea and the Ottomans, then on the crest of their imperial rise, Lepanto marked a climactic ending to the long period of human history where the Mediterranean was the pivot of the western world. The coasts of Italy, Greece, the Levant, and Egypt - which for millennia had been the aquatic stomping grounds of empire - were treated to one more great battle before the Mediterranean world was permanently eclipsed by the rise of the Atlantic powers like the French and English. For those particular devotees of military history, Lepanto is very famous indeed as the last major European battle in which galleys - warships powered primarily by rowers - played the pivotal role.

There is some truth in all of this. The warring navies at Lepanto fought a sort of battle that the Mediterranean had seen many times before - battle lines of rowed warships clashing at close quarters in close proximity to the coast. A Roman, Greek, or Persian admiral may not have understood the swivel guns, arquebusiers, or religious symbols of the fleets, but from a distance they would have found the long lines of vessels frothing the waters with their oars to be intimately familiar. This was the last time that such a grand scene would unfold on the blue waters of the inner sea; afterwards the waters would more and more belong to sailing ships with broadside cannon.

Lepanto was all of these things: a symbolic religious clash, a final reprise of archaic galley combat, and the denouement of the ancient Mediterranean world. Rarely, however, is it fully understood or appreciated in its most innate terms, which is to say as a military engagement which was well planned and well fought by both sides. When Lepanto is discussed for its military qualities, stripped of its religious and historiographic significance, it is often dismissed as a bloody, unimaginative, and primitive affair - a mindless slugfest (the stereotypical "land battle at sea") using an archaic sort of ship which had been relegated to obsolescence by the rise of sail and cannon.

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Here we wish to give Lepanto, and the men who fought it, their proper due. The continued use of galleys well into the 16th century did not reflect some sort of primitiveness among the Mediterranean powers, but was instead an intelligent and sensible response to the particular conditions of war on that sea. While galleys would, of course, be abandoned eventually in favor of sailing ships, at Lepanto they remained potent weapons systems which fit the needs of the combatants. Far from being a mindless orgy of violence, Lepanto was a battle characterized by intelligent battleplans in which both the Turkish and Christian command sought to maximize their own advantages, and it was a close run and well fought affair. Lepanto was indeed a swan song for a very old form of Mediterranean naval combat, but it was a well conceived and well fought one, and Turkish and Christian fleets alike did justice to this venerable and ancient form of battle.

Medieval Languishing

The Battle of Lepanto was fought in 1571, while the last entry in this essay series ended with a consideration of the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. The astute observer may notice that a significant period of time lapsed between these two events, and wonder whether it is possible that something interesting occurred in that intervening period. In fact, many things did happen between the 1st and 16th Centuries of the common era, but relatively few of those things were what we might recognize as naval battles.

After Octavian's victory in the Roman Civil Wars, the Mediterranean again became a pacified internal zone of the Roman Empire, which left little possibility of major naval operations being necessary for several centuries. It was not until the disintegration of pan-Mediterranean Roman power in the 5th Century that Southern Europe and the inner sea again became a contested theater, but the intense geopolitical contest of the medieval period did not lead to a significant resurgence of naval combat. Still, it is worthwhile for us to consider medieval naval warfare, such as it was, as a prelude to early modern war and Lepanto. Although phrases like "the medieval period" and "the Middle Ages" can take on a somewhat nebulous meaning, I have always preferred to date the Medieval era from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 to the defeat of Byzantium in 1453, bookending the period with the two deaths of Rome.

For a variety of reasons, naval warfare was of relatively scant importance during the medieval era. Naval battles were relatively rare and generally smaller in scale than in the archaic world - in those many centuries, there were few naval operations that even remotely compared in scope to the great ancient battles at Salamis, Cape Ecnomus, or Actium. Medieval Europe had ships, of course - the most numerous being the modestly sized flat bottomed cogs which formed a mainstay of merchant fleets. In wartime, however, such vessels were primarily used to transport armies and their supplies, and they usually did so uncontested. Where naval battles did occur, they tended to be ancillary affairs and were not decisive of larger wars - in sharp contrast to the classical era, in which there were many major conflicts that were decided by the naval theater.

The de-prioritization of naval warfare during this period resulted from a dovetailing of strategic factors and preferences. First and foremost, there was a dearth of state capacity, with medieval states lacking the extractive powers and far reaching bureaucracies that characterized powerful archaic states like Rome or Persia. The weak and unconsolidated state had ramifications for many aspects of political life and geopolitical competition, this was acutely felt in the naval arena, to an extent that was disproportionate to the impact on land power.

The key difference between generating fighting power on land and sea in the medieval period lay in the decentralization of military preparedness and the latent power of the peacetime society. What we mean by this is that while medieval societies had the power to quickly raise armies from their peacetime resources, this capacity did not extend to warships. A class of landholding military servitors (which we popularly call knights) provided ready combat power, while peasants could be levied to fight in a pinch. Furthermore, the longstanding threat posed by raiding threats from the periphery - Vikings, Magyars, and so forth - led to the devolution of defensive responsibility. Centralized royal authority was utterly unable to react in a timely manner to such threats, and so defense became essentially a localized affair, delegated de facto to local lords and the fighting resources of the immediate region.

With most medieval societies therefore organized to generate defensive land power from their extant resources, states were, as a rule, simply not organized bureaucratically to maintain capable standing navies, as these were resource intensive forces which required specialized knowledge (both to build and operate) and significant expenditure even during peacetime. Where naval support was required for a war, it took a significant amount of time to amass and usually made use of merchant ships, as contracting or requisitioning existing civilian vessels was cheaper and much easier than raising a purpose built war fleet. Thus, the ships used in medieval naval battles - when they did occur - tended to be merchant cogs and barges, modified for combat.

As a result, medieval societies were geared for warfare on land, even when facing threats from the sea. The preeminent example of this, of course, was the Vikings. Popular portrayals of the Vikings tend to emphasize their extraordinary ferocity in battle, but the true "strategic asset" of the Scandinavians who ran wild in Europe in the 9th and 10th Centuries was their extraordinary seamanship. The Viking longship was an astonishing cultural artifact, capable of navigating rough open ocean while still being maneuverable and shallow enough on the draft to sail up rivers and beach itself for amphibious assault. The ability of the Vikings to cross the tumultuous North Sea and even venture out into the North Atlantic as far as Greenland and the North American coast in open hulled, single decked galleys was truly exceptional.

One thing the Viking longship was not, however, was a good platform for fighting on the water. Lacking any armament whatsoever, it sat too low in the water to board enemy vessels with ease, and there are scant references to what we might call pitched battle involving Viking fleets. Where such battles did occur, as at the Battle of Svolder in 999, combat seems to have involved lashing ships together to form an immobile floating fortress, rather than maneuvering in a recognizable fleet action. So while seamanship and shipbuilding were an essential element of the Vikings' spread and power, the sea played the role of incurring tremendous mobility and striking range to Viking forces, rather than being an arena of combat. All of the most critical engagements between the Vikings and their adversaries, such as the Battles of Brunanburh, Rochester, Edington, Maldon, and Stamford Bridge, occurred on land. The example of the Vikings is greatly instructive, demonstrating that even in scenarios where the sea was the sole vector of attack for the enemy, scaled fleet operations were simply not a favored strategic recourse.

The simple fact that medieval Europe lacked dedicated institutions for naval warfare meant that there was a corresponding lack of specialized engineering, training, and expertise. As a result, medieval navies lacked a ship-killing weapons system. There is no record of the medieval use of rams, such as were used in archaic navies. There are incidents where the use of fire weapons is recorded - most famously by the Byzantines, who used a proprietary chemical mixture of quicklime, naphtha, and sulfur to create the equivalent of a medieval flamethrower - in almost all circumstances medieval naval combat centered on boarding action and the exchange of bowfire.

Because medieval warships were generally armed only with the personal weapons of the fighting men on deck, tactical methodologies favored efforts to fortify the ship, rather than to execute sophisticated maneuvers at sea. A few of these tactical trends bear enumeration.

In a battle between medieval warships, the most pressing and immediate danger came from the missile weapons of the men on the enemy deck, including crossbows, traditional bowfire, javelins, and occasionally jars full of caustic lime. Because battles were at the outset an exchange of personal missile weapons, one of the easiest and most cost effective ways to increase combat effectiveness was to simply increase the height of the ship, so that one's own men were aiming downward at the enemy deck while being protected from enemy missiles by the railing of the ship. There was a concerted trend throughout the medieval period, therefore, to fortify vessels by constructing higher and higher fighting platforms with a protective wooden railing, particularly in the prow and the stern of the ship. Such fighting platforms became the origin of the terms forecastle and aftercastle as names for the front and aft decks, which remained in use long after the utility of such "castles" in combat disappeared.

Given the narrow parameters of a medieval sea fight as an exchange of missile weapons and boarding actions, the relative height and protective quality of these fighting platforms were frequently decisive in battle. Perhaps most notable example of this was the Battle of Malta in 1283, which took place in the "War of the Sicilian Vespers". This was one of those esoteric medieval wars which is almost impossible to make sense of without a great deal of specialized reading - fought between states that no longer exist (chiefly the Crown of Aragon, based on Southeastern Spain, and the Angevin Kingdom of Naples in Southern Italy) for purposes that are essentially incomprehensible to us.

A full and dutiful exposition of this opaque conflict would be beyond our remit in this essay. What is interesting for our purposes was that this was one of the few medieval wars where there was a meaningful naval theater, given the fact that this was essentially a war between Spanish and Italian states over Sicily and to a lesser extent Malta, some 50 miles to the south. In 1283, an Aragonese fleet arrived off the coast of Malta and managed to trap a similarly sized Angevin fleet inside Malta's Great Harbor. The Aragonese fleet had two distinguishing factors in its favor: first, it was led by a highly capable Admiral named Roger de Lauria, and secondly that its ships had been built up with exceptionally tall fighting platforms ("castles").

When de Lauria's fleet arrived at the mouth of the Great Harbor, he formed them up in a line across its mouth and then proceeded to lash his ships together with heavy chains, forming a unified barrier across the exit. Wary of being trapped in the Great Harbor, the Angevin fleet immediately disembarked from its protected anchorage at Fort Saint Angelo and rowed out to give battle. De Lauria, however, counted on the superior height of his decks to shelter his men from enemy projectiles, and ordered his men to return only a small amount of token crossbow fire. The heat of the day was spent with the Angevin fleet futilely futilely flinging crossbow bolts, jars of lime, and javelins at the high Aragonese fighting platforms, doing very little damage and causing few casualties. Once the Angevins had expended all their ammunition, de Lauria ordered his fleet to attack, and his men were able to fire down on the lower decks of their now helpless adversaries.

The Battle of Malta is a very useful illustration of medieval naval combat, containing in miniature many of the more universal principles. First and foremost, the battle was decided tactically by the use of small arms like javelins and crossbows, as the ships involved were unarmed save for the personal weapons of their fighting crews. In this case, the single determinant factor of victory was that the Aragonese ships were taller. The battle also demonstrated that, although rare and usually small in scale, medieval naval combat was extremely bloody, as the victorious side tended to massacre enemy crews. At Malta, the Aragonese killed some 3,500 Angevin personnel, taking only a small fraction of that number captive.

This was a standard practice of the times. At the Battle of Sluys in 1340, for example, a French fleet tried unsuccessfully to replicate de Lauria's blocking technique, chaining their vessels together to prevent the English from entering the Scheldt River. Unfortunately for the French, a strong wind began to disorder their formation, and the English fleet attacked them as they were struggling to hold their line. The English more or less massacred the French to the man, killing some 16,000 in a single day.

The Battle of Malta also, however, illustrates the limits to the scale and operational import of naval combat in this era. The two fleets that clashed in the Great Harbor were very small - something like 20 vessels on each side. Yet even such a small engagement - a skirmish by the earlier standards of the First Punic War - was sufficient to put the Angevins in retreat and cement de Lauria's reputation as the best admiral in the Mediterranean. Today, he is still generally regarded as the greatest admiral of the medieval era, on the basis of a career in which his fleets rarely exceeded 30 ships.

It has become increasingly common to push back on the previously popular motif of the medieval period as a "dark age" of stunted human development in Europe. Despite the fragmentation of state authority after the fall of Rome, the middle ages saw the emergence of new strands in European high culture, the consolidation of embryonic modern states, and major advancements in agricultural practices and military technologies. Many European states, like 13th Century England, enjoyed prolonged periods of remarkable stability and prosperity.

This period was, however, a dark age for the science of war at sea. With Europe's military apparatus devolved to prioritize local defense readiness, states lacked the centralized fiscal-military apparatus, technical expertise, and logistical infrastructure to maintain sophisticated standing navies. This rendered naval battle a matter of expediency, using modified variants of civilian cogs. Battles could be extremely bloody, and had a propensity to turn into the wholesale slaughter of defeated parties, but these engagements remained mercifully small with fleets numbering in the dozens, rather than the hundreds which were frequently seen in archaic battles.

Naval warfare as a science and an art languished for centuries in Europe, waiting for the perfect admixture of ingredients to reinvigorate it. The needs of the navy were threefold: fiscal-military systems capable of financing fleet construction, an economic rationale to make such fleets a sensible use of funds, and a weapons system capable of destroying enemy ships outright, without resorting to a gruesome close order fight. They would get all three: the state, spice, and cannon.

The Advent of Sail and Shot

The development of the highly effective weapons systems that we know as the line ships of the classic age of sail were the result of synchronous developments in the technology of sailing and cannonry, along with the economic systems needed to make these complex and expensive vessels feasible. Taken together, these innovations produced the single most powerful system of power projection ever seen, with vessels that had the range and seaworthiness to attain global reach, and the firepower and capacity needed to bring flexible and formidable combat power to bear wherever they went.

The signal development which set off the rapid development in European seamanship was the reconquest of Iberia in the 13th and 14th centuries. This long period of protracted war against Muslim occupation spurred the consolidation of highly militarized and assertive monarchies in Portugal, Aragon, and Castile, serving as an ideal example of the principle that, although the state makes war, war also makes the state. The reconquesta produced states with a very particular nexus of traits: they were mobilized and had unusually high state capacity for the era, possessed of an expansive and assertive orientation motivated by the sense of an ongoing cosmic war with Islam, and - most importantly - they lay on Europe's Atlantic bow, making the sea their natural vector for expansion.

It was not surprising, therefore, that Iberia (Portugal in particular) became the site of particularly dynamic innovation in ship design and navigation. By the early 15th Century, the Portuguese were probing further and further down the African coastline under the sponsorship of Prince Henrique, Duke of Viseu - known to history simply as "Henry the Navigator." The vessel favored for these annual expeditions was the caravel - an indigenous Portuguese design which featured a shallow draft and lateen (triangular) sails. The caravel was ideal for exploration along the coast - it could run safely in shallow waters and sail very close to the wind, and it proved an ideal workhorse for working down Africa's western coast, with Portuguese navigators steadily working out the shape of the continent and taking constant depth measurements as they went.

The caravel was, however, a limited vessel. It was precarious (to put it generously) in the open ocean, both due to its triangular rigging (which was inferior on the open seas to the square rigging characteristic of larger vessels), and its relatively small size, which made it both cramped and dangerous in rough seas. Most importantly, however, this was fundamentally a scouting and exploration vessel, which lacked the cargo space to actually function as a long range trading vessel. The caravel could hug the coast and plot routes to foreign markets, but it could not haul back large quantities of precious cargo once it had reached them.

It is a well understood fact of history that Spanish and Portuguese exploration in this era were motivated by a desire to procure direct access to the rich markets of the east, tinted with a religious fervor to project Christendom across the globe. Situated on Europe's western edge, the Iberian states were cut off from the profits of the silk roads by both the Islamic powers, which controlled the Levantine coast, and the merchant empires of Genoa and Venice, which dominated trade on the Mediterranean. Most everyone understands that the Spanish and Portuguese wanted to outflank these middle men and procure direct market access for themselves.

What is less understood, or at least less appreciated, is that it was access to these markets that made the European naval revolution financially feasible. The construction of larger and more seaworthy sailing ships, like the hefty, square rigged carrack, was astronomically expensive. These were among the most complex engineering products then in existence, and required a tremendous pool of highly specialized (and expensive) manpower to design, build, maintain, and operate. When the Portuguese crown financed the construction of two large carracks and a 200 ton supply ship for Vasco de Gama's first voyage to India, the navigator Duarte Pacheco Pereira wrote simply: "The money spent on the few ships of this expedition was so great that I will not go into detail for fear of not being believed."

The tremendous expense of these vessels was only made bearable to the state due to the extraordinarily high profits to be made in spices, exotic goods, and specie like gold and silver which could be found in Africa (and soon, the Americas). When Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe and returned safely to England in 1580, the value of his cargo (much of it looted from Spanish vessels) was more than twice the English crown's revenue for the year. Little wonder, then, that the English went all-in on the project of maritime empire.

Perhaps this seems obvious and elementary, but this underscores a crucial strategic aspect of sea power in history. Naval power projection, rather uniquely, has the potential to be economically self-perpetuating. The range and carrying capacity afforded by shipping makes the ocean a unique pathway for exploiting far flung economic resources and penetrating foreign markets. A land-based imperium historically did not offer a similarly cost effective system of scalable economic exploitation. It was not until the invention of the railroad - a late development in the human story - that continental powers like the United States and Russia had a cost effective way to exploit the vast resources of their interior spaces. Maritime empires, in contrast, never struggled with this problem, and so naval power projection and wealth created a singular feedback loop for the states of Western Europe, with each making the other possible.

The Age of Exploration, spearheaded by the Spanish and the Portuguese, therefore had the effect of breaking the ocean wide open for Europeans - not only in the sense that they demonstrated the possibility of global navigation, but also in establishing the economic feedback loop which could empower an early modern state to assume the massive fiscal and logistical burden of maintaining a navy. A possible modern allegory would be the development of phantasmagorical methods to economically exploit outer space - like generating space based solar power, or mining the mineral resources of asteroids - which could suddenly make expensive space exploration financially self-perpetuating.

The arrival of larger and more stable sailing ships also happened to dovetail historically with the emergence of gunpowder artillery, providing the ultimate platform for this powerful new weapons systems. Gunpowder weaponry began to spread in Europe in the late 1300's, initially in the form of irregularly sized cannons which fired arrows, bolts, and stone shot. By the end of the century they had acquired a clear role in battle as defensive weaponry which could be mounted atop fortifications; the Byzantines used primitive cannon to great effect and defeated an attempt by the Turks to capture Constantinople in 1396; the Turks would then famously use dozens of their own large artillery during their ultimate capture of the city in 1453. This was still, however, an embryonic weapons system at the dawn of the early modern era - deadly, but cumbersome, difficult to move, and dreadfully expensive to manufacture.

It was no small matter that gunpowder weapons were emerging as a powerful battlefield expedient precisely as the Iberian age of exploration triggered a colossal expansion in shipbuilding. Large sailing vessels and cannon were, from technical perspective, a perfect match, in that they provided solutions to each other's problems. Early modern cannon were tremendously heavy and laborious to move, and required large magazines of gunpowder and shot to operate. This could be a logistical headache for forces marching overland, which could require dozens of horses to haul a single gun. For a ship with tonnage in the hundreds however, even a sizeable battery of cannon was hardly an undue burden. Cannon, in turn, solved the main problem of medieval naval combat, by finally providing a ship killing weapon.

It therefore ought to be no surprise that the adoption of massed cannon at sea was an inevitability which happened very rapidly. Vasco de Gama's flagship the São Gabriel carried twenty cannon on its 1497 voyage despite being only a modestly sized 100 ton carrack, while the English Mary Rose, which was launched in 1511, had roughly 80 guns of various calibers. When combined with the prowess of the fighting men on board - honed by centuries of intense intra-European warfare and crusading - this was a recognizable prototype of the weapons system that would extend European power to virtually every corner of the earth. Sail and shot had come.

These developments, we reiterate, were wholly dependent on their economic context. These increasingly large and ever more heavily armed vessels were among the most complex feats of engineering and the most expensive investments that an early modern state could make, and they justified themselves by creating the very economic expansion that made this expense possible. This, however, was not universally true. China, for example, achieved tremendous feats in navigation and shipbuilding, but it possessed its own vast inner world and colossal markets, leaving it ultimately disinterested (in both the economic and spiritual sense) in going abroad in search of foreign lands and wealth. Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean, there was no real possibility of a rapid economic expansion. This was a closed sea with a fully explored and intimately known perimeter, with established risks and rewards. In such familiar confines, a more familiar form of war would prevail for a while longer.

Old Reliable: The Galley in the Early Modern Period

The first thing that immediately stands out about the Battle of Lepanto as a major galley battle was how late it was fought. Lepanto was contested in 1571 - nearly eighty years after the Spanish had reached the Americas under Columbus and the Portuguese had arrived in India by circumnavigating Africa. Lepanto took place exactly 60 years after the launch of the famous English warship Mary Rose - a recognizably advanced sailing vessel armed with some 80 cannon.

Lepanto is thus temporally located firmly within the early age of sail. By this time, sailing vessels were crossing entire oceans; Ferdinand Magellan's expedition had circumnavigated the globe, and sailing ships with broadside cannon were becoming a fixture in many European navies. And yet, when the Ottomans and their Catholic adversaries clashed off Greece, they did so with rowed vessels and a combat methodology that was largely similar to that utilized by the Romans, the Carthaginians, the Greeks, and the Persians. This is evidently very odd - in chronological terms, it would be as if the American navy launched sorties in Vietnam with First World War vintage biplanes.

This can give rise to the impression of primitiveness or a lack of imagination by the practitioners of 16th Century galley warfare. While a well armed carrack like the Mary Rose was bristling with many dozens of heavy cannon, a Mediterranean galley of the day would have been armed with, at most, three heavy guns, aimed forward from the prow of the ship - since the broadside of a galley was occupied by hundreds of oarsmen, it was obviously impossible to mount cannon there. Surely such a weakly armed ship represented an obsolete and archaic throwback - a nautical dinosaur awaiting extinction?

In fact, the galley retained its usefulness late into the 16th century due to a variety of economic, strategic, and geographic factors at play in the Mediterranean. The men who fought at Lepanto were not stupid, but were simply plying a well established form of warfare that had proven itself in the unique arena of the inner sea, and the galley as a weapons system can only be appreciated in the context of a broader system of warfare which prevailed in that time and place. In 1526, for example, the Venetian war office made an explicit decision to further experiment with galley designs, rather than pursuing the sailing carracks that were in use in Western Europe. It would require substantial hubris to presume that Venice, then one of the most educated, wealthy, and sophisticated states in Europe, would make such a decision out of ignorance, rather than well grounded tactical and strategic concerns.

To begin to understand this, we must view the Mediterranean Sea the way that strategists of the day saw it: as a single and vast littoral, or coastal zone. The Mediterranean is essentially tideless, splattered with islands, and ringed with accommodating sandy beaches, natural harbors, and shallow approaches. This created a tactical orientation which was fundamentally amphibious, and within this framework the galley remained the favored weapons system for centuries after the advent of cannon artillery. The crucial point is that weapons systems do not exist in a vacuum - it was not simply a matter of galleys being replaced by sailing warships, but rather that these vessels were used to prosecute entirely different systems of warfare.

The sailing, cannon broadside vessels which would eventually come to predominate the world offered a potent new strategic opportunity: they made it possible to control the sea. This was not only due to their powerful armament (with each ship possessing the firepower of a massed artillery battery, they offered the potential to shatter enemy fleets and sink cargo vessels with ease), but also due to their carrying capacity. A deep-draft sailing ship can carry hundreds of tons in cargo, allowing it to stay at sea for months at a time - this provides a permanent and extremely powerful force projection at sea. The ultimate manifestation of such sea control is the blockade: having driven the enemy surface fleet away, an armada of sailing warships can exert a suffocating control over access to the ocean.

A galley cannot do this. With most of the galley's hull space dedicated to the rowing crews, they have a cargo-to-crew ratio that is very poor compared to a sailing vessel, and they are thus unable to stay at sea for extended periods of time. The galley was therefore not a tool for controlling the sea, but a weapon for projecting fighting power from the sea to the land, and vice versa. In the Mediterranean, the ability of the shallow-draft galley to operate right up against the shore, penetrate into riverways, and to ground itself on the beach was extremely valuable.

