Japanese leadership in the Second World War enjoys noticeably lower name recognition than their German counterparts. Most people with a cursory knowledge of the war know the core German leadership group around Hitler - Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Speer, and perhaps Heydrich and Bormann - and the all-star lineup of German generals like Rommel, Manstein, and Guderian. In contrast, the only particularly notorious member of Japan’s nebulous leadership group is General Hideki Tojo, who served as Prime Minister for most of the war and became the centerpiece defendant in the postwar trial. As far as Japanese commanders go, the list of name-brand personnel has but a single entry: Isoroku Yamamoto.

Yamamoto’s life and career present a fascinating trajectory that shapes a particular, sympathetic view of the man. A veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, he spent much of his 30’s in the United States, studying at Harvard and serving as naval attache in Japan’s Washington embassy. He therefore had a first hand understanding of America’s industrial depth, and was famously pessimistic about Japan’s prospects in a a war against the United States. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas”, he argued, “knows that Japan lacks the power for a naval race with America.” In one of his more famous and widely recited (though often badly translated) remarks about a war with the United States, he told Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe in September 1940:

If I was told that I had to do it, then you will certainly observe the Navy going all out for half a year to a year. However, I do not hold conviction about the outcome after 2-3 years.

This quote certainly seems remarkably prescient, in light of Japan’s initial wave of operational successes, which slowly faded away as American combat power ramped up. Far more famous still is his remark, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, that Japan had “awakened a sleeping giant, and filled him with terrible resolve.”

All of this shape’s the perception of Yamamoto as a quasi-tragic figure who understood that Japan was unlikely to defeat the United States in the Pacific War, counseled against the conflict, and then dutifully tried to play a losing hand as well as he could once war had been thrust upon him against his own advice. Yamamoto was furthermore a critic of the Japanese Army’s war in China and a particularly vocal opponent of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Japan, lending credence to the idea that he was war-averse.

Subscribe now

This is the Yamamoto of American popular memory, and indeed of a great deal of Japanese postwar writing: a sort of samurai Cassandra, too perceptive and cosmopolitan for the militarist regime he served, a man who fired the opening shot of the Pacific War with a heavy heart and no illusions.

It is certainly true that Yamamoto had an appropriately pessimistic assessment of Japan’s prospects in an extended conflict with the United States. What is less often appreciated is that Yamamoto did not, on the basis of this assessment, conclude that Japan ought not to fight. He concluded instead that, if Japan was going to fight, it had to fight differently - with greater boldness, more risk, and an aggressive search for a decisive stroke. He did not spend the eighteen months before Pearl Harbor advocating for peace. He spent them designing what was, on balance, the single most aggressive operational scheme that was possible - and then only barely - within Japan’s kinetic parameters.

This is the critical distinction between Yamamoto-the-man and the Yamamoto of postwar hagiography. He was not a pacifist, reluctant or otherwise. He was a Japanese naval officer of strong patriotic conviction, deeply committed to his service and his nation, who happened to understand the arithmetic of industrial war better than most of his colleagues. Notwithstanding his appreciation for America’s vast industrial base, he shared a broader Japanese disdain for American martial proclivities, dismissing American naval officers as a club of “golfers and bridge players.” His understanding of the United States did not produce pacifism. It produced, rather, a particular kind of operational philosophy - one which held that Japan’s best hope in a war with the United States was to front-load its risk-taking, to achieve a string of dramatic early victories that would either compel American negotiation or, failing that, push the eventual American counter-offensive as far into the future as possible. In either case, the operational prescription was the same: bold, high-risk operations aimed at decisive results.

Yamamoto’s personality, such as it can be reconstructed from the record, fit this operational philosophy with almost uncanny precision. He was, quite literally, a gambler. He played poker, bridge, shogi, and go with great enthusiasm and, by contemporary accounts, considerable skill. He is known to have remarked that, given the chance, he could make his living as a professional gambler in Monaco. This is not the biographical minutiae it might appear: Yamamoto himself repeatedly framed the problem of Japan’s strategic situation in gambler’s terms. Japan, in his view, was a player at a table where the house always won in the long run; the only way to walk away a winner was to make a big bet early and then cash out before the odds caught up with you. In short, Yamamoto understood quite clearly that Japan was playing a losing hand, but his response was to raise the stakes rather than to fold.

This is vitally important to understand, and it cuts against the popular historiography of Yamamoto as a man who was hesitant about the war. Two key points, in particular, fall out of a proper assessment of both the attack on Pearl Harbor and Yamamoto as a commander (the two are intimately linked).

First and foremost, it should be understood that despite Yamamoto’s reputation as a war-averse man who was pessimistic about Japan’s odds, the practical impact of his decisions as a commander was not only to directly spark the war, but also radically intensify and escalate it. On the one hand, we have various prescient-sounding quotes from Yamamoto about awakening the sleeping giant. On the other hand, we have Yamamoto’s actions, which directly contributed to the outbreak of war, and furthermore of commencing the war in a way that outraged American opinion towards Japan and closed the door to a negotiated peace. Whatever Yamamoto may have said about the wisdom of war with America, he was in fact the chief architect of that same war’s outbreak, and his aggression pushed America towards the path of maximal war aims which ended in Japan’s unconditional surrender.

Secondly, it should be understood that Yamamoto, the consummate gambler, had almost unparalleled risk appetite and was willing to risk Japan’s most important strategic asset - the First Air Fleet - in aggressive gambits to bring about decisive battle with the American fleet. He got away with it at Pearl Harbor, but one can only go all-in so many times before the dealer wins. Yamamoto lost his bankroll at Midway.

This is a crucial point, because it informs everything about the operational character of the Pearl Harbor attack. It was, by the standards of the day, an extraordinarily audacious undertaking. It involved moving a fleet of six aircraft carriers - at the time the largest concentrated carrier force in the world, and the most powerful single naval formation in existence - across more than three thousand miles of ocean under strict radio silence, through the storm-lashed latitudes of the northern Pacific, to a launch point within striking distance of what was, on paper, one of the most heavily fortified anchorages on earth. The margin for error was essentially zero. Detection en route would have produced either an embarrassing operational cancellation or, in the worst case, a catastrophic loss of the fleet carriers in a daylight engagement far from home. The operation was undertaken, moreover, at a time of year when the North Pacific was at its most hostile, with storms and heavy seas that complicated refueling and threatened the airworthiness of the carrier aircraft.

Moving the carrier fleet into position was hard enough, but this was not even the phase in which Japan expected to suffer the most. The attack itself required the conduct of two massed air strikes, at considerable range, against a target that was expected to be fully alerted once the first bomb fell. Japanese planners expected to lose perhaps a third of the attacking force, including - in the more pessimistic estimates - two of the fleet carriers. This was not a “surgical strike” in any modern sense. It was conceived by Yamamoto as a full-scale naval battle, in which the Japanese fleet staked its most valuable asset - the concentrated mass of the First Air Fleet - on success in a battle in the heart of the enemy’s defenses. That Yamamoto was willing to make this bet, and indeed insisted upon it against the considerable opposition of the Naval General Staff, is itself evidence of a far more aggressive person than the popular historiography often portrays.

It is also worth observing that Yamamoto’s personal conviction was so strong that he repeatedly threatened to resign his command if the Pearl Harbor operation was not approved. This was not the behavior of a reluctant or battle-averse man. It was the behavior of a commanding officer who had convinced himself that a particular course of action was essential, and who was willing to stake his career and reputation on it. The Naval General Staff, for their part, spent much of 1941 trying to talk Yamamoto out of the plan. Their preferred scheme was more orthodox: seize the Southern Resource Area, establish a defensive perimeter, and wait for the Americans to come to them, at which point the Combined Fleet would fight its long-awaited Decisive Battle somewhere in the western Pacific. This scheme had the virtue of conformity with decades of Japanese naval doctrine, and the further virtue of keeping the carrier force concentrated as an operational reserve rather than committing it to an extraordinarily risky opening gambit. Yamamoto rejected it forcefully, and - because he was willing to go over his nominal superiors’ heads by threatening resignation - he got his way.

The strategic context here is important. Yamamoto was not arguing that Pearl Harbor was the best of several good options; he was arguing that the conventional plan was certain to fail, and that only an unconventional and high-risk operation offered even a prospect of success. This was his gambler’s logic in operation. If you are certain to lose the long game, your only chance is to take radical action to shorten the game or change its terms. The Pearl Harbor plan was that radical action. Whether Yamamoto was correct that the conventional plan was doomed is debatable - there is a strong case, as we shall see, that any Japanese naval campaign against the United States was doomed from the outset. What is not debatable is that Yamamoto’s response to the apparent hopelessness of the situation was not pacifism, but a particular kind of operational daring that reflected his personal psychology as much as any strategic analysis.

One more dimension of Yamamoto’s character deserves mention. He was, by all accounts, genuinely charismatic and commanded extraordinary loyalty from his subordinates. The officers of the First Air Fleet - men like Commander Minoru Genda, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, and Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo - became true believers in the Pearl Harbor plan largely because Yamamoto was willing to believe in it first, and to push it through against stubborn institutional resistance. This is the mark, not of a reluctant and tragic figure, but of a powerful advocate for a position he held with deep personal conviction. Yamamoto wanted this operation to happen. He was willing to break institutional china to make it happen. And when it happened, he defended it against its many critics with vigor.

The image of Yamamoto as peaceful and enlightened, therefore, is a postwar construction, convenient both to an American public that wanted its defeated enemy to have at least one “good” villain, and to a Japanese public that wanted to believe their wartime leadership had been tragically misunderstood rather than genuinely reckless. The real Yamamoto was a patriot, a gambler, and a man who thought that the proper response to long odds was to bet the house. The Pearl Harbor attack was exactly the operation such a man would conceive, and it should be understood in that light.

A Different Kind of Revisionism

The Pearl Harbor attack is the subject of a considerable amount of revisionist history, which is generally preoccupied with the Roosevelt Administration. It is relatively common now to see arguments that the White House had foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack and allowed it to happen in order to facilitate American entry into the world war. This is, in general, a misreading of genuine strands of thought in the Roosevelt Administration. It is true that much of the American leadership group was convinced that a conflict with Japan had become essentially inevitable, and that Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were adamant that Japan should fire the first shot. However, this confuses general principles with the particulars of the attack. It is one thing to say that the Roosevelt Administration was generally expecting war to break out with Japan, and another to say that they knew that Pearl Harbor would be attacked on the morning of December 7, and that they let American sailors die like sacrificial lambs.

This is a dense topic which is not our particular subject here. Instead, we will argue rather explicitly for a different sort of revisionism centered on Yamamoto. The great Japanese Admiral, far from being a prescient, wise, and measured commander, was in fact an explicitly disastrous personality for Japan, and a keystone contributor to Japan’s cataclysmic defeat. Whatever Yamamoto may have said about the wisdom of avoiding war with America, he was trigger man who ensured not only that the war would begin, but also that it would begin with a scandalizing attack that radicalized American enmity towards Japan. The attack on Pearl Harbor may have been a tactically and operationally brilliant design, but strategically it was an unmitigated disaster of the highest order.

In attacking Pearl Harbor without a prior declaration of war, Yamamoto not only directly triggered the war that he allegedly was so firmly against, but he also scuttled Japan’s entire strategic conception. Japan’s system of war, both in practice and in theory, was built around leveraging battlefield successes into negotiated victories. Prior Japanese successes, in the Russo-Japanese War and early iterations of the Sino-Japanese War, saw Tokyo achieve negotiated concessions on the back of battlefield momentum. In a war against the United States, this was plainly the only form of victory that Japan could hope for. Since Japan lacked the strategic range to pose even a minor threat to the American homeland, it was clearly impossible for Japan to win anything like a decisive strategic victory over the United States. Rather, any Japanese victory would have to come through negotiation, by attriting American combat power and resolve until Washington agreed to recognize Japanese acquisitions in Southeast Asia and China.

In this sense, the conventional Japanese strategy - establishing a flexible defensive perimeter and waiting for the Americans to come to them - was consistent with a theory of victory centered on negotiations. When Yamamoto blew this strategy up in favor of aggressive forward deployments and direct attacks on American installations, he radicalized the scope of the war and pushed American opinion to support an all or nothing, knife to the hilt struggle predicated on Japanese unconditional surrender. Furthermore, his incredible appetite for operational risks would lead to a rapid spiral in Japanese combat power and shatter Japan’s sword at Midway.

This is, then, a work of Yamamoto revisionism. He was certainly a tragic figure, though not remotely in the way he is generally portrayed. His tragedy lay not in being forced to reluctantly fight a war that he opposed, but rather in the fact that his aggression and risk appetite led directly to an ocean scale fight to the death with an enraged America that he did not understand nearly as well as he liked to imply. His tragedy lay in the fact that he made a sequence of catastrophic mistakes which ended in atomic bombing. The tragedy of Yamamoto is that he was a fool.

Yamamoto’s Flank Screen

To understand why Yamamoto conceived of Pearl Harbor in the first place, we must step back and look at the broader operational situation confronting the Japanese Navy in 1941. This situation was shaped, above all, by Japan’s economic crisis and the increasingly urgent need to acquire an independent supply of oil. As we have discussed in earlier entries, the Japanese economy had been in a state of quasi-war mobilization since 1938 as a result of the botched campaign in China, and the American oil embargo of July 1941 pushed the country’s existing stockpiles from “uncomfortable” to “insufficient for continued military operations within eighteen months.” The consensus that emerged in Tokyo during the latter half of 1941 was that Japan had to move south, and move quickly, to seize the oil of the Dutch East Indies and the rubber and tin of British Malaya before the economic squeeze caved in on the home islands.

This decision created an immediate operational problem. The Southern Resource Area - the Japanese term for the territory running from the Malay Peninsula through the Indies to the Philippines - was not within easy reach of existing Japanese bases. The naval and ground forces required to seize it would have to move across thousands of miles of ocean, through constricted waters flanked by American, British, and Dutch colonial possessions. The campaign, in short, had a serious flank problem. The Japanese could not conduct it without exposing their shipping lanes and their amphibious forces to potential interdiction from the Philippines (under American control), from Malaya and Singapore (under British control), and from the Dutch naval forces operating from Java and the adjacent archipelago.

The British and Dutch components of this threat were, in practical terms, manageable. The British Far East Fleet was a skeletal force. Force Z - Prince of Wales and Repulse, which would be sunk by Japanese land-based aircraft within three days of Pearl Harbor - represented essentially the entirety of the British capital ship commitment to the region, and even that modest force was intended more as a political signal than as an operationally decisive asset. The Dutch had a handful of light cruisers and destroyers, a respectable submarine force, and very little else. Neither power could, in isolation, present a serious threat to the Japanese southern operation.

The Americans were a different matter entirely. The US Pacific Fleet, based at Pearl Harbor since the middle of 1940, was a substantial force by any measure: nine battleships, three aircraft carriers, a robust cruiser contingent, and the supporting infrastructure of a modern naval power. While this fleet was geographically distant from the Southern Resource Area, it was nonetheless a looming threat. The Americans had a forward base at Manila in the Philippines, and the distance from Hawaii to the Philippines via Midway and Wake was within the operational range of the Pacific Fleet. If the Americans chose to intervene, they could in theory assemble a powerful task force at Pearl Harbor, steam it westward through the central Pacific, and intervene in the Japanese southern campaign either by relieving the Philippines, by striking Japanese shipping in the South China Sea, or by threatening the Japanese home islands directly.

The question for Japanese planners, therefore, was what to do about this American threat. The conventional Japanese answer, rooted in decades of doctrinal development, was what we might call the “wait and react” strategy. Under this schema, Japan would seize the Southern Resource Area with minimal direct interference from the Americans (who would require some months to organize a relief expedition), would fortify the central Pacific island chain, and would wait for the inevitable American counter-offensive. When the American fleet came sailing west, it would be subjected to a series of attritional attacks - submarine ambushes, night torpedo actions by light forces, attacks by land-based bombers from the Mandate Islands - until it arrived at some point in the western Pacific sufficiently weakened to be dealt with by the Japanese main body in a Decisive Battle. This was the framework within which the Japanese Navy had been trained and equipped since roughly 1921, and it had the virtue of conforming to the standard Mahanian doctrine shared by all major navies of the era.

Yamamoto’s objections to this scheme were multiple and, in their way, rigorous. First, he did not believe that the Americans could be sufficiently attrited by submarine and light forces during their transit to make the Decisive Battle winnable. The experience of the previous two decades had shown that the attritional phase of naval operations tended to produce disappointing results; submarines were hard to coordinate with surface forces, night torpedo actions were notoriously difficult, and the Pacific was simply too big for a reliable interdiction of a fleet transit. Second, and more importantly, Yamamoto did not believe that the Japanese battle line, even if it caught the American fleet in a weakened state, could actually defeat it. The arithmetic of modern naval gunnery suggested that the superior number of American battleships - even with some portion of the force attrited - would still produce a Japanese defeat in any conventional surface engagement. The wait-and-react strategy, in Yamamoto’s view, led predictably to a losing battle, and then to the collapse of Japanese maritime defense and an American advance on the home islands.

What Yamamoto proposed instead was a radical inversion of the conventional schema. Rather than wait for the Americans to come to Japan, the Japanese fleet would go to the Americans and strike them at the moment of maximum vulnerability - which was, paradoxically, the moment when they were safely at anchor in their main base. The logic of this proposal was twofold. First, it would destroy a significant portion of the American battle line before any attritional phase was necessary, thus solving the arithmetic problem of the Decisive Battle by simply removing the relevant American units from the equation. Second, and perhaps more importantly for the overall campaign, it would so disrupt American operational capacity in the Pacific that the Americans would be incapable of interfering with the Japanese seizure of the Southern Resource Area during its critical opening phase.

This second point is often overlooked in popular histories, which tend to frame Pearl Harbor as an abortive attempt to destroy the American capacity for war altogether. That was never the objective. Yamamoto had no illusions about his ability to “knock out” the United States with a single blow; his entire strategic worldview was predicated on the understanding that such a blow was impossible. What Pearl Harbor was designed to do was considerably more modest: to disrupt American deployment in the Pacific for a period of months, thus securing the Japanese flank during the opening phase of the southern campaign. The Japanese needed roughly six months to seize and consolidate control of the Southern Resource Area. If the American fleet could be disabled for those six months - or better, for longer - then the Japanese could complete their primary operational task without serious interference.

This is a narrower and more realistic objective than the mythology of Pearl Harbor usually allows. It is also, crucially, a flank-securing operation rather than a war-winning one. Yamamoto was not proposing to defeat the United States with the Pearl Harbor attack; he was proposing to create the conditions under which the primary operation - the seizure of the south - could be completed on schedule. In this sense, Pearl Harbor was conceptually analogous to many flank-screening operations in the history of continental warfare: a subsidiary operation, mounted for the purpose of freeing the main effort from an otherwise dangerous threat. The fact that it was an air strike conducted from carriers against a naval base three thousand miles away does not change its conceptual character. It was, essentially, a very long-range flank screen.

Once we understand Pearl Harbor in these terms, a number of the operation’s design features make more sense. The priority targeting of battleships rather than fuel depots, drydocks, or repair facilities, for example, reflects not some peculiar Japanese obsession with capital ships, but the specific operational task of preventing American offensive action during the six-month window of the southern campaign. Battleships were the instrument of American offensive projection; disable them, and the Americans could not mount a Pacific offensive, regardless of how quickly they repaired their infrastructure or replaced their fuel stocks. Similarly, the decision to attack on a Sunday morning, when the fleet would be maximally concentrated in port, reflects the specific operational goal of catching as many American combatants as possible in a state of unreadiness. The entire design of the operation was oriented around the task of flank security for the southern campaign. These were, even in the most optimistic construction, meager gains for such an exorbitant risk.

From Wargame to War Plan

Given the audacity and technical complexity of the Pearl Harbor operation, it is a striking and somewhat underappreciated fact that serious planning for it did not begin until quite late - indeed, remarkably late, by the standards of an operation of this scale. The mythology of Pearl Harbor tends to suggest a long and patient Japanese preparation, with the attack representing the culmination of years of careful planning. This is not correct. In fact, Pearl Harbor was conceived operationally only after a specific American decision created the conditions under which it became plausible, and the serious planning effort did not kick off until the early months of 1941 - barely ten months before the attack itself.

The American decision in question was the 1940 forward basing of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Prior to this, the bulk of the Pacific Fleet had been based at San Pedro, California, with regular deployments to Hawaii for exercises and training. The move to permanent basing at Pearl Harbor was authorized by President Roosevelt in the spring of 1940, ostensibly for the purpose of deterring Japanese aggression in the Pacific. Admiral James Richardson, then the Pacific Fleet commander, objected strongly to the move - arguing that Pearl Harbor lacked adequate infrastructure, that the forward basing undermined fleet readiness, and that, far from deterring Japanese aggression, it placed the American fleet in a more vulnerable position. Richardson pressed his objections to the point of insubordination and was eventually relieved of command. The fleet stayed at Pearl Harbor, where it was destined to become a target rather than a deterrent.

This is important because it means that the operational precondition for the Pearl Harbor attack - the presence of the American battle line at Pearl Harbor - was only established in mid-1940. Even then, however, Japan lacked the organizational and technical means to actually mount the attack.

None of this is to say that the Japanese had not considered such schemes before. As we noted in earlier entries, the concept of a preemptive strike against an enemy fleet in its base had respectable antecedents in Japanese naval thought. The Japanese Naval War College had conducted tabletop exercises involving a carrier raid on Pearl Harbor as early as 1927. Yamamoto himself had lectured on related topics in 1928. The concept, however, was purely theoretical, and it remained so throughout the 1930s because the operational conditions for its execution were lacking. The American battle line was not at Pearl Harbor; carrier aviation was not yet mature enough to deliver a decisive blow; and in any case, the Japanese fleet carrier force was too small to produce the kind of concentrated striking power that a serious attack would require.

By 1940, however, all three of these conditions had begun to shift. The Pacific Fleet had been moved forward. Carrier aviation, particularly Japanese carrier aviation, had reached a level of tactical proficiency that made a massed strike against a well-defended target at least theoretically feasible. And the Japanese fleet carrier force had grown to six first-rate carriers: Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, Soryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku. The last two, the new Shokaku-class carriers, were not in fact commissioned until August and September 1941, which is itself an indication of how tight the operational timeline actually was. Pearl Harbor was planned around a carrier force whose most powerful members were being commissioned barely three months before the operation was executed.

Yamamoto’s own thinking about a Pearl Harbor operation seems to have coalesced during the fleet exercises of spring 1940, when the results of Japanese naval aviation training demonstrated that a massed carrier strike against warships at anchor was - if not trivial - at least operationally plausible. He began privately discussing the concept with Vice Admiral Fukudome Shigeru, his chief of staff, in March or April of 1940. At this stage, however, the concept was still exploratory, and Yamamoto himself considered it too dangerous to attempt.

It is common, at this stage in the emerging planning process, to point to the November 1940 British attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto, in which a force of just twenty-one Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers crippled three Italian battleships at their moorings. Ostensibly, this provided a powerful proof-of-concept. Coming as it did right as Japanese planning was beginning to get underway, it is frequently presumed that the Japanese must have studied the British attack or otherwise derived encouragement from its success. The Japanese did dispatch Lieutenant Commander Takeshi Naito to Taranto to view the damage and discuss the attack with Italian officers, but remarkably, no surviving documentation exists to demonstrate that Naito provided a systematic report on his visit or that he provided input on the design of the Pearl Harbor attack. The connection is spurious at best, and the balance of the evidence suggests that while Taranto piqued modest interest among Yamamoto’s staff, it was not a major driver of their planning, which had a powerful momentum of its.

In a letter dated January 7, 1941 - a document of considerable historical importance, if only for fixing the date at which the Pearl Harbor plan crossed from concept to program - Yamamoto laid out his preliminary operational vision and directed Rear Admiral Onishi Takijiro, chief of staff of the land-based 11th Air Fleet, to conduct a feasibility study. Onishi, an aviation specialist and a fellow air-power enthusiast, was a logical choice for the task. He was not, however, a believer in the operation at the outset. Indeed, Onishi’s initial reaction was skeptical: the tactical problems involved - the shallow depth of Pearl Harbor, the need to extend the range of carrier aviation beyond anything previously attempted, the risk of detection en route - struck him as severe, and the strategic payoff uncertain.

This brings us to a point that is rarely appreciated in the mythology of Pearl Harbor: the operation was built in the face of essentially universal institutional opposition within the Japanese Navy, and it would not have happened at all if Yamamoto had not been willing to force it through by sheer personal authority. The Naval General Staff, the body nominally responsible for fleet strategy, was opposed. Most of the senior officers to whom the plan was briefed were opposed. Vice Admiral Nagumo, who would command the First Air Fleet during the actual operation, was himself privately opposed, and throughout the planning process harbored grave doubts about the feasibility of the attack. The operation moved forward because Yamamoto - as commander of the Combined Fleet, and as the single most prestigious and politically connected officer in the Navy - was willing to stake his career on it, to threaten resignation if it was canceled, and to overwhelm institutional opposition by force of will.

The actual detailed planning was conducted primarily by Commander Minoru Genda, a brilliant and aggressive naval aviator, working with Captain Kameto Kuroshima, Yamamoto’s senior staff officer, and Rear Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka, chief of staff of the First Air Fleet. Genda’s role deserves particular mention. He was the principal architect of the tactical concept: a massed strike from six carriers, launching two waves of aircraft, prioritizing battleships and aircraft carriers as targets, with torpedo bombers, dive bombers, level bombers, and fighters all operating in coordination. Much of what made Pearl Harbor operationally distinct from predecessor operations - including Taranto, which had been a much smaller and less complex affair - was Genda’s insistence on the integrated use of all four aircraft types, in concentrated waves, against a defined target set. This was, for its time, an extraordinary exercise in tactical complexity.

The planning effort moved into higher gear in April 1941, with the formal creation of the First Air Fleet as a unified carrier formation under Vice Admiral Nagumo. This was itself a significant organizational innovation. Prior to April 1941, the Japanese carriers had operated in carrier divisions - two-ship units attached to various fleets - with no central air command and limited capacity for coordinated operations. Yamamoto, who had been an air-power advocate since the 1920s, had been pushing for a unified carrier force for years, and the demands of the Pearl Harbor plan provided the opportunity to create one. The First Air Fleet, as constituted, was the most powerful concentration of naval aviation in the world - and yet it had been in existence for less than eight months when it sailed for Pearl Harbor.

Let us pause to appreciate the astonishing compression of this timeline. In January 1941, the operation was a concept in a letter. In April 1941, the organizational instrument required to execute it was formally constituted. By August 1941, the final two carriers required for the operation (Shokaku and Zuikaku) were commissioned. By late November 1941, the fleet was at sea. The entire operation, from formal commencement of planning to execution, occupied less than eleven months. For an operation of this scale and complexity, this is an extraordinarily short development cycle, especially given the fact that the operation was forced into being by Yamamoto against the objections of both superiors and subordinates.

This compression is itself revealing about the strategic character of the operation. Pearl Harbor was not, as is sometimes portrayed, the culmination of a long-matured Japanese master plan. It was a responsive and somewhat improvised operation, built on tight margins to address a strategic situation that had crystallized only in the preceding eighteen months. The Japanese did not want to fight the United States in 1940. They came to accept the probability of fighting the United States in 1941 only as the economic crisis intensified and the American oil embargo put them on a definite clock. And they planned the Pearl Harbor operation within that tight timeframe, under conditions of significant institutional disagreement, with many technical problems left for last-minute resolution.

On the Clock

The compressed planning timeline meant that a number of critical technical problems had to be worked out at the last moment - in some cases, in the final weeks before the attack. This, more than any other single factor, illustrates the extent to which Pearl Harbor was a manifestation of Yamamoto’s will, with the Japanese naval establishment bending into his operational schema, in many cases working round the clock to solve critical technical problems. The essential point here is that, late into the autumn of 1941, Japan was on a road to gamble everything on an operation that it did not yet have the technical basis to undertake.

The most famous of these technical problems was the shallow-water torpedo issue. The entire viability of the Pearl Harbor attack, in its original conception, depended on the ability of Japanese torpedo bombers to deliver effective torpedo strikes against the American battleships at their moorings. Torpedo attacks were, by 1941, the single most effective method available for sinking a large warship: a properly placed torpedo strike, below the armored belt and into the unprotected underwater hull, could kill a battleship outright, whereas even the heaviest aerial bombs of the period had difficulty penetrating the deck armor of a modern capital ship. If the Japanese could not use torpedoes at Pearl Harbor, the entire operation was abortive.

The problem, however, was that Pearl Harbor was shallow. The average depth of Battleship Row was approximately forty feet, and the standard Japanese aerial torpedo, when dropped by an aircraft, typically plunged to a depth of around one hundred feet before leveling off for its run to the target. In a deep anchorage, this presented no problem; in Pearl Harbor, it meant that any torpedo dropped in the standard fashion would bury itself in the harbor mud rather than strike its target. This was the problem that had caused Onishi, in his initial feasibility study, to question the entire premise of the operation. The Japanese simply did not have, in early 1941, a torpedo capable of functioning reliably in shallow water.

The solution to this problem was developed over the course of 1941 by the Yokosuka Naval Arsenal, working in collaboration with the aviators of the First Air Fleet. The Type 91 aerial torpedo was modified with the addition of wooden stabilizer fins - strapped to the tail of the torpedo, these fins slowed the torpedo’s plunge on entry and allowed it to level off at much shallower depths. The modification was simple in concept but required a great deal of trial-and-error refinement to perfect, and even with the fins attached, the torpedoes required a very specific delivery envelope: a low and level approach at a precise altitude, a low airspeed at release, and a carefully calibrated drop height above the water. Japanese aviators spent the autumn of 1941 in intensive training in Kagoshima Bay - a body of water selected for its superficial resemblance to Pearl Harbor - practicing these modified torpedo attacks. The design of the fin was not finalized until November 1941, meaning that the critical weapon for the attack was not functionally available until a few weeks before the operation was executed.

A second technical problem concerned the bombing of heavily armored battleships. Even with effective torpedoes, the Japanese recognized that some of the American battleships would be moored in positions - inboard of other ships, or otherwise shielded - where torpedo attack would be impossible. For these targets, level bombing with armor-piercing bombs was the only option. The challenge, however, was that standard aerial bombs of the period could not reliably penetrate the thick deck armor of American battleships. The Japanese solution was improvised: they took sixteen-inch naval shells from the stock intended for the Nagato-class battleships, fitted them with fins and a rudimentary arming mechanism, and converted them into 800-kilogram armor-piercing bombs. This conversion program, like the torpedo modification, was not completed until the late autumn of 1941. It was one of these improvised bombs, dropped by Lieutenant Kazuyoshi Kitajima’s flight on December 7, that penetrated the forward magazine of USS Arizona and produced the catastrophic explosion that remains the most iconic image of the attack.

A third technical problem concerned fleet refueling. The Pearl Harbor operation required the First Air Fleet to transit more than three thousand miles from its sortie point at Hitokappu Bay in the Kurile Islands to its launch point north of Oahu, and then - assuming the operation went well - to return to Japan. This transit, even allowing for the fuel-efficient cruising speeds possible for the carriers and their escorts, exceeded the operational range of the fleet’s destroyers, which had limited bunker capacity. Underway refueling - the transfer of fuel from tankers to combatants at sea, which was by 1941 a standard element of American naval operations - was not a routine practice in the Japanese Navy. Japanese tankers and combatants had to develop and train in at-sea refueling techniques specifically for the Pearl Harbor operation, and these techniques were not perfected until the final months of 1941. Indeed, the North Pacific route chosen for the approach - stormy, cold, and generally inhospitable - presented serious challenges for underway refueling, and the operation was conducted with the tacit acceptance that several of the smaller escorts might have to be detached and sent home if refueling proved impossible in heavy weather.

A fourth problem, and one which is rarely discussed because its resolution was so unsatisfactory, concerned the question of a follow-up attack. Yamamoto’s original vision for Pearl Harbor included not just the two strike waves that were actually conducted, but potentially a third and even a fourth wave, aimed at the fuel storage facilities, the drydocks, and the repair infrastructure of the Pearl Harbor base. The destruction of this infrastructure, rather than the ships themselves, was arguably the most strategically consequential possible outcome of the attack, since infrastructure losses could not be recovered in the operational timeframe of the southern campaign. The logistical and tactical feasibility of these additional waves, however, was never fully resolved. In the event, Nagumo - whose conservative temperament would become a recurring theme of the early Pacific War - would elect not to launch a third strike on December 7, and the infrastructure of Pearl Harbor would survive the attack essentially intact. This was not a failure of planning per se; it was a failure of the planning process to definitively resolve a question that should have been resolved months earlier. The late and improvised character of the planning left important operational decisions to be made under fire, by a commander whose inclinations did not favor further risk-taking.

One could multiply the examples. The intelligence requirements of the operation - constant surveillance of the disposition of the Pacific Fleet, precise knowledge of anti-aircraft defenses at Pearl Harbor, identification of specific targets - were not fully met until the closing weeks before the attack, and depended critically on the continued functioning of the Japanese consulate in Honolulu, which was engaged in espionage activities barely concealed from American counterintelligence. The weather forecasting for the transit required real-time updates that had to be delivered by radio in ways that did not compromise the fleet’s operational security. The coordination of the attack with the Malayan and Philippine operations, which were to be launched almost simultaneously, required a degree of synchronization that stretched Japanese command-and-control capabilities to the utmost.

In short, virtually every technical and operational component of the Pearl Harbor plan was completed just in time, with many elements unresolved until the final weeks. The operation was, in this sense, a triumph of improvisation - a demonstration of what a disciplined and capable military organization can accomplish under pressure when it is willing to accept significant risk. It is a mark of the professionalism of the Japanese Navy in 1941 that the attack came off at all, let alone that it achieved the tactical results it did. It is also a mark of how narrow the margins were: a single significant failure - in the torpedo fins, in the bomb conversion, in the refueling, in the operational security - could have produced a failure of a much more mundane, tactical sort. The tragic irony was that, by narrowly threading the needle of this complex timetable and solving their technical barriers in the nick of time, Japan sailed exultantly into a disaster.

