I was recently invited by Jarret Brachman, professor and head of research at West Point’s Center of Combating Terrorism, to give a talk to his students in the department. Below is a transcription of the talk itself, which was given on November 13, 2007. In the days to come I will detail the response of students and teachers, the questions that came up, my impressions of West Point and of the students I met there, as well as talks with other members of the department.
All in all, it was a great experience. Professor Brachman is an expert on Al Qaeda’s inner workings, particularly its use of technology and the Internet. He is only twenty-nine-years old and someone to keep an eye on, a rare sign of intelligence among the Inspector Clouseaus who determine our current policy on terrorism.
The Terrorist Dilemma: A Talk to West Point Cadets, 11/13/07
I want to begin today by talking about a general whom you have probably not heard of, unless you have read my book. His name is Frederich Ludwig, Prince of Hohenlohe. He was born in Prussia in 1746 and came from one of Germany’s oldest and most aristocratic families. The Prince served in the military under the Prussian King Frederick the Great and slowly rose through the ranks.
The Prince was a great believer in the style of warfare created by Frederick the Great. This style was based on having an extremely disciplined army; on always assuming the offensive; and on certain creative maneuvers that the King had invented. Led by Frederick, the Prussians had emerged as the most feared and successful fighting force on the continent, and it stayed that way after Frederick’s death in 1786.
In 1796, the Prince was made a general, at the age of 50, young by Prussian standards. In that same year, the 27-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte was also named general and commander of the French forces fighting in Italy. Over the next nine years, Napoleon would dominate Europe, all of this culminating with his stunning victories at Ulm and Austerlitz in 1805. To the Prince, Napoleon was merely lucky. He was matched against weak and decadent countries (Austria and Russia) that could not withstand his aggressive style of warfare. If he ever met the Prussians on the battlefield, he would be revealed as a military fraud. And with that in mind, the Prince secretly worked on a battle plan in case their two countries came to war.
Well, in 1806, the Prussian King finally declared war and in September of that year, the Prussian generals were asked to prepare a campaign against Napoleon. The Prince trotted out his carefully crafted battle plan. The other generals made their changes to the Prince’s plan and finally they all agreed on it and presented it to the King. But as the Prussian troops were mobilizing, word reached the Prince and his fellow generals that Napoleon’s swift moving army had already entered Prussian territory, coming in scattered directions that were hard to predict, and massing in the south of the country.
There was no time to react. The Prussians were forced to retreat. They would reassemble to the north and attack the flanks of Napoleon’s army as it marched on Berlin. The Prince was put in charge of the rear guard, protecting the Prussian retreat. Only a few days later, a division under Napoleon himself caught up with Hohenlohe, near the town of Jena, and the first battle between these two powerful forces took place. It was like a meeting between the past and the future. The Prussians formed lines in parade fashion to advance, in a ritual that went back to Frederick’s day. Napoleon’s army scattered in all directions and sniped at the Prussians from rooftops, and behind houses. The Prussians were quickly overwhelmed by this totally chaotic form of battle and quickly succumbed. By the end of the day they were routed.
At almost the same time, a French division under Field Marshall Davout defeated a large Prussian force at Auerstadt and within days the entire Prussian military edifice crumbled, as one castle after another fell into French hands. It was one of the most stunning collapses in the history of warfare, a great power destroyed almost overnight.
After this battle, the Prince was totally disgraced and retreated to his ancestral castle. For the last 12 years of his life he tried to make sense of this ignominious fall. He blamed the other generals for slowing down the Prussian response to Napoleon’s attack by their squabbling and their egos. He criticized the Prussian army for its breakdowns in discipline as it retreated. He credited Napoleon’s spy system for giving them a beat up on the Prussian strategy and catching them by surprise. He maintained that the French form of warfare was unethical and gave them an unfair advantage because they were willing to fight dirty.
Now if you think about it, this is all rather astonishing. The Prince was no idiot. He was a great student of military history. He had been able to study the French army for nine years before meeting it in battle. He was able to witness it firsthand at Jena. All he had to do was open his eyes and think. And yet with all this evidence staring him in the face, and with years and some distance to analyze it, he continued to completely misread the essence of Napoleonic warfare. He could only come up with clichés, and the usual conventional excuses. His eyes could only focus on the tactics, the details; he could not see the forest for the trees.
In the aftermath of this debacle, another Prussian was trying to come to terms with the Napoleonic revolution in a much different way. You might have heard of him. His name was Carl von Clausewitz. At the age of 26 he had witnessed the collapse first hand, was captured and held by the French for several years. He and other reformers within the Prussian military, men like Scharnhorst and Gneisau, were determined to gain the right lesson from what had happened to Hohenlohe and the Prussian military. What von Clausewitz did in the wake of Jena-Auerstadt represents a defining moment in military theory and strategy. Based on analyzing Napoleon he came up with a method, one that would lead to all of his great discoveries.