The galley thus continued to fill a critical role in a Mediterranean system of naval warfare that was very different from that which prevailed in the age of sail. This was a system of combat which focused not on major fleet actions and blockades, but on projecting power towards the land, with the main object of these operations being the networks of bases that supported long range galley operations. This was a schema that was intimately familiar to the Romans, who saw most of their naval conflicts resolved through the control of such bases. Carthage was defeated in the First Punic War through the capture or isolation of its harbors and depots, and in the later Roman Civil Wars it was Caesar Augustus and his admiral, Marcus Agrippa, who defeated Antony and Cleopatra by striking at their chain of supply bases and fortresses. This basic operational formulation had not changed much by the early modern period, and networks of island bases still remained the main object of naval combat.

There was one other important consideration which kept the galley relevant, however, and this was the cost and availability of cannon. In the 16th century, cannons were not yet subject to easy mass production. Methods for casting cannon (which produced the barrel in a single cast piece out of a mold) were beginning to appear by mid-century, but much of the European world's artillery continued to be produced with variations of the hoop and stave method, which laboriously welded the barrel together out of multiple strips of metal, similar to the way a wooden barrel would be produced with planks. While the details of the metallurgical processes are perhaps interesting to some, the upshot was that cannon were still very expensive and limited in quantity. Given that the Mediterranean powers needed to provide cannon for both ships and their fortresses, while retaining enough pieces to serve their land forces in sieges (both the Spanish and the Ottomans in particular maintained large forces on land which competed with their navies for cannon), it is not surprising that more modestly armed galleys with a handful of bow guns remained in common use, while the heavily armed broadside ships took much longer to come into play.

And so, when the fleets clashed at Lepanto, the vessels were a refined but intimately familiar variation of the archaic galleys that had plied Mediterranean waters for thousands of years. Allowing for some variations among the combatant nations (more on this in a moment) a "standard" 16th century galley was approximately 136 feet long and some 18 feet wide, powered by roughly 200 oarsmen manning about 24 banks of oars. Vastly improved shipbuilding techniques made these early-modern galleys much more seaworthy than their ancient predecessors (unlike Athenian galleys, they did not take on water and so did not need to be hauled onto the beach to dry out), and of course they were distinguished by the presence of gunpowder weaponry. Lepanto galleys possessed a small battery of heavy cannon which aimed directly out of the bow, which when fired would recoil on their wheeled mounts back into the gap between the rowing benches. For flank protection against boarding, a variety of small swivel guns were mounted on the flanks of the ship, and of course a company of marine infantry prowled the deck.

The important point to emphasize, however, is that the maneuvering aspects of these ships was essentially unchanged since ancient times. This was both because they continued to be powered by oarsmen (and thus they moved essentially the same way as archaic ships), but also because the cannon battery aimed forward out of the bow of the ship - it could therefore only be aimed by turning the ship in combat. Because the cannon aimed statically forward - just like the rams on ancient Greek and Persian vessels - the ship maneuvered much the same in combat, aiming to achieve a shock attack on the vulnerable flanks and stern of the enemy vessel. And so, while cannons are obviously significantly more powerful than a ram, these remained vessels engineered to attack head first. The smell of gunpowder and the crack of the cannon were new, but an ancient admiral watching from a distance would have found the frothing oars and the maneuvering of the fleet to be comfortingly familiar.

Out With a Bang: The Battle of Lepanto

The backdrop for the great clash of Lepanto was the slow and inexorable expansion of Ottoman power around the Eastern Mediterranean rim, which brought it into conflict with the maritime empire of Venice. Venice's strategic position and orientation were highly analogous to that of ancient Carthage: their "empire" consisted of a network of colonies and bases strung along the coasts and islands of the Adriatic and Mediterranean. The critical function of these positions was primarily to provide control over the sea route between Venice and the Levantine coast, with a chain of bases and fortified harbors protecting the shipping which was the lifeblood of the wealthy Venetian economy.

The keystone position which became the basis of the Ottoman-Venetian War was the island of Cyprus. From a geostrategic perspective, the importance of Cyprus is refreshingly easy to understand. As the easternmost island in Venice's control, it was the critical node ensuring Venetian access to the Levantine coast. Cyprus also, however, sat directly on the sea lines of communication between the Ottoman heartland in Anatolia and their provinces in Egypt. In essence, Cyprus sat at the intersection of two critical sea lanes - a north-south line between Anatolia and Egypt, and an east-west line between Venice and the Levant. It is not particularly hard, then, to understand why the Ottomans coveted it.

When an Ottoman armada arrived at Cyprus in 1570, Venice faced a disturbing strategic outlook. Venice was a wealthy but thinly populated mercantile power, ill constructed for a protracted slugfest with the much more powerful Ottomans. The naval prowess of the Turks was by this point a well established fact - in 1538, the Ottoman Navy had smashed a coalition Christian fleet at the Battle of Preveza (fought, incidentally, exactly where the Battle of Actium had taken place some 1600 years prior). Another decisive Ottoman victory at the Battle of Djerba in 1560 had the Turks sitting 2-0 in major fleet actions. A third round would be no laughing matter, and Venice needed allies.

It was thanks to the intense and energetic intervention of Pope Pius V that Venice secured the assistance of Hapsburg Spain and her satellites, with the 1571 formation of the "Holy League". The terms of the alliance called for the fleets of the allies to rendezvous in late summer at Messina, on the Sicilian coast, for a joint campaign into the Eastern Mediterranean. Command of the joint fleet would fall to Don Juan of Austria - the illegitimate half-brother of the Spanish King, Philip II.

And so we come to Lepanto - the swan song of the galley; violent codicil to a three thousand year old form of Mediterranean warfare. The battle was shaped and made possible by a serendipity which is often rare in war: both sides were highly motivated to seek a decisive battle, which meant that both sides had a carefully devised operational scheme that was thought out in advance. Lepanto was a battle that both sides wanted and planned for, and both the Turks and the Holy League managed to implement their battle plans and achieve their desired deployment.

The Turkish motivation to fight is easy to understand - they were under express orders from the Sultan, Selim II, to bring the Catholic fleet to battle and destroy it. As for the Holy League, their dynamic was more nuanced and subtle, and had much to do with Don Juan's attempts to mediate an uneasy alliance.

The various constituent allies had different motivations for joining the war, and correspondingly different senses of urgency. For the Spanish, the war with the Turk was primarily a religious matter - another chapter in their long, cosmic struggle with Islam. Venice, on the other hand, was fighting for concrete geostrategic interests - particularly to save their colony in Cyprus. The Venetians also fought with an important handicap. Because Venice had such a relatively sparse population, mobilizing their fleet required them to raise levies of fishermen, merchant sailors, and other civilian laborers. Coming to a war footing therefore brought Venice's economy to a full halt, and was extremely expensive to maintain. The Venetians were therefore strongly motivated to bring the war to a swift conclusion. Don Juan also had to worry about the various ancillary allies, particularly Genoa, which had joined the Holy League while continuing to trade with the Ottomans.

Don Juan therefore had to plan a campaign around strategic disagreements in his coalition, with the very real possibility that some of his fleet might withdraw from the alliance or even defect. The longer the campaign dragged on, the worse these aggravations were likely to become; therefore, he, like the Turkish Admiral, Müezzinzade Ali Pasha, was also determined to bring about a decisive battle as soon as possible.

After rendezvousing in Sicily late in the summer, the Holy League fleet - some 212 ships in all, crossed the Adriatic and arrived at the island of Kefalonia off the western coast of Greece on October 6th. The mass of the Turkish fleet, 254 vessels in all, was stationed just 65 miles to the east in their naval base at Nafpaktos, in the Gulf of Corinth. The Venetian name for Nafpaktos is Lepanto. The following day, both armadas came out to meet at the entrance of the gulf. It was October 7, 1571.

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4. NATO at the Crossroads

"The 80's called, they want their foreign policy back."

At the time, it was a stone cold zinger - a nice line that was typical of the celebrated personal political skills and folksy ease of President Barack Obama, and a slick little soundbite on the road to his clinical defeat of Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. With the passage of time, however, it has entered into the dubious ranks of history's famous last words.

When Romney argued in that debate that Russia was the chief geopolitical rival to the United States, it was easy for Obama to dismiss him, and for the country to laugh it off. At the time, America was riding the high of its great victory over the Soviet Union, Russia was crouched in a passive stance, and it seemed that the only security challenges that now remained were bush wars in the Middle East. But in 2024, who in the American political and foreign policy establishment would doubt Senator Romney's total validation?

Since 2012, NATO has experienced a revival and a return to relevance that would make any washed up 80's movie star turn green with envy. After languishing for years, where the only real mention of NATO in American politics were the token admonitions for European members to increase their defense spending, NATO is once again at the center of global (and domestic American) politics. NATO has been identified as one of the critical driving anima of the war in Ukraine, with debates raging over supposed American promises given to the Russians that NATO would not expand eastward, arguments over Ukrainian membership in the alliance, and a growing narrative that one of the key threats from a second Trump presidency is the possibility that The Donald would withdraw the United States from NATO or otherwise neutralize the bloc. Americans, strained by inflation and endemic institutional rot, are asked to please think of the poor, frightened North Atlantic Council when they go to vote in November.

The United States certainly does have a NATO problem on its hands. That problem, however, is not some Trumpian affinity for despotism which threatens to unhinge the alliance and hand Europe over to the Russians, nor is it a Russian plot to attack Poland. The problem, rather, is that NATO's place in broader American strategy has come untracked, even as that broader strategy becomes ever more frayed and rudderless. The tail is wagging the dog, and it is steering the dog into a bear trap.

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NATO, in its original conception, was designed to resolve a very particular security dilemma in Western Europe. In the immediate wake of World War Two, Western Europe - specifically Britain and France - had to consider how it might be possible to mount a defense against the colossal Soviet forces that were now conveniently forward deployed in Central Germany. The 1948 "Western Union Defense Organization" (WUDO), which included the aforementioned Anglo-French allies along with the Netherlands and Belgium, was created with an eye to this problem. With the rapid demobilization of American armies in Europe, however, it was obvious that this threadbare European alliance had dismal prospects in the unthinkable event of war with the Soviet Union. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the supreme commander of WUDO forces, was asked what the Soviets would it would take for the Red Army to attack and push through all the way to the Atlantic, and famously replied: "Shoes."

NATO, therefore, was an attempt to resolve the total strategic overmatch on the European continent through two expedients. The first of these, obviously was America's membership, which brought both formal American security commitments as well as permanent American military deployments in Europe. The second strategic boost provided by NATO concerned Germany. Even after being ravaged by war and dismembered by the allied occupation, Western Germany remained the most populous and potentially powerful state in Western Europe. From the beginning, it was clear (particularly to the Americans and the British) that any sustainable strategy for deterring or fighting the Red Army would have to make use of German manpower - but this implied, axiomatically, that West Germany would have to be economically rehabilitated and rearmed. The prospect of *intentionally* rearming Germany was immensely upsetting to the French, for obvious reasons given the events of 1940-44.

NATO thus solved two major obstacles to a sustainable and viable defense of Western Europe, in that it formally and permanently tied the United States into the European defense architecture, and it provided a mechanism to rearm West Germany without allowing for the possibility of a truly autonomous and revanchist German foreign policy.

In many ways, NATO can be seen as a total reversal of the Versailles system which had doomed Europe after the First World War by guaranteeing the Second. The interwar period saw the Anglo-French alliance pitted against an adversarial Germany without American assistance; NATO ensured American commitment to European defense and rehabilitated Germany into a valuable partner - providing the command architecture to rearm Germany and mobilize German resources without allowing Germany to conduct an independent foreign policy.

Thus, the popular formulation, coined by the first General Secretary of NATO, Lord Hastings Ismay, that NATO existed to "keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down." This statement, however, has frequently been misinterpreted. The idea of "keeping the Americans in" was not a plot by Washington to dominate the continent, but a contrivance by the Europeans to keep America engaged in their defense. As for "keeping the Germans down", this is pithily stated but not entirely accurate - the entire point of adding West Germany to NATO was to allow it to rebuild and rearm in the interests of collective western defense. For the United States, NATO made sense as a way to mobilize European resources and calcify the "front" in Europe, in the context of a broader geopolitical struggle with the USSR.

This is what NATO was for. It was a mechanism for formalizing an American security commitment in Europe and mobilizing German resources to deter the USSR, and it worked - the frontline of the Cold War in Europe remained static up until the collapse of the Soviet Union due to the naïve and self-destructive political visions of one Mikhail Gorbachev.

But what is NATO for now? What purpose does it serve in the context of a broader American grand strategy? More to the point, does such a grand strategy exist, and is it coherent? These are questions worth asking.

The Grand Strategy of Area Denial

Grand Strategy, as such, has become a nearly tiresome word, like geopolitics itself. In the abstract, grand strategy refers to the unifying framework for how a state leverages the full array of its powers - military, financial, economic, cultural, and diplomatic - to pursue its interests. This all sounds well and good, but of course the idea of a unified grand strategy is much harder to achieve than it sounds. States are not always easily able to define their interests clearly; in democracies, of course, there may be wide disagreements on state interest, but even within more totalizing regimes there will always be institutional interests and modes of behavior that are orthogonal to each other. We may consider, for example, the sharp vitriol between the Japanese Imperial Navy and Army, or the divide between interventionist and isolationist camps in the United States. With both the domestic framing of interests *and* the international arena in a state of flux, can a coherent grand strategy really be said to exist? Despite growing conceptual disagreement as to what exactly grand strategy is, or even whether it exists at all, there are innumerable books to be found on the grand strategies of all manner of historic or contemporary states - the Roman Empire, the Byzantines, the Hapsburgs, Singapore, South Korea, Russia, Japan, and of course China and the United States.

I rather feel that "Grand Strategy" is one of those things that we struggle to define, but we know it when we see it. Patterns and motifs of state behavior clearly emerge through history, and there are obvious interests towards which states work and coordinate their levers of power. Where these patterns and coordinated behaviors emerge, we call them grand strategy. The state becomes like a wild predator, which exhibits many different tactics and strategies for catching prey. The human observer may endlessly wring his hands, wondering about the interior life of the animal, its capacity to draft a strategy, and its ability to communicate with its pack, but the existence of coordinated and goal-oriented patterns of behavior is enough to deduce that strategy exists.

American grand strategy centers on the policy of area denial, or what we might call hegemonic denial. This is an old strategy, favored by great powers blessed with strategic standoff, and inherited from America's British geostrategic predecessor. The "grand strategy" of the British, for many centuries, was predicated on simply denying any continental European power the opportunity to dominate the continent. The rationale was simple and sublime: Britain's status as an island power afforded it strategic insulation via standoff from continental wars. The channel freed Britain from the burden of having to maintain a large standing army, like the powers on the continent, and invest heavily in its naval power projection. Relieved of the great expense that dangerous land borders bring, British naval power made them the grand winners of the colonial arms race. However, Britain always lived in the fearful shadow of European consolidation. If any one continental power managed to consolidate power over the European core, that power would have the resources to mount a naval challenge to the Royal Navy.

This is why, for centuries, Britain simply backed the rivals of whoever the most powerful continental state happened to be at the time. They backed the Hapsburgs and then the Prussians in wars against France, played an active and central role in the wars to prevent Napoleon from establishing hegemony in Europe, then pivoted to an alliance with France to contain Russia in the Crimean War. Finally, when Germany consolidated and became the most powerful state in Europe, Britain fought in two catastrophic World Wars to prevent German domination of the continent. The presence of Britain loitering offshore and a powerful Russian state in the east served as a natural hedge on continental hegemony, because both Russia and Britain were always guaranteed to be adversarial against any would-be European imperium. France and Germany both gave a mighty effort in their turn, but the challenge of mobilizing sufficient naval-expeditionary power to defeat Britain and the requisite land-logistical power to defeat Russia was enough to undo Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler alike.

The guiding animus of British "grand strategy" was therefore very simple: maintain a cost-effective colonial footprint, and do not let anybody consolidate hegemony on the continent - the latter to be achieved through prudent intervention and the backing of anti-hegemonic coalitions. American grand strategy is much the same, except that it has a more globe-spanning scope. While Britain played hegemonic area denial in Europe, America pursues a similar containment and balancing act in Eastern Europe, the Persian Gulf, and East Asia simultaneously. This means, more practically, strategic area denial and a prevention of regional consolidation by China, Russia, and Iran - each the most powerful states within their prospective regions.

It has become a standard line, of course, to condemn this American defense strategy as fundamentally cynical and sinister, replete with language about American imperialism, its meddling in foreign governments, and complaints about the spread of a vapid American consumeristic culture which atomizes societies. America is frequently abhorred as an eternally expanding blob which is gray and featureless, yet simultaneously emblazoned with the gaudy colors of the rainbow.

Such opposition is understandable and highly sympathetic, but we must acknowledge that the core of America's global defense strategy is not irrational, but aligned with critical American interests, at least in its highest order objectives. East Asia, in particular, is home to nearly 40% of global GDP and is by far the most populous and industrialized region in the world. While America is fundamentally secure from direct physical attack, safely sequestered behind its twin oceans, consolidated Chinese hegemony in East Asia could force American-aligned states to disaffiliate from the United States and either exclude or disfavor America in their enormous markets. While certain aspects of American foreign policy are certainly hyperbolic, disjointed, and damaging to the stability of the world, there can be little doubt that preventing hegemonic consolidation in these critical regions - East Asia, Europe, and the Persian Gulf - does serve a fundamental American interest and safeguards the possibility of a prosperous life for Americans and their allies, free of hostile coercion.

The core animus of American grand strategy, as a policy of anti-hegemonic area denial, is sound. My argument, however, is that it has become diluted by a fraying sense of strategic direction in Washington, and NATO in particular has become untracked as an element of America's strategic architecture.

The Incredible Shrinking NATO

The fall of the Soviet Union created a unique moment in world history, as the first instance of globe-spanning unipolarity, leaving the United States as the last and unrivaled hegemon. The possibility that the USSR could disintegrate bloodlessly was hardly to be taken for granted, and the fact that the Soviet government - although armed to the teeth astride the world's largest security apparatus - simply allowed the core Union Republics to break away remains one of the most fortunate bounces in history. Great bloodshed was averted, though much to the detriment of Soviet citizens, who were cannibalized by a decade of economic turmoil and social upheaval.

With the Red Army suddenly removed from the board, it was not clear what the strategic rationale for NATO now was. It was not immediately obvious that a strong central state would be reconstituted in Russia, and the temporary collapse of authority in Moscow left the European rim of the former Soviet empire up for grabs. But what to do with it?

In hindsight, it is clear that there were two potential paths forward for NATO, which I will call the Expand and Entrench path and the Hold and Engage model, respectively. The choice between these two models ultimately reduces to whether or not Russia was seen as an intrinsically hostile state, destined to animus with the American bloc, or whether the Russians were to be viewed as a prospective partner to be rehabilitated and engaged with on favorable terms.

If Russia was indeed a primordial adversary and a predestined hostis loitering on the perimeter of Europe, then the expansion of NATO to the east into the old Warsaw Pact countries at least made some sense, as a way to expand the west's defensive perimeter cheaply and grow America's footprint. Paradoxically, however, NATO expansion was facilitated by the perception that Russia did not actually pose a serious military threat. Offering defense guarantees to Russia's neighbors appeared to be a trivial matter of extending promises that would never need to be kept, and a nearly cost free way to fence the non-threatening Russians in. Russia could be pacified with a diplomatic campaign - Obama's famous "reset" - at the same time it was boxed in with NATO expansion.

And so, we come to the problem with NATO expansion. The alliance rapidly expanded, fully doubling its membership from 16 to 32 members since 1989, under the illusion that this was a cheap and easy way to secure Europe's eastern flank. In underestimating the revival of Russian power, however, NATO unwittingly created difficult new security challenges for itself at the same time that it was rapidly disarming.

This was the paradox: as NATO expanded its footprint geographically, both its existing and new members radically downsized their military readiness. In many of the keystone existing members, military spending as a share of GDP plummeted beginning in the 1990's. In Britain, it declined from 4.3% in 1991 to 2.3% by 2020; the corresponding drop in Germany was a decrease from 2.5% to only 1.4%. Meanwhile, the new members that it added on its eastern flank were both geographically indefensible and abject military noncontributors.

The prime example, of course, would be the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Perched precariously on the Russian border, the Baltics are both highly exposed in the event of an outbreak of war *and* utterly incapable of defending themselves for even a token amount of time. The armed forces of these three states have a combined strength of fewer than 50,000 personnel and virtually no heavy equipment - at present, the Baltics do not possess a single main battle tank. NATO wargames concluded that the Baltics could be rolled by the Russian Armed Forces in a matter of days. Although the war in Ukraine has certainly sparked Baltic interest in raising military preparedness, this process is being slow walked - Latvia admits that the construction of fixed defenses on the country's border could take up to a decade, with deliveries of new systems like HIMARs scheduled for 2027 or later.

This may sound like I am suggesting that Russia currently has some intention of invading the Baltics and starting a war with NATO. I do not believe this is the case. The problem, rather, is that the process of NATO's expansion has been highly discombobulated and reflects a strategy that has come untracked. NATO expansion was supposed to be a cheap way to push America's strategic footprint to the east - but now it threatens to become an enormous drain on resources.

The essence of the problem is that NATO chose to both expand and disarm at the same time, to the effect that the post-Cold War expansion has raised the probability of a conflict with Russia, increasing America's geopolitical exposure while simultaneously degrading the American bloc's preparedness for such a contingency. Washington saw NATO expansion as a cheap way to expand its strategic footprint deep into the old Soviet strategic space - penetrating into former Union Republics, even. Unfortunately, most of those new members viewed NATO membership as a substitute for their own military readiness - trusting in the differentiated deterrent credibility of American security guarantees as a panacea for their defense. The military readiness of the European bloc was allowed to substantially deteriorate in the face of an apparently dormant Russian adversary, with new members trusting that American security guarantees held a unique and uncontested deterrent value.

Ultimately, this reflects internal incoherence as to the nature and scope of the threat posed by Russia. If Russia is indeed deemed to be an existential threat to NATO's flank, expansion might have made sense in the context of a clearly defined plan to defend that flank. It does not make sense in the context of systemic disarmament across Europe at the same time that America faces the prospect of escalating military commitments in East Asia.

This is why, despite the alliance's confident and inexorable expansion to the east, it finds itself paradoxically grappling with a sense of crisis and vulnerability. There has emerged a clear and gripping sense that a Russian attack on the Baltics is on the table in the coming years, as the point where Russia may attempt to test NATO's commitment to collective defense. Baltic leadership, which tends to be the bloc's most hawkish, seems frustrated that NATO's more westerly members are not taking the prospect of a Russian attack seriously. Washington think tanks like the Institute for the Study of War now write earnestly of a looming war with Russia.

This is all very odd, for several reasons. First and foremost, the central idea of the entire modern NATO project is America's differentiated deterrent credibility: the notion that an American security guarantee (like the tripwire Article 5) precludes the possibility of war. Mounting fears among Baltic leadership that Russia intends to test the alliance indicate an implicit worry that this differentiated American credibility is waning, due to either a real or perceived decline in American willingness to fight in Eastern Europe. In part, this would seem to reflect a dilution of Article 5's strength as NATO expanded eastward. In the Cold War, America's willingness to fight (or even use nuclear weapons) to defend Bonn, Paris, Amsterdam, and London was never really in doubt. In 2024, there are real reasons to question America's appetite for a full scale continental war over Riga or Tallinn. Perhaps the Baltics sense that they really have never mattered to Americans.