Sunday Morning

The operational narrative of December 7 itself has been told many times and need not detain us at great length. The First Air Fleet, under Nagumo, departed Hitokappu Bay on November 26, 1941, and sailed east under strict radio silence along a northern great-circle route that kept it well clear of commercial shipping lanes. The fleet encountered heavy seas - at one point, several destroyers had to temporarily abandon station due to weather damage - but the transit proceeded successfully, and the fleet arrived at its launch point approximately 230 miles north of Oahu in the pre-dawn hours of December 7.

The first wave of 183 aircraft launched at around 0600 local time, with a second wave of 171 aircraft following roughly an hour later. When the first wave of 183 aircraft arrived over Pearl Harbor at about 0745 local time, flight commanders radioed the code word “Tora! Tora! Tora!” This is sometimes rendered literally, as tora means “tiger” in Japanese, but this is not what was meant. “Tora” was an abbreviation of the longer codeword, totsugeki raigeki, which means lightning attack or thunderbolt. This was the code which signified that complete surprise had been achieved. For the American sailors below, the attack may as well have been a thunderbolt from the heavens.

The two waves, integrated with considerable tactical skill by Commander Fuchida, struck Pearl Harbor in sequence. The first wave achieved complete surprise, with the attacking aircraft reaching their launch positions over Oahu before any meaningful American response was organized. The second wave arrived to find alert American defenses and took heavier losses, but was still able to press home its attacks. The Japanese tactical package, which layered and synchronized strafing runs, torpedo launches, and bombing, was tremendously disorienting, and American resistance was never more than sporadic and uncoordinated. By approximately 0945, the attack was essentially complete, and the surviving aircraft were returning to their carriers. The entire action of the day took roughly two hours, from the moment the first wave appeared overhead to the time the second wave began to wheel north to return to their carriers.

The tangible results of the attack were, at first glance, spectacular. Five of the eight American battleships present at Pearl Harbor were sunk or otherwise put out of action outright: Arizona, Oklahoma, California, West Virginia, and Nevada. A sixth, the USS Pennsylvania, was damaged while in drydock. The remaining two, Maryland and Tennessee, sustained lighter damage but were trapped by other sunken vessels and would require time to extricate. In addition, three light cruisers, three destroyers, and several auxiliary vessels were damaged or destroyed. The Army Air Corps, which had concentrated most of its aircraft at Hickam and Wheeler Fields to guard against expected (but non-existent) sabotage attempts, lost approximately 180 aircraft destroyed and another 150 damaged. American personnel casualties totaled around 2,400 dead and 1,100 wounded, of whom nearly half came from the catastrophic explosion and sinking of the Arizona. Japanese losses were modest by any measure: twenty-nine aircraft destroyed, fifty-five airmen killed, and nine submariners lost in an abortive midget-submarine attack.

On paper, this was a tactical triumph of a very high order: an unprecedented display of concentrated, long range striking power. The main body of the active American battle line had been annihilated; the Pacific Fleet had been, in appearance, gutted; and Japanese losses had been trivial. Admiral Yamamoto and his staff, receiving the initial reports aboard the flagship Nagato, had reason to believe that the operation had exceeded their expectations. Vice Admiral Nagumo, in the event, felt that the objectives had been achieved and declined to launch the third strike that some of his subordinates - particularly Genda and Fuchida - urgently recommended.

Nagumo’s decision not to launch follow on attacks has been hotly debated for years. The bull case for further aggression was fairly straightforward, and presumed that additional waves could finish off several of the stricken battleships and attack the fuel and repair infrastructure. Nagumo, however, was far more risk averse than Yamamoto and was concerned about both the whereabouts of the American carriers and aircraft losses to the now-alert American defenses. Furthermore, additional waves could stretch the attack into the evening and force his aviators to attempt night landings, for which they were not well trained. Only a commander with an aggressive disposition and high risk tolerance would have stayed on station to pour in follow on attacks, and that simply was not Nagumo.

The First Air Fleet turned north and began its return transit to Japan, arriving home in late December to considerable celebration.

Snug in the Mud

It is at this point that the tactical narrative of Pearl Harbor begins to diverge from the strategic one. The visual impression of the attack was that of a shattered American fleet. The actual damage, however, was considerably less than it appeared, and the reason it was less than it appeared is simple and worth stating clearly: the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor saved the American battle line from being a total loss, while the immediate proximity to shore facilities greatly mitigated American casualties.

This point is essential to understanding why Pearl Harbor, for all its tactical dazzle, was a strategic failure on Yamamoto’s own terms. In deep water - in the open Pacific, say - a ship that has taken multiple torpedo hits and serious bomb damage is usually a total loss. It sinks. It settles to the bottom at a depth where recovery is impractical, and the hull, the machinery, the armaments, and the infrastructure invested in the ship are all lost to the owning navy. In the case of a modern battleship, which represented somewhere between twenty and eighty million dollars’ worth of specialized naval capability in 1941 currency, such losses are effectively irreplaceable within any operational timeframe relevant to an ongoing war. If the American battleships at Pearl Harbor had been caught in deep water, as Admiral Togo caught the Russian Baltic Fleet at Tsushima in 1905, they would have been gone for good.

Pearl Harbor, however, is a shallow anchorage. The average depth along Battleship Row was approximately forty feet - enough water to float a battleship, but not nearly enough to sink one below the prospect of recovery. When a battleship was struck by multiple torpedoes and took on heavy flooding, it did not disappear into the abyss; it settled to the harbor floor with a substantial portion of its superstructure, and in some cases its main deck, still above the waterline. This meant that the ship could be pumped out, patched, refloated, towed to drydock, and extensively repaired. In the harsh arithmetic of naval war, a battleship sunk in shallow water is not sunk at all.

The post-attack salvage effort at Pearl Harbor was, by any measure, one of the most remarkable operations of its kind in history. Within days of the attack, a Salvage Division was organized under Captain Homer Wallin, who would over the course of the next two years supervise the refloating and partial restoration of most of the damaged vessels. The scope of this effort deserves to be appreciated. USS Nevada, the only battleship that had managed to get underway during the attack and had been beached after sustaining heavy damage, was refloated in February 1942, sent to Puget Sound for extensive repairs, and returned to active service by late 1942. USS California, which had been holed by two torpedoes and a bomb and had settled onto the harbor floor over the course of three days, was refloated in March 1942 and, after extensive reconstruction at Puget Sound, rejoined the fleet in January 1944. USS West Virginia, perhaps the most extensively damaged of the ships that were eventually returned to service, took six torpedo hits and was refloated in May 1942; she would not rejoin the active fleet until July 1944, but when she did so, she would serve through the end of the war. USS Tennessee and USS Maryland, the less damaged battleships that had been trapped behind sunken ships, were back in service by February 1942. USS Pennsylvania, damaged in drydock, was operational by March 1942.

In total, six of the eight battleships present at Pearl Harbor on December 7 were eventually returned to active service. The two that were not - Arizona, whose forward magazine had been penetrated and whose hull had been so damaged by the resulting explosion that she was declared beyond repair, and Oklahoma, which had capsized during the attack and whose hull was so severely compromised that the Navy elected not to return her to service after righting her - represented the actual permanent losses of the attack. Two battleships of the older generation, in other words, were the real American capital-ship casualties.

This is a crucial point, because it directly undermines the strategic logic of the Pearl Harbor operation. The attack had been designed to disable the American battle line for the duration of the southern campaign - roughly six months. In the event, several of the battleships were back in service well within that window. Maryland, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania were operational by early 1942. Nevada was operational by late 1942. The delay actually imposed on the American battle line by the Pearl Harbor attack was, in terms of the battleships that could be repaired, something like a year for most of the damaged ships, with longer delays for the most severely damaged units.

Moreover, and this is a point that bears emphasis, even the older American battleships that were damaged at Pearl Harbor would have been, by 1942 or 1943, operationally second-line assets regardless of the attack. The Pacific War was, as the Japanese themselves had begun to suspect, going to be a carrier war, and the slow American “standard-type” battleships of the 1916-1923 period were not going to be the decisive instrument of American naval power in it. These ships would spend most of the Pacific War in subsidiary roles - shore bombardment, amphibious support, and the occasional surface engagement against equally obsolescent Japanese units. The most consequential American naval assets in the Pacific - the fleet carriers, the fast battleships, the heavy cruisers, and the destroyers that would form the modern fast carrier task force - were either not present at Pearl Harbor on December 7 or were not seriously damaged. The attack, in other words, had struck an American asset class that was already in strategic decline, and had damaged even that asset class in a way that was recoverable rather than permanent.

The more one evaluates the attack on Pearl Harbor, the more one realizes that Yamamoto had conspired to bring about an almost ideally counterproductive battle. This becomes apparent when a comparison is made to the schema advocated by Japanese strategic orthodoxy. Suppose, for example, that Japan had screened its southward advance only by attacking British and Dutch bases in Malaya and the East Indies, and perhaps by bombing American airbases and naval infrastructure in the Philippines. To begin with, this would have been far less explosive politically than an attack on Hawaii, and would have been unlikely to so intensely radicalize American opinion toward Japan.

In this scenario, consider an outcome where the American fleet comes westward to relieve the Philippines in the spring of 1942, several months after Japan’s opening offensive to the south. If the American fleet had been brought to battle east of the Philippines, perhaps in the extreme depths of the Leyte Gulf, a similar damage profile to that done in Pearl Harbor would have resulted in a slew of total losses, with tens of thousands of American personnel killed. A mass casualty battle thousands of miles from home, with no direct attack on core American territories, would have created a far different political situation, with the potential to be more amenable to a negotiated peace. This is an essential point to consider. American casualties in Pearl Harbor were much lower than they would have been in an equivalent engagement in the open ocean, because they were in direct proximity to medical and rescue infrastructure and because most of the damaged ships would not sink in the shallow water. An attack in the shallows of Pearl was always bound to be casualty light relative to the ordinance expenditure, and commensurate with the difficulty of sinking ships outright.

Space into Time, Time into Power

Even this assessment, however, understates the strategic incoherence of the Pearl Harbor attack given the strategic constraints facing Japan. The attack had been designed to buy time for the Japanese southern campaign by disrupting American deployment. The problem, it turned out, was that American deployment was not structured in the way the Japanese had assumed. The United States was not going to come charging across the Pacific in a Mahanian sortie to relieve the Philippines. It was going to fight a different kind of war, one in which the disruption of the Pacific Fleet’s battle line was, in the fullness of time, essentially irrelevant.

To understand this point, we must look briefly at the evolution of American Pacific War planning, which - by an accident of timing that was entirely unknown to the Japanese - had taken a decisive turn in 1940 and 1941 away from the assumptions that underpinned the Pearl Harbor operation. Since the early twentieth century, American war planning against Japan had been organized around what was called “War Plan Orange,” which envisioned a relatively aggressive American response to a Japanese-American conflict. Under various iterations of Plan Orange, the Pacific Fleet was to be deployed westward from Hawaii or the American West Coast toward the western Pacific, to relieve the American garrison in the Philippines and to fight a decisive engagement with the Japanese main body somewhere in the Philippine Sea. This was the American plan that Japanese strategic thinking - including the “wait and react” doctrine of the Naval General Staff, and Yamamoto’s own operational calculus - was designed to engage.

By 1941, however, American thinking had shifted. The rise of Nazi Germany in Europe had forced American planners to confront the prospect of a two-ocean war, and the resulting strategic reassessment - codified in late 1940 in what was called “Plan Dog,” and later elaborated into the “Rainbow 5” war plans - had led to a fundamental restructuring of American priorities. Under this new doctrine, the immediate relief of the Philippines was no longer a central priority. Indeed, American planners had effectively accepted, by 1941, that the Philippines would have to be temporarily abandoned - Douglas MacArthur’s objections notwithstanding - and that the Pacific Fleet would not be making any aggressive westward move in the early phase of the war. The fleet’s job, in the new concept, was to hold Hawaii, maintain the shipping lanes to Australia, and gradually accumulate the forces necessary for an eventual counter-offensive on an American timetable, not a Japanese one.

This was, it should be noted, a strategic doctrine that was essentially unaffected by the Pearl Harbor attack. The Americans were not going to launch a westward offensive in early 1942 regardless of whether their battleships were sunk at Pearl Harbor or floating serenely off California. The Pearl Harbor attack, therefore, disrupted a deployment that was not going to happen anyway. The attack accelerated the obsolescence of an asset class - the old battleships - that was already on its way out of frontline service, and inflicted delays on elements that were not, in any case, needed for the active prosecution of the war in the early months of 1942.

More broadly, the American way of war in the Pacific - as it would evolve over the course of 1942 and 1943 - was designed around a particular strategic logic that rendered the Pearl Harbor attack essentially irrelevant to ultimate American success. This logic was, in its simplest formulation, the conversion of space into time, and of time into overwhelming combat power. The United States had vast geographic and industrial advantages over Japan, but these advantages could not be brought to bear instantaneously. Time was required to mobilize American industry, to train American pilots and sailors, to build American ships and aircraft, and to assemble the forces required for a Pacific offensive. The question, in late 1941 and early 1942, was whether the United States would be granted the time it needed to bring its advantages to bear.

The answer, as it turned out, was yes - and the reason for that yes had very little to do with the Pearl Harbor attack. The Pacific was simply too big. Even if the Japanese had captured all of the Southern Resource Area, and had fortified the central Pacific island chain to the utmost, they did not have the naval or logistical capacity to project force as far as Hawaii, much less to the American mainland. The distance from Tokyo to Pearl Harbor is approximately four thousand miles; the distance from Pearl Harbor to San Francisco is another two thousand. This is not a distance that even a victorious Japanese fleet could have spanned. The American homeland, and the American industrial base that would win the Pacific War, were fundamentally beyond the reach of Japanese offensive action. The question of how quickly the Americans could move westward from Pearl Harbor was, therefore, a question about the pace of an eventual American counter-offensive, not about whether such a counter-offensive would take place.

By converting the immense space of the Pacific into the time required for American mobilization, the United States effectively converted its industrial superiority into overwhelming combat power. This process took roughly two years. By the second half of 1943, the United States had assembled a naval force - organized around the new Essex-class fleet carriers, the Independence-class light carriers, the fast battleships, the heavy cruisers, and the Fletcher-class destroyers - that was, by any conceivable measure, vastly superior to the Japanese Combined Fleet. The fast carrier task force, as it came to be known, was not merely larger than any Japanese equivalent; it was operationally more sophisticated, tactically more flexible, and logistically more robust. It could project air power across vast ocean distances, sustain itself through an elaborate system of mobile service squadrons, and fight successive engagements in successive theaters without withdrawing for refit. It was, in short, a qualitatively different kind of naval instrument from anything the Japanese had fielded, and it was built with resources that were effectively beyond Japanese comprehension. By 1944, American shipyards were commissioning more carriers in a single month than the Japanese had managed to build in the entire prewar period.

None of this was prevented, or even significantly slowed, by the Pearl Harbor attack. The American industrial mobilization was on a schedule that had been established by acts of Congress in 1940 - notably the Two-Ocean Navy Act of July 1940, which authorized the construction of what would ultimately become the naval instrument of American victory in the Pacific. The Pearl Harbor attack had no bearing on this schedule. It could not be accelerated by Japanese action, but neither could it be meaningfully delayed. The United States was, by 1943, going to have a navy qualitatively and quantitatively superior to anything the Japanese could muster, and the precise fate of the old battleships at Pearl Harbor was, in this context, a detail of limited strategic consequence.

This, ultimately is the rub. Yamamoto, despite his reputation as a clear-sighted and realistic man, does not seem to have had a very good understanding of the United States at all. The Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940 was not a secret. It was public legislation of which Japan was fully aware, which called for an enormous building program of aircraft carriers and new fast battleships. The implication of this is that the assets that Japan attacked in Pearl Harbor were ships that were already explicitly marked for obsolescence by the new building program. The most optimistic framing for the attack on Pearl Harbor, then, was a sort of strategic window creation: the idea that the airstrike could knock out extant American assets and create a window of vulnerability before the 1940 building program came online.

The picture that emerges, then, is one where Pearl Harbor was a truly impressive tactical-technical achievement by the Japanese (it would be foolish to deny the novelty of a massed air strike at such extreme ranges), but a disaster on three other dimensions:

First, by attacking the American fleet specifically at Pearl Harbor, Japan struck in a place where American losses would be minimized due to the shallow harbor, the immediate proximity to repair and recovery infrastructure, and the relative ease with which personnel could be recovered and triaged.

Secondly, an undeclared act of war against a core American territory was always guaranteed to inflame American opinion against Japan in a way that an attack on the Philippines would not, let alone attacks on Dutch and British positions in Southeast Asia. This was a deliberate choice by Japan which locked them in a war with no diplomatic escape mechanisms.

Finally, the strike on Pearl Harbor targeted assets which were openly slated for second-rate status at best. The Two-Ocean Navy Act had already been passed and Japanese leadership was fully aware of its provisions. Given this, the entire schema of the Japanese attack becomes highly questionable, because it was already predetermined that American force generation would escalate on a timetable that Japan could not alter, even with the total destruction of the fleet at Pearl Harbor.

The technical brilliance and ambition of the Pearl Harbor attack tends to obscure these realities, as does the enduring fame and begrudging respect given to Admiral Yamamoto.

None of this is intended to imply that Yamamoto was wicked, or stupid, or that he was not a highly respected officer who embodied many of the prevailing values of the Japanese military establishment. What is clear, however, is that Yamamoto - contrary to his reputation as a war averse and wise counterbalance to Japanese militarism - in fact spent almost the entirety of 1941 bending the Japanese Navy to his will, forcing through an operational scheme that brought about a particular kind of war which Japan had no prospects of winning. He brought the Pearl Harbor strike to life against widespread institutional opposition and in the face of serious technical hurdles. It was the embodiment of his ethos as a gambler, and it came up bust in all the worst ways. The fact that Yamamoto seemed to have truly believed that a last second memorandum to the American Secretary of State would somehow alter the American view of the attack as a cowardly and dishonorable act, or dampen American hatred, is a strong clue that he did not understand the Americans as well as he believed. He would ultimately pay with his life and the lives of countless countrymen.

Share

As we cross the one month mark of the Israeli-American war on Iran, a sufficient corpus of data is emerging to contemplate the kinetic dynamics of the conflict. This is a very strange war. It is not merely the fact that the roster of combatants and associated parties - Netanyahu, President Trump, Lindsay “Holden Bloodfeast” Graham - comprise the most polarizing figures in world politics today. As if to punctuate this fact, I fully anticipate angry comments berating me for using a sanitized and emotionally titrated word like “polarizing.” But we digress.

Far more interesting than endless apoplexy over Israel or Trump is a look at the kinetic scheme of the war and what its long term strategic ramifications might be. We are using the term “war”, although it has somewhat humorously taken on life as a “Special Military Operation” - a riff on Russia’s idiosyncratic bureaucratic parlance for the war in Ukraine, which the White House inadvertently stepped in when they referred to Operation Epic Fury as a “special combat operation.”

Subscribe now

The idea of a Special Military Operation is interesting in its own right, and carries a connotation of regime change achieved through a mixture of military force and subversive coercion. Such a label was highly appropriate in the case of America’s January operation in Venezuela, where an overwhelming strike package was combined with political preparations which had Vice President Delcy Rodríguez in position for a favorable transfer of power. In contrast, the conflict in Ukraine has clearly spiraled beyond the scope of a “special operation”, which we can loosely define as kinetically coerced regime change or diplomacy. As early as 2022, Russia was prepared to transition to a conventional war with multiple army groupings and a robust logistical apparatus. While the Kremlin continues to call the war a Special Military Operation, this is mainly a device for domestic political purposes and signals the intent to fight the war without materially disrupting daily life in Russia, and has little bearing on the fact that the war is precisely that.

The war in Iran, however, is something else. Unlike in the Venezuelan case, there was no political preparation for a managed transition of power, and neither the United States nor Israel have substantive ground forces in position for operations against Iran. Israeli ground forces are engaged in Lebanon, and notwithstanding the deployment of several rapid reaction light infantry forces to the Middle East, the US is still only beginning a staging process which was not implemented until after hostilities had commenced.

When one looks past the political overtones, we see a war that, to this point, appears to be practically sui generis: a war conducted almost exclusively from standoff by both sides. This is a novel experiment in striking power, but it leaves us with a poor conceptual framework and vocabulary. Most of the verbiage and conceptual framing of warfare is built on a long history of ground-oriented combat, and there are few obvious comparisons to what is being attempted right now in Iran. War exclusively from standoff would appear to be a new frontier in armed conflict. It may be that it will fail - either through the outright failure by the Israeli-American alliance to achieve its objectives, or by forcing them to take recourse to ground forces. Such a failure would be meaningful, but so too would success. If America can succeed in degrading or destroying a powerful Iranian regime through striking power alone, this would have dangerous ramifications and create an entirely new calculus of deterrence and risk.

A war successfully waged from standoff might be conceived as the realization, nearly a century later, of the more extreme prognostications for air power in the interwar period of the 20th Century. The most famous prewar air power enthusiast, Italian general Giulio Douhet, argued in his influential 1921 book The Command of the Air that strategic bombing could win a war with minimal involvement of ground forces, by breaking the will of the enemy population. In Douhet’s vision, the force with superior striking power could bomb enemy cities with impunity and leave the enemy utterly without recourse. In a similar vein, although tinted with a sense of futility and despair, former British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin famously bemoaned:

I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defense is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.

Strategic bombing did prove to be a powerful new kinetic platform, but it certainly fell far short of these lofty expectations. Douhet’s belief that unstoppable aerial reduction of cities would destroy the enemy’s will to fight - “normal life would be unable to continue under the constant threat of death” - was thoroughly debunked, and even in Japan, which was particularly vulnerable to strategic bombing, effects on the “will” of the population were negligible.

Furthermore, Baldwin’s warning that “the bomber will always get through” proved to be poorly worded. It was certainly true that, given a large enough strike package, some bombers were sure to reach their targets, but strategic bombers proved extremely vulnerable. The overawing quality of strategic bombing belies the fact that losses of aircraft and crews were frequently exorbitant. In 1942 and 1943, loss rates frequently ranged between 5 and 7% per mission. RAF bomber command suffered an overall fatality rate of nearly 45% among its air crews, and the US Army Air Force’s Eight Air Force took losses of around 20%. Somewhat counterintuitively, the fatality rate among bomber crews was substantially higher than among ground forces. A private in a rifle company was far more likely to survive the war in Europe than the pilot of a powerful B-17.

Losses per sortie fell sharply in the Korean War relative to the Second World War in Europe (from 9.7 to 1.3 losses per 1,000 sorties), aided partially by the shorter penetration distances and the lower density of the air defense environment, and the burn rate in Vietnam was lower still. However, the sheer number of sorties flown in Vietnam led to nearly 10,000 lost aircraft on the American side, including just over 3,700 fixed wing aircraft, with more than 90% of these losses inflicted by ground defenses, rather than the paltry North Vietnamese fighter wing.

Although loss rates had fallen significantly on a per-flight basis, in Vietnam - just as in the Second World War - air crews had a more dangerous job than the infantry. Both fixed wing and helicopter flight crews had fatality rates above the overall US average (2.2%), and helicopters pilots in particular were horribly attrited. The 5.4% fatality rate among helicopter pilots was, yet again, higher even than among the 11Bs who formed the backbone of the infantry force grinding away on the ground. High airframe loss rates were also experienced by the Israeli Air Force in both the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, when combat losses were approximately 14 and 8 per 1,000 sorties respectively.

None of this is to suggest that air power has not been an absolutely vital component of military operations over the last century. Rather, what we are suggesting is that the modern framing of air power as an essentially safe kinetic platform - that is, sparing of both airframes and personnel - is relatively new, and dates only to the 1990’s and the Gulf War, where losses plummeted to just 0.16 per 1,000 sorties.

In essence, the first 50 years of strategic air power connoted two important limitations. First, that the use of air power was expensive in both airframes and personnel, and secondly that air power was limited as a strategic lever in the absence of ground forces. The first of these assumptions began to crumble, at least on the American side, in the 1990’s, and the frame of reference on losses in the war against Iran renders the losses in Vietnam incomprehensible to Americans. That same war in Iran is also challenging the second assumption of air power, which presumes that air strikes in the absence of a ground component can achieve only limited results.

What I am arguing, in a sense, is that we are living through an attempt to birth the third epoch of air power. The first epoch, which lasted from 1939 to 1990, was an era of low strategic leverage and relatively high (albeit steadily falling) loss rates. From 1990 until now, we have seen American aircraft operate in relative safety, but with only modest strategic leverage. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, American forces with essentially uncontested access to airspace still required on the ground proxies to control territory and create enduring area denial against adversaries like ISIS and the Taliban. Now, we are witnessing a real time experiment to topple and submit a regional power using air strikes alone. This is the first high intensity war to be fought from standoff.

Conventionally, it was taken as an axiom that airpower cannot provide an enduring presence and the ever elusive “control” of territory that makes decisive victory possible. What seems to have changed in this conflict is a new theory of victory, apparently embraced by Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, which celebrates denial as a substitute for control and embraces the Trashcanistan as a victorious end state.

Insurgency by Other Means

Pete Hegseth finds himself as an unlikely heir of Vladimir Lenin. Not in the ideological sense, of course, but in the pursuit of anarchy and denial as a lever of victory. One of Lenin’s many political talents was his ability to appreciate anarchy as a political lever and to ruthlessly promote it. In the early revolutionary period in Russia, even after their “seizure of power” in the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks exerted very little real control in the vast Russian internal space. Although Bolshevism later became synonymous with an authoritarian bureaucratic hydra, the infant regime was thin on the ground and had few levers of power. The nascent Leninist program was less focused on exerting political authority than it was on denying competitors the ability to do so. The Bolsheviks promoted mutinies in the armed forces, paralyzed what remained of the Tsarist bureaucracy, looted the state bank, and encouraged unrest in the countryside through the expropriation of landed estates. Long before Lenin actually held meaningful political authority in Russia, he successfully promoted the collapse of authority as such and denied competing governing bodies the ability to consolidate control.

This is the war of the insurgent.

Insurgency, in its classical form, is the strategy of the weak against the strong. Unable to match a superior adversary in direct conventional combat, the insurgent instead pursues a strategy of exhaustion and cost imposition: make the occupation expensive, make it bloody, make it politically unsustainable, deny the occupier the fruits of victory. This is a kinetic manifestation of the Leninist political strategy: if control cannot be attained outright, denying others that same possibility becomes an intermediate objective. The insurgent cannot persistently control territory, but he can deny the occupier control over anything beyond the immediate radius of his fortified positions. Mao articulated this logic most clearly, but its principles are as old as warfare itself: Fabius Maximus against Hannibal, the Spanish guerrillas against Napoleon, the Viet Cong against the Americans, the Taliban against everyone. The fundamental insight is that insurgents wage an asymmetric war of denial.

Now consider what the United States is doing to Iran, and notice the structural similarity. The Americans are not occupying Iran. They have no intention of occupying Iran. The American strategy, as articulated by various administration officials and as discernible from the pattern of operations, does not envision ground forces seizing and holding Iranian territory. What it does envision is something remarkably similar to the insurgent’s playbook, executed from the opposite end of the technological spectrum: make the Iranian regime’s existence as the governing authority of its own territory impossibly expensive; deny it the exercise of sovereign control over its own military and industrial assets; impose costs that accumulate faster than they can be absorbed; and through this sustained pressure, either compel behavioral change or create the conditions for the regime’s internal collapse.

To begin, we must consider that the air campaign Iran is not only, or even primarily based on military calculations — it is a political act, which strikes at the apparatus of Iranian deterrence, legitimacy, and cohesion, designed to create a crisis of legitimacy and authority at the heart of the Iranian state. Hegseth’s declaration that CENTCOM had been instructed to “dismantle the Iranian regime’s security apparatus” made the political objective explicit. This is not the language of limited military action. It is the language of a campaign designed to hollow out the Iranian state from the air.

This is the insurgency logic, but it is now applied by the kinetically stronger side. Where the classical insurgent is a fish swimming in the sea of the people, operating below the threshold of the occupier’s conventional military power, the American standoff campaign operates above the threshold of the defender’s conventional military power. The insurgent wins by making the cost of occupation unbearable. The standoff power wins by making the cost of resistance unbearable, and denying the enemy state the mechanisms and political cohesion needed to exert control over its own territory. The insurgent cannot be killed from the air because he blends into the civilian population; the standoff power cannot be exhausted by occupation if he does not care about the political end state. In both cases, the fundamental asymmetry of the conflict lies not in raw military power but in the asymmetric value of political authority. Neither a guerilla force nor the American air forces care much about exerting political authority of their own, because their paradigm of victory requires only that they deny that control to the enemy.

There is, of course, a crucial disanalogy. The insurgent’s strategy succeeds, when it succeeds, by making occupation politically unsustainable — by imposing costs that the occupying power’s domestic politics cannot absorb over time. The American standoff campaign imposes costs that Iranian domestic politics cannot absorb, precisely because the economic and human devastation falls on Iran rather than on the United States. Fifteen American dead, if we take the casualty figures at face value, in forty days of war is not a political liability for the administration in Washington; it is practically a recruiting poster. This asymmetry of cost absorption is, in fact, the entire strategic premise of the standoff campaign.

And yet the campaign has not been without its strategic complications. Iran has demonstrated a residual capacity for cost imposition of its own — missile strikes against Gulf state partners, closure of the Strait of Hormuz, drone attacks against American bases that have inflicted real if modest casualties. The economic costs of the campaign, running at approximately a billion dollars per day in American expenditure, are not trivial, particularly as the war strains inventories of valuable munitions across multiple theaters simultaneously. CSIS analysts have noted, with evident concern, that the Iran campaign is consuming THAAD interceptors and SM-3 missiles at rates that create real risks in the Pacific theater. The standoff campaign is not free, even if its costs are distributed very differently than those of a ground war.

But the essential logic holds. America has found a way to wage war on a state more populous and vast than France or Germany — a state with ninety million people, a sophisticated military apparatus, and decades of preparation for exactly this kind of confrontation — without suffering the kind of casualties that would make continued prosecution of the war politically impossible. This is a genuine strategic innovation, and it deserves to be analyzed with the seriousness it commands.

Sovereignty in Trashcanistan

There is a concept in counterinsurgency doctrine — ungoverned space — that refers to territory nominally under a government’s sovereignty but effectively beyond its administrative and security reach. The canonical examples might include the tribal areas of Pakistan, the deserts of the Sahel, and the archipelagos of the southern Philippines. These spaces become dangerous precisely because the absence of effective governance creates vacuums that non-state actors, criminal networks, and terrorist organizations rush to fill. The problem of ungoverned space has been a persistent preoccupation of American foreign policy for the better part of three decades.

What is happening in Iran today is something structurally similar, but America is attempting to generate it from the outside by air power rather than from the inside by the failure of state capacity. The American and Israeli air campaign is, in a very real sense, a try at manufacturing ungoverned space within Iranian territory — rendering the Iranian government unable to exercise effective control over large swaths of its own military and industrial infrastructure, unable to guarantee the security of its own leadership and command apparatus, unable to project force across its borders or even to defend its own airspace with any reliability. This is sovereignty denial as a strategic objective, achieved not by occupation but by aerial pulverization of the instruments through which sovereignty is exercised. The recent move to expand targeting to include infrastructure is perfectly consistent with this theory.

The mechanism is worth tracing carefully, because it illuminates both the sophistication of the American approach and the limits of what it can achieve. Sovereignty, in the modern state system, is not merely a legal fiction decreed by treaty and recognized by the United Nations — it is an operational reality grounded in the state’s capacity within its territory, to enforce its laws, to collect its taxes, to conscript its soldiers, to defend its borders. Strip away these functional capacities, and the legal fiction of sovereignty becomes just that — a fiction, a paper claim to authority that commands no real obedience because it commands no real power.

The American campaign has been systematically targeting the operational foundations of Iranian sovereignty. The strikes against the IRGC are strikes against the organization that has served as the muscular arm of the Islamic Republic — the entity that suppresses dissent, that runs the proxy networks, that operates the missile forces that give Iran its regional deterrent. The strikes against missile manufacturing facilities are strikes against the tools through which Iran projects its own version of power beyond its borders. The assassination of Khamenei is, in the most literal sense, a strike against the apex of Iranian sovereign authority — the man from whom all authority in the Islamic Republic ultimately derived. The strikes against military-industrial facilities are strikes against the economic and technological sinews through which a state translates its national resources into military capacity.

What the Americans are building, in effect, is a hollow Iranian state — a government that persists in some formal administrative sense, that continues to issue decrees and collect some portion of its revenues and administer its bureaucracies, but that has been stripped of the capacity to enforce its will against determined external pressure. This is not regime change in the conventional sense — it is something more subtle and arguably more insidious. Regime change implies the replacement of one governing authority with another; what the Americans seem to be pursuing is the progressive incapacitation of the existing regime without necessarily having a clear vision of what comes after.

The parallel to insurgent strategy deepens here. The classic counterinsurgency theorist would recognize immediately what is being attempted: denying the opponent control over the contested terrain, in this case not geographical terrain but the functional terrain of state capacity. Mao’s insight that political power grows from the barrel of a gun cuts both ways — he who controls the means of violence controls the political environment. Strip the Iranian regime of its missiles, discombobulate the Republican Guard and its nuclear program and its ability to project power, and you strip it of the instruments through which it has maintained its political authority, both domestically and regionally. The regime that survives Operation Epic Fury will be a fundamentally different entity than the one that preceded it — not because it has been replaced, but because it has been hollowed.

Whether this produces the behavioral changes that Washington desires is a separate and genuinely open question. The historical record of coercive air campaigns is decidedly mixed. The bombing of Serbia in 1999 produced the desired concessions within seventy-eight days; the bombing of North Vietnam produced nothing of the kind across years of sustained effort. The difference, scholars have argued, lies in the alignment between the specific costs imposed and the specific political objectives pursued, and in the coherence of the coercive bargain being offered. The Trump administration’s articulation of its objectives has been, to put it charitably, fluid — ranging from destruction of nuclear capabilities, to regime change, to maximizing pressure, to negotiation, sometimes across the span of a single press conference. This incoherence of political objective, juxtaposed against the impressive coherence of operational execution, represents perhaps the deepest structural vulnerability of the campaign.

