The Limits of Long-Range Planning
As noted previously, technological changes to warfare can rapidly alter the wider social landscape. They can also be notoriously difficult to forecast which limits the ability to accurately plan for the long term. To illustrate, let’s consider a couple of historical examples.
Item 1: Timber for ships that would never be built
The Second Battle of Copenhagen took place in 1807 when Britain bombarded the capital of Denmark-Norway, as the latter’s fleet had been pledged to Napoleon. Following the assault, Britain’s Royal Navy seized the entire Danish fleet and sailed away. To the Danes, this was obviously not just humiliating but extremely costly in multiple ways. It was estimated that in terms of timber this represented around 90,000 oak trees. To rebuild the navy the Danes then had to start from scratch and the regent, Prince Frederick VI, issued a ban on the private felling of any oak tree and ordered the planting of many more to replace the loss.
Now, oak trees used for timber in this way are only felled after they have been growing for well over a hundred years. Of course, the technological advances made possible by the Industrial Revolution quickly made wooden warships a relic of the past. In 1843, British engineer and industrialist Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the first all-iron ship, SS Great Britain. By the 1880s, ships were mostly built out of steel. A hundred years after the Second Battle of Copenhagen battleships had been completely transformed. From 1906 there were dreadnoughts. Ship-building and naval warfare had advanced beyond the comprehension of anybody alive during the Napoleonic Wars.
Incidentally, Denmark was not the only country to embark on such a policy at the time. Britain’s Lord Nelson had his ‘Trafalgar Oaks’. Denmark was not wrong to embark on this policy at the time. They were operating on the knowledge that was available to them. But this strategy was quickly antiquated by the great technological shift that characterised the nineteenth century.
Christian Mølsted, Flåden forlader havnen for sidst gang (The fleet leaves the port for the last time) (1919).
Item 2: From lances to jets in a single generation
In 1914 Jean de Lattre de Tassigny was a young Second Lieutenant assigned to the French Army’s 12th Dragoon Regiment. On 14th September that year he was involved in an engagement with four Bavarian Uhlans, two of which he killed before the third struck him with a lance perforating his lung.
De Lattre recovered and went on to have a very successful military career. In fact during the early years of the Second World War he had been made Général d’Armée. In 1950, in what would be the twilight of his life, he was the French commander during the First Indochina War, the conflict that was the first iteration of what would later be known as the Vietnam War. In the space of a little over a generation warfare had evolved dramatically. In one career he had gone from being wounded by a lance to commanding jets and helicopters in the age of the atom bomb. The young officer of 1914 could not possibly have foreseen just how quickly war would be transformed in his own lifetime.
General de Lattre in 1946. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Strategically, the world is a fluid environment. It is always changing. Sometimes the changes take place slowly and incrementally. Sometimes they come dramatically. This is one reason why you should never mistake tactics for strategy nor confuse means and ends. Strategic success, or victory, is the realisation or achievement of specific ends. In a historical sense, what that looks like practically depends on the facts of the time.
In Gregory Copley’s book The New Total War of the 21st Century and the Trigger of the Fear Pandemic, the author points out that victory is subject to a constantly changing global context and must therefore be constantly shifting in its own goals. Navigating this requires a certain type of mind: “The grand strategist and the leadership, of necessity, commit themselves to intellectually bedouin lives. They are in perpetual motion across the undulating sands of time and the mind.”1
A version of this article was published in June 2024.
Gregory Copley, The New Total War of the 21st Century and the Trigger of the Fear Pandemic (ISSA, 2020) p. 76.