The other strange aspect of the mounting Russia scare is the apparent lethargy and scattered stance of Europe's response. The military leadership of Europe's three most powerful nations - France, Germany, and the United Kingdom - are all open about their unreadiness to fight a high intensity continental war. Despite such warnings, efforts to jump start military readiness are lagging. Germany is not only drastically cutting its aid to Ukraine, but is also rejecting requests from its own military to scale up spending. The UK is dragging its feet when it comes to covering gaps in its procurement plan; French defense investments continue to prioritize domains like space, cybersecurity, and nuclear deterrents at the expense of conventional forces - indicating little interest in a land based slugfest like the one playing out in Ukraine. On the whole, there appears to be little urgency to ramp up force generation or systematically rejuvenate Europe's expensive and scale constrained armaments production.

So while many European states have made much of their success reaching NATO's spending target at 2% of GDP, this has become a totem number that does not directly correlate to military readiness. This is a natural consequence of Europe's degraded armaments industry, which has steadily deteriorated due to low spending, piecemeal orders, a lack of export markets, and competition from American systems. While Europe has shown at least some sense that it must nurture indigenous armaments production, the difficulty of inter-government coordination and lack of scale (with individual states placing small and sporadic orders) make this difficult.

As a result, despite lofty rhetoric about a rejuvenation of the European defense base, Europe lags far behind on its production targets for critical items like shells for Ukraine. When it comes to building out its own stockpiles, Europe still shows a preference for American systems - choosing, for example, to order Patriot air defense systems rather than the indigenous European SAMP-T. Poland, embarking on a buying spree of rocket artillery, is splitting its money between Korean and American systems. On the whole, European spending has simply contributed to a surge in American exports. Less than half of Europeans armaments purchases are actually manufactured within the EU.

This matters a great deal. It's not, particularly, that there is anything wrong with American systems. American armaments are world class, despite their hit or miss track record in Ukraine (which has a great deal to do with the unique use case of the AFU). The issue with reliance on American systems is availability and sustainment. The Ukraine War has already demonstrated that America cannot be a universal and bottomless arsenal for its satellites; already, we have seen orders deferred and shipments rerouted as the United States is forced to make difficult calls on the priority of various theaters, and Ukraine has served as a sort of perfect case study of the difficulties that Europe might face trying to sustain a ground war on its own. In any event of a general European war involving Russia - let alone kinetic action in the South China Sea - European industry would be called on for heavy lift, and the returns so far are not encouraging. Nor are munitions and weapons the only strategic shortcoming; Europe's "critical enablers", like ISR, logistics, airborne transit, and other support elements are far below satisfactory readiness.

All of this is to say, there are roiling contradictions at the heart of NATO. The alliance chose to expand rapidly at the same time that it systematically disarmed, striking a provocative and adversarial stance vis a vis Russia while it simultaneously downgraded its military readiness, making itself both hostile and unprepared. Now there is increasing alarm that a confrontation between NATO and Russia may be on the horizon, but the alliance's European members are dragging their feet on rearmament. Ultimately, NATO transformed itself into a bloc that is geopolitically stanced against Russia, but unwilling to materially prepare itself for the potential consequences - projecting its footprint directly up to Russia's border without considering what might come next.

The decision to expand the alliance while allowing its military readiness to deteriorate dovetails nicely with the ongoing crisis in Ukraine - indeed, Ukraine has become the locus and archetype of NATO's current state of strategic disorder.

Ukrainian Quagmire

The war in Ukraine is now nearly two and a half years old. That is more than enough time to mull over the broader strategic logic of the conflict. Nonetheless, western leadership continues to give contradictory responses to a very elementary question: is the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian War existential for NATO? Depending on who and when you ask, NATO's (or, more specifically America's) interests in Ukraine are presented in various ways, and generally run along three different tracks.

In the more tactical, cynical variant of the story, the west has backed Ukraine because it is an opportunity to attrit an adversary without putting western soldiers in harm's way. This is the mercenary version of the story, where the AFU can propped up in the field to destroy as many Russian vehicles and kill as many Russian personnel as possible. This has a certain opportunistic and cold strategic calculus to it, but it certainly does not frame Ukraine as an existential battleground for the west. Another version of the story reframes Ukraine as an extension of the old Cold War theory of containment. It is the duty of the west, evidently, to defend "democracies" against a perceived bloc of totalitarian states, in a show of deterrence.

The third answer is the most interesting, and the most phantasmagorical. This is the story that describes Ukraine as a forward bulwark and barrier state for NATO. Russia must be stopped in Ukraine, it is argued, because if Russia succeeds in conquering much (or all) of Ukraine, it will surely attack NATO next. That's bad news, because if NATO and Russia get into an open war it will probably go nuclear. Therefore, Ukrainian victory is existential not just for the Ukrainians themselves, or even just for NATO, but for all of humanity. Ukraine is the last line of defense preventing a likely nuclear war. This is an argument that has been repeated in earnest by many figures in both western leadership and the analytics sphere, including ISW and the internet's favorite talking head, Peter Zeihan. This is the argument which underlies all the rhetoric comparing Putin to Hitler - the notion is that "Putler" will continue his rampage if he is not stopped in Ukraine, but unlike Hitler he possesses a nuclear arsenal, so that when he goes down into the bunker, he can take the world with him. Or something.

It's all a bit blasé, of course. But the confusion when it comes down to actually characterizing NATO's interests in Ukraine (are they trying to save the world, or simply degrade an adversary's military?) speaks to a larger contradictory pattern when it comes to Ukraine's role vis a vis the alliance. Two elements in particular stand out - namely, the continued promises of a Ukrainian path to membership in NATO, and the unwillingness to negotiate a settlement which cedes territory to the Russians. Let's review them in turn.

At the recent NATO summit in Washington DC, most attention was directed to President Biden's characteristically incoherent babble, mispeaks, and inability to properly form recognizable English sentences - particularly his introduction of Ukrainian President Zelensky as "President Putin", to thunderous and befuddled applause. But amid the babble, the summit reconfirmed NATO's commitment to Ukraine's eventual and inevitable membership in the bloc.

At some level, this is understandable. Ukrainian membership in NATO has been a consistent element of Russia's war aims, and Moscow has consistently sought a guarantee against Ukrainian membership as a condition for peace. It is not hard to see how NATO would wish to emphasize its commitment to Ukraine, to avoid the impression that they can be easily deterred by Russia.

On a more pragmatic level, however, the logic of Ukrainian NATO membership is badly garbled. At this point in the war, the United States has crossed virtually all of the red lines that it had set for itself at prior points: it sent Abrams tanks after the Pentagon initially ruled it out, it has cleared the way for F-16s, and delivered ATACMS. The pattern is clearly one of slowly (slower than the Ukrainians would like) but surely checking off all the items on Ukraine's wish list, after an initial period of refusal and foot dragging.

The one red line that Washington has consistently hewed to, however, is direct and formal American involvement on the ground (various undeclared American trainers, advisers, and contractors notwithstanding). Biden has been particularly clearsighted about the fact that America cannot justify "fighting the Third World War" in Ukraine. The problem here is a contradictory and undefined sense of the stakes at play. NATO has communicated, in fairly unequivocal terms, that it is not willing to fight an open war with Russia and risk annihilatory nuclear exchange over Ukraine. But by pledging eventual NATO membership for Kiev, they are signaling that they would be willing to do so in the future.

It's not clear how to reconcile these positions. America has essentially pledged that it is willing to link nuclear escalation calculus to Kiev and commit to a hypothetical future war with Russia by bringing Ukraine under the umbrella of Article 5, while simultaneously insisting that it is not willing to fight such a war now, while there is an immediate kinetic threat to Ukraine. It's not obvious why Ukraine might be worth fighting a catastrophic war tomorrow, but not today. If defeating Russia in Ukraine and holding the line at Ukraine's 1991 borders are indeed an existential American interest, then why is America holding back now?

Furthermore, insisting on Ukraine's postwar path to NATO membership alters the calculus of the current war, in myriad ways. Insisting on Ukraine's future membership encourages Russian maximalism - if Moscow resigns itself to the idea that whatever is left of Ukraine after the war will eventually join NATO, it will likely conclude that it ought to leave the most wrecked and neutered Ukrainian rump state that it possibly can. Since NATO membership requires prospective candidates to resolve all their active territorial disputes before entry into the alliance, Russia has a direct lever to scuttle and delay Ukraine's path to membership by keeping the conflict burning.

In effect, the repeated pledges of postwar Ukrainian NATO membership create a host of strategic incentives that are bad for Ukraine and bad for NATO, since it is hard to see precisely why the western bloc would be so eager to admit a shattered Ukrainian trashcanistan with intractable anti-Russian revanchist tendencies. In addition, Moscow would be sure to see this rump Ukraine as the frontline weak spot in NATO, and an ideal place to probe and test America's commitment to Article 5.

NATO has put itself in this bind through its overly eager and careless expansionary mindset - having prematurely promised Ukraine NATO membership as early as 2008, the west cannot formally withdraw its pledges without undermining its own credibility, to say nothing of the backlash from a betrayed and ruined Ukraine, which would likely exit western orbit altogether.

And so, we arrive at the current Ukrainian crisis. NATO frivolously spread to the east, handing out cheap security assurances and pushing right up to the Russian border - intaking the Baltics and making promises to Ukraine at the same time that it systematically disarmed itself. Now, in the face of a counterstroke by the Russians, the west - but America more particularly - cannot seem to decide if these places are actually worth fighting for. NATO expansion as a low cost mechanism to push the American footprint deep into the old Soviet space made sense; NATO expansion as a burden which requires America and Western Europe to prepare for a land war in Ukraine and the Baltics makes no sense at all.

Washington is caught in a bind of its own making, created by decades of writing checks that it would prefer not to cash It has pledged to fight the "Third World War" for Tallinn and Riga, should the need arise, and has promised in no uncertain terms to extend that guarantee to Kiev as well at some point in the future. But faced with a high intensity continental war in the Donbas, there are increasing reasons to doubt American willingness to actually risk it all for these remote and strategically tenuous positions, particular as China's swelling power promises to suck in ever more of America's constrained military power to the East Asian theater, and the keystone European partners drag their feet on military preparedness.

In the end, Ukraine becomes the poster child and archetype for the mismatch between NATO's promises and its material basis of power. It has now been 16 years since Kiev was first enticed with the prospect of NATO membership. But what did they actually get? A wrecked power grid, the loss of 20% of their territory (so far), and hundreds of thousands dead, wounded, or missing. The 45 million strong Ukraine that received those lofty promises so long ago is now a shattered and battered husk with perhaps 25 million citizens left. From NATO, they receive too many words and far too few shells, vehicles, and air defense interceptors.

NATO is, after all, a military alliance. When it was originally created, the hard calculus of divisions, manpower, and operational minutia were a foundational element of its construction. West Germany was brought into the alliance not due to lofty rhetoric about democracy and friendship, but due to the need to mobilize West German manpower and industrial capacity, and the desire to defend forward of the Rhine - a far cry from the induction of the Baltics, which brought no strategic advantage whatsoever. What NATO needs now is not another member, another noncontributing security commitment deep in the Russian strategic space, but a hearty dose of realism.

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5. Mare Nostrum: Roman Naval Power

Most people, if they were asked to list the great seafaring peoples of history, or more specifically the great naval fighting traditions, would come up with a fairly uniform list. There are obviously the two great naval powers of modernity in the British Empire and the United States (though the latter is now not without challengers), and the navigators of the first transatlantic empires in Portugal and Spain. China had a brief period of prolific shipbuilding and navigation in the early modern period, but was disinterested in trying to leverage this into durable power projection. Modern China seeks to rectify this missed opportunity. A deeper dive into the mental archives might churn up the ancient Phoenicians, or perhaps the Genoese and Venetian city states that dominated the Mediterranean in the early modern period. There are those wonderful Vikings, who managed to reach the Americas in their open hulled longboats, and terrorized and colonized much of Europe with their nautical reach. Few, however, would immediately think of the Romans.

The Romans are by convention and by reputation a great land power. The iconic system of Roman power projection was the legion, famed for its discipline, its versatility, and its great prowess of combat engineering - throwing up roads, fortresses, and fortified camps with ease at it trampled enemies from Britain to Syria. In the popular imagination, the Roman Navy is a mere footnote.

The relegation of the Roman naval tradition to the footnotes is a rather interesting phenomenon. It stems, in fact, from a naval victory so totalizing and complete that Roman control of the Mediterranean became an established fact of life. Rome's domination of the sea became so total that for many centuries it was as implicit and unchallenged as the breathability of the atmosphere. Rome swept all challenger navies from the Mediterranean and never let them return, as long as the empire remained strong. Rome is viewed fundamentally as a land power because it obliterated all naval rivals, so that its only military challenges lay on its peripheral land borders.

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In short, the Roman navy is often forgotten simply because it did its job so well. The total victory of Rome at sea gave the Romans the wherewithal to say, without any real hubris or exaggeration, that the Mediterranean was Mare Nostrum: Our Sea. The transformation of the Mediterranean - a crossroads of civilizations that had once been prowled by many rival navies - into a pacified internal zone of the Roman Empire is at the same time a largely forgotten reality - so true that it is taken for granted - and a major source of Roman imperial strength, which let them transport foodstuffs, material, and men around the empire with great efficiency and the assurance of safety.

But the Mediterranean was not always the Roman Sea. Mare Nostrum was not given. It was taken, and the taking required an exorbitant expense and a great loss of life. The watershed event in this saga was the great contest with Carthage - a genuine great power with a strong naval pedigree and tradition of its own - in the Punic Wars. With great effort and difficulty, the Romans slowly but surely exterminated the Carthaginian Navy, and then Carthage itself, in one of the cornerstone acts of Roman empire building and the greatest naval war of the ancient world. In repeated violent clashes on the Mediterranean, the Romans won their sea by their willingness to fill it with the blood of their sons.

Winning the Sea: Rome and Carthage

The Carthaginians have gone down in history as a geopolitical nemesis and foil. Rome, for obvious reasons, is the pivot of many centuries of western history, and as the most hated and dangerous Roman rival, Carthage is usually discussed only in the context of its long, bloody, and ultimately unsuccessful struggle with the Romans. While the naval war with Rome is obviously our main interest here, a few words about the Carthaginians themselves are perhaps worth our time.

The ancient city of Carthage lay on the coast of modern day Tunisia very close to the contemporary capital of Tunis, near the strait that separates Sicily from Northern Africa. Although it lay on the continent of Africa and in the same maritime strategic space as Rome, it was neither European nor African in its nature, but rather Canaanite. The city was founded just before 800 BC as a colony of the seafaring Phoenician people, who from ancient times lived on the coast of the Levant. The particular founders of Carthage were colonists from the Phoenician city of Tyre, in modern day Lebanon.

The Phoenicians were a prodigious people, famed for their navigational skills, mercantile predilections, alphabet, and shipbuilding, but they had the misfortune of being a fundamentally maritime people living near the heartlands of the great archaic land empires. From the 8th Century onward, the Phoenicians were frequently dominated by first the Assyrians and later the Persians, and the fading of Phoenician autonomy (combined with the great distances of the sea) led to increasing Carthaginian independence. The result was a unique Carthaginian civilization, Canaanite in its ethnic origins, with its own systems of proto-Republican government and religion which were alien to the Romans and other peoples in the Western Mediterranean. The Carthaginians, like other Punic peoples (the favored term for the Phoenician transplant civilizations in the west) worshipped gods of the Canaanite religion, including the Baal of biblical infamy. In this sense they were cultural alien both to their Roman rivals and to the African tribes that inhabited the lands around them.

By the third century BC, as Rome consolidated its control of the Italian peninsula, Carthage had carved out powerful position for itself around the rim of the Western Mediterranean, with a web of client states, colonies, vassals, and allies along the North African Coast, in Iberia, Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia. The Carthaginian Empire, like many archaic empires, was not so much a discrete territory subject to direct control as an extension of diplomatic and mercantile influence, bringing in tribute and trade to Carthage, held together by Carthage's powerful navy and by a network of Carthaginian outposts, fortresses, naval bases, and colonies.

In looking at a map of the Western Mediterranean on the eve of the Punic Wars, it may seem that war was inevitable given how close Carthaginian influence had come to Italy. Perhaps the Romans coveted Sicily, or feared Carthaginian naval incursion into Italy? In fact, there was initially little Roman interest in either Sicily or a broader war with Carthage. Rather, the Punic Wars, which would engulf the Mediterranean for a century and lead to the complete destruction of Carthage and its civilization, began practically by accident, and offer an instructive example of how quickly a conflagration can burn out of control.

The great war between Carthage and Rome was started by neither power, but rather by an unemployed company of Italian mercenaries calling themselves the Mamertines, or Sons of Mars. Out of work and bored, they decided to pass the time by occupying the strategic city of Messina, which sits on the strait separating Italy and Sicily. The occupation of this valuable port by a band of rogue mercenaries raised the alarm of Syracuse - a kingdom of Greek transplants in southeastern Sicily which was the only notable independent state in the Western Mediterranean aside from Carthage and Rome.

Because Syracuse was a sort of distant third wheel to the Romans and Carthaginians, the Syracusan King, Heiro II, opted to appeal for aid in ousting the Mamertines from Messina. His call was answered in 265 by a Carthaginian fleet, which arrived and swiftly took custody of Messina and brought the mercenaries to heel. This was the spark that set off the great fire.

The Romans, who at this point were still largely contained within Italy, had never shown any great interest in expanding their dominions to Sicily or in fighting a war with Carthage, but the sudden appearance of a Carthaginian force in Messina was greatly alarming, and after some heated debate it was decided to intervene on behalf of the Mamertines (who had appealed to Rome for help, citing their status as Italians) and eject Carthage from Messina. No one seems to have seriously considered the possibility of a long war, but only a short and decisive action to prevent the Carthaginians from consolidating a base so close to Italy.

In 263, Roman forces crossed the narrow strait to Sicily, occupied Messina, and marched south, forcing Syracuse to capitulate and defect from its alliance with Carthage. King Heiro agreed to pay a symbolic war indemnity, become a Roman ally, and provide basing and supplies for the Roman army in Sicily. The Romans then got the jump on the Carthaginians by rapidly marching to the city of Agrigentum, in southern Sicily, where they laid siege to it and eventually sacked it - a satisfying victory, no doubt, but one which greatly hardened the Carthaginian stance and made a full scale war for Sicily all but inevitable.

The beginning of the war therefore clearly favored the Roman preference for high intensity and decisive warfare - largely as a result of strategic surprise and aggression which caught the Carthaginians on the back foot. Unfortunately for the Romans, Sicily was not a place where this type of war could be waged indefinitely. Sicily is (and was) mountainous and road poor, making supply and maneuver difficult. The terrain, combined with Carthage's preference for a defensive and patient strategy, denied the Romans the opportunity to fight decisive set piece battles and massive sieges. In the following 23 years of war in Sicily, the Romans and Carthaginians would fight only two conventional set piece battles. The remainder of the land campaign would be a frustrating grind characterized by ineffective sieges, raiding, interdiction, and small skirmishes in the mountainous terrain.

The Romans found the pace and nature of the fighting in Sicily immensely frustrating and indecisive, and were particularly flummoxed by their inability to successfully siege the key Carthaginian strongholds on the coast. Because these port cities were easily supplied and reinforced by the powerful Carthaginian navy, conventional Roman siege tactics were ineffective. It was inevitable, of course, that a war for an island would eventually revolve around the sea, however much the Romans may have wished to leaned on the strength of their legions.

It is difficult to emphasize just how little experience the Romans had with naval operations or shipbuilding. They had briefly maintained their own fleet at the turn of the century, but after a defeat on the water at the hands of the small city state of Taranto in 282, they had disbanded their navy and instead chose to conscript the vessels of allied cities as naval auxiliaries - indeed, the Roman army that went into Sicily in 263 was transported and supplied by these satellite navies. Facing the prospect of a wider naval struggle in the seas around Sicily, however, the Romans took the fateful leap. In 260, after three years of stalemate on land, the Romans built their first navy.

By the 3rd century, naval combat had changed from the era of the Athenian trireme in ways that were meaningful, but not radical. Triremes were still in service, but they no longer formed the mass of the battle line, as they had been supplanted by the much larger quinquereme - which, as the name suggests, now had a bank of five rowers rather than three. It was previously taken at face value that there were five separate banks of oars on each side of the ship, but modern scholarship has firmly established that this would have been deeply impractical - making the ship extremely top heavy and raising the likelihood of the mass of oars becoming tangled or fouled. It is now accepted that the quinquereme - sometimes simply called the "five" - instead had three banks of oars like the trireme, but with five associated rowers. The bottom oar would have been manned by a single rower, with the upper two rowed by two rowers each. Thus, a Roman five would have been propelled by a crew of some 280 rowers, as opposed to the 170 men who rowed an archaic trireme.

The addition of more rowers was not an innovation to produce a faster ship. On the contrary, the additional propulsion was desirable because it powered a ship that was much taller, heavier, more seaworthy, and more sturdily built. Triremes continued to be much the faster and more maneuverable vessels, but they were dwarfed by the quinquereme and found it impossible to grapple with the larger vessels in combat. The height and deck space of the quinquereme were particularly important in boarding actions, in that they allowed the ship to carry a much larger complement of infantry on the deck. Whereas an ancient trireme would frequently have as few as 20 marines on deck, the Romans would pack a quinquereme with as many as 120 legionaries. The smaller but faster trireme, now badly outmuscled in pitched battle, took on reconnaissance duty.

Therefore, when the Romans set out in earnest to build a navy, the quinquereme was to be the mainstay of the fleet. The Senate resolved in 260 to fund the construction of a 120 vessel armada, of which 100 were quinqueremes and the remainder triremes. Polybius records that a shipwrecked Carthaginian quinquereme was recovered and reverse engineered as the model for the Roman fleet - consequentially, there is little reason to doubt that the vessels used by the warring navies were of very similar construction. The decisive factor would be training, tactical innovation, and the caprice of battle.

The Roman historian Pliny made a particular point to note that this first Roman fleet was completed in only 60 days. This has at times been taken as an exaggeration meant to emphasize the usual Roman point of pride in their engineering prowess, but modern archeological finds have deduced that the Romans managed to assemble a fleet very efficiently, whether 60 days is the appropriate figure or not. The ribs and beams of sunken Roman vessels from this era are inscribed with notched marks that indicate part numbers and a design template, indicating an assembly line process of mass production.

In any case, the Romans managed to rapidly assemble and crew a fleet, and put a detachment to sea to take the newly recruited and inexperienced rowers through their paces.

The early naval engagements of the First Punic War were a demonstration of a timeless axiom in naval combat - namely, the importance of staying apprised of the enemy's position and striving to keep one's fleet on station together in a mass. Both the Carthaginians and Romans suffered early defeats when a small detachment of their fleets were surprised by larger enemy forces. The Romans lost a small force of 17 vessels (and had a consul go into captivity) when they were ambushed and trapped in a harbor, and several weeks later the Carthaginians lost several dozen ships when a raiding detachment unexpectedly bumped into the main Roman fleet off the northern coast of Sicily.

These were small and relatively chaotic engagements, but they neatly impressed upon the Romans that, although they had successfully copied the Carthaginian quinquereme design, their rowing crews and captains were too inexperienced to hold up against the enemy in maneuvering fights. They had great difficulty ramming and grappling with the more agilely handled Carthaginian ships, and this deficiency led to a critical early war innovation that would prove absolutely essential for allowing the novice Roman navy to compete in early battles.

This new Roman weapon has gone down in history as the Corvus, which means crow - although none of the ancient sources use this term. The identity of the inventor is unknown, which suggests that he was not Roman, as Romans liked to claim responsibility for their achievements. In any case, the corvus was a boarding plank, some four feet wide and 36 feet long, mounted on the bow of the vessel on a swiveling platform. Raised into attack position via a pulley, the swiveled mount allowed the corvus to swing about on either side of the ship, where it could be dropped on any enemy vessel which came too close. The signature feature of the corvus was a curved spike on the underside of the plank's outward end, which would bite into the deck of the enemy vessel as it dropped and prevent it from getting away. This curved hook, which resembled a bird's beak, is likely where the name originated.