What I would argue, in effect, is that the Trump administration has embraced the strategic logic of what I affectionately call a Trashcanistan (a phrase which I saw used by Professor Stephen Kotkin in a different context, which I am determined to coin as an American strategic concept). A Trashcanistan, in my parlance, refers to a state which has been shattered to the point where it is both unable to resist external pressure and maintain uncontested internal legitimacy, putting it in a perennial state of dependence and siege. The late Syrian Arab Republic under Assad was an ideal example, as it was both dependent on foreign backers to stay solvent and unable to control all of its nominal territory. The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan might offer another example, as it was unable to survive without American support and never fully controlled its territories.

Trashcanistans have frequently emerged after short-sided foreign intervention, which either hollows out the existing state or creates a new one with limited capacity and legitimacy. The function of a Trashcanistan has always been, primarily, as a symbol of America’s strategic standoff. Failed interventions and wars leave shattered states behind, but the point is that they can be left behind. The resurgence of the Taliban, for example, is mainly a problem for Afghanistan’s neighbors, like Pakistan.

In Iran, however, the Trump administration seems to have recognized and embraced the possibility that creating a Trashcanistan can be a strategic objective in and of itself. If Iran is unable to reset deterrence, if its economy is shattered and its security services hollowed out, it is of no difference to Washington which direction a toppling state falls.

The Fallout

Let us stipulate, for the sake of argument, that the American campaign succeeds on its own terms. The Iranian nuclear program is set back by a decade or more. The IRGC is so comprehensively degraded that it cannot reconstitute its regional proxy networks for years. The Iranian economy, already reeling from maximum pressure sanctions and now subjected to the physical destruction of its military-industrial base, enters a prolonged depression. The regime, with much of its senior leadership dead, confronting both external devastation and internal protests of a magnitude unseen since 1979, either negotiates a comprehensive settlement or collapses in favor of a successor government more amenable to American preferences. In this optimistic scenario, Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon, and the United States achieves a regional order more to its liking, with a defanged and internally spiraling Iran.

What has the world learned from this success?

It has learned several things, and they are not comforting.

The first lesson is simple and brutal: the United States can, at will and at acceptable cost, reach into any country that lacks nuclear weapons and comprehensively destroy its military capacity and state apparatus. This is not a new lesson in principle — American military superiority has been a fact of international life since at least the 1990s. What is new, however, is an apparent American indifference to political end states. The possibility of being sucked into a costly ground occupation and “nation building” project carried its own sort of deterrence. If, however, the United States is willing to create Trashcanistans from the air with little care for the particulars of the political outcome, this correspondingly raises America’s capacity to act with indifference.

The second lesson follows immediately from the first: Iran did not have nuclear weapons, and Iran is being bombed. North Korea has nuclear weapons, and North Korea is not being bombed. Whatever else one might say about Kim Jong-un’s governance of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, his decision to develop and demonstrate a credible nuclear arsenal has achieved its primary strategic objective with textbook efficiency — it has made his country immune to exactly the kind of treatment that Iran is currently receiving. The logic of this observation does not require sophisticated strategic reasoning to grasp. It will be grasped by every government in the world, including governments currently operating under American security guarantees, including governments that the United States would prefer not to see nuclearize.

The third lesson is about the limits of American security guarantees. The Gulf states — Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia — hosted American forces and accepted the consequences in the form of Iranian missile and drone strikes. They absorbed damage to their civilian infrastructure, their airports, their residential areas. They served, in effect, as the logistical and basing foundation of the American campaign. And they will have noticed something: American security guarantees are real but contingent, and they involve accepting costs that the guarantor does not itself bear. The Iranian strikes on Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, on the US Navy Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, on Dubai, on Riyadh — these strikes were aimed not merely at military targets but at demonstrating to American partners that the price of partnership with Washington includes absorption of enemy retaliation. For some partners this calculus will hold. For others, particularly those in geographic proximity to potential future adversaries armed with long-range missiles, it may begin to look insufficient. In short, America’s actions in Iran show tremendous power, but they also reveal a new indifference to the costs borne by both the target and by America’s allies in the region.

The fourth and most structurally significant lesson is about the relationship between the standoff campaign as a strategic model and the specific conditions that make it possible. The American campaign against Iran worked because Iran did not have nuclear weapons. This is not a subtle or complicated observation, but it is one whose implications ramify outward in ways that are genuinely alarming. The American standoff campaign is, at its core, a model of coercion premised on the adversary’s inability to threaten catastrophic retaliation. Conventional deterrence — the threat to impose unacceptable costs on an aggressor through conventional military means — failed Iran utterly. Its missiles could reach American bases, could impose costs, could complicate the campaign; but they could not threaten the American homeland, could not threaten American cities, could not make the costs of the campaign genuinely unbearable for the American political system. Nuclear weapons would have changed this calculus entirely.

What should be emphasized, in all this, is that the Iranians had good reason to believe that they had exceptionally strong deterrents. They had a large and diverse array of munitions capable of ranging the entire theater, a distributed and well motivated command apparatus that was prepared to endure casualties, and they had unique leverage over one of the world’s great economic chokepoints. There are few non-nuclear powers capable of boasting such a robust deterrent profile. It failed.

Ultimately, a few important trends are dovetailing in a dangerous way. First, America has shown exceptional willingness to use coercion, even against nominal allies. The relationship with NATO is strained, to say the least, and Japan and South Korea are even drawing fire. The Trump administration has shown an eagerness to use violent coercion in Venezuela and Iran, and it is mostly indifferent to both the political end-state and the retaliatory damage suffered by regional allies. The world is becoming increasingly kinetic, and the chaos in Iran has shown that even a powerful conventional deterrent package is not a deterrent at all.

A New Strategic Architecture

A brief digression into history is warranted here, because the relationship between demonstrated conventional military dominance and nuclear proliferation incentives is not merely theoretical — it has played out before, and the historical record is instructive.

The nuclear age was inaugurated by a demonstration of precisely this kind of overwhelming military advantage. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, among other things, a demonstration to the world, and specifically to the Soviet Union, of an American superiority so complete as to be effectively absolute. The American monopoly on nuclear weapons lasted precisely four years before the Soviets detonated their first device in 1949. The acceleration of the Soviet nuclear program after Hiroshima was not coincidental; it was the direct response of a state that had witnessed a qualitative demonstration of what American power could do, and had drawn the rational conclusion that matching it was an existential priority. Stalin’s famous remark after Hiroshima — that Soviet scientists would need to correct the situation — was the most consequential policy statement of the twentieth century.

The proliferation chain that followed — the British bomb in 1952, the French in 1960, the Chinese in 1964 — was similarly driven not merely by abstract strategic theory but by the specific demonstration of what nuclear weapons provided that conventional military power could not: immunity from the kind of coercive military pressure that great-power conventional superiority creates. Each successive proliferator was, in some meaningful sense, drawing the same lesson from the same demonstration.

The post-Cold War period introduced a new variant of this dynamic. The Gulf War of 1991 demonstrated American conventional military superiority in a form so complete that it fundamentally altered the strategic calculations of several states simultaneously. The Iraqi military — reasonably well-equipped by the standards of regional powers, veteran of a decade of combat against Iran — was destroyed so thoroughly and so rapidly that the subsequent analysis produced two distinct strategic responses among American adversaries and potential adversaries. One response was to develop asymmetric capabilities — the kind of investments in missiles, terrorism, proxy warfare, and information operations that characterize the strategies of powers that have internalized the futility of conventional military competition with the United States. The other response was to accelerate nuclear programs, on the calculation that nuclear weapons represented the only true equalizer. North Korea drew this lesson with particular clarity after watching what the Americans did to Iraq in 1991, and then again in 2003.

The second Iraq war provided an even cleaner natural experiment. Saddam Hussein, who had developed a nuclear program and then abandoned it under international pressure, was invaded and hanged. Kim Jong-il, who had developed a nuclear program and refused to abandon it, died of old age in his bed and passed the program to his son. Muammar Gaddafi, who voluntarily surrendered his weapons of mass destruction programs in 2003 in exchange for normalized relations with the West, was overthrown with significant Western assistance in 2011 and killed by a mob. The lesson was not lost on anyone paying attention: the strong guarantee of sovereignty provided by nuclear weapons is the lesson that every rational actor in the international system can read from this record.

What the American standoff campaign in Iran has demonstrated is that an America that is not only willing but even eager to create Trashcanistans as a strategic objective will be almost impossible to deter conventionally. The Trump doctrine can be liked to geostrategic arson. Arsonists, of course, do not bother with building things. They burn them down.

A Difficult Calculation

There is a persistent tendency in American strategic discourse to analyze the costs of military action primarily in terms of immediate expenditure and immediate casualties. By these metrics, the standoff campaign against Iran has been extraordinarily cost-effective: roughly thirty-five billion dollars in direct costs through the first month, fifteen American dead, devastating damage to Iranian military capacity. Compare this to the two trillion dollars and four thousand American dead in the first decade of the Iraq occupation, and the case for the standoff model seems self-evident.

This comparison, however, conflates the costs of a campaign with the costs of the strategic situation that the campaign creates. The Iraq occupation was expensive in direct costs but it also, in its disastrous execution, set a template that has paradoxically reinforced the case for the standoff model: if you cannot afford occupation and cannot sustain the political costs of ground war, then standoff war becomes the preferred tool. If nation building leads to Trashcanistans anyway, simply skip the trouble and create anarchy from the air. The problem is that standoff war, for all its operational elegance, purchases military success at the price of strategic ambiguity. You can destroy a state’s military capacity from the air, but you cannot build the peace that follows from the air.

The munitions cost problem deserves particular attention, because it points toward a structural constraint on the standoff model that is not sufficiently appreciated. CSIS analysts have noted that the Iran campaign is consuming stockpiles of exquisite munitions — THAAD interceptors, SM-3s, JASSMs, Tomahawks — at rates that create genuine risks in other theaters. The United States does not produce these weapons at the rate it is expending them; the defense industrial base has not been configured for sustained high-intensity standoff warfare since the Cold War. The transition from JASSMs to JDAMs as Iranian air defenses were suppressed was not merely a sensible operational choice; it was also a reflection of the finite depth of the American magazine. A war that is cheap in lives can still be expensive in ways that matter strategically, particularly when the munitions consumed in one theater are precisely the munitions that would be needed in another.

There is also the question of what happens to the Iranian state after the dust settles. The standoff campaign has been extraordinarily effective at destroying Iranian military capacity, but military capacity is not the same thing as governing authority. The Iranian state apparatus — its ministries, its courts, its bureaucracies, its revolutionary legitimating ideology — has not been destroyed. It has been decapitated and embarrassed, but decapitation and embarrassment are not the same thing as elimination. History is replete with examples of states that survived devastating military campaigns by retreating to the resilience of their civil institutions and the obstinacy of their populations: Germany endured total aerial bombardment for years and kept fighting; Britain endured the Blitz and emerged with its government and social fabric intact; North Vietnam absorbed more tonnage of bombs than any country in the history of air warfare and still managed to outlast American patience. The standoff campaign can destroy Iranian missiles but it cannot, by itself, determine who rules Iran or what policies that ruler pursues. A favorable outcome for the Americans will depend on whether they can shatter Iranian infrastructure, security forces, and the economic base to induce a true state collapse spiral.

If the campaign ends with a negotiated settlement, the terms of that settlement will determine whether it has achieved anything lasting. A settlement that compels Iran to verifiably dismantle its nuclear program and accept international monitoring would represent a genuine strategic success, though the precedent it sets about nuclear deterrence would remain. A settlement that is merely a pause — that allows Iran to recover its economic footing, rebuild its military capacity, and resume its nuclear program under more careful concealment — would represent a strategic failure of a particularly expensive kind, having consumed billions in munitions, strained relationships with regional partners, and creating an urgent incentive for Iran to obtain nuclear weapons by any means possible.

The most dangerous outcome, from a long-term proliferation standpoint, is a settlement that appears to be a success but is not — one that the international community accepts as the resolution of the Iranian nuclear question while Iran quietly begins the work of reconstituting its program at depths and in locations that even American bunker-busters cannot reach. The Trump administration’s public statements have acknowledged this risk, with Trump himself suggesting that American satellites will be watching for any signs of recovery activity. But the history of covert nuclear programs — Pakistan, North Korea, India — suggests that motivated states with sufficient scientific capacity find ways to develop what they have determined to be a vital national interest, regardless of the surveillance environment.

The most consequential audience for Operation Midnight Hammer and Operation Epic Fury is not the Iranian government. It is every other government in the world that has, or aspires to have, or might someday find itself in conflict with, the United States of America.

North Korea has watched American conventional power annihilate Iranian air defenses in a matter of days and then systematically dismantle the Iranian military-industrial apparatus from the air. Pyongyang has always articulated its nuclear deterrent as the essential guarantee of regime survival; the events in Iran have validated this assessment with a specificity and vividness that no amount of theoretical argumentation could have produced. Kim Jong-un, whatever else one might say about him, is a rational actor in the strategic sense — he has consistently prioritized the nuclear program above the welfare of his population because he has concluded that nuclear weapons are the only guarantee that the fate of Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi does not become his own. He is now watching his assessment confirmed in real time. There is not the slightest possibility that this lesson makes denuclearization talks with North Korea easier.

China has watched an American standoff campaign demonstrate the operational capabilities that the People’s Liberation Army will have to contend with in any future conflict over Taiwan. More importantly, China has watched the United States demonstrate that it can wage sustained high-intensity air operations against a large, hardened adversary from standoff range, at politically acceptable costs in American lives. Beijing’s investment in anti-access and area-denial capabilities — the DF-21 carrier killer, the DF-26 intermediate range ballistic missile, the J-20 stealth fighter, the integrated air defense system — is explicitly designed to raise the costs of exactly this kind of campaign to prohibitive levels. Chinese military planners will be studying every aspect of Operation Epic Fury with the intensity that the Wehrmacht studied British armor employment at Cambrai. The specific operational techniques that proved effective against Iranian air defenses will be analyzed and countered; the munitions that proved most effective will be studied and either replicated or defeated.

But it is the smaller and middle powers — the states that cannot match American conventional power and cannot aspire to Chinese-level military-industrial capacity — that face the most direct proliferation incentive. Saudi Arabia, which has been simultaneously a beneficiary of American protection in the current conflict and a target of Iranian retaliation, will draw from this experience a calculation about the adequacy of American security guarantees. The kingdom has significant financial resources and has long been rumored to have a contingency arrangement with Pakistan for access to nuclear weapons in extremis. The events of 2025 and 2026 will not make Saudi Arabia less interested in the nuclear option. Turkey, which has increasingly charted an independent strategic course under Erdogan and his successors, has the industrial and scientific base to develop nuclear weapons and has in recent years made pointed comments about the rationality of possessing them. South Korea, which faces a nuclear-armed North Korea and an increasingly uncertain American commitment, has conducted public polling showing majority support for an independent nuclear deterrent.

Each of these states is watching the same demonstration and drawing the same calculation: American conventional military superiority is so overwhelming that only nuclear deterrence provides meaningful protection against American coercion. This is not an irrational conclusion. It is, in fact, the most rational conclusion available from the observable evidence.

The cruel paradox at the heart of nonproliferation policy is precisely this: the stronger the case for nonproliferation as a political objective, the more extreme the measures required to enforce it, and the more extreme the measures required to enforce it, the stronger the incentive for proliferation becomes. The United States has demonstrated, definitively, that it is willing to conduct sustained air campaigns against states that are developing nuclear weapons. Every state that draws the lesson that nuclear weapons are the only protection against such campaigns is, from the perspective of American nonproliferation policy, behaving irrationally. And yet every state that draws this lesson is behaving entirely rationally from the perspective of its own security calculus, in light of the available evidence.

---

## VIII. The Deterrence Architecture of the Post-Iranian-War World

Clausewitz famously observed that war is the continuation of political intercourse by other means — that military action is always, at its deepest level, a political act, and must therefore be evaluated by its political consequences rather than its military outcomes alone. This maxim applies with particular force to the kind of coercive standoff campaign that the United States has conducted against Iran, because the political consequences of such a campaign ripple far beyond the bilateral relationship between Washington and Tehran.

The specific political consequence that I want to dwell on is the likely shape of the deterrence architecture that emerges from the wreckage of the Iranian military program. The post-Cold War nonproliferation regime — the NPT, the IAEA inspection regime, the various ad hoc arrangements like the JCPOA — was always a somewhat precarious construction, held together by a combination of security guarantees, economic incentives, normative pressure, and the implicit threat of coercive action against violators. The coercive element was always the indispensable backstop; states that concluded that they could develop nuclear weapons without meaningful consequences tended to do so.

What the Iranian campaign has done is dramatically clarify the coercive dimension of this architecture, while simultaneously clarifying its systemic limits. The coercion is real: the United States will, in fact, conduct military operations against states pursuing nuclear weapons, and those operations can be devastatingly effective. But the coercion is not universal: it depends on the target state not itself possessing nuclear weapons. The architecture, in other words, is coercive against states below the nuclear threshold and effectively toothless against states above it. This is not news — it has always been true — but it has never been demonstrated with quite the operational clarity that Operation Epic Fury provides.

The consequence of this demonstration is likely to be a more sharply bifurcated international system: states that are firmly embedded in American security alliances, that have concluded that American guarantees are adequate and that their own nuclear development would strain those guarantees beyond the point of utility, will likely remain non-nuclear. States that are not so embedded, or that have reasons to doubt the permanence and adequacy of American guarantees, will look at the Iranian experience and accelerate their own calculations about nuclear development. The middle ground — states that were genuinely uncertain about the value of nuclear weapons as a deterrent — has been substantially narrowed by the events of the past year. The demonstration has been too clear and too complete to leave much room for ambiguity.

There is also the question of what kind of deterrence relationship nuclear states have with the United States in a world where standoff war has become the dominant American mode of coercion. The logic of nuclear deterrence has always been that it deters nuclear use by the adversary; in the Cold War this was straightforward, because both superpowers were nuclear-armed and both faced the prospect of civilization-ending retaliation. In the asymmetric world of American conventional dominance, nuclear weapons serve a different function for smaller states: they deter not nuclear attack but conventional regime change. This is the specific deterrence function that North Korea’s nuclear program serves, and it is the function that every rational proliferator is seeking to acquire.

The United States has not, in its public discourse, adequately grappled with the implications of this dynamic. The official position is that American conventional superiority deters nuclear use by adversaries, while American commitment to nonproliferation prevents the spread of nuclear weapons to additional states. The Iranian experience suggests that this position is internally contradictory: the very power of American conventional superiority creates the incentive for proliferation, and successful nuclear deterrence of American conventional power creates de facto immunity from the nonproliferation regime’s coercive backstop. You cannot simultaneously demonstrate that conventional military power is so overwhelming that only nuclear weapons can deter it, and maintain that the nuclear deterrent option is off the table for states that feel threatened by American conventional power.

The Innovator’s Dilemma

There is a concept from the business world — the innovator’s dilemma — that describes the predicament of a market leader whose dominant technology, precisely because of its dominance, forecloses the strategic options that would allow adaptation to disruptive innovation. The dominant player, having invested so heavily in an existing paradigm and having organized its entire operation around that paradigm’s logic, finds itself structurally unable to embrace the new paradigm that is displacing it, even when it can see the displacement coming.

Something analogous may be at work in the realm of American military strategy. The standoff campaign is, by the metrics of its own execution, a masterpiece: technically sophisticated, casualty-minimizing, operationally decisive. It represents the highest expression of the American way of war as it has evolved since the end of the Cold War — precision, standoff, information dominance, airpower über alles. The American military establishment, having spent thirty years perfecting this model and having accumulated enormous institutional investment in the equipment, doctrine, training, and procurement architecture required to execute it, is understandably reluctant to question its strategic utility even when the second-order effects of its successful application point toward a world in which it becomes progressively harder to employ.

The proliferation of nuclear weapons is precisely the disruptive innovation that threatens the standoff campaign model. As more states acquire credible nuclear deterrents, the universe of states against which standoff war can be freely employed — without risking nuclear retaliation — shrinks. The model remains devastatingly effective against the diminishing number of states that have neither nuclear weapons nor the security guarantees that make them de facto nuclear powers. Against all other states, it is effectively irrelevant as a coercive instrument.

The innovator’s dilemma applies: the very success of the standoff campaign against Iran creates the incentive structure that, if followed rationally by other states, will eventually undermine the coercive relevance of the standoff campaign in a nuclearized world. America innovates its way to a military model of overwhelming conventional superiority, and in doing so creates the conditions for a proliferation cascade that makes that model strategically obsolete as a coercive instrument against a growing share of the relevant adversary set.

There is no obvious solution to this dilemma. Restraint in the use of conventional military power might reduce proliferation incentives but would require accepting the spread of weapons of mass destruction by states that can be coerced into abandoning their programs. Aggressive use of conventional military power to prevent proliferation produces exactly the proliferation incentives described above. Extending security guarantees broadly enough to encompass all potential proliferators is both politically impossible and strategically incoherent. This is, in the most literal sense, a genuine strategic dilemma — a situation in which every available option involves accepting costs that are, in some dimension, unacceptable.

Share

Like most people in the western hemisphere, I woke on February 28 to an overwhelming rush of footage, reports, and rumors from the Middle East. The United States and Israel had launched a surprise attack on Iran overnight (after the markets closed for the weekend), and were pummeling the Iranians with massed air strikes. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei - a longtime fixture in regional politics - was dead, according to soon to be confirmed Israeli reports. A few hours later, Iran began retaliating with missile strikes on targets all around the region, including Israel, American bases, and the Gulf States. We were off to the races.

In the weeks that have since elapsed, the emerging Iran War has been subject to analytic confusion that becomes nearly overwhelming. In some sense, this is baked into the conflict given the participants. Israel is, to put it mildly, a controversial state that occupies an inordinate amount of cognitive real estate in the United States. Depending on who you ask, Israel is either a prophetically heralded political avatar of God Almighty, which the United States is bound by sacred obligation to defend, or it is an overtly nefarious parasite which manipulates the American government through a mixture of campaign contributions, religious trickery, and blackmail.

All of this is bad enough on its own, and sure to confuse conversation about why and how the war is being fought. To make matters worse, however, the Trump Administration has been unusually bad about communicating either motives or explicit aims for the conflict. In the span of barely a week, rationales were furnished which ranged from a need to preempt an Iranian first strike, destroy Iran’s conventional missile capabilities, prevent Iranian nuclearization, secure Iranian natural resources, preempt Iranian retaliation after an Israeli first strike, and of course, regime change.

Broadly speaking, there has not been a great deal of clarity as to whether the objective is to destroy the Iranian state outright, or simply to de-fang it by demolishing its strike capabilities and industrial base. To make matters worse, many of the motives offered by the Trump administration have been directly contradicted by its own key members. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that America’s hand was forced by Israeli plans to attack Iran, Trump stated rather speciously that the opposite was true, and that he force Israel’s hand. Pentagon officials, meanwhile, told Congress that they had no evidence that Iran was planning a preemptive attack. Of course, the Iranian nuclear program is always a bugbear in DC, but immediate alarm over Iranian nuclearization would seem to contradict the confident claims that last year’s strikes on the Fordow enrichment plant set Iran’s program back by years. At the same time, the International Atomic Energy Agency claims that Iran has no structured nuclear weapons program at all, which would make sense given the late Khamenei’s fatwa against nuclear weapons.

Little wonder, then, that hardly anybody can agree on what is going on. The factual background of the war is blotchy, and it creates a geostrategic Rorschach test where people see what they want to see.

The most ardent evangelical Zionists in the United States (the Rafael Edward Cruz’s of the world) see a religiously charged crusade for Israel’s security. The less zealous see yet another flex of the Trump Administration’s muscular foreign policy, scratching off a longtime security concern. Israel-skeptics come in somewhere between American foreign policy capture by Israel (reasonable) and Trump being blackmailed by a vaguely defined Mossad-Epstein nexus (absurd). Many Trump voters, although skeptical of foreign wars, simply feel that the President has earned their trust; they are willing to hope for the best and will abandon their misgivings in the case of victory. The Resistance Commentariat at the New York Times and elsewhere gets another data point in their theory of the deranged, militant, quasi-Fascist Trump administration. Finally, the most ardent skeptics and haters of American Empire are practically gleeful over what they see as a hubristic American war machine finally putting its head squarely in the trap, beginning a war which they believe Iran is squarely winning.

Subscribe now

I tend to approach these matters very differently, beginning with my assumption that Israel, the United States, and Iran are all mostly normal states that are predominantly interested in security and power-maximization. Israel, for example, is an odd state, characterized by what I have called an eschatological-garrison ideology, and it exerts an unusual amount of influence in American politics, but its powers are far more limited than either its greatest admirers or most ardent critics suppose. It is neither the apple of God’s eye nor the cursed root of all the ills that beset us. It is a state, interested primarily in its own security and maximizing its regional power relative to rivals. Similarly, Iran - although a unique clerical state - is a state nonetheless.

If you will indulge me this premise - that we are, ultimately, dealing with a trio of states that can be understood as such - I believe the chain of events falls into place very nicely, and we can follow it in sequence. Whether it will lead us to a place we want to be is another question entirely.

Bibi’s Shooting Spree

The longstanding antipathy between Iran and the Israeli-American bloc is a fixed property of regional affairs, and needs little introduction. The first question animating any discussion of the emerging Iran War ought not be why, precisely, but rather: why now?

To answer this, we need to remember the developments that precipitated the current war over the past few years, beginning with Hamas’s operation in Israel on October 7, 2023. In the years that have passed since then, Israel has gone on what I characterize as a geostrategic shooting spree against regional threats and rivals. These operations not only killed a slew of high value enemy personnel, but also trashed many of the hotbeds on Israel’s borders and put the Iranians squarely on the back foot.

For Americans in particular, who are not well versed with key middle eastern personnel and political factions, these events rather blur together. Taken as a whole, however, Israel’s recent successes are remarkable. Since late 2023, Israel has killed much of Hamas’s senior leadership, including Yahya Sinwar, Muhammad Sinwar, Marwan Issa, Saleh al-Arouri, and the head of the Hamas political office, Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Iran. They killed a variety of key Hezbollah personnel in Lebanon, including Hesbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, senior commanders like Fuad Shukr, and the head of the Central Council, Nabil Qaouk - all to say nothing of the damage done to the field command structure in the infamous pager bomb operation. Finally, the Israelis have killed many high ranking Iranian officers, including senior IRGC generals like Mohammad Bagheri, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, Quds Commander Esmail Qaani, and IRGC head Hossein Salami, in air strikes on Iran last June.

Israel’s impressive decapitation run has coincided with the trashing of Gaza and the collapse of the Assad government in Syria. The latter was particularly significant, in that it not only took a key Iranian satellite off the board, but it hampered Iranian connectivity to proxies like Hezbollah, creating an inwardly turned Trashcanistan in between Iran and Lebanon.

This conversation can easily turn sour. The preoccupation with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the soaring death toll there is understandable, and the litany of Israeli headhunts conjures images of martyrdom, with Israel’s opponents rationalizing that Israel fell into some clever trap by killing men like Sinwar and Nasrallah.

That may, of course, be interesting to some. What is most important, however, is that Israel has successfully hollowed out enemy leadership and rocked Iran’s strategic position at relatively low cost to itself. Iranian reprisal strikes in the Twelve-Days War, although a source of kino, manifestly failed to reset deterrence for Iran. Israel’s shooting spree not only put Iran on the back foot by throwing its proxies into dissaray, but also suggested a model for how Iran itself might be brought to the brink.

So, why now? I think the answer is fairly simple: Iran appeared uniquely vulnerable in the wake of Israel’s shooting spree and the collapse of its position in Syria. Forced to choose between attempting a knockout blow on Iran now, with American weight behind it, and allowing the Iranian regime to reconstitute its strength, for the Israelis this was hardly a choice at all. The momentum of their recent successes carried them into this war.

For the United States, involvement was virtually preordained. Once the Israeli government communicated its commitment to act, the United States faced a choice between participation at the outset and ceding control of events by waiting for Iranian retaliation. This, again, is hardly a choice at all. It was clearly preferrable to retain control over tempo and deliver the most powerful possible first strike.

Cosmetically, this appears to validate the complaint that American foreign policy is largely captive to the Israelis, with the attendant despair that the mighty United States is little more than a client of Tel Aviv. It is true that Israel has unusual influence in American politics and tremendous levers to force American military action. If I may be allowed to play devil’s advocate, however, we might note that the dynamic at play here is not all that unusual. In fact, client states (Israel) often have enormous leverage over their larger, more powerful allies (the United States), because they can trigger security emergencies which compel their benefactor to act. British patriots in 1914 may have griped that the United Kingdom was being dragged into a war by commitments to Belgium, but this had little bearing on relative power dynamic between Brussels and London. Nor, for that matter, was Russia a plaything of the Serbian government, though it went to war for the sake of Serbia.

The idea that the United States might stay entirely neutral in a high intensity conflict between Iran and Israel was never reasonable, particularly given the high probability that Iran would retaliate against an Israeli attack by striking American basing in the region. Israel and the United States form, for better or worse, a tightly consolidated bloc in the Middle East, such that Israeli military action triggers American involvement. Given a firm enough commitment to act by the Israelis, it can even do so preemptively.

Given the successes they have had over the last two years, decapitating and defanging Iranian proxies, observing the collapse of the Syrian state, and striking Iran itself without successful deterrence reset by the Iranians, the Israelis clearly felt that they had an opportunity to severely damage, or even destroy the Iranian state by decapitating the regime, destroying much of its strike capabilities and industry, and degrading or destroying its air defenses. Israel clearly communicated its determination to act in what it viewed as an important window of opportunity, and Israeli action preemptively triggered American participation. Any understanding of the particular trigger for this war must begin, however, not with inane theories about red heifers, but with Bibi’s multi-year shooting spree, which both created the opportunity for the final degradation of the Iranian state, as well as the model by which this could be accomplished.

Bombing a Vacuum

Given the decision by the Israeli-American bloc to act and act now, the shape of the military operation itself begins to emerge. Broadly speaking, we can separate the initial strikes on Iran into two broad categories - regime and military targets - with the twin objectives of defanging and decapitating the Iranian state. Though it may not be immediately obvious, these two goals are closely connected and nominally support each other.

Strike activity thus far has been heavily focused on degrading both Iranian air defense and their ability to sustain strike volume: an effort which entails not only striking launchers, but also storage and production of strike systems. While the first few days of strikes - which entailed expending thousands of munitions - achieved immediate success degrading Iranian strike volume, that progress has slowed as the Iranians have shifted to a more methodical husbanding of launch platforms. Degradation of Iranian air defense has also achieved air superiority - loosely defined as dominant advantage in the air and access to enemy air space - but Iran retains some intact defenses which deny air supremacy, generally defined by rendering the enemy incapable of interference with air forces in the operational area.

The key point that must be delineated, however, is whether Iranian strike capacity and air defense are being degraded in the context of operational or strategic goals. This may sound like pedantry, but I beg the reader to bear with me. What we are querying is whether Iran’s capabilities are being degraded permanently on a persistent trend or merely suppressed. The difference is substantial.

Iranian strike volume has clearly declined, though Iran continues to launch missiles and drones at a stable baseline rate. To some extent, however, this may be due both to Iranian decisions to conserve launchers and avoid over-exposing their assets, as well as “last leg logistics”, in which they find it difficult to move assets to launch sites under enemy air superiority. The effective suppression of Iranian strike capacity would be very useful in lessening the burden on Israeli-American air defense and allowing the strike campaign on Iran to continue. It would not, however, permanently neutralize Iranian deterrence and allow for untrammeled Israeli strikes on regime targets without fear of retaliation.

Put another way, the suppression of Iranian strike systems has operational ramifications in the near term, while massive attrition of their capabilities would mean the effective defanging of the state, the destruction of their basis for future deterrence, and long-term Israeli power to act with impunity. More to the point, the destruction of Iranian strike capabilities is a war aim in and of itself, particularly for Israel, while the suppression of strike activity is an operational expedient in the service of other goals.

At the same time, Iranian regime targets have been heavily targeted. Of course, the killing of Khamenei is the crown jewel from the Israeli perspective, but high ranking regime personnel have been more broadly targeted. Overnight on March 16-17, an airstrike killed Iran’s National Security Council head, Ali Larijani. Meanwhile, Ali Khamenei’s son and presumptive successor as Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is - depending on who you listen to - in a coma and missing a leg, disfigured, and gay.

Strikes on Iranian regime and military targets, on paper, form a mutually reinforcing feedback loop which is designed to induce a capacity spiral in the Iranian state. Degrading Iran’s air defense and strike capacity will allow Israeli-American strikes on regime targets with impunity. On paper, a completely defanged and defenseless Iran, with no capacity to launch retaliatory strikes and no functioning air defense, can be struck at will, and the state can be pushed to the brink with ongoing strikes on personnel. The other side of this coin, of course, is that decapitation strikes are designed to disorder Iranian command and control and degrade orderly battle management, so that military targets can be systematically hunted and attrited. At the risk of a reptilian analogy, a snake without fangs can be safely handled, and a snake that is restrained by its head can be safely defanged. This is the basic logic.

This leads us to the rather scattered presentation of American war aims, in particular. The messaging here has been less than uniform, to say the least. Initially, President Trump expressed hopes that Iran would play out similar to Venezuela, where lightning decapitation led to a new leadership group within the existing state structure, albeit utterly pliant to American demands. This was followed be a sense of bewilderment that Iran’s leadership was now undefined and in flux, with the famous quip that the people identified as possible successors had been killed. This gave way to a half hearted call for an uprising, hoping perhaps that the Iranian people might do the job on their own. Now, Trump is expressing disappointment in Mojtaba Khamenei’s selection, and rather sanguinely suggested that the younger Khamenei could simply be killed as well.

