The Novel Expedient
Strategy: The Indirect Approach. By B. H; Liddell Hart. (Faber 25.) Nearly all the battles which are regarded as masterpieces of the military art, from which have been derived the foundation of states and the fame of commanders, have been battles of rhanceuvre in which very often the enemy has found himself defeated by some novel expedient or device, some queer, swift, unexpected thrust or stratagem. In many such battles the losses of the victors have been small.
So wrote Sir Winston Churchill when discussing the deadlock in the West which followed the first battle of the Marne and the develop- ment of trench warfare in the winter of 1914-15. And it was this conviction which inspired his own efforts to break that deadlock and the slaughter it involved by a new strategy of indirect approach. In this book, which is a new and larger edition of a work published in several forms before, Captain Liddell Hart sets out to prove the same thesis by an examination of the history of war from the battle of Marathon to the present day.
In any conflict of wits or wills the line of least resistance is the line of least expectation. That, broadly, is the basis of the strategy of indirect approach. As Captain Liddell Hart rightly points out, this is applicable to all forms of human activity, 'as fundamental to the realm of politics as to the realm of sex.' Weaken your enemy before you attack him and you may not need to fight openly at all. If fighting becomes necessary, he who avoids the obvious is most likely to gain from the moral factor—the decisive element even when combined with inferiority of force. The way to down your enemy is first to unbalance him. This is best achieved by subjecting him to uncertainty anthsurprise, for in that frame of mind he is not
merely unlikely to anticipate the correct point of attack but also most likely to be led into false moves of his own that weigh further the odds against him. Not only is there little to quarrel with in this argument. There is
a strong case for stating it again in a world where the threat of atom and thermo-nuclear warfare compels us to reconsider our strategy. For example, is it clear that—to use Sir John Slessor's phrase—the 'Great Deterrent' would achieve its purpose? Apparently over- whelming force, applied directly, might well create more problems than it solved. In any case, the massiveness of the threat has clearly inspired Russia and her friends to develop a by-passing guerilla type of strategy which the West would do well to answer in the same terms:
By carrying destructiveness to a 'suicidal' extreme, atomic power is stimulating and accelerating a reversion to the indirect methods that are the essence of strategy—since they endow warfare with intelligent properties that raise it above the brute application of force.
Captain Liddell Hart is not afraid to summon up the `lessons of his- tory' to this end. And he writes with all his accustomed fluency and attractiveness. The faults of this book are those of method rather than object. In the first place, it is not a well-balanced piece of work. Even assuming the case for a disproportionately long treatment of the Second World War in a new edition, the author should have chosen between a chronological narrative of the war as a whole and a dis- cussion of those aspects of it most relevant to his purpose. No clear choice is made. As a result there is an attempt to include too much without making the best use of the material. The short section on the war in the Pacific, as it stands, does little more than interrupt the story of what was going on elsewhere. It could easily have provided valuable grist to the mill, both in strategy and in grand strategy. Similarly, the passing mention of strategic bombing and of the policy of unconditional surrender irritate by their inconclusive brevity, whereas they could have clinched the argument. In fact, on this scale selection is inevitable.
In the second place, Captain Liddell Hart sometimes cannot resist the temptation to try to twist an argument to his advantage even when by so doing he gratuitously opens himself to attack. A typical example of this is the suggestion that Britain should have returned some of Germany's colonies to her during the inter-war period. This would have provided Britain with easy initial successes in recapturing these gifts, at the outset of the Second World War, to offset the depressing effect of German victories in Europe! `The psychological importance of such counterpoises should never be overlooked, even by a sea-power.' If this sort of argument is to be used seriously then the reply must be that such success can be cheap in more senses than one. There is too good a case in This book for it to be cheapened in this way. In argument, as in war, simplicity and economy of force normally go together. Complications that deceive oneself are the less likely to mislead the enemy.
N. H. GIBBS
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