The corvus gave the Romans an extremely powerful tactical expedient which allowed them to, in essence, snare any enemy vessel that came within reach of the bow. When an unfortunate Carthaginian vessel came too close, the corvus could rapidly swivel into position, drop with a heavy thud, and grip the enemy deck with its underside hooks. The enemy would have no time to react or dislodge the hook before Roman legionaries and marines came rushing down the ramp, giving the Romans the exact type of fight that they liked best - an infantry fight in close quarters.

This was a powerful tactical method, and it proved to be one that the Carthaginians never did develop a reliable counter to. Most importantly, the corvus greatly simplified the task of the Roman crew - rather than try to match the more experienced Carthaginians in maneuvers, they only had to try to keep the enemy ship away from their stern, since any attack on the bow of the ship would bring the corvus into play. It was much more difficult to ram the enemy in the aft flank than it was to simply get close and grab the enemy with the corvus. We should note, however, that the corvus was not without drawbacks, some of them quite severe. The weight of the corvus made Roman ships even more ponderous and less maneuverable, and in particular they made the ships very top heavy and vulnerable to rough weather. In the short term, however, they provided a powerful tool to balance the odds against the veteran Carthaginian fleet.

The first use of the Corvus was a rousing success. The Roman fleet intercepted a raiding Carthaginian armada near the port of Mylae in northern Sicily, joining the first pitched naval battle of the war. The fleets were of roughly equivalent size - perhaps 120 vessels each - but the Carthaginians were taken aback by their first encounter with the corvus, which time and time again crashed down and snared their unlucky ships, opening the path for a flood of Roman infantry to board. More than 30 Carthaginian ships were captured, and another dozen sunk, in Rome's first victory on the water. However, the faster Carthaginian fleet was able to disengage and escape with all its remaining vessels, while the heavier Roman ships - burdened with the corvus - were unable to pursue.

For the Romans, the Battle of Mylae late in 260 proved that they could fight the Carthaginians on the water and win, despite the superior nautical pedigree of the enemy. The Carthaginians, for their part, probably felt that the Romans had been lucky, surprising them with a novel tactic. The corvus was deadly, yes, but the battle had also proven that the Carthaginian ships were still faster, more agile, and better handled. In any case, the battle confirmed that the sea would now be fully and hotly contested, and would become the decisive theater of the war.

Beginning the following year, both sides would begin pouring vast resources into shipbuilding in the aims of achieving a decisive advantage on the water. The Romans remained frustrated by a grinding stalemate in Sicily, but unexpectedly encouraged by their success in naval engagements. This led the Romans to renew a naval-oriented strategy, and in 256 they launched a campaign to mount an amphibious invasion of Carthaginian North Africa, in the hopes of threatening Carthage proper and forcing a surrender. It was this expedition that set the conditions for the largest naval battle of the war, and indeed of all time.

The Big Brawl at Ecnomius

Late in the spring of 256, an enormous Roman fleet mustered at the mouth of the Tiber and set out for North Africa. The force was a truly imposing armada: 330 warships, almost all of them quinqueremes, under the command of Rome's two consuls for the year - Marcus Atilius Regulus and Lucius Manlius Vulso - each of whom sailed in a colossal six-banked hexareme flagship. In addition to this imposing accumulation of naval combat power, they brought with them a large number of transport vessels which carried supplies, horses, and fodder for the landing army. Though the number of transports is not identified by Roman sources, it must have been substantial given the size of the force.

Intercepting and combatting such a fleet would require virtually all of Carthage's naval assets. It was therefore fortunate that they were alert to Roman intentions, and conducted a near simultaneous counter-muster of the fleet under the command of generals Hamilcar and Hanno off the coast of Sicily, including not only the ships already active there but also a fresh fleet raised in Carthage. In total, the Carthaginians were able to accumulate some 350 vessels.

The amount of fighting power now operating around Sicily was genuinely astonishing, not just for the archaic era but for any period of history. Each Roman quinquereme carried 80 legionaries in addition to the standard complement of 40 marines, meaning that the armada's infantry component alone was nearly 40,000 men. When the rowers and deck crews of the massive ships were added in, one calculates that the Roman fleet had a credible headcount of nearly 140,000 men. The historian Polybius recorded that the Carthaginian fleet contained 150,000 personnel - a number that is broadly accepted, given the similarity in the size of the fleets, though it is possibly too high as there is some reason to believe that the Carthaginians carried fewer infantry on board. But with nearly 300,000 men involved, the ensuing clash between these fleets was, most likely, the largest naval battle of all time when judged by the count of personnel.

The Carthaginians had several important advantages to lean on, most of them related to the mobility of the Roman fleet. Roman ships at this point continued to utilize the corvus in combat. Although this remained a deadly expedient in battle, it gave the Carthaginian ships a substantial edge in maneuverability and speed. More importantly however, the weight and imbalance of the corvus made Roman ships rather suspect in choppy seas - a fact which strongly encouraged Roman fleets to stay as close to land as possible. Furthermore, the Romans had a large number of transports in tow - quite literally, in fact, as the transport barges lacked propulsion and had to be pulled behind the warships.

Burdened by their transport barges and destabilized by the corvus, the Roman fleet was therefore unable to take a direct or rapid route to North Africa. Instead, they had to partially circumnavigate Sicily, sailing within eyeshot of the coast, in order to cross over to Tunisia at the narrowest point of the straits. The ponderous, plodding nature of the Roman fleet gave the Carthaginians strong prospects of intercepting it mid-voyage and bringing it to battle. This is precisely what they did.

As the mighty Roman armada worked its way across the southern coast of Sicily, making a westward course towards Africa, they saw rising on the horizon an equally imposing Carthaginian fleet awaiting their arrival. The greatest collision of nautical fighting power in the history of the Mediterranean was now imminent, off the coast of Cape Ecnomus.

The course of the battle was to be determined first and foremost by the unique arrangement of the fleets as they approached each other. As the Romans were winding along the coast, they kept a tight and compact formation. The 330 warships were divided roughly into four large divisions, commonly called squadrons in the historographic parlance, though this was not a Roman word. The Roman sailing column formed a sort of wedge, with two squadrons leading in oblique echelon. Behind them, the third squadron sailed in a line, towing the vast cloud of transport barges behind them. The final, fourth squadron sailed at the back as a rearguard and reserve.

In contrast, the Carthaginians were arrayed in a conventional battle line, with their left wing angled towards the coast. The battlespace thus had the coast of Sicily as a boundary to the north, and open sea to the south. The dynamics of combat between these fleets were by now well understood. Carthaginian ships could be badly mauled by the Roman corvus and boarding parties if they fought a congested, head on battle, but their superior maneuverability gave them a strong advantage if the battle could be widened into the open sea.

The Carthaginian battleplan, therefore, hinged on an attempt to break apart the compact Roman formation and create a more open, fluid battle where superior Carthaginian mobility could carry the day. The centerpiece of this effort was a feigned retreat by the Carthaginian center as the fleets approached each other. As the Roman wedge approached, the Carthaginian center immediately began to back water, opening up a yawning void in the middle of their line. The two leading Roman squadrons, each personally led by one of the consuls, immediately lunged forward in pursuit. Both sides had now agreed to a mutual gambit. By breaking their front open through the withdrawal of the center, the Carthaginians gave up the integrity of their battle line - but by surging forward to exploit this situation, the forward Roman squadrons abandoned the more vulnerable rear of the column, which was still encumbered by the towed transports.

The Carthaginian trap began to spring shut as the lead Roman squadrons eagerly came forward to attack the withdrawing Carthaginian center. While their center backed water, the Carthaginian wings shot forward, bypassing both their own center and the advancing Roman lead elements. The plan, evidently, was for the Carthaginian wings to rush forward to attack the rear half of the Roman column as it was still attempting to deploy into a battle line. On the Carthaginian left wing, their ships skirted past the coast and prepared to set on the Roman 3rd squadron, while the right wing - which lay on the open sea and contained the fastest and most experienced Carthaginian crews - made a dash for the rear of the Roman column.

Things very well may have gone very badly for the Romans at this juncture. Their 3rd Squadron, which had been towing the transport train, had to disengage their tows before they could even begin to maneuver, while the 4th squadron at the rear could not cleanly enter the battle because all of the transports were in their way. On paper, it certainly looked like the Carthaginian wings were going to slam into the Roman column while it was immobile and disorganized.

Disaster was averted for the Romans thanks to the timely and lithe reaction of their 3rd squadron. Seeing the Carthaginian left wing bearing down on them, they hastily cut their transports loose - then, rather than accept a fight with the Carthaginians in the open water (with the transports at their back, hampering their mobility) their captains made the ingenious decision to run for the coast. This apparently caught the Carthaginians by surprise, for despite the superior speed and maneuverability of their ships, they were unable to snare the Romans into a fight or intercept them before they could reach the coast.

The decision by 3rd squadron to run for the coast was, in a word, brilliant. Out in the open water, the Romans were vulnerable to the agile Carthaginian ships, which could dash in and out looking for opportunities to ram the Roman vessels in the stern. Upon running to the shore, however, 3rd squadron turned about and backed in, so that the sterns of their ships were pointing towards the coast and the bows out towards the sea. With their rear snuggled in against the coastline, it became impossible for the Carthaginians to flank or envelop them. Instead, they faced a wall of ships facing outward, with the deadly corvus waiting to grab any Carthaginian ship that came to close. This neutralized the entire maneuver of the Carthaginian left wing and turned it into an ugly close quarters scrum.

Still, the Romans were not in a particularly cozy spot. Their transports were now adrift, having been cut from their tows. The Roman 3rd squadron was defending itself capably, but it was still pinned against the shore and unable to actively intervene in the larger battle - more importantly, it had voluntarily backed into a corner and would be destroyed if the larger battle went poorly. Meanwhile, the rearmost Roman squadron had great difficulty forming up a battle line due to the drifting transports in the way, and found itself hard pressed and facing likely defeat in the open water at the hands of the Carthaginian right wing.

The battle was decided, then, by the collision of the centers. After backing water to draw the forward Roman squadrons in, the Carthaginian center joined battle and found, very simply, that they did not have an adequate counter to the corvus system. While several Roman ships were successfully rammed and sunk, the Romans time and time again managed to snare enemy ships with the corvus. The all-too familiar horror replayed itself dozens of times: the sudden swivel and drop of the boarding plank, the splintering crash as the bronze spike stabbed into the deck, and the ensuing rush of heavily armored and deadly Roman legionaries rushing to board. That the corvus was the predominant means of combat for the Romans is attested by the Carthaginian losses, a large majority of which were captured, rather than sunk.

By the mid-afternoon, the remaining crews and captains of the Carthaginian center had had enough, and began to break off and retreat. Rather than pursue further, the Roman center, consuls still firmly in command, broke off and immediately began to wheel back to assist their rear squadrons. While the Carthaginian wings had acquitted themselves well, there was now nothing to be done with the squadrons of the Roman center bearing down on them, save extract themselves from the fight as fast as possible and make a break for it. Most of the Carthaginian right wing, which had open ocean on its flank, was able to escape, but the left wing was trapped near the shore and largely destroyed.

Cape Ecnomius had been a resounding victory for the Roman Navy. Intercepted with their transports in tow by a colossal Carthaginian fleet equal in size to their own, Roman captains and crews alike handled themselves with great cool and professionalism, foiling a well conceived Carthaginian battle plan. Total Roman losses amounted to just 24 ships and some 10,000 men - less than a quarter of Carthage's losses, which ran to nearly 100 ships and more than 30,000 men.

On the whole, the Carthaginians seemed surprised at the greatly improved seamanship of the Romans. Earlier battles had seen the Romans handle their ships clumsily and unprofessionally, scraping out victories with the brute power of the corvus and the Roman infantry. In contrast, at Cape Ecnomius, the Roman fleet maneuvered well, as seen in the rapid run by the 3rd squadron to the shore where it could defend itself, though the weight and awkwardness of the corvus continued to give the Carthaginians an advantage in agility.

More broadly, Cape Ecnomius illustrates the tradeoff between scale and experience in warfare. Carthage began the war with a highly professional navy informed by a centuries old naval tradition, and in early engagements there was no question that their seamanship and maneuverability were vastly superior to the Romans. After the Battle of Mylae, however, both navies began to rapidly expand with aggressive shipbuilding programs, floating hundreds of new quinqueremes. This expansion forced Carthage to recruit tens of thousands of new rowers, just the same as the Romans. While the core of the Carthaginian navy still included many experienced crews and captains, this talent pool was diluted by the expansion of the navy, and by the time the great battle was fought at Cape Ecnomius, the Carthaginians were counting on a large number of essentially rookie crews who did not have the same edge that they had enjoyed in previous battles.

Ecnomius was a great Roman victory, and a sort of coming out party for the ascendant Roman Navy. It was also, incidentally, the swan song (or crow song, if you prefer) of the corvus. This had proven to be a formidable weapons system that was decisive in Rome's early victories at sea, but it soon became apparent that the tradeoff in the seaworthiness of the ships was not worth the tactical advantage in the long run.

Despite smashing the Carthaginian fleet, the larger Roman assault on North Africa turned into a debacle. After pausing to rest and refit in Sicily, the Roman armada proceeded to Africa and landed a force of some 16,000 men on the coast. A series of Roman victories in the hinterland around Carthage spooked the Carthaginians into suing for peace, but the Roman consul in command - Marcus Atilius Regulus - demanded such excessively punitive terms that they resolved to continue fighting instead. The Carthaginians then hired a mercenary Spartan general named Xanthippus, who defeated the Romans at the Battle of Tunis and wiped out most of their expeditionary army.

The battle at Tunis was a harbinger of things to come, for the Romans. All of the previous engagements on land had taken place on Sicily, which is - to put it mildly - very poor cavalry country. Having previously only fought the Carthaginians in the Sicilian hills, the Romans had never before gotten a good look at the excellent Carthaginian cavalry, which were a mainstay of their land forces and would later be a critical arm in the great Hannibal's many victories. Well, at Tunis the Romans got a look at the Carthaginian horse, and they didn't like it much at all. Of the 16,000 men who had landed in Africa, barely 2,000 survived to be evacuated by sea.

That is a lot of action, but what was the score? The Roman Navy had acquitted itself remarkably well, utilizing the corvus to even the odds with the more experienced Carthaginians and winning a massive pitched battle at Ecnomius, but the larger expedition had gone all wrong, undone first by Regulus's overly punitive peace conditions, secondly by the arrival of the Spartan general Xanthippus, and finally by the deadly Carthaginian cavalry. Limping home to lick its wounds, the Roman force suffered one final disaster. Off the coast of Sicily, a massive storm blew in which wrecked most of the fleet. After launching more than 300 ships in 256, only 80 survived to return to Italy the following year.

It seems, tragically, that the corvus was to blame. The weight of the apparatus is understood to have been destabilizing, making Roman ships less reliably seaworthy than their adversaries. They could still be handled well enough in favorable water, but evidently the corvus turned into a tremendous liability in a storm, overweighting the bow. Despite the great success of the corvus in battle, its use is never again mentioned after the great shipwrecking storm of 255. This is a powerful reminder of the pivotal role that the weather and the water play in naval operations. The corvus may have been deadly to Carthaginian ships that strayed within its reach, but it was powerless against Poseidon's wrath.

Naval Attrition and State Capacity

The great campaigns of 256 and 255 brought Carthage and Rome to an impasse. Both had lost enormous fleets - Carthage to the Romans, and the Romans to the storm - representing a tremendous financial investment and tens of thousands of personnel. These costs seem to have sobered both belligerents, and there was an interim period of years where pitched battles were rare, fleet strength was slowly rebuilt, and the conflict turned into a gridlocked series of sieges, blockades, and interdiction efforts.

By 249, however, Rome had steadily rebuilt its fleet, and one of the year's consuls, Publius Claudius Pulcher, hatched an ambitious plan. Frustrated by the long and protracted sieges and blockades of Carthage's coastal strongholds in Sicily, Claudius decided to launch a surprise attack on the main Carthaginian naval base at Drepana (modern day Trapani, on the western tip of Sicily).

The plan had a certain bold logic to it. The personnel of Claudius's fleet had been steadily attrited by their participation in a long and bloody siege at Libyaeum - a fact that the Carthaginians were certainly aware of. What the Carthaginians did not know, however, was that Claudius had just been reinforced by 10,000 fresh rowers, who had been dropped off in eastern Sicily and then marched overland to join his fleet. Claudius therefore deduced that the Carthaginians likely did not have an accurate estimate of his strength. His plan was to row by night from Libyaeum to Drepana, some 50 kilometers up the coast, to catch the Carthaginians by surprise, ambushing and trapping their fleet while it was still in the harbor.

In an ominous moment for pious Romans, however, Claudius began the operation with an act of impetuous blasphemy. The Romans were always meticulous about consulting omens before battle. In this case, however, the sacred chickens refused to eat - a strong sign that the battle was not sanctioned by the gods. Claudius allegedly became so angry that he grabbed the chickens and threw them overboard into the sea, shouting "if they will not eat, let them drink." He should have listened to the chickens.

If the plan had worked, it might have ended the war. Unfortunately for Claudius and his men, Drepana became a painful example of the difference that a few minutes can make. The Roman armada - some 120 ships in all - set out at night, but their voyage was slow due to the inexperience of Claudius's new rowers and the difficulty of keeping ships on station at night. It was not so much that they could get lost - after all, the route simply followed the coast northward - but the fleet straggled and became disorderly, with Claudius's own flagship falling into the rear of the column. Then, in the early morning, they were spotted by Carthaginian reconnaissance on land, and messengers raced to warn Adherbal, the Carthaginian admiral at Drepana.

Adherbal understood that if his fleet was caught still at harbor, it would be trapped and easily blockaded. He raced to mobilize his crews to their ships and loaded up as many marines as he could scrounge up, and immediately put to sea.

Drepana was decided by the narrowest of margins. Adherbal's flagship rowed out the mouth of the harbor exactly as the first Roman ships rounded the corner - an almost literal example of ships passing in the night (except it was mid-morning). Claudius had missed his chance by less than an hour. The Carthaginian fleet was now beginning to sweep out to see in a wide arc, turning back towards the Roman armada crawling along the shore. Claudius attempted to form his ships into a battle line to meet them, but was stymied first by the fact that his fleet had become disorderly and strung out during the night voyage, and secondly by the fact that his lead vessels were already rowing into the Drepana harbor. In their attempt to quickly turn back and form up for battle, many of the leading Roman ships in the harbor collided with each other and sheared their own oars.

The Romans did manage to form an improvised battle line, but it was tired from a night of rowing, disorganized, and - most importantly - arranged with its back to the coast. While in the past this had been a benefit, as it allowed the Roman ships to protect their sterns while facing outward with the corvus, by this time the corvus had been abandoned. The battle therefore took the form of conventional boarding and ramming actions, and the presence of the shore at the rear put the Romans at a distinct disadvantage. With their backs at the open sea, the Carthaginians were able to freely reverse away from danger, while the Romans were trapped against the shore and had little room to maneuver. If a Carthaginian ship found itself in trouble, it could simply back away; a Roman ship could not. The battle - originally envisioned as an ambush of the Carthaginians in port - turned into a disaster for the Romans, who lost 75% of the fleet. Claudius, who managed to break out and escape with a mere 30 ships, was so widely panned for the debacle that he was eventually charged by the senate with treason. The sacred chickens, who might have testified to his rashness, were unavailable for comment.

After Drepana, the Carthaginians regained naval supremacy for a time and had a strategic window of opportunity. The expense of having to continually build and rebuild massive fleets was extremely burdensome, even for a society as wealthy and extractive as Rome. The loss of yet another armada to a massive storm late in 249 practically eradicated what remained of the Roman fleet, and the Senate opted to temporarily suspend naval construction and reprioritize the land war in Sicily. Notably, however, Carthage opted not to push the envelope, and seems to have downsized their fleet, thinking perhaps that the Romans were exhausted and no doubt worried about their own mounting financial burdens.

It was not until 243, six years after the debacle at Drepana, that the Romans decided to build yet another fleet and push for a decisive outcome on the water. This time, they would get it. The state, however, was effectively bankrupt by this time, and the new fleet had to be financed with donations by the aristocracy, with wealthy Roman families "sponsoring" ships. On paper, this took the form of "loans" to the state, but the terms were interest free and were due to be repaid with the indemnity to be imposed on a defeated Carthage. They thus represented a genuine patriotic commitment by the Roman elite, and a sort of financial pledge of faith in Roman victory.

By 242, the Romans had once again floated a fleet of over 200 quinqueremes, and they immediately deployed them to the Sicilian coast to blockade the remaining Carthaginian strongholds there, including the naval base at Drepana. Unlike in prior campaigns, however, the purpose of these blockades seems to have been very explicitly to draw out the Carthaginian fleet for a decisive battle. The Roman admiral in command, one Caius Lutatius Catalus, made it a particular point to keep his rowers on a calibrated training routine and kept them well fed and rested, in anticipation of a showdown with the enemy fleet.

The Carthaginians were now in a very serious bind. The new Roman fleet (the sudden materialization of which must have come as a great shock) had successfully blockaded important ports, putting much of the Carthaginian land forces in danger of being starved out. The Carthaginian navy had to resupply them, but it also had to be prepared to fight an engagement with the Roman fleet. Resupplying the garrisons on land meant carrying grain and other supplies, which in turn reduced the space available for marines, which in turn gave the Carthaginians poor prospects in a naval battle. The solution, therefore, was a dangerous gambit, but the only one which offered to solve all of these problems. The mass of the Carthaginian fleet, some 250 ships in all, was to dash for the Sicilian coast laden with grain and supplies, avoiding the Roman fleet. The grain would then be offloaded, and infantry would be onboarded in its place, so that the fleet could seek a fight with the Roman navy and defeat it, hopefully for the last time.

The Carthaginians got a fair chance to execute their ambitious gambit. They crossed from Carthage to the westernmost of the Aegates Islands, some 35 kilometers off the western tip of Sicily. On March 10, 241, a strong easterly wind began to blow through the Aegates, offering the possibility that the Carthaginians could raise sails and make a swift dash to the Sicilian coast before the Romans could intercept them. Their admiral, Hanno, decided to make a run for it. Catalus, however, was alert to their presence. He now faced a difficult choice of their own. He had an opportunity to intercept Hanno's fleet while it was still burdened with supplies and low on marines, but to do so he would need to row into the wind. The war now hinged, in essence, on a race.

Hanno's ships were bearing down on Sicily at top speed, but it was not fast enough. Catalus's crews coped admirably with the unfavorable wind and formed up a battle line in the path of the oncoming Carthaginians, who now had no choice but to fight. The ensuing battle was something of a foregone conclusion. The numbers in the fleets were roughly equivalent - somewhere between 200 and 250 ships on both sides - but the Romans were far better configured for the fight. The Carthaginian ships were much heavier and less maneuverable, both because they were burdened with supplies and because they had their masts. Masts and sails granted extra speed when sailing in a straight line with the wind, but in battle they merely became dead weight that burdened the ships. Catalus, in contrast, had removed his ships' masts beforehand to maximize his agility in battle. Furthermore, the Carthaginian ships were loaded with supplies, not marines, while the Romans carried full complements of fighting men. Being thus undermanned and overweight, the Carthaginian fleet had poor prospects from the outset and was smashed. Nearly 120 Carthaginian ships were lost, against a mere 30 Roman vessels.

Catalus's interception and defeat of the Carthaginians off the Aegates Islands proved to be the final, deciding victory of the war. Rome had now regained naval supremacy, and Carthage was financially unable to construct yet another fleet. Furthermore, the defeat of Hanno's mission to Sicily meant that the Romans now had a firm blockade in place, which isolated and threatened to completely starve out the remaining Carthaginian forces on the island. Defeated at sea and cut off from their Sicilian bases, the Carthaginians resigned themselves to defeat and sued for peace.

With Carthaginian surrender in 241, the Romans became the de-facto masters of the western Mediterranean sea. Of the terms imposed on Carthage, by far the most important was the abandonment of their bases and possessions in Sicily. The short range of galley fleets made them heavily dependent on forward bases and ports to operate at distance - therefore, even if Carthage decided to build a new fleet in the future, its ability to contest the sea would have been sterilized by the loss of the Sicilian bases. In contrast, the Romans now had full control over Sicily, which allowed their navy to operate across the entire theater.