These different paths seem contradictory, and many are frustrated that Washington will not give a firm answer on whether it seeks regime change in Iran. I would argue that this is in fact a signal of American indifference towards the outcome. To the White House, it does not particularly matter whether the existing state acquiesces to American demands (for now loosely defined as “unconditional surrender”), or whether the state collapses outright. In either case, internal disarray and a crippling loss of state capacity are expected to weaken Iran for a generation. It is not that the White House does not know whether it wants regime change or not; it simply does not care.

The American strategy, as such, seems to be little more than throwing bombs at a power vacuum, either until the state collapses, surrenders, or its capacity to retaliate and reconstitute itself are so shattered that the difference no longer carries a distinction. From the American perspective, this would seem to offer flexibility and free the United States from particular commitments to Iranian political factions, forms of governance, or personnel. One advantage, apparently is that it bypasses the “foreign policy blob” altogether. By avoiding a commitment to any particular political outcome in Iran, focusing instead on the material degradation of the state, Trump avoids firm commitments and retains nominal flexibility. Bomb the state until it either collapses or behaves, and in either case it will be crippled. In theory. On paper.

Tehran’s Marathon

Parsing the Iranian strategy is, strangely enough, somewhat easier. The Israeli-American plan is predicated on the twin attempts to defang and decapitate the Iranian regime, throwing bombs at a power vacuum until whatever emerges is harmless and pliant. Iran, on the other hand, is pursuing its own twin objectives of regime survival and resetting deterrence through asymmetric escalation. The United States wanted a sprint, where a few weeks (or perhaps as few as four days) of intense air strikes would put Iran belly up. Instead, Tehran is trying to turn the war into a marathon, betting that their regime has the cohesion to endure and outlast the Israeli-Americans as they progressively upend the gulf and inflict asymmetric economic costs by strangling the Strait of Hormuz.

The crux of the matter, and the first tell of the emerging Iranian strategy, was the massive barrage that they unleashed on targets all around the gulf in the opening days of the war. The horizontal escalation to include Arab countries hosting American assets was, according to President Trump, rather shocking, though it certainly should not have been. Much has been made of the rapid decline in Iranian strike volume after those first few days, and to be sure the Iranians have lost many of their launchers. I would argue, however, that this misinterprets the escalation play by Tehran.

The volume of launches by Iran in the opening 72 hours was always guaranteed to lead to high losses among the launch systems. The sheer number of assets that Iran put in the field in opening days created a large footprint with high visibility against an enemy with clear air superiority, but the loss of these TELs was a calculated gamble. This synergized with Iran’s preparations for disruption of command in the opening days - giving field commanders instructions to launch in accordance with pre-issued orders. The so-called “Mosaic Defense” has been overhyped at this point (as it seems that centralized command and control does still exist), but the broader point is fairly simple: Iran planned for disruption of command and accepted the loss of many launch systems by situating itself to hit as much as possible in the first 72 hours. The goal here was to explode out of the box, even if central command was disrupted and commanders were killed, escalating horizontally to involve not just Israel and American bases, but the Gulf states as well.

This has been followed by sustained, albeit lower volume, strikes designed to steadily exhaust and attrit air defenses around the gulf. Right now, it appears that Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates will be the first to essentially exhaust their interceptor stocks, and with the United States facing a resource crunch of its own, a top off is not likely to come any time soon. The exhaustion of Gulf air defenses will soon open the door to successful Iranian strikes, at scale, on energy and port infrastructure.

This will synergize with the ongoing attempt to strangulate shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which is a problem that the United States and Israel have limited leverage to solve. The methods that Iran can use to bottle the strait are relatively cheap and very difficult to suppress, and include naval mines, explosive packed speedboats, and drones. Completely suppressing these defenses would require both combat engineering assets, which are lacking, and the projection of combat power directly into the Iranian littoral. Little wonder that the White House is now casting about for any possible ally - even China - to help with the heavy lift in the strait. So far, it is hard to find takers.

The goal of all this, from Tehran’s perspective is to transform the sprint into a marathon, where Iran is squeezing an economic artery by striking energy and port infrastructure in the gulf and throttling shipping traffic in the strait. In a sense, this is not too dissimilar from Ukraine’s approach to the war: inflict asymmetric costs to achieve a favorable peace agreement. Even the kit is mostly similar, with drone packages doing much of the work. The difference is that the gulf lacks Russia’s strategic depth, and Iran, unlike Ukraine, has a multi-trillion dollar economic lever within easy reach. This leads us to a farcical situation where the United States is accommodating the sale of Iranian and Russian oil simply to dampen the disruption to the market.

This creates a dilemma for the United States. President Trump has the option to declare victory and walk away, but Iran is poised to continue unilaterally obstructing the strait as long as it can, until it achieves a formal, negotiated peace.

The latter is a particular important point, because Iran is living with the consequences of failing to establish deterrence. Its limited missile exchanges with Israel last year failed to accomplish this, and it is simply intolerable to the Iranian regime to move forward naively if it feels that Israel can act with impunity towards it. The Iranian state wants to survive, but it will not survive for long if it cannot demonstrate that it can both endure America’s haymaker and exact asymmetric costs in response. It wants to survive this conflict while also ensuring that Israel does not reinitiate hostilities in the near future. In Tehran’s ideal scenario, they will be in a position to dictate the terms of the peace. The United States and Israel believed they were defanging a viper, but the Iranians are trying to fight the strangulation war of the anaconda.

Conclusion: Punched in the Face

There are two famous quotes, from markedly different individuals, which endlessly prove their worth whenever a fresh war breaks out. The great Chief of Staff of the Prussian Field Army, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, once quipped that “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Moltke was famous for his intentionally loose operational orders, which were designed to give broad shape to operations while leaving implementation undefined, to allow subordinates to react to changing circumstances. Former world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson put it somewhat more bluntly:

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

In war, everybody gets punched in the face.

What we’ve endeavored to sketch out here is two radically different conceptions of the Iran War. There is an Israeli-American conception of a high intensity air campaign which drops bombs on a vacuum until something tolerable spills out. On the other hand, there is an Iranian framework of endurance and economic costs. Ultimately, however, both of these approaches entail calculated gambles, and the pesky thing about gambling is that one sometimes loses.

It is entirely possible, for example, that Iran’s bet on the state’s ability to endure comes up bust. Iran has, to this point, showed a “next man up” mentality and a willingness to simply absorb losses. The state has not collapsed. To be sure, state collapse is much harder to induce than one might think, but it remains an open possibility that continued blows to regime infrastructure and personnel will lead to a death spiral of capability and command disfunction.

With that being said, the orthogonal nature of this war - an odd sort of race between an Israeli-American sprinter and an Iranian marathon runner - leads us to a forking road. The tempo of the war is shifting as the initial shock of the air strikes stabilizes. American carriers are withdrawing to refit. Much of the Israeli-American throw weight has been spent. Assets are being redeployed as it becomes clear that America was unprepared to sustain multiple theaters. The general picture is that of an Iran with substantially degraded capacities, but an intact state and remaining levers that are, for now, adequate to continue strangulation.

In the coming weeks and months, victory will be defined by two relatively straightforward factors: the survival of the Iranian state, and its ability to inflict asymmetric costs via the straits and strikes on gulf infrastructure. This leads us to a few broad outcome possibilities.

Option 1: Iranian Victory in the Straits

Iran maintains baseline strike capabilities and continues to constrain traffic through the strait of Hormuz. Half hearted and asset-constrained American attempts to open the strait fail, and Iran is able to sustain sufficient threats to shipping. Mounting economic costs and the White House’s inability to mobilize a coalition of European and Asian allies leads to a negotiated peace, where Iran is able to insist on terms by which the United States restrains future Israeli action against them. President Trump is likely to be able to portray this domestically as a victory - “I got a deal, they’re opening the straits, and we killed Khamenei” - but the Iranian regime survives intact and with the hope of reestablished deterrence.

Option 2: The Quagmire

Unwilling to cede the loss of control over the straits, the United States attempts littoral operations at scale to seize control of the straits. Lacking sufficient regional air defense or a reliable way to suppress drones, the United States is pulled by its own momentum into a limited ground operation, bringing both a new dimension and interminable length to the war. At present, this appears to be the most likely path.

Option 3: Trump Defeats Iran and the Foreign Policy Blob

It turns out, you can just bomb a state until it either collapses or behaves. A cash crunch leaves the IRGC unable to pay its personnel. Riots break out in Tehran and the security forces lose control. The ruling group collapses as one member after another dies in a heap of rubble. It’s not only Iran that is defeated, but the American foreign policy brain trust writ large: it turns out you don’t need nation building, or boots on the ground, or advisors, or NGOs, or development funds. You can just bomb a country until it works for you. Probably not. But maybe?

One thing is clear. Iran has, to this point, paid dearly for its inability to set meaningful deterrence. A vast array of conventional missiles and drones, a robust security state, and a web of sectarian proxies: all reasonably good assurances of the state’s safety, on paper, and yet here we are, with the war brought home to Tehran. In any world where the Iranian state survives, it will surely be eagerly seeking more meaningful and lasting levers of deterrence. A quick perusal of recent history reveals a long list of destroyed states and trashcanistans. North Korea is not on that list. Perhaps Iran will think smaller, rather than bigger, and look for safety in the infinitesimally small space inside a splitting atom.

A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it

Share

The Pacific War, fought between the Empire of Japan and the United States of America and her allies between 1941 and 1945, stands apart in the long annals of military history as an essentially unique conflict: a true sui generis war. The scale is an obvious place to begin; given that the theaters of the war encompassed much of the Pacific Ocean, continental East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean, it is fairly self evident that this war absolutely dwarfed all others in geographic scope. While Europe’s grand era of colonialism saw wars in which conflicts in continental Europe had colonial theaters in places like the Americas, India, and Africa, what distinguishes the Pacific War was the fact that this enormous battlespace - ranging some 4,500 miles north to south and nearly 7,000 miles east-west - was contiguous and connected by internal Japanese lines of communication. No other conflict in human history has ever come even remotely close in the size of its contiguous theaters.

Size impresses, to be sure, but beyond the sheer scale of the conflict the Pacific War is unique in that it consisted of highly systematic operations with positional characteristics, but with the unique qualifier of being fought from the sea. Although the vast ocean gives the impression of immense operational flexibility and free movement, the dynamics of the Pacific War, in operational terms, reflected traditional continental warfare in ways that are not often appreciated at first glance, with systematic offenses moving through island strongpoints, great attention given to supply lines (in the form of shipping lanes), and recognizable concepts like flanks and positional leveraging. While cosmetically the Pacific appears to be a vast and open expanse, operationally it presented a complex web of interconnected engagement zones.

Therein arises the problem with casual historiography of the war. Popular knowledge of the Pacific War generally consists of a series of vignettes - Pearl Harbor, Midway, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and the atomic bombs - which form a mostly satisfying narrative chain, but become dissipated operationally. It is not immediately clear, for example, how the carrier battles at Midway and the Coral Sea relate to the gruesome island fighting in places like Guadalcanal, or the Japanese assault on Singapore.

Of course, this is hardly vital knowledge for most people, but in general it is fair to say that the operational schema of the Pacific War are less easily understood than those of the simultaneous war fought in Europe. In part this is because the geography of the Pacific is less widely understood than that of Europe: many people can find Poland, the Baltic Sea, and Paris on a map, but relatively few can pinpoint the Truk Atoll, the Solomon Islands, or Saipan. More to the point, however, the Pacific War was immensely complex, with telescoping scales: battles could range across many hundreds of miles in fleet actions, or shrink to tiny islands barely ten miles square.

Subscribe now

This was a very strange war. The battlespace extended across millions of square miles, but frequently condensed the violence into tiny and claustrophobic zones. It was fought in three dimensions, with air power, submarine forces, conventional surface warships, and amphibious operations all playing vital roles. The Japanese fought to the end with a divided and internally bickering command structure, and yet no Japanese operational unit ever independently surrendered until the end of the war. This was, again, a unique pattern of war-making, characterized by a dysfunctional and factious high command with essentially unrivaled devotion and fanaticism in the field. Japanese forces demonstrated extreme levels of tactical proficiency early in the war, but suffered from egregious strategic lapses.

On the other side, American victory is often portrayed as a simple function of the United States’ laughably superior industrial and economic power. To be sure, the deck was stacked economically against Japan in every conceivable way. By war’s end, American GDP dwarfed Japan’s by a 7:1 ratio: a figure that understates Japan’s absolute poverty in the critical inputs of an industrial war. American production of coal outstripped Japan’s by nearly 1200%. The equivalent figure in iron ore was some 1,750%, and in crude oil it was a colossal 16,000%. In virtually no relevant category of either industrial potential or military production did Japan ever do much better than scraping 25% of American totals.

Clearly all of this mattered, but dismissing the Pacific War as yet another mechanistic result of economic potential belies two important facts about the conflict. First and foremost, the Pacific War was immensely battle-centric: that is, the United States shattered much of Japan’s combat power in battles early in the war, during the period where the force generation of the two sides was roughly equivalent and even in Japan’s favor. In critical encounters during the first phase of the war - in the Coral Sea, in the Solomons, and especially at Midway - the United States and her allies blunted Japanese momentum and inflicted catastrophic losses on the Japanese without the benefit of the massive material overmatch that would come into play during the latter years of the war. Even in the context of an unfair industrial slugfest, battles do matter a great deal, and the Pacific War was full of them.

The second point which bears considering is that, although America’s economic advantages predicted an eventual victory for the United States, American forces leveraged the outputs of the American industrial powerhouse in a specific way, so that American forces in the Pacific were much more than a mere oceangoing steamroller. In particular, the United States made enormous innovations and breakthroughs in the tactics of massed naval aviation (the fast carrier task force), amphibious operations, and submarine warfare. While it was certainly true that the United States could build more ships, more planes, and more bombs than any enemy, it is important to understand that the American armed forces in the Pacific could also do things - tactically, technically, and operationally - that nobody else could do. That too mattered a great deal.

As we embark on a prolonged treatment of the Pacific War, we will begin with respect for Japanese agency and strategic concepts on their own terms. Japan may have been hopelessly outmatched in a war of industrial attrition with the United States, but this does not mean that Japanese leadership was willingly and knowingly embarking on a course of national suicide. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Japan was a country that had mostly won its recent wars. Its ranks were staffed with talented officers and superbly trained fighting men. It disposed of the single most powerful naval asset in the world, in the First Carrier Fleet. It unleashed the largest and most destructive naval war in history. The Pacific War began with the attack on Pearl Harbor, which was at the time one of the longest ranged military operations in history. It ended with those thousands of miles in operational range condensed to the infinitesimal space inside a splitting atom.

The Grand “Strategy” of Japan

Recent years have seen something of a cottage industry spring up for books dedicated to the “grand strategy” of states, both currently extant and historical. A quick perusal of current offerings turns up works on the grand strategies of Iran, the Habsburg Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the United States, the Roman Empire, Ancient Sparta, Russia, China, Singapore, Imperial Spain, and of course, Imperial Japan.

In many ways, the proliferation of such books is understandable. Grand Strategy, as such, becomes useful shorthand for the full range of policies and mechanisms by which states pursue their interests over an extended period of time - though even this is somewhat thorny, because it is not always clear who defines those interests, and internal consensus over the state’s goals is hardly trivial to achieve. In some cases, it is genuinely possible to speak of a “grand strategy”, where a state - over an extended period of time lasting even multiple generations - utilizes a consistent toolbox of diplomatic and military mechanisms and displays a largely coherent schema of behavior that is open to analysis.

In other cases, however, states exhibit what we might term strategic schizophrenia. Their actions are motivated less by a coherent and consistent strategic scheme, and more by opportunism, dissipation, and internal disunity. Scarcely has this been more true than in the case of Imperial Japan. Japan’s political system was characterized by an astonishing a essentially unrivaled level of infighting and competition which frequently spilled over into open bloodshed. In the 1930’s, during the critical build up to the Pacific War, three Japanese Prime Ministers were assassinated, to go along with an army colonel who was killed when assassins mistook him for Prime Minister Keisuke Okada. The country would have an eye popping 14 different Prime Ministers in the decade before Pearl Harbor, part and parcel of a fluid, factuous, and poorly defined leadership group.

As a result of the unique internal dynamics of the Japanese state, a unifying Japanese grand strategy is difficult to elucidate from the history, and Japanese strategic thinking is significantly harder, both to understand and to lay out in narrative, than that of the other major combatants in the Second World War. Indeed, the convoluted inner workings of the Japanese regime were themselves a major contributor to the beginning of the Pacific War. This was not only because of the decisions made and policies pursued by the Japanese themselves, but also because the Roosevelt Administration in Washington had a poor understanding of the inner workings in Tokyo and badly misinterpreted Japanese thought. On some occasions, Washington had access to remarkably accurate intelligence from Tokyo which they could not accurately assess due to a poor understanding of the state’s internal dynamics.

We can, however, trace two important threads of Japanese “strategy” which led to the beginning of the Pacific War. These include both the strategic choices which led Japan to make its leap for empire in Southeast Asia (the trigger for war with America), and the operational particulars of its war plans, particularly on the part of the navy. In other words, we should seek to understand both how and why Japan ignited the Pacific War, and how they designed the operational agenda - including the attack on Pearl Harbor.

In broad terms, Japan’s strategic “problems” are fairly well known. Japan has a mountainous, resource poor, archipelagic geography which lacks the critical material inputs to power an industrial economy, is expensive and resource-intensive to integrate and industrialize, and vulnerable to both invasion and economic strangulation from the sea. All of this is fairly elementary, but it does not follow that a simplistic story unfolds where Japan simply chose to go to war to secure a resource base. In thinking of Japan’s “grand strategy”, it is much more accurate to describe a series of feedback loops, wherein Japanese expansion exacerbated the resource problems it was designed to solve, and these resource constraints in turn drove inter-service disagreements and strategic confusion.

To the extent that there is specific departure point where Japan began the road to the Pacific War, it was the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War on July 7, 1937, with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. This ignominious episode was stochastic and consequential, akin to the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand. A Japanese units from the Beijing Garrison (a holdover from the international intervention against the Boxer Rebellion in 1901) went out to conduct exercises at night. When a certain Private Shimura Kikujiro went missing during the maneuvers (sources disagree on whether he had slipped off to visit a brothel or was merely relieving indigestion in the woods), the Japanese unit demanded entry to the walled Chinese town of Wanping. The Chinese refused. Shots were fired. Men were killed. The war was started. Private Shimura later turned up, apparently unaware that he had started the Second World War in Asia.

After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the situation in China rapidly escalated, and an abortive attempt at a ceasefire collapsed as the Japanese surged forces into Northern China. The Japanese launched a full offensive into China, and by the end of 1937 they had captured Shanghai and Nanking, with the famously associated massacres to follow in that unfortunate city.

This is not a history of the Second Sino-Japanese War. For our purposes, however, three vital threads emerge from the beginning of that conflict. First, that the Japanese incorrectly anticipated a quick victory in northern China, after which they would begin to digest the region’s economic resources. Secondly, the rapid and unexpected expansion of the fighting in China created an enormous drain on Japanese resources which led directly to the economic pressures which created the Pacific War. Third, that same resource crunch sparked and escalated the inter-service disagreements and factionalism which characterized Japanese leadership throughout the war.

In the context of Japan’s larger imperial ambitions and strategy, it is difficult to imagine a more severe backfire than the decision to launch into northern China in 1937. Japanese planners initially hoped for a quick and decisive victory using limited forces. In July 1937, Army operational plans sketched out an offensive using just three divisions which were expected to overrun the Beijing area and crush the enemy’s main forces, at which point Chiang Kai-shek was expected to sue for peace. The idea that Chiang might still be in the field, fighting, even after the loss of both Shanghai and his capital at Nanking was unthinkable, but that is precisely what happened.

The natural result, therefore, was rapid and massive escalation of Japanese resource commitments in China as the war spilled its banks. The optimistic initial estimates - three divisions, three months, and a total cost of just 100 million yen - were swept aside, and the Japanese General Staff found itself preparing to mobilize the entire army for action on an indefinite timetable. Three divisions became twenty; 100 million yen became 2.5 billion.

The ballooning demands of the field army in China pushed Japan into a bona fide economic crisis. Tokyo initially hoped that the field army could finish the fight on those materials that had already been stockpiled in the theater, but these had been exhausted by the end of 1937, with no end to the conflict in sight. Munition and fuel stocks in China were on empty, but that was not all. Even the munitions stocks in Japan were barely sufficient to supply ongoing operations in China, which meant that a Soviet attack on Manchuria - a longstanding and ever present Japanese fear - could quickly create a critical situation.

In short, the stubborn refusal by Chiang to simply collapse and sue for terms as expected had created an enormous resource sink which forced Japan into a full war economy in a state of near crisis. Most disconcertingly, the only way for Japan to make up the critical shortfalls in key materials - above all fuels of all types - was by massively increasing imports from the United States. On December 24, 1937, Japan’s Planning Board submitted its materials mobilization plan for 1938, which estimated that Japan would need 4.1 billion yen worth of imports, in a year where only 2.6 billion yen of foreign exchange was expected to be available.

Given this immense shortfall, Japan was forced to begin war economy measures to make ends meet. Civilian stockpiles of raw materials would have to be drawn down, scrap materials would be recycled, and rationing went into effect. The railroads received a 25 percent reduction in their steel allocation, while shipbuilding was cut by 15 percent. Fuel rationing was even more extreme. A new national mobilization bill compelled all Japanese subjects to register their professional and technical skills with the government, granting the state the power to move labor between or within industries to increase production of key material. The state also appropriated for itself the power to appropriate factories and land for wartime manufacturing.

The basic picture that emerges, then, is that of a Japanese economy which abruptly mortgaged its future by signing on for a war in China that radically exceeded expectations in its scale, intensity, and duration. In response, Japan plunged headlong into a command economy, with resources strained to the max and dependence on foreign imports (especially from America) rising to unprecedented levels. The state budget for fiscal year 1938 exploded to 8.4 billion yen, after clocking just 2.8 billion in 1937.

Japan, therefore, was unique among the major combatants of the Second World War, in that its economy was already in a state of crisis with wartime measures in effect as early as 1938. In the spring of that year, the Army’s chief economic officer submitted an estimate of material needs for planned operations in China, which suggested that the China army alone would consume more material than Japan could import for the entire year. Tokyo, however, could never commit to the obvious (to us, at least) course of retrenchment and drawdown in China. Although the Planning Board repeatedly recommended winding down commitments in China, the Army’s operations planners always countered with yet another offensive with which they promised to knock Chiang out of the war once and for all. Like an alcoholic, they deferred quitting until after just one more drink. Then another, then another.

The ledger, then, was not promising. Japan faced a multi-dimensional economic crisis, with exploding deficits, a collapsing consumer economy squeezed by manpower shortages and rationing, shortages of raw materials, falling exports, insufficient shipping capacity (the army had requisitioned a great deal of shipping to supply the field army in China), and growing dependence on imports from America. All of this spoke to a colossal backfire of the war in China, which had become a black hole for resources rather than an opportunity for exploitation.

It is obvious how this can lend itself to a sense of strategic desperation, but what is often unappreciated is the fact that the crisis of the war economy drove the inter-service rivalry that characterized the wartime Japanese regime. The Army and the Navy now competed not only for prestige and to advance their particular strategic vision, but also to claim their share of the dwindling resource pool. In 1939, for example, the Navy reacted viscerally to cuts in its steel quota. The emerging question of an alliance with Germany exacerbated the split with the Army and galvanized the Navy into more assertively advancing its strategic animus.

The idea of the “Axis” is a deeply engrained concept in the historiography of World War Two. Rarely is it appreciated that the Axis was not a functioning military alliance in any real sense. Germany and Japan did not coordinate military operations, lend meaningful economic or technological aid to each other, or pursue a coherent, unified vision of victory. It is also rarely noted that the alliance with Germany was not a point of consensus within Japanese leadership. The Navy, in particular, waffled somewhere between lukewarm suspicion and outright opposition. Their reasoning was straightforward: an alliance with Germany seemed to be aimed at the Soviet Union, which suggested further Japanese military commitments on the continent (think of hypotheticals where the Japanese invade Siberia after Operation Barbarossa). This was all bad news for the Navy, in that it threatened to pull Japanese resources deeper into continental Asia, rather than into the Pacific.

The Navy resolved, then, to sell their support for the German alliance in exchange for concessions that advanced their own interests. Naval officers at a ministerial conference in January 1939 insisted that any alliance with Germany could not specify the Soviet Union as a target. At this same conference, they acquired the Army’s concession to move forward with the seizure of the Chinese island province of Hainan, in the South China Sea, for the basing and support of future operations to the south. The Navy would later demand revisions to the mobilization plan, including a doubling of its steel rations, before they would agree to the alliance with Germany. The cabinet decided to pay the Navy’s price.

This is all very odd, and in more ways than one. The internal dynamics of the Japanese regime were strange enough, and exacerbated by the economic crisis and material rationing. More to the point, however, the Navy’s opposition to the German alliance neutralized much of that alliance’s military utility. An alliance between Japan and Germany was obviously useful only in the context of pinning the Soviet Union with a two-front war, and yet the Navy agreed to the alliance only on the condition that it not become the instrument for launching a Soviet-Japanese conflict.

The great irony of the Japanese Navy is that, although it became the iconic villain of the Pacific War in American eyes, the service as a whole was among the more war-adverse elements of the Japanese state. The Navy was obviously opposed to war with the Soviet Union, because further expansion of Japan’s military enterprise on the continent threatened to diminish the Navy’s standing in favor of the Army. Yet it would be wrong to assume that the Japanese Navy was spoiling for a fight with the United States. Naval leadership was strongly preoccupied with the fleet as a deterrent (not unlike German thought vis a vis the British in the runup to World War One), and frequently raised the specter of American power to justify higher naval expenditures. The chief of the navy’s research section, however, confided after a minister’s conference that “the navy, although prepared to use Britain and the United States as pretexts for a budget, actually did not want to confront them.”

And where was the United States in all of this? Pop history tends to place the American orientation towards Japan at opposite ends of the spectrum, ranging from the conventional victimhood of Pearl Harbor - America was a pacifistic nation attacked in its sleep on Sunday morning - all the way to the more explosive notion that the Roosevelt Administration deliberately provoked Japan into starting the war. Such views have been further complicated by more recent research showing that key personnel in Washington who drafted policy towards Japan - men like Harry Dexter White, for example - were Soviet intelligence assets, suggesting a third position: that America was steered into a war with Japan by Moscow.

In fact, America’s actions did push Japan into launching the Pacific War, but they were motivated by a relatively mundane problem: the Roosevelt Administration consistently misinterpreted Japanese actions and intentions and failed to understand that policies designed to deter and checkmate Japan were in fact driving Tokyo to launch the war.

The analytic errors underpinning the American position can be personified by two men. On the one hand was the American ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew. A realist about Japanese militarism, Grew understood both the divisive internal dynamics of the Japanese regime and - above all - that Japan was fundamentally a desperate nation, fighting off a severe economic crisis sparked by the war in China, and led by desperate men. This desperation, he argued, might well lead the Japanese to a war with the United States, regardless of the outcome. He would later write:

I know Japan; I lived there for ten years. I know the Japanese intimately. The Japanese will not crack. They will not crack morally or psychologically or economically, even when eventual defeat stares them in the face. They will pull in their belts another notch, reduce their rations from a bowl to a half bowl of rice, and fight to the bitter end.

Grew argued that Japan’s desperation called for American moderation. In particular, he suggested that Washington must avoid backing Japan into a corner, and that a heavy hand would only lend ammunition to Japanese hardliners who believed war with America was inevitable.

At the opposite end of the spectrum was Stanley Hornbeck, the State Department’s chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs. A Sinophile who had lived in China for several years, Hornbeck understood as well as Grew that the China War had put Japan in a dire economic trap, but he drew the opposite conclusion. In his eyes, Japan was not a desperate nation willing to fight its way out of a trap, but a drained and exhausted state that would not dare fight a war with the United States, which it was sure to lose. Hornbeck was an advocate for maximal economic pressure, particularly when it came to oil.

Of course, America’s actual policy towards Japan was significantly more convoluted, but the positions of Grew and Hornbeck showed the range of analytic confusion that reigned in Washington when it came to Japan. Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull came to the rather odd conclusion, for example, that an embargo on oil would likely lead Japan to attack the Dutch East Indies, but embargoes on other raw materials like scrap iron would not. Policy questions were further complicated by America’s own rearmament, which suggested a need to limit the export of vital materials, and a growing consensus against “appeasement”.

American policy towards Japan was implicitly oriented towards containment, if not outright hostility, given both American affinity in China and Washington’s commitment to the “Open Door Policy”, which aimed to preserve free access to Asian markets for all outside powers (and was therefore opposed to Japanese efforts to absorb and monopolize Chinese economic resources). However, the drift to open war can be largely explained by three major events: the Japanese invasion of French Indochina, the collapse of diplomacy between Cordell Hull and Japanese Ambassador Kichisaburō Nomura, and the America embargo of Japanese oil. All of these, obviously were interlinked and fed into each other.

The Japanese move into northern Indochina in 1940, ostensibly submitted to under duress by French colonial officials, was motivated by an attempt to cut off the flow of material into southern China, in the hopes that this would isolate and - at long last - collapse Chiang’s forces. This was in itself concerning to Washington, but the real crisis emerged on July 28, 1941, when Japanese troops invaded southern Indochina in violation of the previous year’s agreements with the French colonial government. What is perhaps most interesting about the Indochina crisis, however, is that it led the United States to incorrectly interpret intelligence which was superficially accurate.

Washington had advance notice of Japan’s intention to thrust further south into Indochina, courtesy of the excellent MAGIC Cryptanalysis office, which had long since broken Japan’s diplomatic communications (though not, we should note, the naval cipher, which is why the Americans had no forewarning of the Pearl Harbor attack). MAGIC had revealed in advance the Japanese move into Indochina, but what it could not reveal was the context of Japan’s internal deliberations. It could not reveal the extent to which Japanese foreign policy was being guided by a sort of internal bartering, with strong disagreements over Japan’s vectors of expansion and a deep rift between Army and Navy.

American intelligence was almost totally unaware of this unique internal dynamic. When MAGIC tipped Washington that the Japanese were moving deeper into Indochina, this was interpreted as a point of consensus among the Japanese leadership group. There was no sense that the Japanese regime was bartering with itself, that the Imperial Navy was attempting to string the Army along for more steel, or that the Navy still hoped to avoid a war with the United States. Joseph Grew’s suggestion that the Japanese were fundamentally desperate, and that an escape hatch should be left open for Japan to moderate itself, was forgotten.

The latter half of 1941 was something of a whirlwind. The United States responded to the Japanese move into southern Indochina on July 26 with escalated economic pressure, including a ban on the export of high grade gasoline, caps on other petroleum products, and a freeze on Japanese assets in the United States. The latter amounted to a de-facto embargo on oil by precluding Japan’s ability to pay. From there, it was largely an inevitability that diplomacy between Hull and the Japanese ambassador would gradually collapse, though the minutia of that process remain interesting. On November 27, Hull told the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson: “I have washed my hands of it, and it now in the hands of you and Knox - the army and the navy.” It was only a few days later, on December 1, that Emperor Hirohito met with the new cabinet of Hideki Tojo and presided over a unanimous vote for war.

The point of this admittedly verbose amble through the diplomatic and economic backdrop to the Pacific War has been, primarily, to emphasize that there was no coherent Japanese “Grand Strategy” which included a confrontation with the US Navy in the vast Pacific. Japan’s actions were characterized above all by desperation, time pressure, and a lack of options. The catalyst for all of this was primarily the botched war in China, which began optimistically in 1937 with hopes of a quick and decisive campaign, but quickly spiraled out of Tokyo’s control.

The China war had already put Japan’s economy in crisis by 1938 and put the country in a state of quasi-total war, with central economic controls, rationing, and mobilization. These problems were then intensified by repeated Japanese escalation in China, with a series of operations designed - over and over again - to crush the Chinese once and for all. The move into Indochina, in turn, was fundamentally another front in the China War, which was designed to cut off the flow of foreign supplies. Rather than a quick campaign which allowed Japan to exploit Chinese economic resources, the Japanese were left with a metastasizing conflict which strained the economy to the utmost. The economic calculus of the China War had gone exactly opposite to the plan, but that very cost made it impossible for Japan to walk away.

The sudden resource crunch intensified the drift between army and navy and amplified the bizarre internal dynamic of “self bartering.” This was all very strange: the more desperate Japan’s situation became, the less unified and the more erratic the regime became. Little wonder that the United States struggled to interpret Japanese actions and diplomacy.

Above all, however, the American side made one fundamental miscalculation: they assumed that Japan understood that it would lose a war with the United States and therefore would not dare to try its luck. Even Roosevelt, who understood that an oil embargo would provoke the Japanese, was mostly concerned that they would attack the Dutch East Indies and seize the oil fields there. The idea that Japan would attack the United States did not seem to register as a real possibility.

It was perhaps natural, therefore, that Washington believed a program that mixed rearmament and economic pressure would checkmate Japan. At one point, Cordell Hull even channeled President Roosevelt’s famous cousin and wrote to FDR:

It may be advisable - in light of indications from the Far East - to “speak softly” (carefully avoiding any word that might to a wishful thinker imply that we would consider offers of “compromise”), while simultaneously giving by our acts in the Pacific new glimpses of diplomatic, economic, and naval “big sticks.”

The reality, however, was that Japan’s failure to resolve the China War, and the ensuing economic crisis, had already created a genuine state of strategic desperation, which the United States intensified by its rearmament and especially by the 1941 strangulation of oil exports to Japan. This latter move, in particular, immediately put the Japanese on the clock and created the consensus for war. Since Japan’s existing stockpiles of oil were sufficient for perhaps 18 months of normal consumption, the loss of American exports put Japan at a fork in the road and pressured them to act immediately.

The United States succeeded, broadly speaking, in economically and diplomatically cornering and checkmating the Japanese. With Japan’s economy already in a state of crisis, the oil embargo threatened to cave the entire structure in. By any reasonable measure, the United States did indeed have the Japanese backed into a corner. The miscalculation was the assumption that Japan would not attempt to fight its way out against desperate odds.