This is why, when Carthage and Rome renewed their multi-generational struggle in 218 with the beginning of the Second Punic War, Carthage conducted no meaningful naval operations at all. The operational centerpiece of this war was the great Hannibal's famous overland invasion of Italy, but this overland strategy (and the famous crossing of the alps) was made necessary by Rome's control of the waves. Unable to operate at any scale or distance in the western Mediterranean, Hannibal instead had to accumulate forces in Carthage's Iberian territories and laboriously march them to Italy.

How did Rome defeat Carthage, despite the latter's superior naval pedigree and early advantages in the naval theater? According to Polybius (who, although Greek himself, was an unequivocally pro-Roman author with no incentive to lie) the Romans lost a total of some 700 warships in the First Punic War, against roughly 500 Carthaginian losses. Many of these Roman losses were due to storms, to be sure, but the fact remained that the Roman navy did suffer roughly 40% more losses than its adversary. It does not much matter to a drowned sailor whether the enemy or the weather has killed him.

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6. Blood on the Wine Dark Sea

Few romances are as cursed and enduring as the tragic love story of man and the ocean. Humans have been venturing out onto the water since the earliest days of our social life: depictions of boats are featured in ancient cave art, and the use of waterways and seas as systemic transportation arteries is among humanity's oldest technologies. People love the sea for its beauty, its bounty of delicious assorted fish, and its place as the interstitial connecter of the world. And yet, the ocean is trying to kill us. It slices ships apart with icebergs, it rams them under with enormous waves, it spins up colossal hurricanes, and heaves tidal waves and tsunamis into our cities. It killed the Crocodile Hunter.

Navigating the ocean safely is no easy task. Today it is far safer than it has ever been, but even with modern shipbuilding, communications, weather forecasting, and rescue infrastructure, the ocean is still more than capable of claiming fresh victims.

Humanity, of course, had to complicate matters by bringing political life out onto the water. The ocean is trying to kill us, but it was not long after the first navigators set out onto the water that humans also began trying to kill each other on the ocean. Naval warfare - the organized armed struggle of men (who are, after all, terrestrial creatures) on the waterways and seas of the world - is very old indeed, and forms an integral component of some of the first recorded wars in human history.

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In this essay series, we will consider man's history of maritime violence and his warring on the seas. Man wants to become master of the sea, and while this necessarily implies the mastery of navigation, it also requires mastering the other men that one finds out there on the waters. For all its formidable powers of destruction, the sea could not keep men out, and once man was on the water he made it another arena of his foundational political act, and made war. And so it has been, and so it will be, until the sea gives up her dead.

Naval Operations: A Conceptual Sketch

The motivating animus of naval warfare is not as readily apparent as that of conventional land operations. The idea of fighting overland campaigns is fairly easy to grasp. One seeks to neutralize the enemy's capacity to fight (and thus impose your will upon him) by degrading or controlling his base of material power: occupying his capitol city, severing his control over his population, destroying or capturing his economic base, etc.

The plain point, however, is that none of these things are conventionally found out on the open water. The foundation of the sea's strategic import, therefore, lies in its role as a transportation medium. This has been true for quite literally all of human history. Archaic man found that it was far more efficient to float materials on barges than it was to haul them with pack animals. In the early modern era, it was ironically far easier to economically link far flung maritime colonies than colossal land masses (unless there were robust river linkeages), and it was only after the invention of the railroad that continental interiors became competitive. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the Crimean War - in the 1850's, seaborne supply and communication were far faster and more efficient for the invading French and British armies than for the defending Russians, despite the war being fought within Russian borders. Famously, British reinforcements and supplies took a mere three weeks to reach Crimea via the sea, while Russian material took three months to slog to the battlefield on foot.

Because the sea fundamentally acts as a medium of transportation, naval operations therefore take on a surprising simplicity. Virtually all naval combat in history can be categorized in two general groups, these being amphibious power projection and interdiction.

Amphibious power projection is fairly easy to understand, and it means simply the use of naval assets to bring armed force to bear against targets on land. The form can vary wildly, of course - ranging from Viking longships disgorging a small army of raiders, to British sailing ships bombarding enemy fortresses, to modern amphibious landings such as the 1944 assault on Normandy, all the way to the contemporary American navy operating sorties from colossal nuclear powered aircraft carriers. In truth, there is not much of a conceptual difference between any of these things - the mobility and carrying capacity of the sea in all cases allows fighting power to be rapidly shuttled to decisive points.

Interdiction is the other form of the naval operation, and it means simply area denial - hindering or preventing the enemy from utilizing seaborne lines of communication, supply, and power projection. Interdiction has both strong and weak forms. The strongest form, of course, is the blockade - which deigns to screen all (or nearly all) ocean traffic to the target country. While a true blockade requires essentially unrivaled naval supremacy, there are weaker forms of interdiction, ranging from privateering (a sort of legal form of piracy common in the early modern era) to submarine operations against merchant shipping.

In short, one can argue that despite the enormous diversity of forms that naval warfare has taken, with astonishing evolution in both the tactical and physical aspects of the warship, navies throughout history have essentially attempted to perform two basic tasks: use the sea as a medium to nimbly and effectively project fighting power towards the land, and deny the enemy the free use of the sea. The cinematic clashes between the main bodies of surface fleets of course have their own tactical logic and intriguing dimensions, but they always support one (or both) of these goals.

One other brief conceptual note worth mentioning is that, rather, obviously, naval operations are both extremely capital intensive and by extension highly fragile. We are of course perfectly used to this notion in the modern age, where shipbuilding programs cost many tens of billions of dollars - the total cost of America's new Gerald R Ford Carrier class is well over $100 billion, for example. The cost barrier to naval power is not, however, unique to the modern world. Indeed, it seems that it has always been true that navies are far more costly than armies.

Warships are expensive and intricate engineering products, subjected by the ravages of the sea to costly maintenance, and they require specialized (and thus expensive) expertise to both build and operate. In the First Punic War, Rome and Carthage both bankrupted themselves attempting to fight what amounted to a naval war of attrition - by the end of the war, Rome had to finance shipbuilding by squeezing the aristocracy for donations.

Furthermore, the specialized nature of naval engineering often prevents a simple conversion of aggregate national wealth to combat power. For example, at the beginning of the 20th Century Imperial Germany was unable to achieve its goals of pacing British shipbuilding, despite astonishing levels of economic growth and enormous spending on the navy. Between 1889 and 1913, Germany's GDP grew three times as quickly as Britain's, and Germany became the 2nd largest industrial economy in the world (behind only the United States). Despite these advantages, Britain's long-established and vast shipbuilding capacities prevented Germany from achieving its force generation goals relative to the Royal Navy.

In short, the sea is an arena of high risk and high reward; it compounds the usual frictions of war with the added complication of intricate engineering and navigational problems. The enormous expense and the vast (and often highly skilled) manpower required to compete in high intensity naval operations by extension means that navies tend to be more fragile than armies - that is to say, vulnerable to decisive defeat and less able to recuperate fighting power. But this very fact has made battle a decisive instrument in the history of the ocean. The navy that can gain supremacy by crushing the enemy in pitched battle will generally keep it, and thus hoard its privileges thereafter. War on the water can be won or lost in a day, or an afternoon, or an hour, in an undulating foam of blood and wood.

Early Warships and the Birth of the Trireme

Naval warfare has gone through four major definitive eras in warship design, and a fifth is now being born. For most of human history, the basic design of the warship was some variation of the Galley - which is defined primarily by its reliance on rowing for propulsion. Galleys, in various forms, dominated the seas from the earliest days of archaic warfare all the way until the 16th Century, where they put on a violent closing performance at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Thereafter, the oarsmen of the galley gave way to the classic Age of Sail, when sailing ships armed with shot and powder became the predominant weapons platform. Sail gave way in the late 19th Century to the short-lived age of the Mahanian Battleship, which combined armor, modern naval artillery, and mechanical propulsion (be it with coal or oil), before the Second World War definitively proved the supremacy of Naval Aviation. The aircraft carrier then became the totem platform for naval fighting power, and has remained so until our own unsettled era, with a bevy of missile systems now threatening to force yet another naval revolution.

This is a skeletal look, of course, and the purpose of this series will be to follow the changes in naval combat through the ages. What we wish to note, however, is that for the majority of our history it was the galley, propelled by hardy oarsmen, that provided the main platform for naval combat. The age of the battleship, for example, lasted scarcely 50 years, and the age of sail some 250. The purpose-built war galley, however, was a dominant weapons system for at least 2000 years, all the way from the Greco-Persian Wars to the early-modern Battle of Lepanto. For literally millennia, men operated rowed warships and fought a particular form of naval combat that did not radically change in all that time. Therefore, we will examine the origins of this peculiar and powerful weapons system.

In the beginning, there was no distinction between commercial vessels and warships. Naval combat existed in the bronze age, but it appears to have been largely piratical in nature. Rowed barges, designed for hauling cargo, could just as easily carry a complement of fighting men who would attempt to grapple with their targets (be it an enemy warship or a merchant vessel targeted for raiding) and board it.

It was not until the 5th and 6th centuries BC that the construction of purpose built warships became prevalent, with varying iterations including the Penteconter - a light warship with a single bank of rowers on each side - and the Bireme, which added a second bank for added propulsion. By 525 BC, the Persian Navy was definitively using the vessel that we know as the iconic platform of archaic naval combat: the trireme.

There remains some debate as to where the trireme was first developed (differing sources have alleged both the frequently oceangoing Phoenicians and the Greeks of Corinth as the first designers), but wherever it was first built, the trireme was a remarkable feat of engineering.

The defining quality of the trireme, of course, was its triple bank of oars, crewed by a standard complement of 170 oarsmen. It may seem fairly obvious that adding more oars would provide more propulsion and speed, but simply adding more and more oarsmen was not an easy engineering task, as they had to be arranged in a way that would provide for efficient rowing without compromising the stability and strength of the ship. Therefore, careful considerations had to be made to balance the combat requirements of the vessel. The ship needed to be strong enough to withstand the impact of ramming in combat, but without being too heavy - both for the sake of speed in combat, and because triremes needed to be hauled out of the water on essentially a daily basis, while a low center of gravity was necessary to keep the ship stable in choppy seas and while attempting agile maneuvers in combat. The trireme seems to have provided the ultimate solution to this difficult optimization problem.

Greek shipbuilders, in particular, adopted a variety of best practices that made the trireme a formidable and sophisticated weapons system. To begin with, the ship was built with an assortment of different lumber, including oak, fir, and pine - these offer varying levels of strength, weight, and absorbency, and they were carefully selected in appropriate ratios to create a light but sturdy hull that could be handled well in combat while surviving the great stresses created by ramming.

As a further method to increase the strength of the hull without unduly adding weight, Athenian triremes featured a massive cable that ran the length of the hull. This cable, called a hypozomata, kept the hull taut via tensile strength - this both reduced the flexing of the planks (preventing it from taking on water) - and strengthened the ship during ramming. The hypozomata was considered so essential to the combat performance of the trireme that they were regarded as something like an Athenian state secret, and it was forbidden to export them or show them to foreigners - though, we should note, the secret did get out and they became a standard component across the Mediterranean.

Finally, the trireme accrued great stability in the water via the arrangement of the oars, which included overlapping oar banks. The lowermost bank of oarsmen sat practically at the waterline, so that the center of gravity remained low. Being arranged near (or at) the waterline and in an overlapping fashion, however, the oarsmen on a classical trireme were essentially rowing blind; they would have had only a bare glimpse at the water through their ports and would have no view of the tip of their oar. Therefore, rowing a trireme effectively was a difficult task that required a high degree of training and group coordination in addition to great physical strength and stamina - particularly when executing precise turns and maneuvers in combat. While a sturdy cloth sail provided some additional propulsion in some circumstances, the square rigged sails of the archaic era had limited value and the primary source of propulsion remained the backs and arms of the oarsmen.

The result of these various engineering features was a ship that was strong yet light. The latter was particular important given the trireme's need to be hauled out of the water regularly. To economize on space, triremes had very little cargo space and would only have remained on the water overnight in dire circumstances. Furthermore, triremes tended to become waterlogged over time, and therefore needed to be hauled out of the water to dry out. This was thus a vessel intended to be used for day trips, to be beached overnight by the crew.

All in all, then, these were remarkable vessels. Capable of carrying some 200 men (including 170 rowers and a deck crew), they could top 10 miles per hour (more than 8n knots), and a well trained crew could cover more than 60 miles in a day. They could be hauled onto the beach under the power of the crew (a modern recreation estimated than 140 men could pull a trireme onto the beach), had the stability to survive rough seas, could be handled with great precision in combat, and could withstand the impact of ramming an enemy vessel at full speed. As an added benefit, it could be transformed into a powerful amphibious weapons platform with virtually no physical modification to the ship. Simply by reducing the complement of rowers in favor of armed infantrymen, the trireme became a potent troop carrier - slower than the combat configuration, but capable of slithering right up onto the beach and disgorging a complement of warriors, as is described so beautifully in The Iliad.

The classic trireme was therefore among first great feats of human military engineering. It would earn its fame as the central weapons system in one of humanity's first great wars.

The Great Aegean War

The Greco-Persian Wars (499 - 449 BC) hold a place of pride in the western historical imagination. They are probably the oldest wars that most casual students of history are aware of, and despite their great antiquity they retain a strong emotional pull. Most of the time, the Greeks are viewed as a stand in for "western civilization" writ large, and represent enlightened democratic ideals standing against a despotic Asiatic tyranny. Books on the subject routinely play up this angle - Tom Holland's "Persian Fire" is subtitled simply: "The Battle for the West", for example.

Even at a distance of millennia, certain vignettes of the war exert a powerful pull on the imagination. The most famous of these, of course, is the rearguard action of the Spartan King Leonidas at the pass of Thermopylae. It is, to be sure, a cinematic scene, with a small force of Greek heavy infantry valiantly holding their ground for days against an innumerable Persian horde, before being defeated by treachery. Gerard Butler's washboard abs certainly helped to enrich the scene for us.

There is much that we could say about the Greco-Persian War, and indeed many volumes have been filled on the subject, beginning with the famous Father of History, Herodotus, whose "Histories" center on the war and on the origins of the Persian enemy. Herodotus, as an aside, continues to enjoy a modern resurgence and validation. His Histories remains an extremely engaging and entertaining read, and archeological discoveries routinely prove that he was correct about seemingly phantasmagorical details that were long assumed to be fabrications.

An exhaustive history of these wars is beyond the scope of this piece, to be sure, but we can describe the basic geopolitical shape of the conflict easily enough. Contrary to the popular idea (as presented in the movie 300) that the Persians invaded Greece simply because the Persian King wished to subjugate all human life on earth, the Greeks actually started the war - in 499, several Greek city states including Athens sent troops to support a rebellion in Persia's Asiatic provinces (on the Aegean coast of modern day Turkey), and managed to sack and burn the regional capitol of Sardis. From the Persian perspective, therefore, the Greeks represented a dangerous foreign backer of internal rebels, and sending troops on an expedition to quell this threat is certainly understandable.

What I wish to emphasize here, and indeed my central argument is that the Greco-Persian Wars were first and foremost a naval war. Military treatments of the war frequently focus on an important Greek advantage on land - namely, that the heavily armored Greek hoplites and their compact formations presented a tactical challenge that the Persians were unable to defeat. There is certainly something to this fact - Persian troops tended to be more lightly equipped (generally using armor and shields made of padded textiles, leather, and wicker) and they found the heavily armored Greek infantry nearly impossible to deal with in close quarters.

Notwithstanding the performance of the iconic hoplites, it was in fact the naval theater that was the decisive dimension of this war, and the Greek victory demonstrated above all that the sea was a decisive theater that could determine outcomes on land. In this sense, the Greco-Persian War was the first great naval war for which we have strong documentation, and the decisive weapons system that saved independent Greek civilization was the trireme.

Indeed, the first phase of the Greco-Persian War took the form of a large-scale Persian amphibious operation against the Greeks. In 490, a Persian task force equipped with some 800 triremes, supply ships, and specialized horse carriers crossed from Anatolia and conducted successful landings on the islands of Naxos and Euboea, sacking Greek cities. This was a potent demonstration of what a powerful state could do with naval power - the sight of hundreds of Persian triremes beaching themselves and disgorging many thousands of infantry must have been shocking. Having successfully "punished" the residents of Naxos and Euboea (for the Persians construed this as a punitive expedition) they sailed on towards Athens.

The famous Battle of Marathon, fought in September of 490, was in form a conventional archaic land battle, with tight formations of infantry deciding the outcome. In its broader conception, however, this was something akin to the 1944 landings in Normandy, with the Athenian defenders attempting to contest a Persian amphibious assault. The Persians beached their fleet at the bay of Marathon, some 25 miles northeast of Athens. Their intention was to disembark the army there and then march it the remaining distance to Athens to conduct a siege, but the Athenians managed to muster their citizen-militia of Hoplites and rapidly march to block the Persian exit from the beach.

The actual battle itself was relatively simple - the outnumbered Athenians (probably some 10,000 Hoplites) formed up a line in a blocking position to prevent the Persians from exiting the plain around the beach. The position was well chosen, because both of the Greek flanks were protected by terrain features - the Bay of Marathon to the right, and a mountainous ridge to the left. This was crucial for two reasons - first, because it prevented the more numerous Persians (who had something like 25,000 men) from simply extending their line and wrapping around the edge of the Athenian line, and secondly because it prevented the Persians from deploying their excellent cavalry. By fighting in the narrow gap between the mountain and the sea, the Greeks managed to secure the only type of fight that they would win, which was a head on, set piece infantry battle.

After the two armies made contact, the line rapidly began to lose cohesion. The Persians had placed their crack troops in the center of the line, and began to make headway against the Greek center, forcing it to steadily withdraw up the road. On both the left and right wings, however, lightly armored Persian troops found it impossible to hold back the heavily armored Greek hoplites, and both Persian wings eventually routed and fled back towards their ships. Rather than immediately pursuing, the Athenian wings then wheeled inward to envelop the advancing Persian center, shattering what remained of the Persian battle line.

Marathon was an important Greek victory, and demonstrated the shock power of the hoplite formations when they could be deployed in favorable terrain. Most accounts of the battle tend to stress the clever envelopment of the Persian center and the powerful weight of the Hoplite lines. It was, to be sure, a clear and decisive victory which put an end to the Persian amphibious operation. What is important for our purposes, however, is the pivotal role of the Persian navy in 490. Using entirely seaborne means, the Persians had managed to successfully raid two Greek islands in the Aegean, then deposit a substantial army within a day's march of Athens. Then, on the heels of defeat, they managed to extract the bulk of the force - of the some 25,000 Persian infantry present at Marathon, more than 18,000 were able to withdraw to their ships and sail away.

The hoplite phalanx was certainly a formidable tactical expedient, and at Marathon the Athenians found an ideal application, placing their line in an unflankable blocking position. The more crucial strategic dimension, however, was the sea. It was naval power that gave the Persians the ability to project fighting force directly into the Athenian heartland, to supply large armies at great distance, and control the strategic initiative. Marathon was an important defensive action which warded off and forestalled the Persian threat, but control of the Aegean would be the longer-term determinant of victory.

Naturally, therefore, when King Xerxes launched a second, much larger invasion of Greece in 480, the navy was to play a pivotal role. Rather than attempting another punitive amphibious expedition, this was to be a full-scale invasion of southern Greece. Ancient sources claimed that the Persian force numbered in the millions - giving rise to the usual tropes about an innumerable horde of slaves, whose arrows would blot out the sun. While such exorbitant figures are self-evidently ridiculous, modern scholarship does agree that the Persian invasion force was genuinely massive by the standards of archaic armies: perhaps as many as 200,000 men, though many of these would have been camp followers, aristocratic attendants, and support personnel.

Supplying and supporting such a force overland would have been impossible. While the Persians did have a forward base of support on the northern coast of the Aegean in Thrace and Macedonia (which were Persian provinces), it was simply infeasible to run lines of communication and supply overland, particularly in the mountainous and road-poor environs of central Greece. Therefore, from the beginning the plan was to pair the vast and crawling land force with a shadowing naval component, featuring hundreds of triremes and a great convoy of supply ships. The Persian plan of approach envisioned the army marching its way along the coast with regular linkups with the fleet.

Because the Navy was to provide the lines of communication and supply with the Empire, the entire premise of the Persian invasion hinged on the ability to operate in the Aegean - and indeed, as events played out, the Greeks never did have to defeat the massive Persian army. Shattering the navy would instantly render the invasion operationally sterile and, in a word, defeat it.

And so we come back to Thermopylae and the heroically doomed stand of Leonidas and his little Spartan force. The romantic variant of the story emphasizes the idea that the Spartans fought alone - betrayed and abandoned. In fact, the Spartans had powerful assistance loitering offshore. The Spartan defense at Thermopylae was one half of a broader allied plan to block the Persian advance into central Greece. Thermopylae (like the beach exit at Marathon) was a narrow pass between mountain and sea, which offered an ideal chokepoint for Greek heavy infantry, but there was also the sea route to worry about. Given the proven capability of the Persian navy to land sizeable amphibious forces, any attempt to block Thermopylae without naval support would have been suicidal - the Persians would have simply landed a force in the Spartan rear and wrapped the whole thing up neatly. Therefore, a Greek fleet of 271 triremes led by the Athenians was dispatched to block the Persian navy at the strait of Artemisium. This created a pair of simultaneous blocking actions, with both the Persian land and naval elements barred at strategic chokepoints. Far from the story of a lonely and abandoned Spartan stand, their flank was guarded by a Greek fleet, with consistent communication between the two.

The Battle of Artemisium is far less famous than the simultaneous Spartan action at Thermopylae, but it offers a fascinating look at the emerging tactics and battle considerations of classical trireme fleets. And so, at last, we come to this topic. Feel free to berate me for taking 4,500 words to come to the point.

Trireme combat offered three primary possibilities to defeat enemy vessels. These were as follows:

• Ramming: Triremes were equipped with sizeable bronze rams on the front prow of the vessel, easily capable of splintering the side of an enemy vessel in a collision at full rowing speed. Because triremes sat low in the water, were not overly seaworthy, and lacked meaningful damage control capabilities, ramming damage to the side could quickly disable a vessel, causing it to list and become immobile. Ramming had to be conducted carefully, with an aim to immediately rowing backwards to disengage - both to prevent a counterattack by the marines on the enemy deck, and to prevent the ram from become tangled or stuck in the enemy hull.

• Shearing: By approaching at a partially oblique angle, the prow of the trireme could be used to shear off the oars of an enemy vessel in passing. Even the partial loss of an oar bank would largely immobilize an enemy vessel.

• Boarding: Triremes carried a company of marines who could endeavor to grapple with enemy vessels using hooks, ropes, and boarding planks. Because the crew complement of a trireme consisted mostly of unarmed rowers, defeating the enemy's marines would generally lead to the capture of a vessel.

Thus, archaic naval combat centered on attempting to sink, immobilize, or capture enemy vessels by one of these methods. Matters were complicated by several considerations, however. One of these was the utterly abysmal level of command and control - while rudimentary signal flags and horns did exist, once battle was joined it was virtually impossible to exert central control over the battle. Battles thus tended to revolve around a preliminary plan which could quickly devolve into chaos, particularly as battle lines became disorganized, splintered, or fouled. The ability of individual captains and squadron leaders to improvise and keep their heads in an extremely chaotic, noisy, and terrifying scrum became critical, as did the training and conditioning of the rowers.

By the time of the Battle of Artemisium, the Persians enjoyed not only a substantial numerical advantage (likely nearly 3 to 1 over the 271 ship strong Greek fleet), but also a notable edge in the experience of their rowing crews and captains, with most of the Greek fleet being new construction that had not yet seen serious action.