Offering Battle: Japan’s Naval Schema

What we have endeavored to show with this admittedly overwrought prologue is that the Japanese launched the Pacific War against the Anglo-American powers largely out of a sense of economic crisis and geostrategic checkmate. Japan’s urgent need to acquire an independent supply of oil, which it attempted to solve by seizing the Dutch East Indies, is by far the best known element of this crisis, but it is important to understand that the Japanese economy was already under incredible strain in domains that went far beyond fossil fuels.

This general sense of crisis related directly to the scale and aggression of Japan’s opening offensives. The Japanese famously exploded out of the box in 1941-42, with operations in Malaysia, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, New Guinea, the central Pacific, and of course, Hawaii. This massive Japanese offensive was shaped by a particular mixture of desperation and long held assumptions about how a Pacific War would be fought. Japan had to accomplish a huge list of operational tasks in the opening phase of the war, and this list was dictated by both the immediate economic crisis and an idiosyncratic theory of war.

Read more

Most of my writing to this point has focused on the analysis of wars that have either already happened (sometimes very long ago) or are currently happening. Here, I’ll risk a slight deviation by attempting three theoretical histories of a war that has not yet begun, but which looks increasingly possible. What happens if the United States makes an aggressive push to seize Greenland against the wishes of the Greenlanders, the Danes, and the European security community writ large?

Perhaps these histories will strike the reader as nothing more than fiction, although hopefully enjoyable and interesting fiction at that. I think, however, that each case has an essentially coherent chain of cause and effect, and the wildly different outcomes that ensue should sober us. Nothing about geopolitics - and by extension history - is truly deterministic in ways that are obvious to us in real time. Like balls careening around a pool table, second order effects begin to multiply quickly. Our history is full of great wars which began in seemingly small places: the Lexington Common, Fort Sumter, an Archduke’s touring car in the back alleys of Sarajevo. Will Nuuk be next?

Subscribe now

The First Story: The Great Shattering

The battle in Greenland ended before the world had come to grips with the fact that it had begun. The idea of live fire between the Americans and their former European allies - a notion which seemed ludicrous and unthinkable barely a year before - was considered so impossible that governments across Europe were still in a state of disbelief when the outcome of the fighting became obvious, some 9 hours after the first shots were fired. It was as if the sky was falling.

President Trump was on a roll. In January of 2026, US forces had conducted a lightning raid in Venezuela which captured President Nicolás Maduro and extracted him to the states for trial. The previous year, American strategic bombers had penetrated Iranian airspace and struck sensitive nuclear facilities. While armchair analysts and bloggers had incessantly debated the particulars of these two incidents, pouring over grainy images of impact sites and iPhone video of American helicopters over Caracas, the basic fact was that America had boldly excursed into two hostile countries, seemingly at will, without suffering a single casualty. The President could be forgiven for feeling that he was on a bit of a heater.

As he pivoted his attention back to Greenland, President Trump insisted that America absolutely had to have the thinly populated and inhospitable island, to ensure both American security and the safety of the broader western world. Justifications seemed to vary by the day - from the spectral threat of a Chinese presence in Greenland, to the need to defend theoretical future shipping routes, to basing for strategic assets like Upgraded Early Warning Radar for detecting ballistic missiles and space activity. Nobody could quite agree on why Trump wanted Greenland so badly, but he was adamant that America needed to not only maintain a military presence there, but annex the island outright.

At first, the American President deployed his favorite all-purpose diplomatic tool and began levying import tariffs on the Europeans, with promises to raise them over time, to pressure the Danish government to sell. It was perhaps not unreasonable that Trump expected the Europeans to cave, yet again. The Danes, however, refused categorically, and instead began deploying forces to defend the island, scrounging up a coalition of European partners to help garrison Greenland.

Few could question the fighting spirit of the Danes - who after all had contributed and in turn suffered disproportionate casualties participating in America’s Middle Eastern wars - but the idea of truly fighting the Americans for Greenland was doomed from the start. To begin with, it was clear that the Europeans never actually expected the Americans to shoot at them. The European mission to Greenland had a symbolic sheen from the beginning: the idea, one supposes, was that confronting the Americans with the prospect of actually killing their own allies would compel even someone as intransigent as Trump to balk. Accordingly, the European and allied forces consisted of relatively small contingents. The British government made the strongest showing and dispatched the brigade-sized 40 Commando of the Royal Marines; Canada contributed a single Arctic Response Company Group; Norway provided two companies of the Narvik Battalion (specialists in Arctic warfare); the Dutch, Finns, and Germans sent company equivalent formations.

What all of these deployments had in common, like the Danish garrison, was that they consisted mostly of light infantry, and they lacked critical enablers like layered air defense, standoff strike capability, robust combat engineering, and air support. This was a classically expeditionary force. In terms of sheer firepower, it was clear that they were woefully overmatched by the American armada, now massed in the Labrador Sea under USNORTHCOM. It was obvious that their deployment was designed mainly as a demonstration of European resolve, and to confront the White House with the idea that they could only have Greenland if they were willing to shoot at their own allies. The Europeans thought they were calling President Trump’s bluff. He was not bluffing.

Early in the morning on Monday, April 27, 2026, American forces began to shower targets in Greenland with a mixed strike package of air and sea launched missiles, while layered cyber effects wreaked havoc on European ISR and Command and Control. Ship-launched Tomahawks struck ammunition depots, barracks, and command posts sprinkled around the fjords on Greenland’s western coast. The HDMS Niels Juel, a Danish Air Defense Frigate, was struck and disabled by an air-launched AGM-158C LRASM. Within an hour, the Europeans were in disarray, and resistance was minimal when the American 11th Airborne Division - the “Arctic Angels” - began their insertion as the sun was coming up. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver Denning, who commanded the Royal Marine 40 Commando (stationed around Sisimiut), managed to inform the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters in the north of London that “The Americans have engaged us” shortly before communications went offline.

The Europeans, staggered, had no choice but to order a stand down and retreat. The death toll was relatively minor by the standards of Europe’s long and bloody history: a total of 97 European KIA, mostly in the initial wave of strikes, but the sight of coffins returning home, draped in their various national flags, was shocking. European capitals roiled in a psychologically overwhelming mixture of disorientation, betrayal, disbelief, and anger.

The Europeans were determined to retaliate with everything in their toolkits, short of escalating a kinetic war with the Americans, which they belatedly admitted they could not win. In July, the European members, along with Canada, began a coordinated mass withdrawal from NATO, precipitating an American withdraw from what remained of the organization. By August, the only remaining members were Turkey, Croatia, and Bulgaria, who awkwardly disbanded the alliance.

As they withdrew, European states began formally ejecting American troops from their bases across the continent. As the American armed forces began drawing down their long held positions, abandoning Cold War keystones like Ramstein, Lakenheath, and Aviano Air Base, some troops came home, but most redeployed to the expanding Incirlik Air Base in Turkey (which was quick to leverage the new Atlantic divide by welcoming a larger American presence) and facilities in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, the Europeans unleashed a three-pronged economic counteroffensive against the Americans, targeting American imports, tech, and military procurements. A whopping 100% import tariff on American goods all but priced the Americans out of the European common market, while European regulators - who had long been gunning for American tech companies - were finally let off the leash. Over the summer, the EU finally realized its vision for a single digital regulatory agency for the entire union, which began to systematically crush American giants like Google, Meta, Tesla, and X, eventually banning them completely. Enterprising young men continued to use VPNs and other workarounds to access American social media, but publicly the American presence faded and Chinese offerings like Baidu, BYD, Huawei, and ByteDance moved in to replace them.

Finally, the Europeans realized at long last that they could no longer remain reliant on American defense contractors. Orders were unceremoniously cancelled across the continent (even Poland wistfully cancelled its exorbitant orders for American HIMARS), and the Europeans began flooding money into indigenous producers like Rheinmetall, BAE systems, and Saab. It was satisfying to finally snub the Americans, but deliveries were scheduled on long timetables and costs seemed to consistently overrun promises. Nobody said it, but everyone began to wish that they could have back all the gear that had trickled into Ukraine over the years.

The shattering of the NATO bloc did not occur in a vacuum. The Russian government, ever calculating and opportunistic, immediately began to step up the pressure on Ukraine, which was now in severe disarray. By the summer of 2026, President Trump - seeking to dump a flaming Ukrainian crisis in Europe’s lap - cut off Ukrainian access to American weaponry, intelligence, and targeting data. On July 4, in his TruthSocial post wishing “HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY TO ALL”, he announced that he had instructed Elon Musk to disconnect Ukraine’s Starlink. Put out of command and with the flow of western munitions now shut off, Ukrainian forces began to evaporate. Facing mass surrenders and Russian breakthroughs across the front by early September, Kiev was forced to sign a peace treaty acknowledging Russia’s annexation of ten oblasts: Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Odessa, Dnipro, Kharkov, and Sumy.

The Kremlin did not waste time. By the end of the summer, European media was reporting with alarm on the buildup of Russian forces along the border with the Baltic states. In October, the Russians went in. They had learned from their mistakes in Ukraine, and came in with a heavy hand - striking power generation, barracks, and municipal infrastructure at the outset. It took 17 days for Russian ground forces to overrun the Baltics. NATO did nothing. NATO was gone.

Lacking any formal security commitments to the Baltics, the European community was bitterly divided over whether to intervene. Only the Poles were willing to step up at the outset, but they sobered quickly after the 18th Mechanized Division was mauled outside Kaunas (advancing in stereotyped marching columns, it was badly savaged by veteran Russian drone operators), and Warsaw signed an armistice. With winter descending, and in desperate need of Russian gas to prop up a reeling economy, the Europeans decided to cede Russian administration of the Baltics. Finland, reverting to the hedgehog strategy that had served it so well in the Cold War, formally adopted a policy of neutrality and intensified refresher training for its large pool of military reservists.

China wisely decided to be the last man into the fight. With the Americans dealing with thorny economic problems (the collapse of economic relations with Europe had pushed American treasury rates to the roof and shocked supply chains), and the American military reorienting itself, the Chinese waited until mid-2027 to blockade Taiwan. Nvidia’s stock cratered in after hours trading. Chaining attacks on America’s overweight tech sector, Beijing paired their move on Taiwan with the release of a wave of open source AI models, including the cutting edge DeepSeek V5. The sudden launch of dozens of competing AI models, combined with the prospect of the total loss of Taiwanese chip manufacture, sent American tech stocks into a spiral of collapse, and the S&P 500 fell 23%. President Trump announced his intention to retaliate with tariffs. Taipei capitulated.

As the world groped forward into 2028, the emerging geopolitical landscape was wholly unrecognizable. The launch of America’s hemispheric policy was an unqualified success, within its own narrow parameters. Greenland was consolidated as an unincorporated American territory, along the lines of Guam and Puerto Rico, while eager junior partners like El Salvador and Argentina provided outposts of American power along the spine of the Americas. After a brief standoff in the summer of 2027, Panama returned control of the Canal Zone to the United States, which set to work reactivating military facilities including Howard Air Force Base and Naval Station Coco Solo. With control over both the Panama Canal and the Venezuelan Oil Fields, and an intensified military presence in Greenland, the Donroe Doctrine had been realized.

The costs, however, had been exorbitantly high. The American alliance in Europe, built up and maintained a great cost all through the Cold War, had been lost. America’s position in Asia was mostly intact - the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, and Australia remained keystone American allies - but the failure of the United States to actively defend Taiwan had deeply sobered them all, and it was an open question whether they could count on the Americans to resist further Chinese encroachment. In an interview on FOX News, Professor John Mearsheimer suggested that Japan and South Korea might be best able to ensure their own security by acquiring nuclear weapons. Tokyo was already thinking the same thing: in October 2027, the Japanese Air Self Defense Forces tested a new intermediate range ballistic missile. The media nicknamed it Godzilla.

The Second Story: Turbo-America

“He’s a madman. But there’s nothing we can do.”

Internally, the Danish government roiled with rage and disbelief that it had come to this. After declining, diplomatically but firmly, the American President’s $700 billion offer to purchase Greenland, they had been subjected to a blistering pressure campaign on all fronts. The Americans had begun slapping escalating tariffs on Denmark’s European partners, while President Trump publicly berated the Danes for their ingratitude and stubbornness. An American aircraft carrier group had parked itself in the North Atlantic, some 200 miles off the coast of Greenland. The Danish ambassador to Washington had been summoned to the Oval Office, where the President excoriated him and threatened to “blast you out of the sky” if the Danes continued airlifting additional military personnel into Greenland.

The Danes weighed their options and found that they had none. Danish military personnel were quietly recalled from Greenland, and Copenhagen began seeking ways to save face. On July 4, 2026 - the anniversary not only of America’s founding, but of the Louisiana Purchase - the White House tweeted a photo of President Trump and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, signing the formal transfer of Greenland to the United States. In the background, a lustrous poster displayed a map of Greenland shaded in the stars and stripes. President Trump beamed. The Prime Minister did not smile.

The American annexation of Greenland sobered the Europeans to the two basic premises which now governed their political reality. First, the Americans were perfectly willing to take recourse to coercion against not only enemies, but allies as well. Secondly, Europe had checkmated itself so that it was unable to resist this coercion. For all the talk of American decline and the emerging multi-polar world, the view from Brussels indicated that America was more powerful than ever.

President Trump was hardly finished with his tour de force against the Europeans. Later that summer, with Russian forces on the approaches to the sister cities in the Donbas, the Ukrainians finally reached a breaking point. Secretary of State Marco Rubio flew to Moscow. On August 24 - Ukraine’s independence day, rather pointedly - the United States announced that an agreement had been reached with Moscow. Washington would recognize Russia’s annexation of the four eastern oblasts, along with Crimea, and compel the Ukrainians to adopt a formal policy of neutrality, in exchange for Russian guarantees of non-aggression towards the remaining rump Ukraine. Ukraine was to receive security guarantees and an investment fund for the reconstruction of the country.

The Europeans quickly learned that they would be bearing the costs of these latter items. America would be pocketing any proceeds accruing from the 2025 minerals deal - “They have to pay us back”, Trump insisted - and Washington would take a hand in overseeing the reconstruction fund, but the actual costs would fall on the Europeans. The total tab was now estimated at a whopping $650 billion dollars - hardly a meager sum. Behind the scenes, however, Trump threatened repeatedly to withdraw the United States from NATO and simply walk away from Europe altogether. When the European Commission publicly pushed back against the idea of bearing the reconstruction costs, the President threatened to levy a 25% tariff on the EU and direct the revenue to the reconstruction fund. “They’ll pay for it one way or another”, he said. “They have to pay for it.”

Europe was caught between a hammer and an anvil. On the one hand, it had irreparably estranged itself from Russia, and it was unable to course correct on that front due to the continued intransigence of the former Warsaw Pact states. On the other hand, it remained intensely reliant on an American overseer which was perfectly willing to offload all the costs of the Ukraine War onto Europe, use ostentatious coercion to ensure that the Europeans complied, and even demand that they say thank you.

Ultimately, what prevented the EU from solving these problems was the fact that the EU was not a truly functional polity, but a multitude. A dangerous asymmetry existed, wherein the EU could be bullied and tariffed and coerced like a single entity, but internally it was unable to craft a coherent, unified foreign policy. Now it was left holding the flaming bag that was a rump, wrecked Ukraine.

In practical terms, President Trump had successfully executed full-spectrum domination of Europe. He had humiliated them with the annexation of Greenland, using a mixture of economic and military threats to force the Danes to hand over the island. In Ukraine, he’d achieved a successful dismount: bringing home a mineral deal and a peace agreement as “shiny objects” to show off to the electorate, while leaving the Europeans with the bill. And of course, in a program that ran back to the Biden administration, the Ukraine War had vacuumed up extant European military inventories and forced them to replenish with purchases from American defense contractors.

He was a madman. But what could they do?

The Third Story: Nuclear Charlemagne

The Danish humiliation was felt as a European humiliation. One European leader after another had confronted President Trump directly, or made public statements affirming that Greenland was Danish territory, that Danish sovereignty was sacrosanct, and that NATO would defend its members against any threat - even an American threat. When push came to shove, however, the Danes of course had to back down. Greenland was indefensible, and nobody actually believed that the Europeans would fight a hot war with the Americans in the Arctic.

President Trump was over the moon, of course. The Danes had backed down bloodlessly, Marco Rubio had flown to Greenland and taken an awkward picture in front of the Inatsisartut building in Nuuk, where the American flag now waved. It appeared, cosmetically, to be yet another major foreign policy coup for the Americans, who seemed to act with impunity and get away with it, time and time again.

Internally, however, European governments felt that the roiling, mutual resentment had become intolerable. Trump lectured Europe about ingratitude, but where was American gratitude for the Danes - a loyal ally who had fought and died in those wasteful American bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Time and time again, Europe had toed the line and dutifully formed up behind the Americans, and where had it gotten them? It was time for a divorce.

Of course, not everybody in the European community was keen on abandoning the American alliance which had been the cornerstone of continental security policy for so long. The eastern states in particular - Poland, the Baltics, Finland - remained preoccupied with the Russian threat on their border, and would hardly dream of abandoning NATO and willingly walking out from under the American nuclear umbrella. For the states of Western Europe, however, it was long past time to create a coherent security architecture: under, by, and for Europeans.

In Brussels, on November 11, 2026 (Armistice Day, chosen to evoke the memory of old Europe before it was a satrapy of the American president), sixteen European states announced their intention to withdraw from NATO and enter into a new security architecture under the European Common Defense Organization (ECDO), although of course it would be colloquially known as the Brussels Pact. Taken together, these states - Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden - counted a population of some 350 million people, and a GDP of nearly $20 trillion, dwarfing the remaining European members of the now greatly reduced NATO.

Predicated on a similar tripwire defense protocol of common defense (an attack on one is considered an attack on all), the new defense pact was designed from the outset to pack a serious punch. The text of the European Common Defense Treaty called for the establishment of a multi-national rapid reaction force of twelve brigade equivalent units, ready to deploy rapidly anywhere within the “European theater”. The treaty also bound all of its member states to be “prepared to contribute to the common defense” by reintroducing mandatory universal conscription of 18 year old males, and extracted a commitment to expend no less than 4% of gross domestic product on defense.

By far the most revolutionary development of the ECDO, however, was the formal integration of France (the organization’s sole nuclear state) as the bearer of the pact’s strategic deterrent. This was achieved by granting France a veto prerogative in the Common Defense Council, in exchange for clauses which could invoke a “review of strategic strike options” in cases where the council determined that the “territorial or political integrity of the common defense area is threatened.” This innovation, which amounted to a de-facto extension of a French nuclear umbrella over the pact (and a tacit admission of French leadership in Europe) became popularly known as the Charlemagne protocol.

The creation of the ECDO and the withdrawal of its members from NATO led necessarily to the expulsion of American forces from bases across Europe. Facilities like Ramstein, in Germany, and Aviano Air Base in Italy were drawn down, and the Americans began a migration to their remaining outposts in Europe. The United Kingdom remained in the fold, but Poland, Turkey, and Hungary hosted the majority of the redeployed American garrisons - though increasingly, it was unclear whether they were there to ward off threats from the east or the west.

Undoubtedly, the ECDO member states hoped to maintain cordial relations with the Americans. Inevitably, however, frictions arose, largely because America now maintained an irritating blocking position in East Central Europe. With NATO’s continental foothold now limited to a thin band of states (Finland, the Baltics, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey) - this greatly reduced American satrapy remained in a position to block European access to Russia (and Russian gas), and the Americans worked incessantly to mediate and control the relationship. Worse still, in 2027 Turkish forces overran northern Syria and annexed large swathes of the country with American backing. This paved the way for the revival of the Qatar-Turkey pipeline, placing yet another high-leverage energy stream in the hands of the American alliance.

The ECDO had solved a major problem of modern European history. For the first time, Western Europe - which represented the mass of the European economy - had crafted both a political mechanism for coordinated military action, and laid the groundwork for a real force capable of backing it up. It had not been easy for all the member parties to grant the de-facto leadership role to the French, but this bitter pill was made easier to swallow by the humiliating memory of the Greenland crisis. In any case, Gaullism had certainly been vindicated and it was high past time to follow the French lead on such matters.

Superficially, the new geopolitical lines in Europe appeared mostly stable - with one notable exception. In May 2028, the Common Defense Council met to discuss increasing tensions in the disputed territorial waters between Greece and Turkey. This had been a major source of tension for decades, and on two occasions - 1987 and 1996 - Greece and Turkey had come close to general military hostilities. Now, however, Greece was a member of the ECDO, subject to the Charlemagne Protocol, while Turkey remained a constituent of NATO. More than that, Turkey had become arguably the most strategically critical American ally in the world, mediating access and energy flows between Europe, the Middle East, and Russia. Incirlik Air Base - expanded in 2027 - was home to more than 9,000 American personnel, and nearly 80 American nuclear weapons. Now, Turkish patrol vessels were said to be repeatedly and intentionally intruding on Greece’s territorial waters.

The German defense minister, Boris Pistorius, was heard to say: “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Aegean.”

Share

One of the hallmarks of the Second World War was the technological maturity and systematic application of military technologies which were still in their infancy during the first war. Tanks, which had previously been lumbering and mechanically histrionic death traps, emerged as pivotal assault and exploitation weapons which trampled Europe by the thousands. Aircraft, initially used in the first war in reconnaissance roles, now swarmed in vast hordes, ranging hundreds of miles into enemy space and disgorging unprecedented firepower. The radio became ubiquitous on the battlefield and provided unprecedented levels of command and control over far flung and fast moving units.

Tanks, mechanized infantry forces, self propelled artillery, rockets, strategic bombers, close air support: all deadly and cinematic, and part of a deadly new tactical package. However, they could hardly match the sinister terror induced by the most understated and subtle member of this maturing era of warfare: the submarine.

The Second World War witnessed two concurrent campaigns by which submarines were used in an attempt to economically isolate and degrade an island nation enemy. One of these attempts was remarkably successful. In the Pacific, US Submariners sunk millions of tons of Japanese shipping - more shipping, in fact, than Japan had possessed at the outbreak of war. A brutally effective submarine campaign against Japanese tankers affected a near perfect starvation of Japan’s war machine: after intaking 40% of East Indies crude production in 1942, only 5% would reach Japanese shores in 1944. This was a cataclysmic decline which Japan could not survive, owed largely to the 155 tankers sunk by American submarines in 1943 and 1944. In the final year of the war, American boats were able to undertake the ultimate dream of submarine theorists: a close blockade of the Japanese home islands, with American submariners prowling practically every inlet and bay.

The success of the American submarine campaign was genuinely astonishing, and created a near perfect asphyxiation of the Japanese war economy, with imports of virtually every vital industrial input plummeting to near zero by 1944. Admiral Charles Lockwood, who commanded the Submarine Force Pacific Fleet, was probably only slightly boasting when he later told an instructor at the Naval Academy:

Now don’t teach those midshipmen that the submariners won the war. We know there were other forces fighting there, too. But if they kept the surface forces and the flyboys out of our patrol areas we would have won the war six months earlier.

Despite the phenomenal success of America’s submarine operations against Japan, the American war on Japanese shipping generally receives scant attention. To take just one example, Francis Pike’s magisterial and colossal tome on the Pacific War relegates American submarine operations to an appendix. In contrast, there is an astonishing volume of literature devoted to the war’s other grand submarine campaign: the so-called Battle of the Atlantic. Germany’s famous U-boats attempted a similarly strategic interdiction war against shipping to the British home isles. Unlike the American submarine force in the Pacific, however, the U-boats failed.

Germany’s U-boat campaign against Britain has always been lavishly furnished with attention, not only because of its intrinsically interesting qualities - with at times hundreds of submarines at sea hunting across a battlespace of more than 10,000 square miles - but also because it seemed to offer one of Germany’s few genuine levers against Britain, and therefore one of the few true avenues through which Germany may have won the war. Winston Churchill famously noted in his memoirs that “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril”, implying that the war on shipping really had some element of war-breaking potential.

Subscribe now

The U-boat campaign was, to be a sure, an important element of the emerging global war. As a major departure point for alternative histories, however, the Battle of the Atlantic is always bound to attain some element of controversy. It is increasingly popular, in the historiography, to focus on the sheer magnitude of American industrial power and conclude that there was simply nothing that the German U-boat force could really do to plug the flow of shipping across the Atlantic. In this view, the Germans were fighting a brutal but ultimately futile delaying action against an unstoppable economic force, and had no better prospects of success than a man trying to plug a failing dam with his fingers. The general presumption is that Germany never had real prospects of winning the global war, which renders alternative history a waste of mental energy. It bears repeating, however, that the men running the war against Germany - men like Churchill and the British Admiralty - viewed the U-boats in real time as a genuinely lethal threat. Dismissing this as a folly exposed by brute industrial statistics would be a mistake. Both German and British naval leadership saw the Battle of the Atlantic as a genuinely decisive aspect of the war, and we should do them the courtesy of trying to see what they saw.

Hitler’s British Problem

One of the most striking and nearly ubiquitous problems with the popular historiography of the Second World War is the practice of dramatically exaggerating Great Britain’s strategic peril in the aftermath of French defeat in 1940. From films like Dunkirk and Darkest Hour, to trite popular histories like The Splendid and the Vile, the common practice is to portray a tottering and beleaguered Britain, alone and under siege by merciless Luftwaffe bombing, staring down the barrel at cataclysmic defeat. The Churchill cult always works to play up this perception, emphasizing a creeping fog of defeatism and crisis which was transcended only by the irascible courage of the hard drinking and hard driving prime minister.

Rarely is Britain’s strategic position considered from the German point of view. As the Germans saw it, Britain was not a battered and besieged state in crisis, but rather a great porcupine loitering offshore which they had no clear way to strike at. Britain retained a significant and growing air force, an enormous industrial plant, economic linkages to a vast overseas resource base (both in its own empire and in the United States), and absolute supremacy at sea. So long as Britain chose to keep fighting, Germany had shockingly few direct kinetic levers against her.

The Luftwaffe’s strategic air campaign - the famous Battle of Britain - is an ideal example. The usual impression given is that the German air force was really on the verge of bringing the RAF to the breaking point in 1940, but this was largely a mirage stemming from poor intelligence on both sides. German intelligence tended to drastically underestimate British aircraft production, giving the impression that the Royal Air Force was close to defeat when it was not. For example, in 1940 Luftwaffe command staff estimated British aircraft production at 9,900, of which 2,790 were thought to be fighters. Actual British output that year clocked 15,049 aircraft, of which 4,283 were fighters. German intelligence also drastically overestimated the efficacy of their bombing and believed that British production would decline to some 7,000 aircraft in 1941; in fact, British production was accelerating and would top 20,000 planes that year.

Without being drawn too far into the particulars of German memorandum, the basic fact is that throughout the latter half of 1940 the Luftwaffe generally believed that the RAF was taking delivery of far fewer aircraft than it really was, and incorrectly concluded that it was on the verge of air supremacy over southern Britain. This caused a sense of disillusionment and mild bewilderment when, contrary to expectations, RAF Fighter Command continued to throw aircraft into combat rather than collapsing. The high hopes placed on the strategic air campaign faded gradually and plans for an amphibious landing in Britain were quietly shelved.

On the other hand, British intelligence had the opposite tendency to overestimate German strength. This was partially because the ratio of operational craft and reserves in the Luftwaffe was incorrectly presumed to be in-line with British practice (leading to the belief that the Germans had far more reserve aircraft than they really did), and partially because British intelligence greatly overestimated German production. An August report from British Air Intelligence estimated German output of 24,400 aircraft in 1940, with a front line strength of some 5,800. In fact, German aircraft output that year was just 10,247, with a serviceable frontline strength of just 2,054.

These numbers reduce to a fairly simple problem. The Germans underestimated British aircraft production by 50%, and the British overestimated German production by 140%. Consequentially, the British believed they were fighting a desperate struggle against an overwhelming enemy, and the Germans believed they were working to finish off an overmatched foe that was all but defeated. Add it all up, and everybody apparently agreed that the RAF was in serious trouble. But this was never really the case, and the “Battle of Britain” became a sort of mutually attritional struggle that was never particularly decisive. By October 1940, when it was finally becoming clear that the Luftwaffe had failed to gain air supremacy, both side had roughly 700 operational fighter aircraft with adequate pools of trained pilots. Neither side was really defeated, but the stalemate in the air left Germany without a mechanism to strike directly at Britain on any meaningful scale.

German strategic dissipation proceeded rapidly from this point. Planning for Operation Barbarossa began to dominate resource allocation problems in 1941, and the breakdown of the campaign in the east had further implications for the emerging war against the Anglo-American bloc, both in terms of delaying the consolidation of Germany’s blockade-proof continental economic space, and changing the nature of Germany’s strategic perspective in the west. By 1942, the focus had shifted from finding a mechanism to defeat Britain outright towards a method for preventing the opening of a second front in the west.

Enter Karl Dönitz. The navy’s Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote - “Commander of the U-boats” - Dönitz became the originator and advocate of a particular theory of the war against allied merchant shipping. Dönitz identified allied seaborne transport capacity as the critical strategic problem facing the Anglo-Americans and therefore the critical objective for the navy to degrade.

The Kriegsmarine had been operating against allied shipping from the beginning of the war using both surface warships and U-boats; in fact, a memorandum from Hitler the day before the invasion of Poland instructed the Navy to “operate against merchant shipping, with England as the focal point.” Nothing about Dönitz’s ideas were particularly novel or interesting from that perspective. What was new, however, was Dönitz’s twofold assertion, first the objective of the navy’s operations was to very explicitly to sink the highest aggregate tonnage of enemy shipping, rated against expected construction, and secondly that this could only be achieved by U-boats.

Dönitz, very particularly and personally, was the originator of the mathematic framework for the U-boat war: the idea that the Anglo-Americans could be attritted and perhaps even defeated provided that their shipping tonnage was sunk at a rate which exceeded new construction. The implication of this was that the navy needed to adopt tactics that aimed to sink the absolute maximum tonnage of shipping. In practical terms, what this meant was that U-boats ought not to be positioned based on other operational considerations (like the defense of the Norwegian coast, or interdiction in the Mediterranean) - rather, submarines needed to be in the places where they could sink the most shipping tonnage. In April, 1942, Dönitz wrote:

The enemy merchant navies are a collective factor. It is therefore immaterial where any one ship is sunk, for it must ultimately be replaced by new construction. What counts in the long run is the preponderance of sinkings over new construction. Shipbuilding and arms production are centered in the United States, while England is the European outpost and sally port.

The tonnage war had three sublime factors recommending it. The first was the idea that its success could be guaranteed by attaining quantified and measurable objectives: if the Germans could succeed over an extended period of time in sinking more ships (tonnage equivalent) than the Anglo-Americans could build, then the British war economy would inevitably degrade until it was crippled and eventually collapsed. Secondly, the tonnage war had both an offensive and defensive facet to it: not only did it offer a path to collapse the British war economy, but it would also degrade the Anglo-American capacity to convey war material from America to Britain. This would delay the accumulation of American ground forces in Europe and by extension delay the opening of a second front in France or Norway. Finally, the tonnage war could be waged, according to Dönitz, exclusively by U-boats, which unlike surface warships could be brought online relatively quickly and based safely on the French Atlantic coast.

This latter point was particularly important. After the sinking of the Bismarck, no German capital ships ever ventured back into the Atlantic, and by the time Dönitz began his aggressive push for the tonnage war, the Germans had already implemented Operation Cerberus to recall the remaining battleships from the French Coast. This was because the Atlantic bases had proved remarkably vulnerable to British air strikes. Submarines, however, being significantly more compact, could maintain their basing in France under the shelter of fortified, bomb proof pens which could not be built for larger surface warships. Indeed, the RAF would repeatedly bomb the U-boat bases on the French coast and come away mildly astonished at how durable they were.

Even more importantly, U-boats - unlike surface ships - could attack even well escorted convoys. According to Dönitz, surface vessels like cruisers could not freely attack shipping lanes because they had a fundamentally “defensive” priority of evading superior enemy forces. As a memo from Dönitz’s staff put it:

Only the U-boat can therefore continue to penetrate into the areas where the enemy enjoys naval supremacy, remain there, and fight, since it does not need to take issue with this enemy supremacy. The increased presence of enemy battleships and cruisers in these areas does not mean greater danger for the U-boat, but on the contrary a welcome increase in targets. The Commander of the U-boats emphatically disputes that our battleships and cruisers are indispensable for the conduct of the war in the Atlantic.

All of this leads, in a roundabout sort of way, to a fairly basic question, as to what exactly the “Battle of the Atlantic” was, and when it took place. “Officially” - noting fully the sarcasm implied by the quotation marks - the Battle of the Atlantic lasted the entire duration of the war, with German submarines at sea and engaged in combat operations up until the literal day of German surrender on May 8, 1945. Similarly, U-boats were underway and conducting attacks on allied shipping in 1939 and 1940, and the Germans began establishing bases on the French Atlantic coast within weeks of French surrender. If the “Battle of the Atlantic” is taken to mean the entire sweep of German U-boat operations in the Atlantic, then in fact it did cover the duration of the entire European war and was among the longest and most complex naval operations in history.

A more meaningful dating schema places the critical action in the Atlantic in a two year period from May 1941 to May 1943. On May 8, 1941, Dönitz made the fateful decision to widen the area of U-boat operations. Formerly, U-boat operations had been limited to patrol lines on the lanes of approach into the British Isles, but the order of May 8 laid the ground work for attacks on convoys in the open North Atlantic. The area of operations would eventually widen farther to include America’s eastern seaboard, after the formal entry of the United States into the war. Some two years later, on May 24, 1943, Dönitz called a halt to such attacks, on the grounds that the loss of submarines had risen to an “intolerable level.” A more precise estimation of events would thus date the Battle of the Atlantic from May 8, 1941 to May 24, 1943. Not coincidentally, this also coincided with the period in which the U-boat force in the Atlantic consistently grew. In May 1941, there were just 24 boats operating in the Atlantic on average. This number grew steadily through the end of the year before exploding in 1942 as an accelerated building program kicked in, before peaking in May 1943 with an average at-sea force of 118 boats - a total which thereafter declined.

Operational trends varied greatly across those crucial years of the submarine war. Of course, the material basis of the U-boat campaign shifted substantially as U-boat designs and allied countermeasures improved. The situation escalated with particular rapidity in 1942, both because of American entry into the war and because it was not until this year that German submarine production really began to reach impactful levels. Furthermore, the locus and intensity of the U-boat operations would ebb and flow based on both opportunity and strategic priorities. In February and March of 1942, for example, the area of operations shifted into the Caribbean, with German submariners drawn by both the relatively balmy weather and the crude tankers sailing from Venezuela. Ancillary European theaters like the Mediterranean and the Black Sea also absorbed resources, and Dönitz was always forced to keep more U-boats around Norway than he would have liked, simply to satisfy Hitler - who spent years preoccupied with a supposed British reinvasion of Scandinavia which never came.

Regardless of all the particulars and the distractions, for Dönitz U-boat operations took on the character of an absolute war against allied tonnage. Because shipping tonnage was viewed as an essentially fungible, or interchangeable, capability, for Dönitz the matter was simple: U-boats needed to operate at scale in the areas where they could sink the most tonnage in absolute terms, including the heavily trafficked routes on the North Atlantic. In the spring of 1942, he estimated that the United States and Great Britain could collectively build 8.1 million GRT (Gross Register Tonnage) in 1942, increasing to 10.3 million GRT in 1943. On this basis, Dönitz argued: “We would have to sink approximately 700,000 tonnes per month in order to offset new constructions.” Provided the U-boats could consistently achieve this mark over a sustained period of time, the enemy war economy would *necessarily* degrade and eventually collapse.

The result was a peculiar sort of war predicated on accounting statements. Dönitz and his staff assessed the results of the U-boat war as a function of two simple ratios: tonnage sunk relative to expected allied construction, and U-boats lost relative to completions. Since an accelerated submarine construction program was expected to yield some twenty new boats per month, and on the basis of his own estimates of allied shipbuilding, the math of this war of industrial attrition was simple: if the U-boat force could sink more than 700,000 tons of shipping per month while keeping losses to a minimum, then allied shipping would inexorably degrade while the submarine force grew in strength. If this happened, Germany would be winning.

Pack Hunters

Karl Dönitz was an interesting character. Invariably described as a man of imposing intelligence, he was undoubtedly among the smartest and most organized men among the higher German leadership. One of the great peculiarities of his life was his inglorious (and mercifully brief) tenure as Hitler’s successor. When Nazi leadership collapsed at the end of April, 1945 - with Hitler and Goebbels committing suicide and Himmler and Goering branded as traitors - Dönitz was left holding the bag, posthumously named Head of State by the late Fuhrer. The Admiral’s postwar memoirs, titled Ten Years and Twenty Days, were a nod to his two high posts in service to the Reich: ten years as the commander of the U-boats, and twenty days as the president of a defeated Germany.

In any case, at Nuremburg he was found to be intelligent, lively, and relatively affable by Anglo-American personnel. He genuinely seemed to believe that the Anglo-Americans would be grateful to him for surrendering the U-boat fleet to them, rather than to the Soviets. This synergized with the experience of British personnel who took custody of surrendering U-boats after the war: they documented that many of the German crews were downright friendly, and asked the British when they would fight “the Russians” together.

If Dönitz was expecting gratitude, he was to be disappointed. His interrogation file notes that he was outraged at the suggestion that he could be tried as a war criminal, and maintained with total conviction that the navy had fought a clean war. Many allied officers agreed with him. US Admiral Daniel Gallery felt that Dönitz’s actions were consistent with American submarine warfare, and that his trial at Nuremburg was an “outstanding example of barefaced hypocrisy”, which was “an insult to our own submariners.” He later wrote that if he ever met Dönitz, “I would have trouble looking him in the eye. The only crime he committed was the crime of almost beating us in a bloody but legal fight.”

Dönitz was not pleased to be charged with war crimes, but on almost all other subjects, however, he proved happy to converse in an essentially friendly tone, and discussed topics like radar and experimental U-boat designs. The British Division of Naval Intelligence concluded:

Doenitz, classified by psychological tests as just below the genius class, is an independent thinker, clear and precise, and is an expert in his field.

The file also notes, with a tone of the ominous:

Doenitz is credited with having invented the “wolf pack” technique of submarine warfare.

Any discussion of Second World War U-boats inevitably runs straight into this intimidating and thorny term, which is generally viewed as Dönitz’s seminal tactical innovation. The general impression of the wolf packs is usually that of a tactical system which allowed allied convoys to be attacked by massed submarines, sometimes numbering a dozen or more. But this is not quite correct. The wolf pack was not a tactical system in the strictest sense, in that it did not allow for orderly command and control or synergistic movements during an attack. The wolf pack system was not really a question of tactics at all, but was instead closely related to significant German advances in signals intelligence and communications.

To understand what this means, we must return to the First World War and recall why convoys were such an effective answer to submarines in that conflict. Although escort ships in the first war had some successes deterring or sinking submarines, U-boats that encountered convoys were generally able to attack. The primary advantages of the convoy, rather, were primarily concealment and survivability. By concentrating ships into convoys, the Anglo-Americans were able to denude the sea of targets and make it much more difficult for U-boats to spot their prey. Additionally, although U-boats could usually attack convoys successfully and then escape, they generally had time to torpedo only one or two targets before hightailing it away. The majority of the convoy was expected to be unharmed, and more importantly they were on station to rescue survivors.

Doenitz’s wolf pack system was an element of a comprehensive answer to the convoy system which completely turned the logic of the convoy upside down. In comparison to the First World War, Doenitz’s U-boat force had two critical capabilities that had previously been sorely lacking: they could reliably locate convoys, and they could attack them at scale once they had been spotted. These advantages, however, derived primarily from improvements to communications and signals intelligence, rather than a tactical methodology as such.

The first step in overcoming the convoy system was devising a reliable method for locating convoys in the first place. In the First World War, the British had quickly discovered that a convoy containing dozens of vessels was not particularly easier to spot than a single vessel, and U-boats - with their low profiles and short conning towers - were bad at sighting far off targets. The benefits of aerial reconnaissance were obvious, but Germany’s sole suitable long-range reconnaissance craft - the Fw 200 Condor - was never available in suitable numbers. Efforts by the naval command to reinforce air reconnaissance were frustrated by both a shortage of aircraft and the truculent Goering, who was disinterested in cooperating with the navy.

Although Condor flights did contribute valuable reconnaissance on occasion, wide-ranging aerial surveillance was never systematically available to the Germans and could do little to offset the poor visual range of the U-boats at scale. However, the Germans did benefit tremendously from the great strides that they had made in signals intelligence, cryptography, and radio communications. The allies were famously successful at breaking German ciphers and reading the famous Enigma traffic. Far less famous was the parallel effort of the German B-Dienst office (short for Beobachtungsdienst, or observation service). This was a signals intelligence department in the German Naval Intelligence Service, which by the autumn of 1941 had broken the British Naval Combined Cipher, which provided a steady stream of clues concerning convoy sizes, positions, courses, and escorts.

The intelligence provided by B-Dienst allowed the German U-boat force to place patrol lines along the expected course of convoys at sea. The optimal practice was to position a large number of U-boats in a patrol line (with gaps of some 40 nautical miles between them) in the suspected path of the convoy. It was at this point that Germany’s system of signals traffic and wireless communication became crucially important. The first U-boat in the patrol line would not attack immediately, but instead fall in behind the convoy in a hidden trailing position, maintaining visual contact and calling in the remaining boats in the patrol line.

This was much more difficult than it sounded. The idea of summoning the entire patrol line to attack a convoy simultaneously sounds fairly obvious, and raises a question: why was Dönitz so highly regarded for devising such an elementary tactic? The answer, as such, is that while the tactic of a group or pack attack was generally quite obvious, it required a remarkable system of communication and control to actually implement it.

Operational control of the U-boats required extensive radio communications routed through Dönitz’s headquarters in France. Orders had to be given to form and route patrol lines, coordinate massed attacks on convoys, and then re-form attack groups. By 1943, when the Germans had in excess of 100 U-boats underway at any given time, Dönitz’s headquarters was handling well over 2,000 radio signals per day, all of which had to be encrypted and then repeated episodically to ensure that every boat received the relevant orders. In addition, communications officers on every U-boat had to receive and transcribe every single signal before decrypting it to find out if it was relevant to them. Radio traffic control is decidedly unsexy in the context of a global war, but Dönitz wielded a sophisticated and remarkably efficient signals network which was the key to making pack tactics possible. Sir Francis Harry Hinsley, a British intelligence officer who later wrote a magisterial multi-volume history of British intelligence during the war, made the assessment that the Kriegsmarine’s signals network was essentially unequalled in its complexity, efficiency, and flexibility.

All that is to say, the great achievement of the U-boat service was not that it discovered the advantages of attacking in groups (this had always been obvious), but rather a victory of organization and communication which made it possible for Dönitz, working out of his headquarters in the Villa Kerlilon in Lorient, to reliably direct dozens of U-boats to converge on spotted convoys thousands of miles away. Once a convoy was spotted by a U-boat in the patrol line, the boat would call in to headquarters, and the lithe and efficient German signals network would begin pulling other boats out of the patrol line to descend on the convoy.

The ideal, as such, was for all the boats within range to converge ahead of the convoy, massing in its path and loitering in anticipation of a night attack. The absolute ideal, although this could not always be executed, was for the U-boats to attack simultaneously at night from the “dark” side of the convoy, so that the enemy ships were silhouetted by the moon while the submarines were in darkness.

However - and here is a point of major confusion - there was no tactical control of the battle once the attack began. U-boats generally communicated very little once the action started, and neither Dönitz at HQ nor an officer on station exercised central control of the attack. Management of the battle was limited to taking a count of the U-boats on station, confirming that favorable conditions existed, and then commencing the attack. Once the attack actually began, each U-boat captain chose his own targets opportunistically and broke away as he saw fit, without external direction. The upshot of all this, and the sort of singular takeaway, is that U-boat pack hunting was not a tactical method for coordinating the attacks on convoys, but rather an operational-organizational system that allowed U-boats, spread out in wide patrol lines, to converge on their targets.

The irony of the U-boat war was that, although it increasingly came to be viewed as a decisive element of the broader war, it was a fight that neither the British nor the Germans were well prepared for. The British, on the basis of their success overcoming the U-boats in the First World War, did not consider submarines a serious threat to their sea transport. They considered convoying to be an essentially adequate solution and failed to anticipate the way that massed attacks could turn the logic of the convey upside down. Furthermore, the British were far too optimistic about the effect of new antisubmarine weapons like Asdic (early sonar) and depth charges. Asdic sonar soon revealed itself to be a terrifically flawed system. It had a limited range of a mile and a half at most, which left great gaps around the perimeter of convoys. Even more importantly, however, Asdic could not detect submarines on the surface, which rendered it meaningless in most attack scenarios. The biggest problem by far for the British, however, was a catastrophic shortage of escort ships. In the early years of the war, convoys of fifty or more ships traveling in 9 columns might have just 4 or 5 escorts, leaving huge gaps that were easy for U-boats to penetrate. Once submarine attacks commenced, escorts found it impossible to react correctly when outnumbered by the U-boat packs: wheeling to hunt for the offending submarine simply opened a new gap in the perimeter which was sure to be exploited by other boats.

That is not to say that the Germans were any better prepared than the British for an expansive U-boat war. The shortage of escorts gave the U-boats good tactical prospects when they fell on a convoy, but in 1941 there were simply far too few U-boats to capitalize on these opportunities at scale. The Germans were also hindered by their own technological blind spots, but whereas in the British case it was Asdic sonar that proved disappointing, the Germans were let down by their encryption.

The story of the German Enigma machines, the Ultra Project, Alan Turing, and the British cryptological project at Bletchley Park - although essentially unknown until the declassification of relevant materials in 1974 - are by now a fairly well known story. Thanks to a head start gifted by the Polish secret service (which had been studying German cipher machines since the 1920’s), their own herculean efforts, and the fortuitous recovery of German cipher materials, the basic fact is that the British were generally able to read U-boat wireless traffic in the Atlantic throughout 1941. The capture, intact, of the damaged boat U-110 complete with all its cipher materials, keys, and signal book was a particularly significant coup.

The most direct benefit from reading the U-boat traffic, from the British perspective, was not necessarily to hunt submarines (which still had tactical methods for escaping hunters), but to reroute convoys around U-boat patrol lines. This was achieved with significant success. Although the average number of U-boats in the Atlantic tripled between February and August 1941, the tonnage lost declined precipitously, so that July of that year saw the lowest losses since the fall of France. Dönitz was highly suspicious of the disappointing returns and suspected that the British were reading his mail, but an “investigation” by Naval Intelligence concluded that the Enigma system was fundamentally secure.

British signals intelligence did succeed in substantially curtailing shipping losses in the latter months of 1941. The German military historian Jürgen Rohwer estimated, based on the number of boats at sea, that the Germans reasonably expected to sink some 2,035,000 GRT in the second half of 1941, while actual sinkings, thanks to Ultra, were a mere 629,000 GRT: fully 70% below target. This was far too low to achieve a decisive result in the “tonnage war.” The basic ledger on 1941 was mixed, then. The British had learned that the convoy system, particularly given the paucity of escorts, was vulnerable to attack by massed U-boats, but they had blunted the worst of the damage by reading German radio traffic and evading patrol lines.

A variety of factors would converge to ensure that 1942 was the year in which the U-boat war began to accelerate and reach potentially decisive heights of intensity. Three important changes stand out above all. First and foremost, 1942 was the year where the at-sea submarine force actually began to grow to critical mass. Dönitz began 1941 with just 22 U-boats in the Atlantic on average, and by the end of the year this had climbed to 60 boats. In 1942, an accelerated construction program began to kick in, and the Atlantic force climbed to 160 boats (though not all of these would be at sea simultaniously). Secondly, in February 1942 the Germans added a fourth rotor to their naval cipher machines, which exponentially raised the complexity of the encryption and forced the British to work blind for the rest of the year. Finally, the entry of the United States into the war in the closing weeks of 1941 greatly expanded the operating areas of the U-boats in the following year.

American entry into the war opened up profitable new hunting grounds for the U-boats, largely courtesy of lax American defensive protocols. Traffic along the American seaboard was so vulnerable to U-boats, in fact, that Dönitz increasingly abandoned efforts against convoys in the open Atlantic to hunt along the American coastline, despite the longer trips required by. The reasons for weak American defenses were numerous. First and foremost, the US Navy had very few available escorts, and erroneously theorized that convoys without escorts were more vulnerable than ships sailing individually (deducing that an unescorted convoy created what amounted to little more than a shooting gallery for U-boats). The Americans also eschewed a variety of best practices suggested by the British, including coastal blackouts: instead, American cities remained brilliantly lit up, which nicely silhouetted ships at night for targeting.

More generally, it is fair to say that anti-submarine measures were simply not a top priority for Admiral Ernest King, who - to be fair - had plenty on his plate. A measure of arrogance vis a vis British advice, indifference by the overworked King, and a shortage of escort ships made the perfect mixture for defensive lethargy, and the result was a fantastic shooting spree for the U-boats along the American east coast, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean. In fact, from January to July 1942, the U-boats achieved their maximal rate of efficiency (taken as GRT sunk per at-sea submarine) and drastically reduced their losses by avoiding confrontations with escorted convoys. It was not until the summer of 1942, when the Americans belatedly introduced convoys along the east coast, that tonnage losses were stabilized, and Dönitz was forced to admit that a return to pack attacks against escorted convoys was now the only way forward.

The belated introduction of standard security measures and convoying along the American eastern seaboard led to an immediate drop in sinkings beginning in July, although U-boats would continue to hunt productively in the Caribbean where defenses were more lax. The collapse of the easy hunting along the American littoral precipitated a massive U-boat offensive against convoys in the North Atlantic, which began in August 1942. This is usually identified as the climax and final phase of the U-boat war.

Read more

When the Second World War began in September 1939, levels of preparedness varied widely across Europe, both across and within various leadership groups and institutions. War was met by the French and British with a general mood of grim resignation and by the Germans with a curious mixture of aggression and foreboding, while Poland saw its initial mood of punchy defiance and determination to defend itself melt in the face of an overwhelming German maneuver scheme and the Wehrmacht’s deadly new tactical package. Arguably, however, the military institution that was the most unprepared for this new war was neither the Polish, French, or British armies, but Germany’s own forgotten service arm: the navy.

The Kriegsmarine (War Navy) of the Third Reich was a curious institution rife with contradictions, resource wastage, and strategic confusion. Naval leadership nurtured ambitious dreams of a formidable Atlantic surface fleet, with little sense of either how such a grand fleet could fit into the timetables of German foreign policy, or the requisite material base to build it. There are few equivalent examples of such a yawning gap between military ambitions and reality: while the Kriegsmarine touted the famous “Z-plan” to construct a fleet of over 700 ships, capable of defending fortress Europe against the British (or American) navies, the German Navy in fact began the war with only a handful of capital ships, and its most famous operations generally involved only a single vessel, or at most a pair, desperately running for dear life.

In many ways, the German surface fleet became something like the perfect black hole for resources. In the prewar years, it began a nominally ambitious building program which was still in its infancy when the war began. Naval planners were explicitly preparing for a mid-century war, with construction programs targeting fulfillment in 1948. Consequentially, the navy was entirely unprepared for war in 1939, and the surface fleet never threatened to fulfill any meaningful strategic function. Yet the scale of the building program was sufficient for the navy to siphon meaningful financial and industrial resources from the ground forces and the Luftwaffe. This was an impressively titrated level of wastage: naval expenditures were large enough to weaken the other arms of the Wehrmacht, but too late and too little to make the navy into a useful arm in its own right. Furthermore, wasteful investments in surface ships, particularly capital ships, materially weakened the one element of the Kriegsmarine that did have a strategic function: the U-boats. The result was a force expensive enough to cannibalize the rest of the Wehrmacht (and itself) but far too immature and small to do anything useful on a strategic scale. In the one German campaign where the navy did play a pivotal role, the limited fighting destroyed most of the surface fleet.

Subscribe now

Little wonder, then, that the German surface fleet features sparsely in popular histories of the war. Perhaps the only strong impression of the force is the 1941 chase of the Bismarck - often somewhat shakily labeled as a German “super battleship”. The infamy of the Bismarck is probably fair, simply in the sense that her short service life was undoubtedly exciting, but her strategic impact was essentially null. In ignoring the Kriegsmarine, however, one ignores other important questions, like the tactical lessons derived from the sea war in Europe, and strategic questions of resource allocation. The fact remains that in 1939, on the eve of war, the Kriegsmarine received a surge of funding so that Germany’s naval expenditures were, temporarily at least, the highest in the world - larger even than self-evidently naval oriented powers like Japan and Great Britain. Years into the war, the navy continued to absorb hundreds of thousands of new personnel, even as it languished strategically. An obvious question emerges: what was it all for?

A Dream, a Plan, and a Folly

Like virtually all aspects of the interwar German state, the Reichsmarine (State Navy) was constrained by the Versailles Treaty, which limited personnel and vessels. The Germans were allowed six pre-dreadnought battleships, six light cruisers, twelve destroyers, and twelve torpedo boats. Submarines were forbidden. On the personnel side, the navy was capped at just 15,000 men - a paltry total which was particularly strained because this sum included not only fleet crews, but also coastal installations, signaling and communications, repair and basing, administration, and the naval academies. When the treaty provisions prohibiting a German air force were taken into account, the result was a technologically primitive force (lacking modern battleships, naval aviation, and submarines) with bare bones staffing, suitable only for low intensity coastal defense.

Enter Adolf Hitler and the German rearmament program, which began in 1934. Like the other armed branches, the Reichsmarine (formally renamed the Kriegsmarine in 1935) moved to take part of the rearmament bonanza from the very beginning, and already in 1934 Hitler and Erich Raeder (head of Navy Command) had agreed that long-term expansion of the fleet would have to take place in defiance of British opposition. Like the broader German rearmament program, however, the fleet buildout took place in a complicating milieu of resource constraints, competing strategic priorities, and efforts by the British to make reasonable accommodations to integrate Hitler’s Germany into a stable European order. In the case of the navy, the latter took the form of the 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement, through which London unilaterally (that is, without consulting France) loosened the Versailles limits and allowed Germany to built out a tonnage equivalent to 35% of the Royal Navy.

The 1935 Naval Agreement is frequently maligned in the historiography as an archetypical case of appeasement, with the gullible British accommodating Hitler’s rearmament by greenlighting Germany’s fleet expansion. This is deeply unfair, and ignores a broader effort by the British to use naval diplomacy to secure the Royal Navy’s supremacy. The 1922 Washington Naval Treaty and its addendums had already codified capital ship ratios with the Japanese, and analysis provided for the Admiralty projected that allowing Germany to build out 35% of British tonnage would preserve a narrow superiority for the Royal Navy over the combined German and Japanese fleets: that is to say, it would protect a British advantage in both European and Asian waters and preserve the two-power standard.

More broadly, the British were attempting to safely navigate a period of strategic vulnerability - a fact that accusations of “appeasement” frequently fail to appreciate. Economic depression had wrecked much of Britain’s shipbuilding industry and created a strong impetus to control costs. Combined with the naval treaties of Washington (1922) and London (1930) this had pushed out plans to replace extant British battleships until 1936 at the latest. The delay in the construction of new generation battleships was particularly important, because it prevented Britain from continuing the policies of the late Jackie Fisher (died 1920), who had pursued British naval supremacy at the turn of the century through a program of technological superiority. Fisher’s policy had been to secure British advantage by leading the world in the construction of the newest and most powerful ships (beginning with the Dreadnought), but this approach was obviously impossible in the early 1930’s because economic conditions made it impossible to push up the construction of a new battleship class. Therefore, the British were obliged to pursue a strategy of quantitative balancing (carefully titrating the number of equivalent battleships), rather than the more costly policy of qualitative superiority.

The overarching British goal continued to be the preservation of superiority over the combination of Japan and whichever European navy happened to be the largest, and naval diplomacy seemed to offer the cheapest way to do this. When Hitler demanded tonnage equivalent to 35% of the Royal Navy’s, ostensibly under the pretense of near parity with France, this seemed like a convenient opportunity to co-opt Germany into Britain’s larger policy of titrated supremacy, as it did not fundamentally alter British fleet requirements. In short, the 35% ratio promised to satiate German rearmament goals by allowing them parity with the French without forcing the British to embark on an accelerated (and costly) building program of their own. This is why the strongest advocates of the 1935 naval agreement were not the politicians and diplomats (the traditional villains of “appeasement”) but the Admirals.

Even allowing for a modest German buildout, the gap between the Kriegsmarine and the Royal Navy was bound to be colossal, and raised questions about what, exactly, the Germany Navy was for. A 1936 study from the Reich fleet department concluded that a naval war against Britain was “hopeless”, and a more formal assessment from Naval High Command the following year concluded that the German Navy might, at some unspecified later date, be able to win a war against France and the Soviet Union (particularly with Italian help). The study argued, unhelpfully, that war with Britain was unlikely and therefore did not need to be planned for. This was a clear case of simply wishing away an unpleasant scenario, which Hitler doused in cold water when he informed Admiral Raeder that France and Britain were the most likely enemies in any future war. This warning prompted the fleet department to conduct a new study to determine the requirements for a war with Britain (the very thing that they had just concluded was impossible and unwinnable), the results of which eventually became the basis for the phantasmagorical Z-plan.

One important conclusion of the Kriegsmarine studies was the idea that a fleet slanted towards cruisier warfare would be crucial in any future conflict against the British. This would require faster, longer ranged ships which would, if at all possible, be pre-stationed in the Atlantic at the outbreak of war to threaten the sea lines of communication and supply to Britain. In theory, this would both strategically compromise Britain and force them to loosen their blockade (redeploying ships to the Atlantic to hunt down the cruisers).

The provisional final goals (and the basis of what would eventually be known as the Z-plan) implied a considerable naval construction project. Raeder’s initial design called for 10 battleships, 15 “pocket battleships” (essentially a heavily armed cruiser, or battlecruiser), 5 heavy cruisers, 24 light cruisers, 36 ultralight cruisers, 8 aircraft carriers, 249 U-boats, 70 destroyers, and 78 torpedo boats. As formally adopted in the Z-plan, the surface fleet was to comprise at least 230 surface vessels plus many hundreds of submarines. While this is sometimes cast as some sort of German master plan for naval domination, it in fact reflected strategic confusion of the highest order.

The emerging naval plan was disordered and confused in virtually every dimension: strategic, operational, temporal, industrial, technical, and diplomatic. To begin with, the Z-plan is often expressed as Germany’s plan to “compete” with the Royal Navy, as a sort of revival of Tirpitz’s dream from bygone decades. In fact, Raeder pointed out to Hitler on multiple occasions that even the full expansion plan would still not provide a fleet capable of winning a naval war against Britain, and he belatedly and half-heartedly suggested pivoting more heavily into submarines. Hitler, however, insisted that any military confrontation with Britain would be far off. He even explicitly told Raeder that there was no risk of war with Britain in a meeting on August 22, 1939, scarcely a week before the invasion of Poland. The completion objective for the Z-plan was all the way out in 1948 - far too late not just for the start of the world war, but the ending as well.

The picture that emerges is one of absolute strategic schizophrenia, and nearly total disconnect between the naval authorities and Hitler’s foreign policy and war aims. Raeder was thinking of a fleet buildout over the course of nearly a full decade, with a construction program that was mired in delays. When war began in 1939, there were just five capital ships, 7 cruisers, 21 destroyers, and 57 U-boats in service. Fleet command had begun with the assumption that a proper naval war against Britain was unwinnable, only to be told that they had to plan for one anyway. In response, they spit out the monstrous Z-plan, which required hundreds of vessels built over the course of a full decade. This plan could only even be discussed because Raeder, somewhat shockingly, believed Hitler’s assurances that there was no immediate risk of war with Britain. When the war was sprung in September 1939, the Kriegsmarine was left holding the bag: ambitious plans, expensive orders, strategic confusion, and only a handful of ships.

Above and beyond the problem of paltry force generation, however, the Kriegsmarine had also run into major technical difficulties. The plans for cruiser warfare against the British required ships with both speed and exceptional endurance, which the Germans hoped to achieve through the use of diesel engines. Diesel powerplants with the performance required for heavy cruisers and destroyers, however, were not yet available, nor was it clear how the enormous fuel demands of the navy could be met. Naval studies calculated that, after the completion of the full construction program in 1948, the fleet would require 2 million tons of diesel and 6 million tons of fuel oil annually. This was a whopping 1300% of the Reich’s total production of diesel in 1938, and 1600% of its fuel oil output. Even if the Reich’s economic plans achieved their goals and exponentially increased output, the navy was planning to consume the Reich’s entire output of fossil fuels twice over every year.

The result was a nesting doll of planning failures. The Z-plan, while monstrously ambitious, would still yield a fleet that was too small to wage a successful war against the Royal Navy, as Raeder admitted to Hitler on multiple occasions. These inadequacies turned out to be irrelevant, because war came almost a full decade before the navy expected it. Plans for cruiser warfare required diesel engines that were not available and could not be fueled, powering ships that could not be built.

The real kicker, however, was that in 1939 Hitler - reacting to Raeder’s complaints about shipyard delays - promoted the Z-plan to the highest industrial priority. This made an immediate and material impact on the readiness of the German ground forces for the war that was about to start. Steel rations to army production were cut dramatically, precisely as the ground force was expanding and preparing for action. In 1939, after Hitler pushed the navy to top priority, the German Army was forced to scale down production of the MG34 machine gun (cut by 80%), the 10.5cm field howitzer (by 45%), and the Panzer III and IV tanks (by 50%).

The abrupt priority shift towards naval construction occurred at the worst possible moment on the German strategic timeline. Shipbuilding, with its long timeframes and technological bottlenecks, could yield nothing in the short term - the lone exception being submarines, which could be built faster, but of course Raeder was not focused on U-boats at this time. Thus, despite accelerating the naval program, all the active ships at the start of the war had been laid down in 1935 or earlier. However, the naval program did succeed in cannibalizing the ground forces, siphoning off critical industrial resources. 1939 was the worst time for such a reordering of industrial priority, and it ensured that Germany began the war with hundreds fewer tanks and howitzers, and not a single extra ship to show for it.

Arctic Hinge: The Norway Campaign

The Wehrmacht’s operational agenda in the opening eighteen months of the Second World War was dizzying and unprecedented in its scale, its variety, and its successes. The two “big” campaigns - Poland in 1939, France and the Low Countries in 1940 - conventionally receive most of the attention for obvious reasons, but they were hardly the only combat tasks on Germany’s ambitious early war schedule. Beyond shattering and overrunning the powerful neighbors on the Reich’s eastern and western flanks, the Germans also found time and resources for a Scandinavian campaign, the dispatch of an expeditionary corps to North Africa, the overrun of Yugoslavia and Greece, and an invasion of Crete, which was undertaken exclusively by airborne forces. Little wonder that this early wave of German conquests is frequently depicted in documentaries and books as a sort of amorphous expanding blob: a wave of red that simply rolls outward and blankets Europe. Then and now, it seems as if the Germans were everywhere, practically all at once.

Given the incredible tempo and reach of Germany’s early war successes, the defeat and occupation of Norway and Denmark frequently become little more than footnotes. The occupation of Denmark, in particular, was essentially bloodless and occurred essentially overnight. For our purposes, however, Germany’s Scandinavian campaign in 1940 is particularly interesting for several reasons.

Obviously, an invasion of Norway required the involvement of the Kriegsmarine and was therefore fundamentally different from Germany’s overland campaigns in Poland, France, and Yugoslavia. What is often not understood, or at least unappreciated, is that the campaign in Norway was, rather uniquely, driven by the Navy, with Kriegsmarine leadership - particularly Admiral Raeder - providing much of the strategic rationale for Norway and arguing strongly in favor of the operation. Furthermore, the success of the Norway campaign is somewhat of a paradox. Germany’s ability to launch a successful amphibious invasion of Norway shocked the British, who presumed that their overwhelming naval superiority would make such an operation a nonstarter. Yet Germany, despite this terrible British overmatch, did manage to launch a combined sea and airborne invasion of Norway right in the face of the Royal Navy, including at far flung places like Narvik, more than a thousand miles from Germany’s meager naval bases. This was a remarkable accomplishment for an overmatched Kriegsmarine, and yet the effort nearly killed it: the losses suffered in the invasion of Norway wiped out virtually all of the German surface fleet.

Northern Europe, although a relatively ancillary and forgotten theater of the war today, featured prominently in the minds of both German naval officers and economic planning. To begin with, the Scandinavian countries form a sort of strategic hinge: abutting both the Baltic and the North Seas, they formed a geostrategic intersection between core maritime spaces of Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union. In the prewar years, relations between the states of Northern Europe and the great powers were generally regulated by treaties and nonaggression pacts, and in fact Hitler expressed a preference for their continued neutrality, but it was obvious that this could be subject to change under wartime conditions. The general point, however, is that there was not some particular German desire to overrun Northern Europe, either out of a mania for conquest or some strong urge to absorb racially-affiliated “Nordic” populations. Rather, German policy was driven by essentially rational calculations, many of them made by the leadership of the Kriegsmarine.

In the closing years of the prewar period, during the acceleration of German rearmament, naval leadership conducted a series of studies assessing the prospects of a war against Britain and the Royal Navy. Some aspects of these studies dealt with the material requirements of the fleet, as has been previously stated, but the navy also tackled more concrete operational questions. One fundamental conclusion of these studies was that Germany had an urgent need to rectify its maritime geography. The 1938 “Study of the Tasks of Conducting a Naval War” concluded: “As long as… the military advantages of the British geographical position cannot be overcome, we must not expect to achieve lasting and decisive success.”

The critical point was Germany’s utter inability to project naval power outward, due to both her lack of overseas bases and Britain’s ability to jam the exits of the North Sea. Raeder gently encouraged Hitler to use diplomacy to acquire bases abroad that could support German cruisers, but he also raised the question of:

What Wehrmacht operations could improve the starting-position for a decisive naval war in the oceans of the world, in view of the fact that political successes in peacetime do not give us the chance to acquire and develop bases beyond the North Sea and the Baltic.

He concluded, in the end, that “The occupation of the French Atlantic coast or of central and northern Norway would solve this problem.”

The Kriegsmarine was therefore already thinking about ways that army operations could improve the fleet’s prospects for escaping the “wet triangle”, as the limited extant German littoral on the North Sea was called, by capturing forward bases in Norway and the French coastline. Navy leaders continued to insist that Germany had no chance of outright victory in a naval war against Britain, but they stressed that, if promising basing could be acquired, the fleet might have the possibility of “tackling certain military tasks with good prospects of success” - in other words, waging interdiction warfare against Britain’s trade and protecting vital internal lines of the German space.

The latter was particularly important in light of German dependence on Swedish iron ore. Prewar economic assessments noted that Germany imported some 9.1 million tons of iron ore from Sweden, of which 74% was exported through just two ports: Lulea, on the far north of Sweden’s Baltic coastline, and Narvik, in the far north of Norway. Due to the sparse rail connectivity to northern Sweden, where the highest quality (that is, the highest iron content) ore was mined, it was considered impossible to fully replace the seaborne exports with overland transportation. In total, Wehrmacht High Command (working with the economic authorities) estimated that in wartime, Germany might be able to import 3 million tons of lower quality ore mined in southern Sweden, along with perhaps 2.5 million tons of higher quality ore which could be shipped by rail from northern Sweden. This left, at bare minimum, a shortfall of 3.2 million tons, which was deemed “not acceptable for the German war economy in a war lasting significantly longer than six months.”

The only way to make up this shortfall, then, was to ensure that the seaborne exports from Narvik and Lulea remained accessible. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 seemed to safeguard Lulea by establishing non-aggression in the Baltic, and an October memorandum from High Command noted optimistically of the Scandinavians:

Barring completely unforeseen developments, they will probably remain neutral in future. The continuation of German trade with these countries seems possible even in a long war.