The Persians (or at least, the Phoenician subjects who crewed much of the Persian Navy) had by this point in time developed a coordinated tactic in battle which the Greeks would later adopt and call the "Diekplous", which means "through and out". This is a fascinating maneuver which shows that archaic naval combat was far more complicated than it seems at first blush. It sounds all well and good to simply say "ram the enemy" - but this is not particularly easy because the enemy is also moving about and trying not to be rammed. Furthermore, when fleets approach in battle lines they are arrayed parallel to each other, which makes it very difficult to reach the side of the enemy vessels.

Rather than devolving into a naval dogfight, with ships rowing chaotically about in circles trying to find each other's soft sides, the Persians utilized the Diekplous. This maneuver called for the front line of the fleet to row at high speed towards the enemy line, with each ship then veering to the side so as to pass through the gaps in the line - shearing off enemy oars if possible, but passing all the way through. Once behind the enemy line, the fleet would wheel around as if to turn towards the back of the enemy's ships.

The purpose of passing through and then wheeling about was not necessarily to attack the enemy in the rear - it was well understood and expected that the enemy would not simply allow this, but would instead turn their own vessels about to prevent being rammed. It was this very counter-turn that was the point of the Diekplous. As the enemy turned about, they would expose their sides to attack by a *second* line of attacking ships, which would by now be making their own attacking run.

The Diekplous was thus a contrivance that could force the enemy to rotate and disorder his line, so rendering it vulnerable. The attack was not a simple matter of just rowing in and ramming someone in the side - it was important to first disorder and reorient the enemy line to expose the soft targets on the side of the ship. Such a tactic was ideal given Persia's advantages. Having the more experienced captains and rowing crews, they could feel confident trying to manipulate the less experienced Greeks into disordering their lines. Even more importantly, however, the Persians had more ships, which meant they actually had the capability to form up two separate lines of attack and execute the Diekplous.

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7. Russo-Ukrainian War: Widening the Front

There are certain regions of the world that seemed destined by the cruel caprice of geography and chance to be perennial battlegrounds. Often these ravaged lands lay at the crossroads of imperial interests, as in the case of Afghanistan or Poland, which have been so frequently trampled by armies going this way or that, or else they are simply plagued by perennially unstable governance or roiling ethnic conflict. Sometimes, however, it is the peculiar logic of military operations that brings violence to the same place, again and again. One such notorious sufferer is the great industrial city of Kharkov, in northeastern Ukraine.

Originally founded as a modest fortress in the 17th Century, Kharkov was fated to play an unusual role in the Second World War. The city became a sort of symbol of frustration for the warring Soviet and German armies: it was the place that both armies wanted to get to, but could not quite seem to take and hold. In 1941 the city was captured in the waning phases of Germany's colossal invasion of the USSR, and fell under occupation through the winter. In 1942, the city's environs became the scene of an enormous battle when the Germans planned to launch an offensive out of Kharkov at exactly the same time that the Red Army planned an offensive towards it. The following year, the city was briefly recaptured by the Red Army as it pursued retreating German armies away from Stalingrad, before once again changing hands after a timely German counterattack. Finally, at the end of August 1943, the Soviets retook the city for good as they began their inexorable drive towards Berlin.

No major city changed hands as many times in World War Two as did Kharkov, which became the scene of no less than four substantial battles. The cruelty of fate had turned Kharkov into a sort of mutual culmination point - the spot on the map beyond which both armies repeatedly found it difficult to advance.

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History does not repeat, as they say, but it does rhyme. Kharkov's strategic position, as the great urban center blocking the inner bend of the northern Donets River, has not changed much in the eighty years since the Soviets and the Germans last fought in the forests here, and Kharkov Oblast is once more becoming the rope in a deadly game of tug of war. The area was briefly overrun by the Russian army in the opening weeks of the Special Military Operation, with the Russians establishing a screening line to cover their capture of the Lugansk shoulder. Later that year, Kharkov became the scene of Ukraine's seminal military achievement of the war, when they overran the thin Russian defenses and launched a pursuit all the way to the Oskil River. And now, the Russians are back, launching a fresh attack into Kharkov Oblast on May 10. The sound of artillery is once again heard in the city.

The Northern Front

I understand the impulse to draw "big arrows", as the parlance goes. Many people are becoming frustrated with the pace of the war and the positional nature of the combat, and so Russia opening a new front looks like a chance to unlock the frontline and restore mobile operations. I think this is misguided for several reasons, and more generally the idea that the Russians are making some sort of serious play for Kharkov is very wrongheaded. In fact, the opposite is true - it's likely that we will see the Russians attempt to avoid fighting in Kharkov's shadow. On the other end of the spectrum are those labeling the new offensive a "feint", which is wrong both as a misunderstanding of the military nomenclature and of the Russian intentions.

First off, let's clarify something about the word "feint", and see how it does not at all apply to Russia's Kharkov operation. A feint refers to a deceptive or distracting maneuver designed to disrupt the enemy's decision making or pull his forces out of position. That is not what is happening here, for two reasons. First, the Kharkov operation is a real attack involving meaningful Russian forces. Russia currently has two Army Corps in this area of operations - the 11th and 44th, along with elements of the 6th Combined Arms Army and the 1st Guards Tank Army. This is a grouping with serious punch - the Ukrainians are of course forced to divert forces in response, but they are doing this not because they have been deceived but because the Russians are presenting a serious threat that warrants response. Secondly (as we will see shortly), this is an operation that has the potential to be supportive of Russia's operations on the Oskil front (around Kupyansk).

In other words, it's not a deception or a feint, but a real front that forces Ukraine to reallocate assets. By extending the front, they are drawing in Ukrainian reserves and fixing them in place - more on that later. But the new front is far more than just a distraction.

It may be useful to look a stripped down map of the area to get a handle on things. There are of course a variety of great mappers out there, like Kalibrated and Suryiak who do excellent work geolocating the war and marking front lines, but one drawback that they all share is that they use Google Maps for their base, which can make things look rather cluttered. In this case, a more minimalist view can help us see what is going on.

Right now, Russian operations are directed on two towns close to the border - Volchansk and Lypsti. Let's consider what this means.

The first thing that we have to note is that Volchansk is on the east bank of the Donets River, meaning it is on the Kupyansk side and not the Kharkov side. The initial Russian thrust managed to cut Volchansk off from the west bank of the river, which means the main route for AFU forces to access the town would be the arterial road running north and crossing the river at Staryi Saltiv. However, on May 11 the Russians managed to destroy the bridge in Staryi Saltiv. There were only two bridges over the Donets within 30 miles of Volchansk; one is now physically blocked by the Russians after they captured the village of Staritsa, and the other is destroyed. Russia has also struck several ancillary bridges on the Volchya river, preventing the Ukrainians from efficiently moving reserves to the flanks of Volchansk.

This has put the AFU in a real bind. To feed reinforcements into Volchansk, they are forced to take a circuitous route (crossing the Donets near Chuguiv) and drive up a well surveilled road where they are extremely vulnerable to Russian fires. In essence, Volchansk has become an isolated battlespace where approaching Ukrainian reserves can be pummeled on the march. Geolocated Ukrainian losses from LostArmor confirm this, with hits clustering on that main avenue of approach.

This has turned Volchansk into a very well shaped battlespace, with Russia managing to partially bifurcate the front along the Donets River. Meanwhile, the Russian advance on Lyptsi has an important supportive role, in that it will allow Russian tube artillery to bring the city of Kharkov in range.

Ukraine has to defend this front, of course. Most of Russia's forces in this grouping are still in reserve, and it is very clear that the AFU cannot simply allow the Russians to open a backdoor to Kupyansk for free. However, in the short term this defense is costly for the AFU, because the shaping of the battlespace and the lanes of approach for their reserves allow Russia to fight an effective interdiction battle. The Ukrainian army simply does not have adequate road access to Volchansk to hold the town for long.

In sum, the reopening of the Northern Front does not signal a qualitative change in the conduct of the war, but it does create a major stress on the AFU. Russia is not going to suddenly unlock the front and begin slicing mobile operations. This is still the same war that it has been for the last two years, with methodical positional fighting and paralyzing strike capabilities. But the Kharkov front does serve a variety of Russian interests, and supports the following goals:

1. Stretch the front laterally to denude Ukrainian strength and draw in AFU reserves.

2. Fight an interdiction battle, striking AFU forces as they deploy on the east bank of the Donets and degrading Ukraine's ability to sustain their defenses.

3. Place the AFU around Kharkov under tube artillery fire.

4. In the longer term, exploit the front by isolating the Ukrainian grouping around Kupyansk.

The most important aspect of all this, however, is the ability to both force the Ukrainians to commit precious assets *and* attrit them in an efficient manner by forcing them to feed units into an isolated combat area on the east bank of the Donets. Ukraine's ability to generate new forces and provide replacements is reaching its limits, with mobilization covering perhaps only 25% of losses. Budanov has complained that there are essentially no reserves left, and Ukraine has begun begging for western military trainers to deploy in Ukraine to allow for faster throughput on their mobilization and deployment.

For Russia, therefore, it's very important to prevent Ukraine from husbanding resources, and that means drawing as many AFU assets into well shaped battles as possible. Kharkov would be an ideal example of this, with an operationally significant pressure point opened up so that the AFU is forced to funnel forces into a furnace. Opening an additional front in Sumy would have a similar effect.

The bigger problem for Ukraine, from a force generation perspective, is their increasing reliance on a small roster of premiere brigades which are constantly being shuttled around the front to fight fires and attend to pressing combat tasks. The most notorious example would be the 47th Mechanized Brigade, which was at the center of Ukraine's failed Zaporizhian Counteroffensive before being scrambled to Avdiivka, where it was at the center of Ukraine's fierce, but unsuccessful defensive stand. Now, the 47th is increasingly combat incapable, and a botched attempt to pull it out of the line for badly needed refit led to the debacle at Ocheretyne, where Russian forces exploited a yawning void in the Ukrainian line.

Reopening the Kharkov front creates yet another emergency to suck in these premiere assets. Already, the 93rd Mechanized Brigade has been scrambled into the Volchansk area - or at least, elements of it, as some units of the Brigade appear to still be fighting around Chasiv Yar in the Donbas. In total, the new Kharkov front seems to have absorbed nearly 30 Ukrainian battalions, which would be almost 10% of the AFU's frontline strength (based on the 33 Division equivalent estimate that I discussed here).

The broader point here is that Russia's vastly superior force generation allows it to accelerate the burn off of Ukraine combat power in two ways. First, by widening the front, they can create more and more hotspots that force the rapid reshuffling of Ukraine's premiere assets; secondly, simply extending the active front can force Ukraine to feed newly mobilized personnel into the front faster.

The mess at Ocheretyne provides the best example of this. This sector had originally been under the auspices of the 47th Mechanized - once a premiere asset, now a hollow shell. When an attempt to swap the 47th out of the line went horribly wrong, how did the AFU plug the gap? By rushing in the 100th Mechanized Brigade - a unit which had been constituted less than a month before, and which had not yet even received heavy weapons characteristic of a Mechanized formation.

These sorts of emergencies add up to a simultaneous burn off of both the AFU's present and future combat power; keeping the 47th in high intensity combat for months degraded a current critical asset, and the ensuing gash in the line forced the AFU to prematurely send an embryonic brigade into combat, burning off the future.

Under conditions like these, it becomes frankly nonsensical to chart Ukraine's path forward on the ground. An army that is in a constant state of reacting to emergencies can only continue for so long before they stop reacting at all, and an army that is constantly forced to scramble its best brigades around and deploy unprepared units to hold the line can never regain the initiative. It has no ability to accumulate resources, and remains in a permanent state of reactivity and awful, awful churn. Ultimately, this is an army with serious resource constraints and no ability to conserve those resources.

In effect, we're now seeing Russia reverse the events of Autumn 2022, when the Russian army was forced to accept a radical shortening of the front - withdrawing from west bank Kherson and being run out of Kharkov oblast. In that case, it was Russia that had inadequate force generation. The difference is that Russia had a higher gear - untapped mobilization and a war economy that gave it the prospect of a long term surge in combat power. Ukraine doesn't have a higher gear. Furthermore, Ukraine lacks the ability to shorten the front. Russia was able to withdraw from large sectors of the battlespace in order to more efficiently allocate resources. Ukraine cannot do this, because giving up sectors of front means letting the Russian army roll over large swathes of the country. Russia has the ability to both shorten and widen the front at will, and Ukraine does not. This pivotal strategic asymmetry is simply the reality for an overmatched country fighting on home turf.

It is possible that Russia will further stretch the front with a similar foray into Sumy oblast - in either case, it's highly unlikely that we see any serious effort to capture either Sumy or Kharkov. The main purpose of these fronts will be to fix Ukrainian reserves in place and denude Ukraine's ability to react on other fronts. This war will not be won or lost in Kharkov, but in the Donbas, which remains the decisive theater.

We currently appear to be solidly in the preparatory/shaping phase of a Russian summer offensive in the Donbas, which (likely among other things) will feature a Russian drive on the city of Konstyantinivka. This is the last major urban area shielding the advance towards Kramatorsk-Slovyansk from the south (remembering that these twin cities form the ultimate objective of Russia's campaign in the Donbas). Let's make a brief perusal of what the lines of contact and advance look like on this front.

The shape of the Russian advance is already quite clear, and was facilitated by the temporary Ukrainian collapse which allowed Russia to capture Ocheretyne in only a few days. Konstyantinivka (prewar population of some 70,000) sits at the center of a concentric Russian advance out of Ocheretyne and the Bakhmut area, and the emerging Russian operation here promises several major benefits.

The Russian advance out of Ocheretyne will have as its objective the highway connecting Konstyantinivka and Pokrovsk. The latter is among the most important transit hubs in the Donbas (the map below shows the spiderweb of highways running through it, like spokes through the hub of a wheel.) Pokrovsk's nature as an operational hub means that Russia does not need to capture it to render it sterile; simply turning Pokrovsk into a frontline city, with Russian forces screening the eastward highways, will be sufficient to neuter it and handicap Ukrainian sustainment in the region. Ocheretyne also serves as a launching pad to partially (or perhaps fully) envelop the Toretsk-New York defenses.

Toretsk and New York are both strongly held and very well fortified settlements. They have been held continuously by the Ukrainian army since 2014, and accordingly are among the best fortified positions on the map. Russia will clearly aim to avoid a head on assault, and they are well positioned to do so. They can advance out of Ocheretyne and Klischiivka and approach the Toretsk agglomeration obliquely, taking them into a firebag and forcing a difficult Ukrainian decision as to whether to funnel resources into the defense there.

In short, I would expect Russia to begin a dedicated summer operation with Konstyantinivka as its center of gravity, aiming to capture Chasiv Yar for use as a launchpad against Konstyantinivka's northern flank, while severing the line to Pokrovsk through advances out of Ocheretyne. Moving concentrically on Konstyantinivka in this manner will naturally bypass the Toretsk position.

Eyes on the prize, as they say. The locus of Russian operations continues to be their grind towards Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, notwithstanding the new extensions of the front in Kharkov (and potentially Sumy). By stretching the front, however, Russia is powerfully synergizing two of the critical asymmetries in this war - namely, that Ukraine has to defend on every front (Russia does not) while the Russian army has substantial reserves on hand (while Ukraine does not). The AFU simply does not have the luxury that Russia enjoyed in 2022 of being able to withdraw from large sectors of the front. They are obliged to respond to everything, at the cost of denuding their strength and hollowing out their positions elsewhere.

Command Shakeup

Russia's extension of the front coincided with two important political events - somewhat oddly, an election that happened, and an election that did not. Vladimir Putin was predictably reelected easily as President of Russia - notwithstanding all manner of complaints about Russia's state-steered media and regulated political culture, observers in the west have grudgingly admitted that the war in Ukraine has actually strengthened Putin's popularity. Simultaneously, Zelensky's legal term in office expired after Ukraine's elections were cancelled, ostensibly due to the stresses of the war.

Putin's reelection led almost immediately to a substantial rearrangement of the Russian national security leadership, followed by a currently unfolding series of arrests in the Russian officer corps. Let's briefly consider the meaning of these changes.

The headline move, of course, was the removal of Defense Minster Sergei Shoigu with Andrei Belousov. Belousov is a technocratic economist by trade, who formerly held the economic development portfolio in the cabinet. Shoigu was shunted over to the secretariat State Security Council, which is still a meaningful role, responsible for the coordination of Russia's security organs. The fact that Shoigu retains a prominent role means that his removal from the Defense Ministry is not entirely a rebuff, but Belousov is clearly being brought in for a particular reason.

The basic problem, as such, is that Russia's defense spending has risen dramatically while problems with corruption (particularly in procurement) remain. There is no need to naively idealize the Russian state - corruption, while certainly much improved from the calamitous 90's, does remain a thorn in the side of good governance, as in almost all post-Soviet states.

The obvious problem for Russia is that the stakes are obviously much higher during wartime, and the ballooning defense budget makes it harder to control such leakages. Simultaneously, Russia needs to chart a sustainable military-industrial policy as defense spending swells to some 7% of GDP. Hence, Belousov - a man known for being a true believing devotee of the state who lives a modest lifestyle and is himself seen as essentially resistant to corruption. The near instantaneous launch of a high-level purging of senior MoD officers under charges of corruption signals a similar sea change.

There is, however, another aspect of these anti-corruption arrests which is being overlooked. Most western analysis wants to regard these arrests as a Stalin-esque "purge", possibly in an attempt by Putin to remove "Shoigu loyalists" from the ministry of defense. In this framework, Putin - like Stalin - fears a rival power center under Shoigu and wishes to neutralize an imagined threat by reassigning Shoigu and arresting "his men." I think, rather, there is a different and more straightforward explanation. Putin has spoken repeatedly about his desire to promote a new Russian leadership cadre comprised of proven veterans of the SMO in Ukraine. Behind the particular Russian political vernacular, there's an obvious truth: for the first time in the post-Soviet era, Russia has a growing pool of experienced and battle-hardened officers to promote. The arrested officers represent a class of peacetime promotions, grown soft and corrupt on the largesse of the MOD's past permissiveness. Under Belousov, it is clearly intended that the MOD be remade with leadership made up of commanders proven in Ukraine. They want a leaner and more economizing defense apparatus led by wartime promotions. Who can blame them?

Putin's team is clearly aiming to put the war economy on a sustainable footing, which means controlling costs, economizing resources, and cracking down on corruption. There are, however, some conflicting signals as to what this will look like. Belousov is known as a believer in the state's role as the driver of industrial policy - some have taken this to mean that he will lead the transition to a perennial war economy, with military spending as a critical economic driver in the long run. I rather think it's the opposite. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov noted that Russia's defense spending had soared to levels not seen since the late Soviet era, and pontificated that this needed monitoring. Peskov noted that "it's very important to put the security economy in line with the economy of the country" - in effect an official statement that defense spending is much higher than the government would like in the long run.

The mental picture that I have is one where defense spending ramped up in a somewhat uncontrolled manner as Russia kicked its war economy into gear, with Shoigu overseeing a sort of binging phase. Belousov is now being brought in to trim and economize; as a civilian technocrat, he is not connected to any of the military-industrial cliques and will have the political standoff required to manage the cutting phase.

Some of this is fairly standard stuff - new management for a restructuring phase; someone detached enough to make dispassionate cuts. In the United States, for example, the Truman administration made a series of personnel changes at the top as it attempted to rapidly demobilize from WW2 and bring spending back under control. Secretary of Defense Louis A Johnson even at one point mused that the Marine Corps might be abolished in its entirety. What is different about Russia's case, of course, is that it is still very much in a state of war. Ordinarily it might be deemed unwise to change horses midstream, but the Putin team clearly feels that the situation on the ground is favorable enough (with Gerasimov keeping his post as chief of the general staff) and the need to rein in spending is great enough that he feels comfortable putting an economist in charge of a wartime defense apparatus.

Rockin' in the Free World

While Putin was rearranging his cabinet and initiating high profile corruption arrests, a different sort of show was playing in Kiev. American Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in town, mesmerizing the people with his preternatural musical talents, playing hits like "Rockin in the Free World".

The "Free World", as the Atlantic Bloc sees itself, remains pivotal to the Ukrainian conflict, as the material and fiscal engine driving Ukraine's ability to stay in the fight. Aside from the Kremlin, the American government is the decisive actor in Ukraine, and the stance of American policy is always among our chief considerations.

I think it's worthwhile to think about the way American policy has changed vis a vis Ukraine. Slowly but surely, the United States has pushed through all of its self-imposed limitations on aid to Ukraine. It seems absurd now, but not so long ago the Pentagon was adamant that American tanks would not be sent to Kiev. There were similar hesitations around F-16 fighters, and ATACMs systems. All of those limits were eventually breached. We've reached the point where when Washington says there is some system that is off limits, it really means that Ukraine just has to wait a few more months.

Now we come to a point where one of the last remaining American taboos - the use of western weaponry to attack pre-war Russian territory - is being pushed on, with both congressional Republicans and Secretary of State Blinken urging the Biden administration to give the green light.

This seems to have been spurred at least partially by Russia's new Kharkov front, with Ukrainian leadership complaining that they were unable to disrupt Russian staging due to American rules against firing on Russian territory. This is, of course, not true - Ukraine has been striking Belgorod oblast for many months, and have even made it a point of pride that they have "brought the war home" to Russia. We're trapped in a narrative disparity where there are regular boasts about Ukraine's successful strike program on targets in the Russian strategic rear, and yet we are to believe that the Russians were allowed to stage unmolested for the Kharkov operation because the AFU is not allowed to fire into Russia. It's odd, to say the least.

Regardless, the track record shows that the American government will inexorably yield to every Ukrainian ask, given enough time. Abrams, F-16's, ATACMs - Ukraine always ends up getting what it asks for. It seems likely that before long, the formal American blessing will be given to accelerate strikes on prewar Russia. Facilities inside Russia will be hit. The Kremlin's response will underwhelm and infuriate its supporters on the internet.

The problem for Ukraine is that they tend to maniacally focus on token "big ticket" items that do not ameliorate their broader strategic crisis. License to hurl ATACMs at targets inside Russia is not a panacea for Ukraine's bigger problem. Ukraine has already showed the ability to hit Russian strategic assets - sniping naval installations, radar, and air defense batteries. Ukraine's successful strikes on such assets have continually trickled in as the west has propped up their strike capability with Storm Shadows, ATACMs, and more. And yet, Ukraine continues to give ground in the Donbas amid an increasingly dire shortage of basic war making necessities like infantry.

The trajectory of the war suggests that the NATO bloc will do everything in its power to prop up Ukraine's strike capabilities, and that Ukraine will continue to hunt for high profile strategic assets, even as it continues to be ground down in the critical theater, which is the Donbas. When the AFU is finally ejected from their last toeholds along the line - losing Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, being squeezed out of southern Donetsk Oblast, and forced back on the west bank of the Oskil, the temptation in Kiev will be to blame the west - that they gave too little, too slowly, too late. This is one lie that they must not be allowed to get away with. The NATO Bloc has, virtually without exception, given Ukraine everything they've asked for. It just didn't matter.

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8. Maneuver, Position, Attrition

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

~ Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

It is undeniably true that war is among man's oldest preoccupations. The evidence is abundant that war is essentially as old as mankind's political life, predating cities and sedentary society. It seems that man took recourse to organized violence almost as soon as he grew to a socio-political pattern of life, and from that early period much of human political and technical innovation was spurred on by the relentless drive to fight and win.

Almost as soon as war graduated past its tribal phase, it seems that man stumbled upon his next great tradition - not a tradition quite as old as war, but nearly so. The oldest battle for which we have recorded details on battlefield movements (thus the oldest battle that can be reconstructed in some level of detail) was the Battle of Kadesh, fought between the Egyptian Pharoah Ramesses the Great and the neighboring Hittite kingdom. The climax of this battle was a heroic and audacious maneuver by Ramesses, who led a battlegroup of charioteers on a ride around the battlefield to attack the Hittites on the flank.

It thus seems that for nearly the entire history of warfare (which is to say the history of man), armies have been attempting to get a powerful grouping of combat power mobile, move it to the enemy flank, and attack it immediately. Such maneuver sits at the nexus of those two powerful coefficients of battle - rational calculation and emotive aggression. Warfare constantly mediates between these two, balancing the strategic benefits of planning with the initiative and vigor of instinctive aggression. Maneuver sits at the crossroads and harnesses their powers synergistically, promising victory through initiative, decisiveness, and aggression.

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Yes, armies have been lusting for the enemy flank for millenia, but technical factors often frustrate their efforts to get there. Maneuver waxes and wanes as a battlefield expedient, at times kneecapped by various technical or material constraints, be it shortcomings in logistics, command and control, or the protection of assets on the move. Operational maneuver in particular has frequently gone through long periods of technical sterility. Today in Ukraine, the ability of both combatant armies to strike staging areas and troop concentrations has forced a re-emphasis on dispersion and concealment. With maneuver once again at a crossroads in Eastern Europe, we can conclude this series by considering maneuver in its eternal relation to the military arts writ large.

Trapped in Theory

Having made a long an arduous walk through the timeline, we see disparate instances of the military art splattered like a temporal collage of violence. What is it that unifies the body of examples? Is there a conceptual connection between the oblique order of the Thebans at Leuctra, the Mongol flying columns in Persia, Napoleon's corps movements, and the Wehrmacht's panzer package? Is there a unifying theory of maneuver at all?

Maneuver, in the simplest terms, is the use in warfare of movement relative to the enemy to gain some advantage. However, as in all areas of human endeavor, definitions themselves can become battlegrounds. Maneuver has meant different things in different ages, and in the modern age has become the subject of self-conscious debate - as, for example, in the case of the US Marine Corps' internal wrangling over the "Maneuverist" school of warfare. It is easy to get bogged down in these arguments, or to come away thinking that "Maneuver", like obscenity, is something that we cannot define, but we know it when we see it.

Modern sensibilities of maneuver - particularly those of the American military - are in fact almost unrecognizable from earlier concepts. In particular, modern theories are intensely battle-centric and focused heavily on the use of tempo and initiative to disrupt the enemy's ability to process and fight. Furthermore, in the modern parlance, maneuver is held to be essentially the opposite of positional fighting; the former is mobile and decisive, the latter is static and incremental. Such a schema would have been alien to the great generals of the early modern era. In the era of early modern warfare "maneuver" meant something very different, being both distinct from recognizably active battle and intrinsically tied to position, rather than being opposed to it.

An example would likely help, and the best comes from the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714). A little studied and little appreciated war today, this was nonetheless a war of colossal import and great military interest - fought (at the risk of fantastical reductionism) to determine the balance of power in Europe between the Hapsburgs and the French, with the British backing the Hapsburgs to contain an increasingly powerful France from establishing continental hegemony.

In any case, the military aspects of the war are fascinating, because cosmetically it would appear to be a static and attritional conflict. Battles were linear, head on affairs (as was typical in the era of early musketry), and the front lines (which largely ran through modern Belgium) were dominated by complex networks of fortresses and earthworks. When viewed at satellite scale, this looked like a more primitive variation of World War One, with small territorial changes, powerful fortifications, and an apparently positional-attritional character.

In fact, the War of the Spanish Succession featured three of history's most gifted generals, including one from each of the primary combatants: Prince Eugene of Savoy for the Hapsburgs, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough for the British, and Marshal Claude Louis de Villars for the French (shorthanded simply to Prince Eugene, Marlborough, and Marshal Villars). All three are recognized by historians as supremely talented commanders, with sensibilities that they would have clearly defined as "maneuverist."

The essence of campaigning in the WoSS was a complex series of marches and countermarches designed to lever the enemy out of position or create otherwise favorable circumstances for positional improvements. In such an operating, environment, however, the lines between maneuver and positional fighting were easily blurred. Let us take two notable examples from the career of the Duke of Marlborough, which usefully illustrate the issue.

By 1711, after a decade of war, the anti-French alliance had slowly but surely squeezed the French out of their positions in the Spanish Netherlands (as Belgium was rather confusingly called at the time), pushing the lines of contact into Northeastern France. Despite several years of setbacks, the French could feel confident in their position - the frontier was guarded by a well prepared defensive line, immodestly called the "Ne Plus Ultra Line". The line was essentially a defensive belt of rivers (many of which had been strategically dammed to raise water levels), earthworks, fences, and fortresses, with Marshal Villars prowling behind with the French Field Army. Villars felt, and not without reason, that the line was essentially impenetrable. His confidence was boosted by the unstable political position of Marlborough, who faced growing opposition back home in Britain. Villars felt that he was fighting from a position of great strength against an adversary who was under political pressure to take risks.

Marlborough, however, contrived a brilliant scheme to pierce the Ne Plus Ultra Line without firing a shot. Knowing that Villars' intention was to follow him laterally across the line to contest any attempt to cross, Marlborough moved west towards the fortress at Arras. Villars dutifully followed him. Marlborough then made a great show of preparing to offer battle - sending out screening cavalry detachments in full view of the enemy, and riding out with his staff to survey the terrain. French sentries observed the Duke gesturing with his cane, pointing out various terrain features and objectives to his officers. Villars implicitly believed that Marlborough would offer battle in the coming days, and sent a letter to King Louis XIV informing him that he had "brought Marlborough to his Ne Plus Ultra".

The order came down: "My Lord Duke wishes the infantry to step out." Marlborough would not offer battle - instead, he clandestinely struck camp as night fell, and began a forced march back towards the east at top speed, reaching a pre-designated crossing point over the Scheldt near the fortress at Bouchain, linking up with engineers and artillery that had been secretly positioned in wait. It was about 9:00 in the evening when Marlborough began his rapid shuttle to the east; Villars got wind that the British had gone at 2:00 AM, and though he immediately decamped in pursuit, that five hour head start was more than enough. Marlborough's forces covered over 30 miles in about 19 hours, and managed to move the entire body over the Ne Plus Ultra Line without a fight.

This was certainly an impressive and effective operational contrivance by Marlborough - drawing the main body of the French field army out of position with a feint towards Arras, then flying back up the road under the cover of darkness to cross the river lines near Bouchain. What seems incongruous, however, is that Marlborough used this maneuver to position himself for a siege of the Bouchain fortress. Having crossed the river lines and penetrated the French position, he set his men to work building fortifications of his own. Most importantly, Marlborough's men built a pair of long entrenchments and earthworks running back to the rear, creating in effect a protected lane of supply and communications which allowed them to haul up the ponderous and vulnerable siege train, with the enormous cannon required to reduce the Bouchain fortress.

What relation did Marlborough's Bouchain operation have to "Maneuver", as such? In the modern scheme, the fit is not immediately obvious. None of the favored motifs about tempo or aggression particularly apply. Marlborough did not "open up" the front or create a state of mobile operations. Rather, he created a window of opportunity for himself to seize an important position. The usual dichotomy of war being either mobile or positional breaks down here; maneuver for Marlborough is not an alternative to positional combat, but an enhancement to it which allows him to seize an advantageous position.

Another campaign of the Duke's, however, offers an interesting counter-example, that being the famous 1704 march to the Danube and the subsequent Battle of Blenheim. The strategic conception was fairly straightforward: the French began the 1704 campaigning season by linking up with their Bavarian allies for an offensive into the Hapsburg heartland with the intention of threatening Vienna and forcing the Hapsburgs to negotiate, thus splintering the anti-French alliance. Marlborough, who had been wintering in the Netherlands, made the risky decision to march a portion of his army all the way to southern Germany to counter the French offensive.

Marlborough's march up the Rhine has always drawn very high (and well deserved) marks from historians, for a variety of reasons.

The distance traversed was monumental for the day, with Marlborough's 20,000 strong force covering some 300 miles by foot in a month. Despite the enormous distance covered by this "scarlet caterpillar", as the long columns of redcoats were described, they arrived in the southern theater in superb fighting condition, much to the astonishment of their Hapsburg allies. This was thanks to extraordinary staff work by Marlborough and his team. The march route was carefully plotted out, and messengers were dispatched on horseback (with bags full of cash) far in advance of the main body to arrange supply depots. Consequently, the Duke's men would march into various and sundry towns on the scheduled day to find food and livestock fodder waiting for them. Marlborough thus kept his men well fed and minimized their fatigue. He even arranged to have them re-shoed, making an advance purchase to have tens of thousands of pairs of boots manufactured and delivered to Heidelberg, where the army found them waiting in enormous mounds. The precise planning of the march and the regularity of the supply were executed to near perfection.

Furthermore, the strategic redeployment entailed no small measure of risk at both the strategic and the operational level. Decamping for the Danube front left the Netherlands relatively undefended, but Marlborough accepted the hollowing out of this important front, correctly gambling that the French would not be able to exploit his absence. Furthermore, the march itself was perilous, because it necessarily involved moving laterally (that is, across the face) of the French border in marching columns. What this meant was that for an entire month, Marlborough would be presenting his flank to the enemy as he worked his way south. Again, however, the French were not positioned to capitalize.

The rapid and well-executed move to the south succeeded, without exaggeration, in saving the anti-French alliance. Linking up with Hapsburg forces under Prince Eugene, Marlborough and his allies smashed the French at the Battle of Blenheim, destroying much of a large French field army, killing its commander, and completely defeating France's southern strategy. The victory even succeeded in knocking the key French ally (Bavaria) out of the war. Blenheim is understood as a key turning point in the war which dissipated early-war French momentum.

Marlborough's 1704 campaign impresses in a variety of ways. He demonstrated a decisive instinct for command along with a bold tolerance for strategic risk, and the staff work in organizing and supplying the long march was truly exceptional. There was absolutely nothing easy or automatic about marching an early 17th century army hundreds of miles away from its supply bases, but Marlborough executed it seamlessly. Then, having successfully redeployed to the south, he fought and won a close run battle against a powerful French force. All the while, he had to manage a politically delicate coalition with the Hapsburgs. This was a classic for the ages.

But what was the relation of the Blenheim campaign to Maneuver as such? While the speed of Marlborough's movement to the south certainly evokes an impression of maneuver, in fact the campaign was simply a footrace - an attempt to reach the southern theater in a timely manner to prevent Hapsburg defeat. Marlborough did not aim to gain some advantage from movement, but only wanted to reach the decisive theater in time. The Battle of Blenheim itself was a fairly straightforward and linear field battle, with the two armies drawn up in rather classic formation. This was a display of operational mobility, to be sure, but not maneuver.

Thinking about these two operations of Marlborough - the 1704 march to the south, and the 1711 penetration of the Non Plus Ultra Line - we see that maneuver as a concept can be easily misconstrued, in particular with the modern battle-centric scheme and the aversion to positional warfare.

In 1711, Marlborough genuinely did make use of operational maneuver, using rapid lateral movement to shake off Villars and slip across the river line uncontested. In the simplest terms, he used movement to achieve meaningful advantage - however, because that advantage manifested itself in a positional siege, it would seem to be out of sync with the open and battle-centric modern schema of maneuver. In contrast, the 1704 campaign utilized rapid movement, but this was a simple matter of reaching the critical theater, rather than generating some advantage that could be levered into battlefield success.

Having suffered through this long ancillary diatribe about Marlborough, we come to the point. Maneuver and movement are not synonymous, in that some operational movements are not maneuver as such, and some maneuvers do not lead to mobility. Our general conception tends to assume that war is one or the other - position or maneuver, attrition or annihilation - but in fact these concepts can coexist quite comfortably, with maneuver empowering position and vice versa.

In the age of Marlborough, in fact, maneuver generally manifested itself as antithetical to battle, in that it could allow a force to lever the enemy out of favorable positions. For example, we may return to our old friend Marshal Villars - it is easy to feel bad for him after being juked out of position by Marlborough, but in 1712 he would have his own moment of greatness and revenge - with the anti-French coalition on the verge of victory on the northern front, Villars maneuvered his forces through a seam in the enemy positions with an audacious night march, cutting them off from their supply depots and forcing them to withdraw. With one bold maneuver, he unraveled years of coalition gains and set the stage for the compromise peace that finally ended the war.

Warfare in Marlborough's era is usually described as "limited", or "positional" in nature, often characterized by agonizingly slow and incremental gains. This was not, however, due to some doctrinal preference for position, but rather due to the logistical constraints of the era. Standing armies had become quite large, with demands for food and animal fodder that made it impossible for them to live off the land. The only way to sustain early modern armies was by assembling enormous stockpiles of food, fodder, powder, and other supplies, and running constant convoys of horse drawn wagons to haul these supplies from the depot to the field army. Given the poor state of European roads at the time, however, the range and speed of these wagon convoys was poor. Thus, the nature of the supply system kept armies tightly chained to their logistical chains and tended to keep them close to their depots, and maneuvering to threaten the links between army and depot was one of the main operational goals of all the combatants. This is why Marlborough's march to Blenheim was considered so exceptional - it remains one of the only examples of the era where an army managed to operate away from its own supply magazines.

The point here is that for generals like Marlborough or Villars, "maneuver" took on a particular meaning based on the material context of the war. The "limited" and position-oriented nature of their maneuvers was not due to some lack of vision or skill on their part, but deeply entwined with the constraints of the military system at the time.

Maneuver and position only began to separate with the later advent of the Prussian operational sensibilities and the kinetic operations of the Napoleonic era. Napoleon practiced a highly mobile and aggressive form of warfare, but it was not recognizably a form of maneuver as defined by the likes of Villars and Marlborough. To those earlier generals, maneuver was about levering the enemy by manipulating position and threatening crucial lines of supply and communications that connected enemy depots, fortresses, and field armies. Men like Napoleon and Frederick the Great, on the other hand, liked to get after the enemy at top speed and attack him immediately - on the flank, if possible, but frontally if necessary. Napoleon had little time for wriggling his way on to the enemy's supply lines - he wanted to find the main enemy field army and crush it.

Thus, the concept of maneuver expanded over time. Napoleon did not always use positional manipulation to defeat the enemy. Sometimes - as in the case of the famous Ulm Campaign - he would use a Marlboroughean (is that a word?) form of maneuver, to lever the enemy into surrender, but often he simply attacked frontally in a conventional field battle and smashed the enemy with the superior French tactical package and his own magisterial feel for command.

Modern theorists, like John Boyd, finally offered the conceptual framework to expand the definition of "maneuver" to include the generalship of men like Napoleon and Frederick. The key, according to this American school of thought, is in tempo, speed, and the disruption of the enemy's ability to process information and make decisions. Napoleon's operations were a form of maneuver because the French army used its superior speed and agility to disrupt the enemy's deployment and command.

The American theorist William Lind (a disciple of Boyd), who wrote the self-importantly titled "Maneuver Warfare Handbook" even went so far as to argue that operational maneuver was exclusively about time, speed, and cognitive processing. He noted in that 1985 book that that the Soviet doctrinal guidelines defined maneuver as "the organized movement of troops during combat operations… for the purpose of taking an advantageous position relative to the enemy." Marlborough and Villars are nodding, but Lind disagreed. Maneuver, he insisted, was not a question of spatial arrangements or position, but mental processing, and maneuver warfare was the art of acting and thinking faster than the enemy.

"But Serge, you onerously verbose rapscallion", I hear you say. "Why does any of this matter? Is theory really that important? Isn't this just an obscure debate among historians?" Well yes, I reply, but theory does matter a great deal, because it creates the cognitive architecture that militaries take to war. Armies become trapped in their theoretical animuses, which prime them to view warfare in a particular way. Misinterpreting the past to shoehorn events into a predetermined theoretical framework is often a path to battlefield difficulties or even defeat.

The German officer corps provides a poignant example of this. In the interwar period, the vestiges of the German army did an extensive amount of navel gazing, contemplating where they had gone wrong and how the first world war could have been lost. This period of soul searching reinforced the sense that war had to be fought in a mobile, attacking way - concepts from the the German operational tradition, like Schwerpunkt, Concentric Attack, and the fetishization of mobile operations became ever more deeply entrenched.

When this system worked, it worked brilliantly. German operational sensibilities and aggression carried the Wehrmacht agonizingly close to victory, churning its legs to the end at Moscow, in the Caucasus, and in North Africa. However, during the second half of the war the Wehrmacht increasingly looked like an army trapped in an alternate reality, enslaved to its own doctrine and historical self-conception. The late war history of the Wehrmacht is littered with operational schema that no longer made any sense - counterattacking the beach at Salerno, or the Mortain Gap in Normandy, or drawing up a phantasmagorical counteroffensive through the Ardennes in late 1944.

In the comfort of our hindsight, it is easy to dismiss ideas like "Schwerpunkt", or "Concentric Operations", or any of these other buzz words as simply artifacts of history - obscure lexical curiosities for military historians to throw around. They are that, but they were once more. These words and concepts were central to the way that German officers viewed and fought the war. They are splattered across the war diaries of the Wehrmacht and embedded in their orders and maneuver schemes. A unifying theory or doctrine of warfare is important for a military, because it provides a cohering intellectual framework that allows the officer corps to see and interpret events the same way, and thus act in a more unified manner. However, these theories and doctrines can easily become traps when they no longer correspond to the physical substrate of the war, and the events of recent decades have shown us just how fast that substrate can shift.

Maneuver's Eternal Return

The American military establishment spent the post-Vietnam decades thinking intensely about how to fight a major ground war, particularly in Europe, under peculiar cold war conditions. The fruits of this American reinvention were a reinvigorated training regimen, an array of new weapons systems and vehicles, and a totalizing commitment to agile command and control, strategic use of deep fires, and mobile operations.

Fortunately, the wargaming of the cold war remained an intellectual exercise only, and there was never occasion to test American doctrines and systems against massed Warsaw Pact tank armies. The Fulda Gap remained at peace, and Mikhail Gorbachev opted to unravel the Soviet Union with a series of self destructive political reforms. The bipolar world collapsed, as if spontaneously, into a temporary moment of unipolarity and utter American hegemony, and the American military was left holding an enormous hammer with nothing to smash.

Hence, the Gulf War - an unrivaled display of profligate military supremacy. America's Desert Storm stands at the pinnacle of the military art; a surgical, almost surreal dismantling of the adversary. America and her coalition axillaries destroyed, in the course of only a few weeks, the 4th largest army in the world, shattering a million man Iraqi army at the cost of fewer than 300 dead among the entire coalition, and a mere 148 Americans. The "kill ratios" were astonishing: something on the order of 70-1 in personnel and 80-1 in armored vehicles. In a sense, it appeared that the United States had "solved" conventional war, winning total victories at near-zero cost.

In hindsight, of course, it was easy to point out all manner of deficiencies in the Iraqi military which betrayed it to be a vast, but overmatched force. Iraqi command and control, morale, training, integration of fires, field grade command, and small unit tactics were exposed as utterly inadequate, and American forces enjoyed critical technological advantages, such as its airborne electronic warfare and ISR platforms, precision guided munitions, and the superlative fire control system on the M1 Abrams tank, which allowed American tankers to trade at exorbitant ratios when dicing it up with Iraqi armor.

It is probably fair to say that American and coalition forces enjoyed decadent advantages in virtually every dimension of combat effectiveness, including the technological, the institutional, and the human. All that being said, however, the Coalition campaign was extremely well organized, and this fact greatly augmented the inherent advantage in combat effectiveness. The situation can be somewhat compared to the German conquest of Poland in 1939 - Germany had insuperable military advantages, but a well designed maneuver scheme allowed the Wehrmacht to leverage the biggest and most overwhelming victory possible.

The Gulf War saw two distinct phases: a strategic air campaign (the first modern air campaign at scale against an enemy with an integrated air defense) and a maneuver campaign. We can consider the characteristics of each in turn.

The coalition Strategic Air Campaign (with over 90% of the sorties provided by American aviation) had a powerful shaping effect, in that it degraded and paralyzed Iraqi capabilities at both the strategic and operational level. Strategic targets included power generation, road and rail infrastructure, government offices in Baghdad, and industrial facilities - closer to the battlefield, critical targets like air defense, command and control posts, strike systems (particularly SCUD missile launchers), and communications were hunted.

The most impressive element of the air campaign, however, was the eradication of the Iraqi air force and air defense. On paper, the Iraqis had a sizeable park of air and air defense assets, with the world's sixth largest air force (parked in specially built hardened aircraft bunkers), over 100 SAM (Surface to Air Missile) batteries, and an integrated air defense network. The Iraqi air defense net was tied to a centralized command and control bunker which ran on a French-designed computer system called Kari (the French name Irak spelled backwards). A prewar report from the Pentagon described the Iraqi air defense the following way:

The multi-layered, redundant, computer-controlled air defense network around Baghdad was denser than that surrounding most Eastern European cities during the Cold War, and several orders of magnitude greater than that which had defended Hanoi during the later stages of the Vietnam War. The multi-layered, redundant, computer-controlled air defense network around Baghdad was denser than that surrounding most Eastern European cities during the Cold War, and several orders of magnitude greater than that which had defended Hanoi during the later stages of the Vietnam War.

In fact, this was rather overly generous. The size of the Iraqi defense system belied a variety of major problems. First and foremost, Iraqi defense batteries were deployed in a point-defense role, creating clusters of air defense around strategic targets (particularly Baghdad and the invading Iraqi forces in Kuwait) with enormous gaps that allowed easy penetration of Iraqi airspace.

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9. Index of Articles

For ease of reference, I will endeavor to keep this list updated with all the articles published here, ordered chronologically by topic or series.

Russia-Ukraine War

• Russo-Ukrainian War Six Month Retrospective (Aug 31, 2022)

• Ukrainian Kharkov Counterattack (Sep 9, 2022

• SMO Season 2: Russian Mobilization (Sep 12, 2022

• Russian Radicalization: The Winter of Yuri (Sep 29, 2022

• Sound and Fury: Nukes and Force Generation Problems (Oct 28, 2022

• Surovikin's Difficult Choices: Russian Kherson Withdrawal (Nov 12, 2022)

• The World Blood Pump: Battle at Bakhmut (Jan 20, 2023)

• Shrodinger's Offensive (Mar 1, 2023)

• Pentagon Leak Biopsy (Apr 10, 2023)

• The Battle of Bakhmut: A Postmortem (Jun 2, 2023)

• Dam! The Nova Kakhovka Dam Breach (Jun 7, 2023)

• The Wagner Uprising (June 26, 2023)

• Escaping Attrition: Ukraine Rolls the Dice (Aug 29, 2023)

• Russo-Ukrainian War: The Reckoning (Nov 15, 2023)

• The Deluge: Z World Turns Two (Mar 1, 2024)

• Russo-Ukrainian War: Widening the Front (May 25, 2024)

History of Russia

Coming Soon

Military History: Maneuver

• Part 1: Concentric Attack and Schwerpunkt (Nov 4, 2022)

• Part 2: Dispersement, Ambiguity, and Concentric Movement (Nov 10, 2022)

• Part 3: Archaic Annihilation Battles

• Part 4: Turning Movements and the Geometry of Musket Armies (Nov 28, 2022)

• Part 5: Napoleon's Art of Warfare (Dec 6, 2022)

• Part 6: The Failure of Decisive Battle in the American Civil War (Dec 16, 2022)

• Part 7: The Moltke Mirage (Dec 31, 2022)

• Part 8: The Failure of Maneuver in the First World War (Jan 17, 2023)

• Part 9: World War 1: Groping for a Solution (Feb 2, 2023)

• Part 10: German Rebirth: Blitzkrieg (Feb 17, 2023)

• Part 11: Apocalypse: Operation Barbarossa (Mar 22, 2023)

• Part 12: The Troubled Beginnings of Soviet Operational Art (Apr 27, 2023)

• Part 13: Death Trap on the Volga: The Stalingrad Campaign (May 9, 2023)

• Part 14: Death Tango in the Dnieper Campaign (June 23, 2023)

• Part 15: Red Army Rising - Kursk and Beyond (July 11, 2023)

• Part 16: The Eagle has Landed: America Meets the Wehrmacht (Aug 2, 2023)

• Part 17: Götterdämmerung in the East (Aug 16, 2023)

• Part 18: Apex Predator - America in Normandy (Sep 26, 2023)

• Part 19: One Final Effort: Germany's Last Battle (Oct 26, 2023)

• Part 20: Mechanized Stalinism (Dec 23, 2023)

• Part 21: Downfall: the Conquest of Germany (Jan 19, 2024)

• Part 22: Maneuver Theory in the Cold War (Mar 28, 2024)

• Part 23: Conclusion - Maneuver, Position, Attrition (Apr 26, 2024)

Military History: Naval Warfare

• Part 1: Blood on the Wine Dark Sea - the Great Aegean War

• Part 2: Mare Nostrum - Roman Naval Power

• Part 3: The Passing of the Age - The Battle of Lepanto

• Part 4: The Rise of Shot and Sail

Miscellaneous

• Politics by Other Means: Putin and Clausewitz (Oct 5, 2022)

• Three Regimes in Russia: Silent Revolution (Sep 26, 2022)

• The Soul of Battle (Nov 1, 2022)

• The End of Cabinet War (Dec 1, 2023)

• The Age of Zugzwang (Feb 13, 2024)

• NATO at the Crossroads (July 19, 2024)

10. Maneuver Theory and the Cold War

American military supremacy is an article of faith for most Americans, granting the military a strong measure of resistance to the broad decay in the trust that people have in their public institutions. Congress, the president, courts, banks, and tech companies are all lousy and crooked in the eyes of most Americans, but the military, almost uniquely, retains the trust and support of the majority. The prevailing view remains that the American military is the best trained, most technologically advanced, most competently lead, and liberally equipped force in the world. America's colossal defense budget is practically a point of pride.