The ultimate impetus for the German occupation of Denmark and Norway, however, was to come from neither Hitler nor the Wehrmacht High Command, but from the Kriegsmarine and its commander-in-chief, Admiral Raeder. Motivated by a desire to both carve out a role for the navy in the short term (participating in a Norwegian operation) and acquire bases in Norway to support future operations, Raeder began a full charm offensive on the Fuhrer to persuade him of the necessity - if not of immediately invading Denmark and Norway - of at least preparing for such an operation. Fortuitous events helped Raeder’s cause. Most famously, a February incident in which the Royal Navy’s HMS Cossack boarded the German tanker Altmark in Norwegian waters did much to convince Berlin that Norway was becoming sympathetic to the British. If Oslo was going to allow the Royal Navy to operate in Norwegian territorial waters, could the ore shipments from Narvik ever be truly safe?

Many are aware of the Norwegian fascist Vidkun Quisling, whose collaborationist government led his surname to became a colloquialism for a collaborator or traitor. Fewer are aware that it was Admiral Raeder, of all people, who introduced him to Hitler on December 12, 1939. It was Raeder who bent Hitler’s ear for months about the economic necessity of guaranteeing the flow of Swedish iron from Narvik, and it was Raeder who convinced Hitler to order the Wehrmacht to begin exploring plans for the occupation of Norway.

The Navy complied with Hitler’s instructions to begin examining Norwegian options, and outwardly they presented this as simply an impassionate compliance with orders. In a show of audacity that beggars belief, Admiral Raeder confided in a memo that moving on Norway in the face of “a vastly superior British Fleet… is in itself contrary to all principles in the theory of naval warfare.” True enough, but had not the whole thing been largely his idea to begin with? This ostentatious caution masked the fact that those orders had come about largely because Raeder had been bending Hitler’s ear for months about the importance of a Norwegian occupation. As the official German history of the war puts it:

Putting aside their military reservations, the naval war staff now took the view that ‘The demands of the political leaders that the Wehrmacht solve this problem using all available forces must be fulfilled’. It was overlooked that the navy leaders, and primarily Raeder himself, had suggested those demands to Hitler. By professing readiness blindly to carry out orders resulting from their own wishes, the navy leaders attempted to escape the political responsibility for their actions.

Finally, as German preparations for what would eventually be called Operation Weserübung began to accelerate, it was the Navy’s suggestions which created the urgency to pull the trigger. The scale of Weserübung was such, they pointed out, that the “complete concentration of the whole navy” was required, which implied a complete halt to all other naval operations: recalling all available submarines, halting minelaying operations and cruiser raids, and denuding the German coast of its defenses. This was only justifiable, they argued, if Weserübung was initiated in a timely manner. Speed was of the essence, not only to improve the odds of success, but also to free up the navy for other tasks afterwards. Raeder expressed this view to Hitler on March 5, 1940. Two days later, Hitler signed the Weserübung directive.

The German invasion of Denmark and Norway began on April 9, 1940, and not a moment too soon. Only the day before, British forces had begun mining several channels between the Norwegian coast and Norway’s offshore islands (Operation Wilfred) in an attempt to deny German shipping the use of Norwegian waters. Wilfred was, rather blatantly, a major violation of Norway’s territorial sovereignty, and the mines laid on April 8 would sink several Norwegian ships as well as German vessels.

In any case, the British were the first to move on Norway with Wilfred, but the Germans were much faster and moved more decisively. The British Admiralty believed, fundamentally, that British naval superiority would make it impossible for the Germans to operate on the Norwegian coast. It therefore came as quite a shock when Weserübung successfully landed troops at a variety of widely separated points on Norway’s coast. On the first day of the operation, the Germans had small forces ashore (initially no more than 2,000 men at each landing) at Oslo, Kristiansand, Bergen, Trondheim, and Narvik, and German paratroopers had captured airfields at Oslo and Stavanger, where the Luftwaffe almost immediately moved in and set up shop to provide close air support. Meanwhile, a mixed overland, amphibious, and airborne assault on Denmark toppled that country in only a few hours, with fewer than 50 men killed in total.

In terms of its general impression, the Norwegian campaign offers several instructive facets. The first, very obviously, was the enormous advantage that the Germans derived from speed and surprise. In order to accelerate the operation, the decision was made to land ground forces using speedy naval vessels, primarily destroyers, rather than cumbersome troop transports. This was a deliberate tradeoff which provided speed at the expense of very low combat power; for example, the force dispatched to Trondheim - Norway’s third largest city - consisted of just a single heavy cruiser, the Admiral Hipper, and four destroyers carrying 1,700 men. In the context of the Royal Navy’s fighting power, these German assault forces were genuinely tiny, dissipated task forces, but the Wehrmacht had correctly gambled on speed and aggression. Every German objective had been achieved by the end of the first day.

The Norwegian campaign also demonstrated, for the first time and at scale, the decisive role of airpower brought against naval targets. In the 1930’s Japan had experimented with the use of naval aviation against overland targets, waging a strategic air campaign in China using carrier air groups. In Norway, the Luftwaffe attempted something like the reverse, using ground based aviation to chase the Royal Navy away from the Norwegian coast. German air deployments in Norway were considerable, and were active from almost the first moment, with airborne forces seizing airfields in the opening days of the campaign.

In all, the Germans would deploy 290 bombers, 40 Stuka dive bombers, 100 fighters, 70 variegated patrol and reconnaissance aircraft, and 500 transports in Norway. This was a considerable concentration of airpower that the British could not compete with, and the Royal Air Force never managed to accumulate more than 100 total aircraft in the theater. Luftwaffe bombers managed to sink the destroyer HMS Gurka, heavily damage two cruisers (the Southampton and Glasgow) and even damage the battleship Rodney, chasing it away from the coast. In the context of the Royal Navy’s total force, these were not crippling losses, but it inverted preliminary assumptions about area denial. British admirals assumed that the superiority of their surface fleet could prevent the Germans from operating off Norway at all; instead, it was the Royal Navy that found the littoral closed to them.

The British response to the German invasion of Norway was indecisive, dissipated, and clumsy. In fact, the general incompetence displayed by the British in Norway was a proximate cause for the fall of the Chamberlain government, with aged former PM David Lloyd George ranting in the House of Commons about the “half-prepared” and “half-baked” British response. Curiously, the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill escaped most of the scrutiny, despite his personal micromanaging of the operations in Norway.

In any case, the British failed to mount an effective response in Norway, largely because they suffered disorientation from the speed and range of the German landings. It never seemed clear to the British where the main point of emphasis was, with German forces landing at a variety of sites all along the Norwegian coastline, and they failed to react with appropriate decisiveness and violence. A variety of uncharacteristic logistic and command lapses magnified the problem. For example, troops which had boarded in Scotland for conveyance to Norway were offloaded, then reloaded before being sent to Narvik without any winter clothing. The British carrier HMS Furious was dispatched in a hurry - such a hurry in fact that she failed to load her fighter wing, and carried only torpedo bombers. A litany of oversights, delays, and dissipated reactions all conspired to prevent Britain from every seriously contesting the invasion of Norway.

The dynamics of the German operation - centered as it was on extremely small naval groupings - and the correspondingly scattershot British response ensured that direct naval engagements were relatively small and accidental. Rather than a coordinated fleet engagement, there were instead a handful of incidents where small flotillas fought meeting engagements.

On April 6, the destroyer HMS Glowworm encountered a pair of German destroyers after dropping out of her task force to search for a man overboard. In the ensuing skirmish, the German ships were joined by the battlecruiser Admiral Hipper, which catastrophically damaged the Glowworm with a series of direct hits. Crippled and cornered, the Glowworm’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Gerard Broadmead Roope, turned into the Hipper in a last ditch ramming attack, which sheared off the Glowworm’s bow and sank her. The maneuver so impressed the Hipper’s officers that Captain Helmuth Heye wrote to the British admiralty (using the Red Cross as an intermediary) recommending Roope for the Victoria Cross, making Roope one of only a handful of British fighting men to receive the award on a recommendation from the enemy.

On June 8, the British aircraft carrier Glorious and her escort destroyers, Acasta and Ardent, bumped into the twin German battlecruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The two British destroyers put up a vicious fight, but the mathematics of mass were strongly against them, and the Germans sank all three British ships. This encounter was a debacle and an embarrassment to the Royal Navy on a variety of levels. It was not simply that an aircraft carrier was an expensive and valuable asset that was difficult to replace; the near-ambush of a carrier by surface ships was an anomaly, made possible only by British carelessness: on the morning of the battle, the Glorious had no combat air patrols in the sky, nor even a single man in the crow’s nest. Furthermore, the British battlegroup were out of radio contact with the rest of the fleet, which meant the Admiralty (thanks to its own orders for radio silence) did not even know of the sinkings until they learned about it from German radio broadcasts. Therefore, although hundreds of men managed to abandon ship (in the estimate of the survivors), no rescue attempt was made for well over 24 hours, and only forty men were recovered alive, including 38 from the carrier and one man each from the destroyers.

Although the Norwegian campaign on the whole was a disaster and an embarrassment for the British, there were situations where the Royal Navy was able to bring its combat power - which remained laughably superior - to bear at critical points. The seminal example of this were the twin battles of Narvik, which became relatively famous (as far as the Norwegian campaign goes) as a classic in small-ship fighting, particularly given the cinematic setting in the confines of an icy Norwegian fjord.

Structurally, the Narvik battles were very simple. The Germans had committed a disproportionate naval task force to Narvik, which was the critical port for the seaborne export of iron ore to the Reich. The German force, consisting of ten destroyers, had arrived in the fjord at Narvik on April 9, in heavy fog and snow. The following day - April 10, 1940 - the First Battle of Narvik was fought when a British destroyer flotilla arrived at the mouth of the fjord and launched a surprise attack. A spirited duel between the destroyer fleets ensued, with two ships sunk on either side. The critical fact, however, was that the British ended the day in control of the mouth of the fjord, and were thus able to trap the remaining German destroyers inside. On April 13th, the hulking battleship HMS Warspite cruised into the fjord and fought the Second Battle of Narvik, which was really more like a shooting spree. The powerful battleship methodically moved into the Narvik Fjord, mowing through the undergunned and trapped German destroyers. After the first three had been sunk, the remaining five simply evacuated their crews onto the shore and scuttled themselves.

The battles at Narvik are certainly interesting and unique, not least because of the breathtaking background in the fjord. In the long run, of course, the Germans consolidated their occupation of Narvik and the British withdrew, but the naval fights were a much needed lift for a Royal Navy that had not handled the Norwegian campaign well. For our purposes, however, what stands out is that these relatively small fights in the Narvik Fjord wiped out fully half of the German destroyer fleet. More broadly, Narvik was emblematic of the Kriegsmarine’s extreme fragility.

Despite rapidly achieving its objectives and scoring a variety of satisfying blows on the British (the sinking of the Glorious not least among them), the accumulated action in Norway more or less wiped out the German surface fleet. The heavy cruiser Bluecher was sunk by a Norwegian coastal battery; cruiser Karlsruhe was torpedoed by a British submarine; cruiser Koenigsberg was sunk by British dive bombers; Hipper was temporarily put out of action by the Glowworm’s ramming attack, and both the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau took damage and needed refitting. In the aftermath of the campaign, the Kriegsmarine had just three cruisers and four destroyers operational. In practical terms, therefore, the effort in Norway - although successful - had expended essentially the entire German surface fleet.

Read more

The Russo-Ukrainian War seems to have been engineered in a laboratory to frustrate people with repetition and analytic paralysis. Headlines appear to be circulating on a choreographed loop, all the way down to the place names. Kaja Kallas at the European Commission recently announced, without a hint of irony, that Europe’s new sanctions package - the 19th one - is the toughest yet. Ukraine’s supporters are insisting that Tomahawk missiles are the weapons system that will finally change the game and break the war decisively in Kiev’s favor - reiterating the same grandiose claims that they made about GLMRS, and Leopards, and Abrams, and F-16s, and Storm Shadows, and ATACMs, and virtually every other piece of military hardware in NATO’s inventories. On the ground, Russia is attacking settlements named Pokrovsk and Pokrovs’ke; it recently captured Toretsk and Tors’ke and is now attacking Torets’ke. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

The analytic frameworks applied to the war have also changed relatively little, buried and obfuscated by the nebulous concept of attrition. On the Ukrainian side, there is continued insistence that Russia is suffering exorbitant losses and straining under the pressure of Ukrainian deep strikes, while Ukrainian setbacks are blamed in large part on the failure of the United States to expand its largesse and give Ukraine everything it needs. Many pro-Russian lines of thinking mirror this and suppose that the AFU is on the verge of disintegration, while the Kremlin is accused of failing to “take the gloves off”, particularly in regards to the Ukrainian energy grid, Dnieper bridges, and dams.

The result is a very strange sort of war. This is an extraordinarily high-intensity ground war. Both armies remain in the field, holding hundreds of miles of continuous front after years of bloody fighting. Both armies are (depending on who you ask) taking unsustainable casualties which ought to lead to collapse soon, and yet Moscow, Keiv, and Washington are all (again, depending on who you ask) guilty of failing to take the war seriously enough. All of this is maddeningly repetitive, and one could be forgiven for tuning out entirely. Even the diplomatic tango between Trump, Zelensky, and Putin, after delivering a few entertaining moments, failed to really move the needle in any discernable direction.

Subscribe now

Few would argue that the trajectory of the war changed in an obviously dramatic way in 2025, and it is important to avoid the worn out and clichéd language about “turning points” or “collapse” or any such silly thing. However, 2025 saw several shifts in the war, which while hardly ostentatious or dramatic, are nevertheless very important. 2025 has been the first year of the war in which Ukraine launched no ground offensives or proactive operations of its own. This fact is not only a hint at the threadbare state of Ukraine’s ground forces, but also a testament to the way Russian forces transformed “attrition” from a buzzword into a method of persistent pressure across a variety of axes this year.

In lieu of initiative on the ground, and facing a slow but relentless rollback of their defenses in the Donbas, the theory of Ukrainian victory has shifted in an unacknowledged but dramatic way. After years of insisting that it would achieve maximal territorial integrity - an outcome which would require the total and decisive defeat of Russia’s ground forces - Ukraine has reframed its path to victory mainly as a process of inflicting strategic costs on Russia that mount until the Kremlin agrees to a ceasefire. Consequentially, the debate about arming Ukraine has shifted from a conversation about armor and artillery - equipment useful for retaking lost territories - to a discussion about deep striking weapons like Tomahawks, which can be used to shoot at Russian oil refineries and energy infrastructure. In short, rather than move to prevent Russian from achieving immediate operational objectives in the Donbas, Ukraine and its sponsors are now seeking ways to make Russia pay a price such that victory on the ground is no longer worth it. It is unclear whether they have thought about what price Ukraine will pay in the exchange. Perhaps they do not care.

About Tomahawks

Notwithstanding Ukraine’s attempts to jumpstart indigenous production, it is inevitable that Ukrainian capabilities will be largely determined by the largesse of western sponsors. This aspect of the war took a sudden turn at the beginning of the October when fresh reporting began to circulate that Tomahawk missiles might be on the table for Ukraine. Tomahawks have always been on Ukraine’s wish list (given that the Ukrainian wish list as such consists of essentially all the military equipment in NATO’s combined inventories) but this was the first reporting that they might be under serious consideration.

As is frequently the case, the discussion spiraled away from realistic grounding, with some suggesting that the Tomahawk would be a “game changer” for Ukraine (where have we heard that before?) and the pro-Russian sphere dismissing it as an irrelevant distraction. There’s a tendency to focus on the quality of American weapons systems, casting them as either unrivaled technological marvels or overhyped and overpriced baubles, but this is generally not productive and largely irrelevant to the matter at hand. The Tomahawk, broadly speaking, is exactly as advertised, and provides proven and reliable strike capability at strategic depths in excess of 1,000 miles. In role, range, and payload it is essentially an analog to Russia’s Kalibr missiles (I am begging the enthusiasts to note the phrase “essentially an analog” rather than rake me over the coals over the different guidance systems and other technical minutia). Such a system will always be valuable and would obviously improve Ukraine’s deep strike capabilities.

The “problem” with Tomahawks does not relate to any “problem” with the missile itself, but with its availability and Ukraine’s technical capability to launch them. The Tomahawk is conventionally a ship-launched missile (there is no extant air-launched variant) with a few novel options for ground launch. Ukraine, obviously, would require ground launch systems, and the problem is that these systems are essentially brand new and available in very limited quantities: more importantly, American service branches are in the process of trying to build out these capabilities throughout the decade. Providing ground-launchable Tomahawks to Ukraine in any meaningful numbers would therefore essentially require the US Army and Marines to scrap their own force buildout plans.

There are two basic options for ground launching Tomahawks. One of these is the US Army’s MRC (Mid-Range Capability) Launcher, dubbed the Typhon. This is an enormous tractor-trailer launcher with four launch tubes, first delivered in 2023. It has an enormous footprint - so large, apparently, that the Army is already asking for a smaller replacement - and is intended to give the Army an organic fires component in the gap between the shorter range Precision Strike Missile and hypersonic systems (which do not yet exist). The critical fact is this: the Army intends to field a total of five Typhon batteries by 2028, of which two have been delivered so far. Each battery consists in turn of four launchers, implying that eight out of a planned twenty launchers have been delivered. Even more importantly, both of the currently operational batteries are already deployed, with one in the Philippines and one in Japan. These systems are being actively used in exercises and trials, including an exercise this summer in Australia.

The situation with the Marine Corps’ launch system is quite similar, although the launch platforms themselves could not be more different. Unlike the lumbering Typhon tractor trailer, the Marines are fielding a significantly more lithe and compact LMSL system, with the tradeoff of a single launch tube compared to the Typhon’s four. What matters is not so much the technical differences, as the fact that the Marines - like the Army - only received their first deliveries in 2023, and they are currently in the process of building out the force. In the case of the marines, the goal is to have a Tomahawk battalion built out by 2030. In fact, the production contract came into effect as recently as 2025.

What does all of that mean? It means that, although the Tomahawk itself is a fine missile, the systems for ground launch are so new and available in such limited quantities that equipping Ukraine with Tomahawks would require either the US Army or the Marines to materially alter their force structure in the near term (through 2030, essentially). These are essentially the opposite of much of the gear that’s been given to Ukraine to this point: far from being inventories of older systems that can be earmarked as surplus or tabbed for replacement, Tomahawk ground launch is a brand new capability that is in the middle of deployment and buildout for the first time.

This is, of course, a layered complication on top of Tomahawk quantities in and of themselves. The issue of Tomahawk availability is both over and under emphasized, depending on the context. The United States has something like 4,000 Tomahawks in its inventories (although half of these are currently inside their cells on American ships), so it is not quite correct to say (as some have) that America is running out of these critical weapons. The issue is that production rates are relatively anemic (generally between 55 and 90 per year) and are fail to replenish the expenditure from even relatively brief strike campaigns, such as the repeated strikes on Yemen. Broadly speaking, then, the issue is not so much that the United States is in immediate danger of running out of Tomahawks, but that procurement schedules are so slow that even relatively minor expenditures can erase multiple years worth of deliveries.

It may be useful, then, to consider Tomahawks in comparison to the ATACMs missiles which have already been provided to Ukraine. Unlike the Tomahawk, the ATACMs is a system which has already been tabbed for replacement, with the Precision Strike Missile in the early phases of its rollout. ATACMs were also compatible with launch systems that Ukraine already had. In comparison to Tomahawks, then, ATACMs are both vastly more strategically expendable, produced in larger numbers, and easier to deploy. Despite all these points in their favor, the United States provided Ukraine with just 40 ATACMs. Even if the Army could be pressured into handing over one or two of its brand new Typhon launchers, it is difficult to imagine that more than few dozen Tomahawks could be spared for Ukraine: a token inventory far too small to wage a sustained strike campaign in the Russian heartland.

Given that Tomahawks for Ukraine would be measured in the dozens, rather than the hundreds, it’s worth asking whether this could actually change anything for the AFU at the front. The answer is clearly no in the long run, but it would be unwise to dismiss the possibility that even a limited tranche of Tomahawks (let’s say 40 to 50 missiles) could help alleviate pressure on Ukrainian forces at the front, provided they were used appropriately. A short term boost to Ukrainian strike capabilities, if deployed against Russian rear areas, could force further dispersal and rationing of Russian assets and temporarily stall Russia’s emerging multi-axis offensive. This could defer the loss of key positions until early 2026. This presumes, however, that the Ukrainians would be content to use Tomahawks against operational targets. In reality, Ukraine can never seem to resist lobbing missiles at targets that have little bearing on the front, like the Kerch Bridge. Indeed, a failure to synergize strikes at depth with operations on the ground is a major reason why the ATACMs achieved so little.

On the other side of this equation, it is a common complaint from the Russian perspective that Moscow has done too little to “deter” the United States from empowering Ukraine’s strike campaign - both by directly providing munitions and supplying the planning, ISR, and guidance systems. This, however, rather misses the point. Russia has done nothing of note to deter the United States because both Moscow and Washington understand fully that there is essentially no appetite (on either side) for a direct confrontation. In the (sensible) absence of a willingness to strike back at NATO targets, there is really nothing Russia can do to deter beyond maintaining its own retaliatory capabilities. The issue is not that Russia has failed to actively deter, but that there is nothing they could do even if they wanted to.

The basic pattern here is well established. The United States has done what it can to backstop Ukrainian strike capabilities, but it has held them at a level where Ukraine’s damage output falls far short of decisive levels. So long as that is the case, Russia has clearly demonstrated that it will simply eat the punches and retaliate against *Ukraine*. Hence, when the United States helps Ukraine target Russian oil facilities, it is Ukraine that receives the reprisal, and it is Ukraine which has its natural gas production annihilated as the winter approaches. In a sense, neither side is really trying to deter the other at all. The United States has raised the cost of this war for Russia, but not enough to create any real pressure for Moscow to end the conflict; in response, Russia punishes Ukraine, which is something the United States does not really care about. The result is a sort of geostrategic Picture of Dorian Gray, where the United States vicariously inflicts cathartic damage on Russia, but Ukraine accrues all the soul damage.

In the case of Tomahawks, the risk-reward calculus is just not there. Tomahawks are a strategically invaluable asset that the United States cannot afford to hand out like candy. Even if the launch systems could be provided (highly doubtful), the missiles could not be made available in sufficient quantities to make a difference. The range of the missiles, however, significantly raises the probability of miscalculation or uncontrolled escalation. Ukraine shooting American missiles at energy infrastructure in Belgorod or Rostov is one thing; shooting them at the Kremlin is another thing entirely.

There is, however, another aspect of this which seems to be garnering little attention. The biggest risk of sending Tomahawks is not that the Ukrainians will blow up the Kremlin and start World War Three. The bigger risk is that the Tomahawks are used, and Russia simply moves on after eating the strikes. Tomahawks are arguably one of the last - if not *the* last - rung in the escalation ladder for the USA. We have rapidly run through the chain of systems that can be given to the AFU, and little remains except a few strike systems like the Tomahawk or the JASSM. Ukraine has generally received everything it has asked for. In the case of Tomahawks, however, the United States is running the most serious risk of all: what if the Russians simply shoot down some of the missiles and eat the rest of the strikes? It’s immaterial whether the Tomahawks damage Russian powerplants or oil refineries. If Tomahawks are delivered and consumed without seriously jarring Russian nerves, the last escalatory card will have been played. If Russia perceives that America has reached the limits of its ability to raise the costs of the war for Russia, it undercuts the entire premise of negotiations. More simply put, Tomahawks are most valuable as an asset to threaten with.

Reading between the lines of President Trump’s public statements recently, it seems likely that he has rationally weighed these considerations. Publicly, he used the threat of Tomahawks to try and force Russia to keep negotiating, and he’s received a commitment for another meeting with Putin for his trouble (more on that later). He has now, for the time being, shelved the Tomahawk plan, commenting that “we need them” and applying the usual Trumpian linguistic style to the broadly accepted issue of inventories which I have outlined here. Tomahawks are simply more valuable to the United States as a tool to threaten escalation, rather than as an actual kinetic asset in Ukrainian hands, and so long as Trump keeps his powder dry he can re-raise the issue later.

Ultimately, perhaps, this discussion is not about Tomahawks at all. These missiles, rather, are simply a totem which demonstrate two important dovetailing points. First, that American resources are not infinite, and as the United States reaches deeper into its bag to help Ukraine, it begins to grab at strategically critical assets that the US military simply cannot spare. Secondly, we must remember that America’s policy in Ukraine is a game of titration, with Washington probing the limits of Russia’s willingness to “eat the strikes” without allowing the reprisal violence to spill out of Ukraine.

The Big Banana: Russia’s Operational Schema

At this point, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to say anything meaningful about the actual operational progression on the ground. There are several reasons for this. First and foremost, the war has now gone on so long and is consistently moving at such an apparently glacial pace that most people simply do not care at this point whether Russia holds Yampil or not, or whether they have advanced past the rail line in Pokrovsk. There is severe fatigue (or perhaps boredom is the better word) with the status of an interminable sequence of apparently small settlements, industrial complexes, and forestry plantations, and as a result most people have essentially checked out. Not the least among these must surely be President Trump, who apparently chucked Zelensky’s map of the frontline and complained that he was tired of being shown the same maps over and over again.

On the other hand, we have the true obsessives who continue to dutifully follow the frontlines regularly and are voluntarily intaking daily updates. We end up with a bifurcated system where some people are still highly plugged in to the micro movements on the battlefield, but most people just don’t care, and we can hardly blame the latter. I think it would be profitable, then, to think about the broader Russian operational scheme, what it has achieved, and what it aims to achieve in the coming year. This is probably more interesting and less repetitious than fixating on the exact positioning within Pokrovsk or Kupyansk.

There are two larger points that I think are worth making before we look at some specifics.

First and foremost, much of the battlefield analysis that comes out (particularly from western analysts) makes firm pronouncements as to what constitutes Russia’s “primary” and “secondary” efforts, but these are essentially interpolated and frequently incorrect. For example, it’s become a fairly mainstream conception that Russia’s “primary” point of effort right now is the capture of Pokrovsk, but this does not actually seem supported by Russian actions. There is no particular advantage to be gained for Russia by pushing to capture Pokrovsk as soon as possible - the city is already in a stranglehold partial encirclement. To be sure, Pokrovsk *was* a major logistic hub for Ukrainian forces, but it can no longer serve that role and was sterilized as a transit hub months ago, once it became a frontline city. The opposite side of this coin is that other Russian axes of advance, particularly in southern Donetsk and the bend of the Donets River, are dismissed as “secondary” efforts. This is a major mistake, and I will attempt to show that these are critical advances where Russia is shaping the battlefield to its advantage for follow on operations.

Secondly, it should be understood and appreciated that Ukraine has lost essentially all battlefield initiative. In 2024, the AFU was able to assembled a mechanized reserve and launch their operation into Kursk. This operation ultimately failed and resulted in severe Ukrainian losses, but this is unrelated to the fact that Ukraine was still able to accumulate forces and pursue offensive operations on its own initiative. In 2025, however, Ukraine has been in a permanent state of reactivity. This was the first year of the war in which Ukraine did not launch any proactive operations or counteroffensives of its own, and Ukrainian hopes have instead pivoted to their strategic strike campaign against Russian oil facilities.

In a larger sense, the effect of attrition can be seen year by year with the shrinking scope of Ukraine’s proactive operations. In 2022, Ukraine was able to launch a pair of widely separated offensives which yielded modest successes: an offensive out of Kharkov rolled the front back over the Oskil River (though it failed to collapse the Lugansk shoulder), meanwhile, a series of battles outside of Kherson failed to break through the Russian lines, but they did play a role in persuading the Russians to abandon their bridgehead over the Dnieper. The point of course is not to once again autopsy these offensives, but to point out that there were two of them, that they were meaningful in scale, and they did result in important territorial gains for Ukraine. In 2023, by contrast, Ukraine launched a single theater-level offensive in the south, which failed. In 2024, we got the Kursk operation: smaller and less lavishly equipped than 2023’s Zaoprizhia offensive, and aimed at a peripheral theater. This year, there were no proactive Ukrainian operations at all. There is a very clear pattern at play here, with Ukraine’s offensive punch progressively shrinking before disappearing entirely in 2025. This was a year of essentially uninterrupted Russian initiative.

Putting Ukraine permanently on the backfoot is a significant Russian achievement, and it is owed to a few converging factors. Obviously, the attrition of Ukrainian forces is a major factor. We’ve gone through the flailing Ukrainian mobilization, the cannibalization of its forces, and the general lack of reserves in detail on several occasions, and there’s no need to retread that ground here. Suffice it to say, Ukraine’s ability to husband forces for offensive operations appears to be severely degraded. Russia has exacerbated this problem by pressing steadily on a variety of different axes. At the moment, there are no fewer than seven Russian axes of attack, pressuring a slew of cities all along the line. This creates a series of defensive emergencies, maintains the burn rate on Ukrainian forces, and fixes them on the line. Finally, in a point to be detailed shortly, Russian advances have begun unraveling Ukraine’s logistic connectivity, which puts strain on supply and prevents the concentration and accumulation of forces.

Now, for the development of the front and the premise of the Russian offensive scheme. The main point that I want to impress is essentially as follows: rather than fixating on Pokrovsk, Russia’s advances across Southern Donetsk and on the inner bend of the Donets River ought to be thought of as vital operations which have severely disrupted the coherence of both the Ukrainian front and their logistics. This has the triple effect of preventing the Ukrainians from launching offensives of their own, accelerating the attrition of Ukrainian forces, and shaping the front for the coming operation to capture the Slovyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration.

To begin, let’s consider the progress that Russia has made in southern Donetsk, both in raw territorial terms and its implications for Ukrainian logistic connectivity. To demonstrate this, I’ve pulled maps from DeepState (again, a Ukrainian mapping enterprise) for August 2023 (when Ukraine was attempting its counterattack out of Orikhiv) and for October 20th, the week of this writing. I have noted both the length of the southern front (obviously a linear approximate, as the actual front has many bends and bulges) and highlighted the key highways that Ukraine uses to run the backbone of its logistics.

Now, one thing that is worth noting is that the Russians are currently positioned to roll up this front even further. Ukrainian defensive lines are primarily oriented towards on a north-south axis. Once Russian forces cleared Kurakhove, they entered the seams in these defensive lines - that is to say, they are advancing laterally along the face of the prepared defenses, rather than trying to bash through them from the front. This is one reason why their progress has been relatively steady and uninterrupted. Now approaching the “elbow” in the lines, where they pivot southward, and having crossed the Yanchur River, the Russians are entering a substantial space that lacks meaningful prepared defenses. Using the Military Summary map (Ukrainian fortifications are mapped with yellow dots), the void in the defense is fairly obvious as the Russians work their way into the elbow of the line.

Apart from the obvious development of note here - that Russian forces have, to this point, rolled up roughly half the length of the southern front and are positioned to roll up another ten to fifteen miles - we want to note two things which are emblematic of the way the war is going for Ukraine, but curiously receive little attention. First, the compression of the front is robbing the Ukrainians of the maneuver space which made it possible for them to stage and assemle forces for their counteroffensive in 2023. Two years ago, there was a wide, lateral buffer zone around the Ukrainian staging area in Orikhiv, and Ukrainian forces had access to multiple highways where they could disperse forces in their marching columns and run their logistics.

Today, that buffer zone is gone, as is the easy access to several of the branch highways. The Russian advance, which started with the breakthrough at Ugledar and Kurakhove last year and which has now rolled up some 50 miles of front, has essentially sterilized Ukraine’s capacity to attack in the south, because they have neither the space nor the roads to safely accumulate forces here. It has also shattered the interconnectivity of Ukrainian logistics: rather than having several highways to shuttle troops and material to the east, Ukraine now has to support several disconnected logistic fronts with individual highways. More to the point, there is no longer a single Donetsk “front” to speak of, but rather a series of logistic fronts: one in the south, around Orikhiv, another at Pokrovsk, and the largest one in the Slovyansk Banana. These are lacking lateral connectivity to each other for the Ukrainians due to the wedges that the Russians have forced in the front, particularly in the south, funneling logistics and reinforcements down individuated corridors.

The bigger issue, however, lies farther north on the Pokrovsk and Donets axes, and in the way that they synergize. People who are focusing, to the exclusion of all else, on when and how Russia will capture Pokrovsk are failing to see the bigger picture, and indeed are not even trying to understand it.

The ultimate Russian operational objective (in this phase of the war, at least) is the belt of cities which runs in an arc from Slovyansk to Kostyantinivka, which I affectionately call “the Slovyansk Banana” due to its curved shape. A cursory look at the map shows us why the very operations that are being dismissed as secondary efforts are in fact critical axes of Russian effort which are shaping the battlefield for the attack on the Banana.

There are two very important facts about the Banana, from the perspective of operational geography. The first is that, although the combined mass of the agglomeration is far larger than any of the urban areas that have been fought over to this point, the Banana is relatively difficult to defend because it sits on the floor of a river valley: the Kazennyi Torets flows through all the cities in the Banana before it flows into the Donets. Russian forces approaching the city from the southwest, the east, and the north will all be advancing along the high ground that overlooks the cities on the floor.

The second important fact about the Banana is that, despite its size, it is supported by just two highways which approach from the southwest and northwest respectively, funneling into the Banana like a wedge. Taking the northern highway/MSR (the E40 highway) as an example, we see that Russia’s operations inside the Donets bend are hardly secondary efforts: they are vital shaping operations linked to the integrity of the Banana. The E40 highway tracks the Donets bend very closely (it generally stays within five miles of the river. If the Russians sustain their progress north of the Donets and reach the river at Bogorodychne or Svyatogirsk, it will not only put E40 under persistent drone attack but also curl the defensive line behind the Banana, to say nothing of the enormous pressure on the Siversk salient.

On the Pokrovsk front as well, Russia’s progress is being misinterpreted. After their breakthrough at the end of the summer, Russian forces have consolidated the bulge north of Pokrovsk (despite weeks of Ukrainian counterattacks) and are steadily working their way towards Rais’ke and Sergiivka. This is not about Pokrovsk at all - reaching Rais’ke would put Russian forces directly in the backfield of Kostyantinivka, on the supply lines to the underside of the Banana.