America is, to be sure, one of the great martial nations of world history. It has generally won conventional conflicts, and won them big. It retains world leading capabilities in many domains, enormous power projection, and it produces exceptional fighting men. Where Americans go wrong, however, is taking this excellence to be a law of nature. An army is not a tiger, dictated by biology to be the largest, fastest, and most powerful predator in the world. It is, rather, an institution which evolves and learns over time, developing particular patterns of war-making which may or may not be well calibrated for particular operating environments.

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In the latter half of the 20th Century, during that peculiar security condition that we call the Cold War, the United States Army underwent a roller coaster of institutional change - rapidly demobilizing after the defeat of Germany, coming aghast at its own unpreparedness in Korea, and cannibalizing itself in Vietnam. By 1970, the US Army was in a state of clear crisis, with its own senior leadership increasingly concerned about their ability to win a high intensity land war. From this crisis, however, the American land force began a climb back to the apex, with a radically revamped operational doctrine, new weapons programs, and an invigorated commitment to fighting an American brand of maneuver warfare.

The Menace: Stalin in Manchuria

The Second World War had a strange sort of symmetry to it, in that it ended much the way it began: namely, with a well-drilled, technically advanced and operationally ambitious army slicing apart an overmatched foe. The beginning of the war, of course, was Germany's rapid annihilation of Poland, which rewrote the book on mechanized operations. The end of the war - or at least, the last major land campaign of the war - was the Soviet Union's equally totalizing and rapid conquest of Manchuria in August 1945.

Manchuria was one of the many forgotten fronts of the war, despite being among the oldest. The Japanese had been kicking around in Manchuria since 1931, consolidating a pseudo-colony and puppet state ostensibly called Manchukuo, which served as a launching pad for more than a decade of Japanese incursions and operations in China. For a brief period, the Asian land front had been a major pivot of world affairs, with the Japanese and the Red Army fighting a series of skirmishes along the Siberian-Manchurian border, and Japan's enormously violent 1937 invasion of China serving as the harbinger of global war. But events had pulled attention and resources in other directions, and in particular the events of 1941, with the outbreak of the cataclysmic Nazi-Soviet War and the Great Pacific War. After a few years as a major geopolitical pivot, Manchuria was relegated to the background and became a lonely, forgotten front of the Japanese Empire.

Until 1945, that is. Among the many topics discussed at the Yalta Conference in the February of that year was the Soviet Union's long-delayed entry into the war against Japan, opening an overland front against Japan's mainland colonies. Although it seems relatively obvious that Japanese defeat was inevitable, given the relentless American advance through the Pacific and the onset of regular strategic bombing of the Japanese home islands, there were concrete reasons why Soviet entry into the war was necessary to hasten Japanese surrender.

More specifically, the Japanese continued to harbor hopes late into the war that the Soviet Union would choose to act as a mediator between Japan and the United States, negotiating a conditional end to war that fell short of total Japanese surrender. Soviet entry into the war against Japan would dash these hopes, and overrunning Japanese colonies in Asia would emphasize to Tokyo that they had nothing left to fight for. Against this backdrop, the Soviet Union spent the summer of 1945 preparing for one final operation, to smash the Japanese in Manchuria.

The Soviet maneuver scheme was tightly choreographed and well conceived - representing in many ways a sort of encore, perfected demonstration of the operational art that had been developed and practiced at such a high cost in Europe. Taking advantage of the fact that Manchuria already represented a sort of salient - bulging as it did into the Soviet Union's borders - the plan of attack called for a series of rapid, motorized thrusts towards a series of rail and transportation hubs in the Japanese rear (from north to south, these were Qiqihar, Harbin, Changchun, and Mukden).

By rapidly bypassing the main Japanese field armies and converging on transit hubs in the rear, the Red Army would effectively isolate all the Japanese armies both from each other and from their lines of communication to the rear, effectively slicing Manchuria into a host of separated pockets.

There were, of course, a host of reasons why the Japanese had no hope of resisting this onslaught. In material terms, the overmatch was laughable. The Soviet force was lavishly equipped and bursting with manpower and equipment - three fronts totaling more than 1.5 million men, 5,000 armored vehicles, and tens of thousands of artillery pieces and rocket launchers.

The Japanese (including Manchurian proxy forces) had a paper strength of perhaps 900,000 men, but the vast majority of this force was unfit for combat. Virtually all of the Japanese army's veteran units and equipment had been steadily transferred to the Pacific in a cannibalizing trickle - a vain attempt to slow the American onslaught. Accordingly, by 1945 the Japanese Kwantung Army had been reduced to a lightly armed and poorly trained conscript force that was suitable only for police actions and counterinsurgency against Chinese partisans.

Really, there was nothing for the Japanese to do. The Kwantung Army had far less of a fighting chance in 1945 than the Wehrmacht had in the spring of that year, and everyone knows how that turned out. Unsurprisingly, then, the Soviets broke through everywhere at will when they began the assault on August 9. Soviet armored forces found it trivially easy to overrun Japanese positions (armed primarily with archaic, low caliber antitank weaponry that could not penetrate Soviet armor even at point blank range), and by the end of the first day the Soviet pincers were driving far into the rear.

It is easy, in hindsight, to write off the Manchuria campaign as something of a farce: a highly experienced, richly equipped Red Army overrunning and abusing an overmatched and threadbare Japanese force. In many ways, this is an accurate assessment. However, what the offensive demonstrated was the Red Army's extreme proficiency at organizing enormous operations and moving at high speeds. By August 20 (after only 11 days), the Red Army had reached the Korean border and captured all their objectives in the Japanese rear, in effect completely overrunning a theater that was even larger than France. Many of the Soviet spearheads had driven more than three hundred miles in a little over a week.

To be sure, the combat aspects of the operation were farcical, given the totalizing level of Soviet overmatch. Red Army losses were something like 10,000 men - a trivial number for an operation of this scale. What was genuinely impressive - and terrifying to alert observers - was the Red Army's clear demonstration of its capacity to organize operations that were colossal in scale, both in the size of the forces and the distances covered.

More to the point, the Japanese had no prospect of stopping this colossal steel tidal wave, but who did? All the great armies of the world had been bankrupted and shattered by the great filter of the World Wars - the French, the Germans, the British, the Japanese, all gone, all dying. Only the US Army had any prospect of resisting this great red tidal wave, and that force was on the verge of a rapid demobilization following the surrender of Japan. The enormous scale and operational proclivities of the Red Army thus presented the world with an entirely new sort of geostrategic threat.

Soviet forces would begin a formal withdrawal from Manchuria and Korea in 1946, but as they receded they left in their wake consolidated and well supported communist political machines, including the Workers Party of Korea under Chairman Kim Il Sung, and the Communist Party of China under Chairman Mao Zedong. In this regard, Communism showed itself to be a much more geopolitically agile and adaptable ideology than Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as it preached a millenarian, transnational, and ostensibly scientific ideology that could motivate indigenous political parties, and the Soviet government had already developed tried and true institutional mechanisms for mobilizing resources and maintaining a political monopoly. In other words, while Nazism had always clearly been for the Germans and the Germans alone, communism could recruit and galvanize local believers around the world, and the Soviet model could give them the tools to take and hold power.

Thus, the Soviet Union presented something of a unique geopolitical triple threat. It had astonishing state capacity in its own right, in its ability to field huge armies and roll them over continent sized spaces; it had ideological penetration and appeal stemming from Communism's universalizing claims and an attractive message of social justice and scientifically ordered abundance; and it had a proven model of effective political institutions which could allow local communist parties to establish powerful political monopolies. Add it all together and you get the great menace of the Cold War: a vast and powerful Red Army that could roll over its enemies with ease, recruit enthusiastic cadres of local communists, and establish durable state structures.

All of these powers had been on full display in Asia, with the lightning advance, the rapid consolidation and funneling of resources to local communist parties, and the durable North Korean and Chinese party-states that were left behind once the Red Army withdrew. To make matters even worse, this powerful Soviet expansion apparatus was now precariously forward deployed deep in the heart of Europe, with the Soviet frontier pushing all the way into Central Germany.

The fear that the Soviet Union would replicate its Manchurian exploits in Europe became the foundational anxiety of the Cold War - predating both Soviet atomic weapons and, by extension, the fear of nuclear war. As early as 1947, France and the United Kingdom began signing joint defense pacts, which expanded to include Belgium and the Netherlands with the 1948 Treaty of Brussels, bringing about the short-lived "Western Union Defense Organization" (WUDO). It was clear, however, that such a limited alliance structure would be utterly inadequate in the event of war with the Soviet Union. France and Britain were degraded, threadbare powers in no place to fight yet another major war. One telegram sent from Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery's staff at WUDO headquarters to a liaison at the American State Department simply said:

Present instructions are to hold the line of the Rhine. Presently available forces might enable me to hold the tip of the Brittany Peninsula for three days. Please advise.

Montgomery himself, though, said it best. Asked what it would take for the Red Army to break through to the Atlantic, he simply answered:

Shoes.

Thinking about the Unthinkable

The transition from the end of the Second World War to the beginning of that peculiar global security dilemma which we call the Cold War is often poorly understood or even glossed over - obviously, the entire history of the late 1940's is beyond the purview of our interest in the history of maneuver doctrine and operations, but a skeletal recollection may still be useful.

The beginning of the Cold War, as such, can probably be best identified as a sequence of events in 1948 and 1949, which together represented the breakdown of the post-war Soviet-American cooperation in Europe and the consolidation of the power blocs that would characterize the Cold War. In those intervening years after the end of the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union undertook a series of actions designed to consolidate their positions in Europe according to the postwar settlement.

These actions took the form of both direct influence and attempts to exclude the other party from the appropriate sphere. The United States, for example, rehabilitated and integrated Western European economies under the Marshall plan while the USSR forbade eastern bloc countries from participating, fearing American economic and political penetration into its satellites. While the USSR reconstituted governments in Eastern Europe into Soviet style communist political monopolies, communists were ejected from governments in France and Italy. There was thus a certain degree of symmetry as both the USSR and the United States consolidated the two spheres of Europe, creating a sharp split down the spine of the continent.

The situation continued to spiral, with the United States intervening in Greece in 1947 to prevent a communist takeover, a 1948 Soviet-backed coup by communists in Czechoslovakia, and the subsequent Soviet abandonment of the Allied Control Council (in effect ending the primary post-war joint body for administration in occupied Germany). The culminating point of all this was an attempted communist putsch in Berlin, followed by the infamous Soviet blockade of the German capital and the Berlin airlift in the winter of 1948. It is not a coincidence that the formation of NATO on April 4 coincided with the closing weeks of the Berlin blockade and the collapse of the Allied Control Council. The formation of a formal American military bloc in Western Europe was the natural culmination of a security situation that had deteriorated with alarming speed. The Soviet Union predictably followed with the Warsaw Pact a few years later. The Cold War was on.

What matters most for our purposes, of course, is not this whirlwind sequence of events or even the breakneck bifurcation of postwar Europe into Soviet and American spheres. What is interesting to us is the fact that the onset of the Cold War presented the United States with a novel problem, namely how to plan for and think about a future war on the European Continent against the Soviet-led forces of the Warsaw Pact. This was, in fact, a very new position for the United States, which for most of its existence had maintained a relatively skeletal officer corps that did not think deeply about operations, or military doctrines at all.

The American Army had always been most unlike its European counterparts, spending most of its life as a border constabulary in the expanding American West. It was certainly nothing like, say, the Prusso-German Officer Corps, which was accustomed over the decades to theorizing, debating, planning, and simulating ad nauseum. While all the major continental armies spent the 1930's thinking deeply about armored warfare and doctrinal concepts, the US Army had no armored force at all, and the simple field regulations issued to officers had nothing to say about the matter. It was not until 1941 (after the German campaigns in Poland, France, and the invasion of the Soviet Union) that the US Army conducted its first ever operations scaled mechanized field maneuvers.

The difference between the pre and post World War Two American security dispositions could not have been more stark, therefore. While the pre-war army thought very little about continental warfare in a systemic or doctrinal way, the US Army in the Cold War was frequently preoccupied with theorizing about a future European war against the Soviet bloc. While prewar America was secure in its latent industrial power and the strategic depth provided by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, postwar America remained forward deployed in both hemispheres. Central European lands that had once been the stomping ground of Prussian and French armies now became an American security fixation.

Matters were further complicated by the entirely novel kinetic additive of atomic weapons, which gave frightening new capabilities and an uncertain use case. Throughout the cold war, both the USSR and the USA would be constantly assessing and reassessing both theirs and the other's willingness to use nuclear weaponry, and this in turn fed assumptions about how a ground war in Europe would be fought.

America's atomic monopoly did not last very long in absolute terms, but it nevertheless shaped the base of Cold War military thinking. In the years leading up to the Soviet Union's first successful atomic test in 1949, there were many assumptions made about the security that the west could derive from the American nuclear monopoly (including, most fantastically, Bertrand Russell's call for a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union). All of these assumptions were shattered by the speed at which the USSR was able to demonstrate its own atomic powers.

Paradoxically, however, the Soviet Union's 1949 atomic test did not ameliorate Soviet insecurities in the short term. This was because, although the test was an important milestone and show of force, the USSR was not able to immediately convert the test into use-ready atomic weaponry. In fact, the Soviet Air Force did not take delivery of operational atomic bombs until 1954. This meant nearly a full decade of acute atomic vulnerability which strongly shaped Soviet strategic sensibilities.

The upshot of all this was that America's atomic monopoly lasted much shorter than the United States had originally hoped and anticipated, but much too long for Moscow's comfort. The security of the early atomic monopoly allowed the United States to rapidly demobilize its armies; simultaneously, the Soviet Union hoped to lean on vastly superior conventional forces as a counterposition to the American nuclear arsenal, and those same gargantuan conventional forces deepened the sense of crippling insecurity in Western Europe.

As previously mentioned, by the late 1940's it was already clear that the limited WUDO alliance (comprised essentially of France, Britain, and the Low Countries) was simply too weak to present a credible opponent to the Soviet Union and the emerging Eastern Bloc. This sense of European insecurity only intensified between 1949 and 1951, with the successful Soviet atomic test, the victory of the communists in China, and the war in Korea. Any earnest attempt to contend with the Red Army would inevitably require the involvement of the United States.

Even with American involvement in European security via NATO (formed in 1949), there were a host of difficult and divisive issues to parse out. In contrast to the Russian perception of NATO as nothing but a tool of American foreign policy, the alliance's early history was wracked with disagreements about how to ensure European security. First and foremost was the question of Germany's role in Europe.

It was quite clear to many, particularly in America, that any credible European alliance would require the rehabilitation and integration of West Germany (formally the Federal Republic of Germany), which was formed in 1949 through the merging of the British and American occupation zones. Even after the trauma of the Second World War and the division of the country, West Germany was by far the most populous and potentially powerful country in Western Europe. It was also, rather obviously, likely to be the critical battleground in any future war with the Soviet Union. Therefore, the Anglo-Americans decided early on that the rehabilitation and rearmament of West Germany was critical for European security. This plan ran into vehement opposition from the French, who remained deeply resentful towards Germany and suspicious of any attempt to rearm them - one particularly bold French proposal even called for German infantry to be inducted into the European commands (in effect, preventing the West Germans from having any organic units higher than a battalion and subordinating them to French divisions).

In the end, it was clear that German manpower and resources would have to be fully leveraged, particularly in light of NATO's preliminary goals of fielding a 50 division army in Western Europe. Therefore, as a sop to the French, the unification and rearmament of Germany was counterweighted by additional American deployments in Europe, as a gesture of America's commitment to European defense and a guarantee that France would not soon find itself dominated once again by the Germans. The integrated NATO military command and preponderance of American influence ensured that German resources could be mobilized without granting West Germany any genuine strategic autonomy. Thus, the basic strategic arrangement of European security was established by the early 1950's, with the first General Secretary of NATO, Lord Hastings Ismay, famously observing that NATO had been structured to "keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down." Notably, however, the item about "keeping the Americans in" was viewed not as an American attempt to maintain influence in Europe, but the other way around: Europeans feared being abandoned by the Americans and wanted to ensure an American commitment to European security.

Even with all of this diplomatic and geostrategic horse trading, however, the math of force generation was simply not in NATO's favor. Even with plans to raise 12 German divisions, it was clear that NATO's 1952 decision to field a 50 division force was simply unrealistic - particularly because western leadership was loathe to risk the fragile economic recovery of Western Europe by adopting a crash rearmament program. This was plainly evident to Dwight Eisenhower, with his intimate knowledge of the European theater, and when he became president in 1953 his national security team immediately began to implement a new defense posture that aimed to use atomic weaponry as a substitute for conventional ground forces in Europe.

In the mid 1950's, therefore, NATO's war planning (really, America's) was built around a 30-division ground force which would be tasked with delaying and funneling Soviet forces into concentrated masses which would offer enticing targets for tactical (battlefield) atomic weapons, paired with a policy of so-called "massive retaliation", which promised catastrophic atomic bombing of Soviet rear areas and cities. Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, said in a public 1954 speech:

We need allies and collective security. Our purpose is to make these relations more effective, less costly. This can be done by placing more reliance on deterrent power and less dependence on local defensive power... Local defense will always be important. But there is no local defense which alone will contain the mighty land power of the Communist world. Local defenses must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power.

Perhaps at this point an editorial comment is warranted. Our focus in this (very long) series of articles has been the history of maneuver in warfare. It would seem warranted to ask whether we've lost the plot here, with a very long digression into the early history of NATO and America's nuclear use doctrine. This is fair enough. What we wish to establish, however, is that during the first decades of the Cold War American operational sensibilities were heavily predicated on the inevitability of atomic use, the application of atomic weaponry as a deterrent, and the battlefield uses of atomic weapons.

Almost no thought was given to winning a conventional war against the USSR. Louis A Johnson, Secretary of Defense from 1949-1950, was frank in his belief that America had practically no need for non-nuclear forces, and openly mused that the Navy and the Marine Corps out to be abolished outright. In such an environment, little thought was given to conventional operations. By the end of the 1940's, General Omar Bradley was of the opinion that the US Army "could not fight its way out of a paper bag."

This thinking was soon mirrored by the Soviets themselves, particularly with Nikita Kruschchev's 1960 address to the Supreme Soviet in which he proclaimed a new strategy of comprehensive nuclear missile warfare. Under such a framework, there was virtually no distinction between attack and defense - any conventional conflict with the west would be implicitly presumed to go nuclear, therefore the only way to fight such a war was to immediately launch an all-out ground offensive paired with nuclear annihilatory strike. As a 1960 Soviet handbook put it:

Soviet military doctrine sees concerted offensive operations as the only acceptable form of strategic actions in nuclear warfare, and stresses that strategic defense contradicts our view of the character of a future nuclear war and of the present state of the Soviet armed forces… Under modern conditions, passivity at the outset of a war is out of the question, for that would be synonymous with annihilation.

Throughout the 1960's, therefore, the Soviet Union conducted an enormous armaments program which expanded not only their own conventional and nuclear forces, but also the forces of Warsaw Pact satellites, which received over 1,200 new aircraft, 6,000 tanks, and 17,000 armored equipment in the first half of the decade. There was particular emphasis on the base of fire, with Soviet divisions expanding from 8,000 to 12,000 men to increase the size of the organic divisional artillery, and a host of new rocket brigades being provisioned for Warsaw Pact armies.

The culmination of the Soviet "60's program", if we can call it that, was the 1969 Zapad-69. The Red Army simulated a nominal "attack" by NATO, and responded with an all-out offensive by five different army groups, which went punching into West Germany, shooting over the Rhine, south towards the Swiss border, and northward into Denmark. Given the enormous preponderance of Eastern Bloc force generation, Soviet planners concluded (probably realistically) that by the fourth day of the war their spearheads would be well established on the Rhine, and NATO would resort to atomic weapons to avoid total defeat. At that point, the conventional phase of the war would be over and a full nuclear exchange would be underway.

All that is to say, that although both the USSR and the USA followed their own unique paths of strategic development, by the 1960's had come to the assumption that conventional war would lead necessarily to nuclear war. A host of different doctrinal names, like Eisenhower's "massive retaliation" and Khrushchev's "comprehensive nuclear missile warfare" all related essentially to the primacy of nuclear warfare and the growing centrality of escalation management and game theory.

In such an operating environment, there was little role for dynamic thinking about how to fight a conventional war in Europe, particularly for the US Army. Eisenhower rather explicitly viewed US ground forces as little more than a trip wire and a delaying screen that would set the stage for decisive action from the US Strategic Air demand.

Ground forces became so subordinate that the US Army Chief of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor, contrived an entirely new structure for US Army Divisions that would allow them to have organic nuclear weapons systems (an 8-inch howitzer battery equipped with atomic shells and the MGR-1 Honest John Atomic Rocket system). His rational was essentially the institutional survival of the army: nuclear war had become so fundamental to European war scenarios that Taylor believed the Army would have to carve out an atomic role for itself if it wanted to retain its budgetary and personnel access.

A conventional war of mobile operations, in the style of the Second World War, increasingly seemed like an anachronism. Mid-century American conflicts like Korea and Vietnam offered few glimpses into what a peer war in Europe would be like. Korea, after episodic periods of mobility, largely developed into a firepower intensive slugfest amid the mountainous and unfriendly terrain of the peninsula. Vietnam, of course, devolved into an infamous American military headache, but one which seemed to have few parallels to a future war in Europe. Between the focus on atomic weaponry and befuddling Asian misadventures, the world-beating US Army seemed adrift. Then the Israeli Defense Forces recieved a nasty surprise on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur.

Revival (in Theory)

The Vietnam War as a major socio-political stressor for mid-century America is a well worn and well understood story. Less well known, however, was the way that the war brought the American military establishment to a state that bordered on crisis. Beginning with Lyndon Johnson's decision to fight Vietnam without mobilizing reserves or national guard (instead choosing to lean on the active force and the draft) caused the war to cannibalize and drain the active force. Meanwhile, the financial drain of the war ate away at the defense budget, to the effect that the army fielded no major new systems during the 1960's. Finally, defeat was brushed aside as a manifestation of American political failures and the peculiar nature of fighting a tropic counterinsurgency - the broad conclusion seems to have been that the military did not fail in Vietnam so much as the parameters of the war had failed to accommodate the military.

As a result, the US Army entered the 1970's with aging weapons systems, low institutional confidence, and no real lessons learned. It is not an exaggeration to say that the US Military (and the Army in particular) were at a sort of institutional nadir at this point. This happened to coincide, however, with a renewed interest in thinking about winning a conventional war in Europe, that is to say, without immediate recourse to atomic weaponry, largely due to the growth of Soviet second strike capabilities. In other words, the US Army had a sudden revival of interest in fighting a conventional ground war at exactly the time that it had the lowest capacity to due so.

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