I am not suggesting at all that Russian forces are on the verge of some great offensive surge that will carry them into the heart of the Banana instantly. However, there is a fairly well established Russian operational methodology in this war, which involves working their way methodically into Ukraine’s logistical lanes and seams, segmenting the front and strangulating their strongpoints, forcing them to supply frontline strongholds with single file logistics and dirt roads. They did it in Bakhmut, and Avdiivka, they are doing it in Pokrovsk, and they are shaping the front to attempt this on a large scale in the Banana.

The general point that we are trying to make here is that dismissing Russian advances in the Serebryanka Forest, the emerging bulge north of Pokrovsk, and their move into the Donets Bend as “secondary efforts” is mistaken. Zooming out to the appropriate scale shows that these are concentric operations, shaping the front for a 2026 assault on the Banana - moving towards the E40 road from the north, bending the defensive shield around Siversk, and working into the underbelly of the Banana through Rais’ke.

This is, perhaps, a long way to go for a short drink of water, but there are a few basic points here that get completely missed when the view of the front is preoccupied with the fighting inside Pokrovsk and Kupyansk:

1. Russia’s advance out of Kurakhove across the southern front is not a secondary axis. They have rolled up half of the southern front, condensing Ukrainian forces into a compact space which sterilizes their ability to attack in the south.

2. Broad Russian pressure across a half-dozen axes maintained a steady burn rate on Ukrainian forces and prevented the accumulation of forces for proactive operations. 2025 has been the first year of the war in which Ukraine has not launched any offensive operations on its own initiative.

3. Advances in the Donets bend and the interstitial space between Pokrovsk and Kostyantinivka are not subsidiary or secondary operations: they are critical shaping operations that are moving concentrically toward the Banana.

To be frank, the general mood of optimism in the Ukrainian infosphere, which lasted for much of the summer, struck me as remarkably odd. The frontline has yielded no real good news for Ukraine at any point this year. Beyond the broader strategic point, that Ukraine has lost the initiative and does not seem capable of getting it back, Russia is in the process of capturing two important urban centers (Russian troops are in the city centers of Pokrovsk and Kupyansk), it has begun the assault on at leas two more (Lyman and Kostyantinivka), it has rolled up half of the southern front, and cleared most of the inner Donets-Oskil bend. The Banana is on deck for 2026.

Ukraine’s Cost Theory of Victory

One thing that has become apparent over the last year is that Kiev has abandoned previous notions of outright victory on the battlefield and adopted a new strategic framework predicated on imposing unacceptable costs on Russia, so that Moscow will agree to freeze the conflict.

This is a subtle and unspoken yet extremely important distinction. It is easy to miss, because both Ukrainian leadership and Ukraine’s western backers continue to speak of Ukrainian “victory” and the possibility of Ukraine “winning” the war. What is crucial to understand is that the “victory” that they speak of now is categorically different than the victory of 2022 and 2023. In the first years of the war, it was possible to at least speak of Ukraine taking the initiative to advance on the ground and retake territory. There were concrete examples of Ukrainian offensives in 2022, and the battle in Zaporizhia - although unsuccessful - showed that it was at least possible for Ukraine to attempt a proper mechanized offensive.

Therefore, in the first years of the war, when leaders in Kiev and Brussels and London and Washington spoke of Ukrainian victory, they essentially meant the defeat of the Russian ground forces and the reconquest of much (or all) of the Donbas. The Kursk Operation of 2024 began to split the difference: Ukraine still had some resources to mount proactive operations, but these operations were no longer aimed at the dense eastern front and instead aimed at relatively soft subsidiary fronts with an eye to out-levering the Russians.

Today, with the Ukrainian army stuck in a permanent state of reactivity and slowly receding defense, it no longer makes any sense to speak of Ukrainian victory in the most straightforward sense, which is to say victory on the battlefield - no matter how tenaciously or bravely the Ukrainian rank and file continues to fight in essentially intolerable circumstances. Instead, Ukrainian “victory” has been transmogrified to mean essentially that Russia absorbs such exorbitant costs that it agrees to some sort of ceasefire without preconditions.

The costs to be imposed on Russia are implicitly assumed to be a mixture of battlefield casualties and damage to strategic assets inflicted by Ukrainian air strikes, and in regards to the latter Ukraine seems to be particularly placing its hopes in a strategic strike campaign against Russian oil. Ukraine’s attempts to disable Russian oil production and refining have dovetailed with ever more aggressive sanctions from the United States against Russian fossil fuel exports - although it is worth noting that the limited price response to these sanctions indicates that markets expect that Russian oil will continue to flow.

Trump’s suggestion that Tomahawks may be on the table for Ukraine must be seen as a constituent element of this new strategy and theory of victory. And this, ultimately, is very important to understand. Tomahawks are not being bandied about because anybody (in Kiev or Washington) believes that 50 cruise missiles will allow Ukraine to defeat the Russian Army and recapture the Donbas. Tomahawks were mentioned because the Ukrainian alliance is threatening to cripple the Russian fossil fuels industry (through a mixture of sanctions and kinetic strikes on production facilities) unless Putin agrees to a ceasefire.

This is why it is wrong to be surprised that Trump abruptly cancelled his meeting with Putin and instead announced more sanctions. There’s nothing abrupt or erratic about this. Threats to Russian oil are now, without exaggeration, the main lever that the Ukrainian bloc has against Russia. It certainly should not have been a surprise that the Kremlin, which has reiterated the same fundamental war aims since day one, was not excited about coming to Budapest to freeze the conflict, and neither should it surprise us that Trump would instead prefer to pull harder on the oil lever. The two powers are playing entirely different games: Russia is slow-walking negotiations while it advances on the ground, and the United States is playing a pain game designed to raise the costs for Russia.

We have fundamentally reached an impasse when it comes to negotiations. For Moscow, negotiations with the United States are essentially a way to string Washington along. Moscow feels that it is winning on the ground, therefore a diplomatic impasse suits Russian interests. When western leadership complains that Russia does not seem interested in ending the war, they are correct, but they are missing the point. Russia is not interested in ending the war right now because doing so would not serve Russian interests. The Banana is in the crosshairs, and a ceasefire now would be an egregious compromise when victory on the ground is in sight.

The sense of urgency that Washington feels to end the war - mainly by yanking furiously on the oil lever until the Kremlin cries uncle - stems from the fact that this is now the only sort of victory that Ukraine can hope to win. The ground war has been written off as a total loss, and all that remains is to lob missiles and drones at Russian refineries, sanction Russian firms and banks, and harass shadow tankers until the costs become intolerable. The longer the Ukrainian ground forces can hold the line the better, but this is merely a matter of limiting the downside. The fact that Russia can retaliate disproportionately against Ukraine barely factors into this thinking.

The key point here, however, is that the concept of Ukrainian victory has been completely transformed. There is now no real discussion of how Ukraine can win on the ground. For the Ukrainian bloc, the war is no longer a contest against the Russian Army, but a more abstract contest against Russia’s willingness to incur strategic costs. Rather than preventing Russian capture of the Donbas, the west is testing how much Putin is willing to pay for it. If history is any guide, a game predicated on outlasting Russia’s strategic endurance and willingness to fight is a very bad game to play indeed.

Share

And now for something completely different.

I have something very different and very exciting today, which I hope you will enjoy. Dr. Sean McMeekin is a name that readers may recognize from his regular appearance in my recommended reading segments at the ends of our regular history pieces. Dr McMeekin is a prolific author of what I like to call “muscular history”, particular the wars and revolutions of the early 20th Century. A Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College, Dr. McMeekin is the author, among other works, of The Russian Origins of the First World War, July 1914: Countdown to War, Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, The Russian Revolution: A New History, Stalin’s War, and To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. Some historians are fine scholars but rather dry writers, and some people are good writers and shoddy scholars, but I have always enjoyed the McMeekin corpus because it is muscular, interesting history which is actually enjoyable to read, with clear and direct prose.

In any case, a few weeks ago I reached out to Dr. McMeekin inquiring if he would be willing to have a conversation with me about his books, his approach to writing, and more generally about the World Wars. To my delight, he not only obliged but gave lengthy answers, which I hope you will enjoy as much as I did.

Subscribe now

Big Serge: “One of the first things that stands out about your work is that you have found success writing about topics which are very familiar to people and have a large extant corpus of writing. World War One, the Russian Revolution, World War Two, and now a broad survey of Communism – these are all subjects with no shortage of literature, and yet you have consistently managed to write books that feel refreshing and new. In a sense, your books help “reset” how people understand these events, so for example Stalin’s War was very popular and was not perceived as just another World War Two book. Would you say that this is your explicit objective when you write, and more generally, how do you approach the challenge of writing about familiar subjects?”

Dr. McMeekin: “Yes, I think that is an important goal when I write. I have often been called a revisionist, and it is not usually meant as a compliment, but I don’t particularly mind the label. I have never understood the idea that a historian’s job is simply to reinforce or regurgitate, in slightly different form, our existing knowledge of major events. If there is nothing new to say, why write a book?

Of course, it is not easy to say something genuinely new about events such as the First World War, the Russian Revolution, or World War Two. The scholar in me would like to think that I have been able to do so owing to my discovery of new materials, especially in Russian and other archives less well-trodden by western historians until recently, and that is certainly part of it. But I think it is more important that I come to this material – and older material, too – with new questions, and often surprisingly obvious ones.

For example, in The Russian Origins of the First World War, I simply took up Fritz Fischer’s challenge, which for some reason had been forgotten after “Fischerites” (most of them less than careful readers of Fischer, apparently) took over the field. In the original 1961 edition of Griff nach der Weltmacht (Germany’s “Bid” or “Grab” for World Power, a title translated more blandly but descriptively into English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War), Fischer pointed out that he was able to subject German war aims to withering scrutiny because basically every German file (not destroyed in the wars) had been declassified and opened to historians owing to Germany’s abject defeat in 1945 – while pointing out that, if the secret French, British, and Russian files on 1914 were ever opened, a historian could do the same thing for one of the Entente Powers. I had already done a Fischer-esque history on German WWI strategy, especially Germany’s use of pan-Islam (The Berlin-Baghdad Express), inspired by a similar epigraph in an old edition of John Buchan’s wartime thriller Greenmantle – Buchan predicted that a historian would come along one day to tell the story “with ample documents,” joking that when this happened he would retire and “fall to reading Miss Austen in a hermitage.” So it was a logical progression to ask, if Fischer can do this for Germany’s war aims, why not Russia?

Readers may have missed the obvious Fischer inspiration for Russian Origins owing to the editors at Harvard/Belknap, who thought my original title – the obviously Fischer-inspired Russia’s Aims in the First World War – was boring and unsexy. Probably this helped sell books, but it did lend my critics an easy line that I was “blaming Russia for the First World War” rather than simply applying a Fischer-esque lens to Russia’s war aims. Some also called me Russophobic, which is understandable, though I think it misses the point. To my mind, subjecting Russian strategic thinking, wartime diplomacy and maneuvering to the same scrutiny as those routinely applied to Germany and the other Powers is taking the country seriously on its own terms, rather than ignoring Russia, as nearly every historian of, say, Gallipoli has done.

A book on Russian war aims was also long overdue. Other than an underwhelming Chai Lieven study from 1983 and a few articles, no one had really done this for Russia since Soviet scholars and archivists had (with very different motivations) published annotated volumes of secret Russian diplomatic correspondence back in the 1920s. For me, this was a door wide open, and I walked right in. Stalin’s War is in many ways a sequel to Russia’s Aims in the First World War (my own title!), written in a similar spirit, albeit much longer and in some ways more ambitious.

With the Russian Revolution, it was probably still harder to say anything really new, particularly after the popular histories of Richard Pipes and Orlando Figes (and a huge new literature written partly in response to them) came out in the 1990s. And I do not think my “take” was quite as revisionist or controversial as those on WWI or WW2. What I did try to do, in order to add something new to the story, was to combine my own research in a number of areas (Russian army morale reports before and after Order No. 1, depositions taken after the July Days, police reports from 1917, Bolshevik finances and expropriation policies, etc.) with new work done by others since 1991 on, especially, Russia’s military performance in WWI (a topic almost completely ignored in Cold War era literature on the Revolution, both Soviet and western), to reinterpret both the February and October Revolutions. In full disclosure, I would have preferred to write an ambitious history on just 1917, where I had the most original material and new points to make, but my publisher wanted a one-volume “comprehensive” history of the Revolution, so that is what I wrote. Like most historians and writers, I like to think that I write entirely from inspiration with a free hand, but of course there are all kinds of factors that play into our work.

Getting back to your question – while I have certainly done original research for all of these books, I am hardly the only historian to take advantage of Russian archives opened after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 – including, I should add, all the incredible archival material compiled by Russian researchers in the 1990s and 2000s into huge published volumes of Soviet-era documents. I think it is my mindset that differentiates me from other scholars who have taken similar advantage of this opportunity. Simon Sebag Montefiore, for example, uncovered incredibly rich veins of new material for Stalin. Court of the Red Tsar, as Antony Beevor did for Stalingrad, both of which books made an enormous splash. They’re not exactly “revisionists,” though. Rather, these historians retell stories already partly familiar, but with reams of fascinating new details that greatly enrich the story. I think this is a wonderful way to write history, and thousands of readers evidently agree. It is just not what I do.”

Big Serge: “I’m glad you brought up The Russian Origins of the First World War. This was the first of your books that I read, and I found it interesting for a counterintuitive reason, in that its arguments seem like they should be obvious and not particularly controversial. The essence of the book is that the Tsarist state had agency and tried to use the First World War to achieve important strategic objectives. That should be obvious, after all this was an immensely powerful state with a long pedigree of muscular foreign policy, but people are very accustomed to the Guns of August sort of narrative where all the agency and initiative is with Germany, and everyone else is reduced to the role of objects in a story where Germany is the sole subject.

It makes me think somewhat of a quip that Dr. Stephen Kotkin has used in interviews about his Stalin biographies, when he says that the “big secret” of the Soviet archives was that the communists really were communist. His point is that, even in a very convoluted and secretive regime, sometimes what you see really is what you get. I think you made a similar sort of point with Russian Origins. If I could paraphrase you, the big reveal is that the big, powerful Tsarist Empire was behaving like a big powerful empire, in that it had cogent war aims and it consistently sought to work towards those – so consistently in fact that the war aims were initially largely unchanged after the fall of the monarchy in 1917. You’re saying something very similar with Stalin’s War: the shocking secret here is that a powerful, expansionist, heavily militarized Soviet regime acted like it and worked aggressively to pursue its own peculiar interests.

How do you conceptualize this? It strikes me as a little bit odd, because, as you say, there is sometimes a bit of a stigma round the label “revisionist”, but your books generally present schemas that are fairly intuitive: Tsarist Russia was a big, powerful empire that pursued big imperial aims; Stalin was the protagonist of his own story and exercised a muscular, self-interested foreign policy; the Bolsheviks used extraordinary violence to conquer an anarchic environment. Are you surprised that people are surprised at these things?”

Dr. McMeekin: “I wish I was surprised, and perhaps at first I was, but I suppose that, over the years, I have become inured to the shocked! Shocked! reactions I receive when I point out fairly obvious things. Historians, like most groups, tend to be pack animals, who like to run in safe herds. When it comes to a familiar subject such as the outbreak of World War I, the literature tends to groove around well-trodden themes and questions. Certainly it has done since Fischerites took over the field: it’s Germany all the time, with perhaps a nod to Austria-Hungary in the Serbian backstory, or Britain with the naval race. France and Russia had almost disappeared from the story, as if one of the two major continental alliance blocs was irrelevant. I was heartened that my own treatment of Russia’s role in the outbreak of the war and Russia’s war aims garnered attention and shaped the conversation, both in itself and through Christopher Clark’s bestseller Sleepwalkers (which draws on Russian Origins). By contrast, Stefan Schmidt’s pathbreaking 2009 study of the French role in the outbreak of the war (Frankreichs Aussenpolitik in der Julikrise 1914), which Clark and I draw on heavily, has still not been translated into English, making barely a ripple in the profession. Clark and I have poked around with English-language publishers, trying to gin up interest in a translation, but so far without luck.

With the Second World War, I suppose the “shock” value is still greater, and perhaps therefore even less surprising. In Germany, after all, there are laws on the books making it illegal to “trivialize” the Holocaust, for example by foregrounding Soviet war crimes on the eastern front, and of course whole areas of the war such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Soviet war plans in 1941, and even Lend-Lease are highly sensitive in Russia, though I’ll note that there has been a curious exception for the “full-on” revisionism of Rezun-Suvorov (Icebreaker, etc.) – perhaps because his thesis is so extreme as to be easily caricatured, or maybe just because his books sell so well, it has never been difficult to find them in Russian bookstores. In a way, I also think the popularity of Suvorov’s books in Russia relates to the way they do take the Soviet Union seriously as a great power, as I do, of course – whether or not one agrees with his thesis, and I’m sure many of his Russian readers do not, it is less condescending than western histories that treat the Soviets as passive victims of fate in the Barbarossa story before Stalin woke them up.

I was perhaps more surprised at the visceral reaction to Stalin’s War in Britain, particularly my discussion of Operation Pike (eg British plans to bomb Soviet oil installations in Baku in 1940), which sent certain reviewers into paroxysms of rage I found absolutely bewildering. If anything, I should have thought my sharply critical treatment of Hopkins and Roosevelt would have offended Americans far more gravely than my slightly more sympathetic portrayal of Britain’s wartime statesmen, but it was quite the opposite. Certainly some American Roosevelt admirers were annoyed, but this was nothing like British reviewers’ hysteria over Operation Pike. Curiously enough I had dinner not long ago with one of these reviewers, and he brought up Stalin’s War. He was very civil, full of British charm, but he still wanted desperately to know why I had argued that Britain “should have gone to war against the Soviet Union instead of Nazi Germany.” As always when I am accused of this – another reviewer stated this point blank in the TLS – I simply asked him if he could locate a passage in the book where I had stated any such thing? The entire subject of World War II has become so encrusted with emotion and taboos that I think it clouds people’s vision. They see ghosts.”

Big Serge: “As I’m sure you are well aware, it’s always common to force analogies between current events and World War Two, so that we’re constantly reliving the Munich Pact, reliving the Hitler-Stalin pact, and so on. If you watch the news and scroll social media, you’d think we’re always stuck in 1939. However, there’s one comparison to the present that I think is rather apt, and that’s the similarity between Presidents Trump and Roosevelt, in terms of the primacy they put on personality in politics. We know that President Trump prides himself on being a dealmaker, somebody who just needs to get everybody in the room (Putin, Zelensky, Xi, or whomever) so he can hammer out a deal. FDR was very similar: he was a very skilled politician and he put a lot of weight on his own ability to handle people in meetings. When I hear President Trump talking about how people respect him and want to make deals with him, it instantly makes me think of FDR bragging to the British that he can handle Stalin because Stalin likes him. Do you think this is a reasonable comparison, and what do you think the diplomacy between Stalin and FDR (and Harry Hopkins by extension) tells us about the role of personal politics in history?”

Dr. McMeekin: “That’s an interesting comparison, Trump and FDR. Others have pointed out the obvious parallels with the flurry of executive orders in the first “100 days” in office, and the assertion of Executive authority more generally. And there was certainly some Trumpian braggadocio in FDR’s approach to wartime diplomacy, particularly vis-à-vis Stalin as you suggest. I do think both Presidents overpromised what personal diplomacy could avail them vis-à-vis Stalin and Putin, respectively, although I should add, in fairness, that it is still very early in Trump’s second term and therefore perhaps too early to dismiss his administration’s efforts to broker an end to the war in Ukraine before we know how the story turns out.

All this said, I do think there are important differences, and not only in the personalities and the ideology – FDR being politically “progressive” for his time (at least on some issues) and Trump some kind of populist reactionary (even if, as many have pointed out, many Trumpian positions on trade and immigration, and even his skepticism of ambitious foreign military interventions, were held by mainstream Democrats until fairly recently). Trump seems willing to try out his deal-making prowess on nearly every foreign leader, even those from hostile countries such as North Korea and (presumed) ideological opponents such as Keir Starmer of Britain. He is obviously susceptible to flattery, but he also uses flattery on foreign leaders in turn, not universally but very nearly so. FDR, by contrast, was almost brutally offensive in his treatment of “lesser” figures such as de Gaulle and more painfully, Churchill. In Stalin’s War, I only mentioned a few of these episodes, such as Roosevelt publicly insulting Churchill at Teheran in order to cozy favor with Stalin, or forcing Churchill to “beg like Fala” (Fala being FDR’s dog) at Québec. Far more dramatic was a story Peter Hitchens recounts in his recent book Phoney War, when FDR forced Churchill’s ship to circle around aimlessly at sea for several hours before being welcomed into Placentia Bay in August 1941, simply to get his beauty sleep.

One could almost imagine Trump doing this to Starmer – he would certainly have cause, in view of the insulting things some of Starmer’s Ministers have said about him. Curiously, though, for whatever reason, Trump has been far friendlier with Starmer than FDR ever was with Churchill – though with the caveat that he bullied Starmer into accepting a lopsided trade deal. Come to think of it, that trade deal is reminiscent of the extortionate prices FDR charged Churchill’s government in the bases-for-destroyers deal and other wartime aid packages.”

Big Serge: “One of the aspects of Stalin’s War that I particularly liked was that it presented a more nuanced alternative to the Soviet Attack hypothesis, or the infamous Suvorov Icebreaker theory. There doesn’t seem to be concrete evidence that Stalin was planning an imminent attack on Germany, and the Germans don’t seem to have understood Barbarossa as a preemptive strike, but you lay out a strong case for Barbarossa as a sort of preventative war. The basic idea here is that Hitler was checkmated in East-Central Europe on issues like Romania and Finland (very clear after Molotov’s trip to Berlin), and the terms of their bilateral trade were strengthening the USSR at the expense of Germany. So essentially, the Germans realize that war with the Soviets is probably only a matter of time, and they choose to start it on their own terms when they have the best odds. The question that follows from this, then, is that despite the Nazi-Soviet War having powerful ideological/eschatological overtones, is it possible that the best way to understand it is as a straightforward geopolitical question of preventative war, almost analogous to Thucydides Trap? Do we need the ideological trappings to make sense of this conflict, or can Barbarossa and German-Soviet diplomacy be fully understood through mundane, power-maximizing politics?”

Dr. McMeekin: “I am glad you distinguished between “preventative” and “pre-emptive” war, as many people conflate or confuse the two. That is very well put – Hitler did see Barbarossa as a way of seeing off a mounting danger, of a future threat coming from the East if the Soviets kept strengthening their position, but he was not forestalling an imminent attack.

As for your question about “ideological trappings,” in view of how dramatic and destructive the ensuing war on the eastern front was, it would seem reductive to ignore ideology entirely. Once the war got going, ideology (Naziism/anti-Communism and anti-Semitism on one side, Communism and anti-fascism or anti-Naziism on the other, along with a more traditional Russian nationalistic fervor against the invader), along with metastasizing ethnic hatreds – all this helped fuel the horrendous cycle of war crimes and often indiscriminate reprisals that made the conflict so unfathomably bloody.

That said, I do not think that the war was caused by these ideological and ethnic tensions, except insofar as they may have influenced Hitler’s final decision to strike, or Stalin’s war preparations. It is possible to explain the outbreak of the Nazi-Soviet war largely, if not exclusively, through a fairly traditional story of power-maximizing politics, as you say, with Soviet and German interests clashing with increasing vehemence in Finland, Romania, and the Balkans. I do think that Hitler made his decision to strike after, not before, Molotov’s trip to Berlin in November 1940, more specifically after he received Stalin’s borderline insulting counter-proposal of Soviet terms to join the Tripartite Pact (eg a German withdrawal from Finland and Romania, and German permission for Soviet troops to occupy Bulgaria and the Turkish Straits). The transcript I discovered in the Bulgarian archives of Hitler’s reaction to this proposal, which I cite in Stalin’s War, shows Hitler in full, semi-unhinged rant mode – but also calculating how badly Germany’s geopolitical interests (eg owing to the Wehrmacht’s need for regular supplies of oil, chrome, bauxite/aluminum, nickel, etc.) were being threatened by any further Soviet encroachment in Finland, Romania, and the Balkan region. Of course, one could make the counter-argument that Hitler would have been better off grudgingly allowing the Soviets to continue supplying the Wehrmacht with most of what it needed, rather than invading Russia to seize Soviet resources, but this would imply that he trusted Stalin, a man who had just used Soviet economic leverage to (try to) bully him into sacrificing vital German interests.

Certainly the personal element was in play here, and I would no more want to reduce the Nazi-Soviet war to “mere” geopolitics or economics than to ideology alone. I also don’t think the “Thucydides Trap” quite works, as it is unclear which was the rising and falling power between Nazi Germany and the USSR in 1940-1941 – if anything, one could say that both powers, and Britain, too, were being unnerved if not menaced by the inexorable rise of the United States. But Barbarossa may be the most dramatic example we have of the Great Man theory of history, with the lives of millions of people upended or ended owing to the decisions of two men – or perhaps just one, if we absolve Stalin of starting the war (though not of preparing for it and perhaps provoking Hitler into invading). No matter how many factors were in play in 1940 and 1941, the final decision to invade the Soviet Union was made by Hitler alone, just as the decision to reject Hitler’s overtures in November 1940 and then aggressively deploy Soviet armor, warplanes, and build hundreds of new aerodromes and tank parks in border regions abutting the German Reich in early 1941, with whatever precise purpose, was Stalin’s alone. I honestly think that, had Stalin not been so paranoid about security and foreign travel, had he traveled to Berlin instead of Molotov in November 1940, he and Hitler may even have worked out a deal of some kind postponing, if not forever ruling out, an armed conflict between them. Not that this would have been an unreservedly positive outcome for their oppressed subjects, necessarily – and certainly not for Churchill and Britain, for whom a renewed Hitler-Stalin Pact that winter would have been a strategic nightmare, likely dooming Egypt and sowing doubt in FDR’s mind that Britain’s war against Nazi Germany was winnable and worth supporting. But it could have happened.”

Big Serge: “I appreciate your comment about Hitler, and that even when he was deep into one of his classic rants he was still making generally rational calculations about the German war economy. I’ve explored similar themes in my own writing, that Hitler – for all the neuroses – was generally trying to make rational decisions. One example that I use is the no-retreat order outside Moscow in the winter of 1941-42. This is often lampooned as an example of the Nazi appeal to willpower, but it had a fairly sound military logic, in that retreating in the snow would have meant leaving lots of heavy equipment behind, and in the end Army Group Center was able to defend itself throughout the winter and retain its cohesion. Without going too far down this rabbit trail, it’s very common that decisions by both Stalin and Hitler are construed as fundamentally ideological, and if you attempt to explain them rationally this is often interpreted as “defending” them.

We can see similar tendencies today in the way Putin is construed, but in a sense it’s even worse. Putin does not have an ideological brand that is recognizable to westerners, so his actions can’t even be chalked up to an ideology per se – instead, he’s simply a dictator doing vaguely dictatorlike things. When Vice President Vance said that he thinks Putin is genuinely motivated by his understanding of Russian self-interest, it was met with incredulity and outrage.

My question for you, in this vein, is that both in current events and when reading history, do you think it’s a best practice to begin with the assumption that everybody is rational and is pursuing state self-interest? Obviously ideology has a great deal to do with how those interests are understood – IE, the collectivization of agriculture makes perfect sense given the imperatives of the Marxist-Leninist project, but appears to be an act of insanity otherwise. Do we ever see truly irrational state actors in history? More importantly, is it possible to make good decisions if we cannot acknowledge that even our adversaries are attempting to coherently pursue cogent objectives?”

Dr. McMeekin: “The way Putin is discussed by most western politicians and the press must be almost incomprehensible to Russians, or anyone with experience in Russia. In reality he is nowhere near as colorful as the media caricature – though I do think this caricature is a bit more filled with content than you suggest. In part because Putin’s Russia distanced itself from western “woke” trends in everything from an Orthodox revival to curious western obsessions such as the martyrdom of Pussy Riot, and also because he became associated with Trump by extension through the phantasmagoria of “Russiagate,” I really do think Putin has become a genuine ideological hate figure in the West, beyond simply being a “dictator doing dictator-like things.” I have often tried to push against this, both in print and in various conferences and panel discussions, pointing out as you do that Putin’s foreign policy has usually been fairly standard issue, based on his understanding of the Russian national interest. I am met with bewilderment.

To answer your question, I do think that it is possible for state actors to behave irrationally, and this does happen from time to time. I actually think it happens more frequently with U.S. foreign policy, which has always been subject to – not the vicissitudes of public opinion and/or “democracy” exactly, but a kind of emotional thinking, a fuzzy idealism about democracy, which has led to curious patterns such as the U.S. backing or installing figures such as Batista in Cuba or Diem in Vietnam before ousting them, responding to 9/11 with an ill-begotten crusade to democratize Afghanistan and Iraq, and other boondoggles. I am aware that many people have argued that there is method in this madness, that the U.S. has some mysterious grand strategy that requires periodically wrecking countries, but I’ll confess I don’t see it myself.

Big Serge: “I would be remiss if I did not ask about Lend-Lease. I’ve shared my view in the past that Lend-Lease was not the sole factor ensuring German defeat in the east, simply because the Wehrmacht was already so badly attrited by the winter of 1941-42. However, the vast quantities of material sent to the USSR, which you detail, clearly accelerated the Red Army’s sweep westward. It’s hard, for example, to imagine the Red Army sweeping up to the Vistula so quickly in 1944 without all the motorization provided by the United States. Do you agree with this basic schema, in the final analysis, that Lend-Lease was not why Germany lost the war, but it was the reason that Stalin was able to expand so far to the west? Do you think that in the absence of Lend-Lease, the USSR and Germany would have ground into some sort of attritional stalemate along a line in western Russia? Please give us your view of a plausible outcome in a world where Lend-Lease to the USSR either does not exist, or is radically curtailed.”

Dr. McMeekin: “Those are good questions, and difficult to answer. I would certainly agree that any material Lend-Lease contribution to Soviet survival in 1941 (in tanks, trucks, warplanes, etc.) happened only in December, at the Battle of Moscow, and was even then marginal, as I say clearly in Stalin’s War (though the margins matter!) Yes, the Wehrmacht was by then badly attrited and it is certainly possible, even likely, the Red Army could have saved Moscow absent Lend-Lease aid. I do think the comparative contribution of Lend-Lease armor ramped up significantly by the time of Stalingrad, and more strangely still during and after Citadel/Kursk in July 1943 – I say strangely because, once Soviet survival in the war had been assured and the Wehrmacht was retreating, any strategic logic behind Soviet Lend-Lease was weakened if not undermined entirely. But the Roosevelt administration, instead of slowing down shipments of trucks, tanks, and warplanes as the Red Army began its long “sweep westward” against an ever-weakening German Wehrmacht, instead ramped them up to something like hyperspeed.

I am sure that many critics of Stalin’s War think that I overrate the importance of Lend-Lease aid in the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, but I do think that I am careful not to exaggerate – I give precise figures and percentage estimates even in categories, such as tanks, in which the contribution from Soviet domestic production was comparatively greater than in trucks, where it was negligible, or in warplanes, which fell somewhere in between. One thing I will say is that the Soviet military, by restricting access to the archives in Podolsk severely, has made it almost impossible to document how and how many Lend-Lease tanks, trucks, warplanes, Bren gun carriers etc. were incorporated into individual Red Army units – but oh how I tried! Unfortunately, now that my book, producing the first serious estimates of this nature, made such a ruckus, I very much doubt anyone will again squeeze as much out blood of this stone as I did.

More broadly, I really think it is vital that we distinguish between finished war materiél and military-industrial or other material inputs, and in the latter area I think the Lend-Lease contribution began to factor sooner and ultimately went deeper, eg in the aluminum, refined steel, armor plate, nickel, and so on without which much of Soviet war industry could not have functioned at anywhere near its achieved capacity, not to mention the upkeep of Soviet infantrymen and officers, from Tusonka pork to dehydrated borscht and eggs, to boots and even epaulettes. In the most literal sense of clothing and feeding the Red Army, the Lend-Lease contribution was fundamental, often reaching figures as high as 70% (as in sugar). Then there was U.S. gasoline and aviation fuel, particularly important in the Soviet Far East. Presumably, although of course this is impossible to document, the contribution of massive shipments of American foodstuffs, boots, fuel and so on to Soviet morale was equally significant.

Could there have been an “attritional stalemate” on the eastern front, absent American Lend-Lease aid? I certainly think this was a possibility. Stalin suggested as much to Hopkins at various moments as early as July 1941, admittedly in part to emphasize Soviet need so as to get Hopkins to unleash the Lend-Lease spigot. Perhaps more significant were Stalin’s remarks justifying his “no retreat” order 227 on July 28, 1942, when he observed, as Operation Blau was unfolding and in view of German territorial gains so far in “Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic Region, the Donbass,” that the USSR had by then lost any initial advantage it had over the Wehrmacht in population, grain output, or in its material-industrial base. And of course, if the Germans cut off the Volga lifeline at Stalingrad to the Caspian and resources of the Caucasus, then the material equation would tilt still more dramatically against the Soviets. It was not an accident that Stalin’s requests for Lend-Lease aid peaked in frequency, intensity and what we might call chutzpah between this decree and the launching of Operation Uranus outside Stalingrad that November (eg “I consider English conduct on the question of Airacobras tremendously insolent. The English had no right to divert the cargo without our consent.”)

I do think the Soviets were in danger of being pitched back across the Volga in 1942 into a defensive position, still more dependent on Lend-Lease aid to continue fighting than they might have been otherwise – though on the brighter side for the Red Army, by then the U.S. was in the war and so the strategic and political imperative behind Soviet Lend-Lease would have been strengthened. In that sense, I think your counter-factual would have cancelled itself out: absent sufficient Lend-Lease aid to let the Red Army hold on and allow Zhukov to mount the giant armored flanking operation of Uranus, the Soviets would have fallen back – which would then have led Washington to unleash more Lend-Lease aid to keep them in the war.”

Big Serge: “Lend Lease is an unusually controversial subject. On the Russian side, it seems that the topic is resented as an attempt to minimize the human losses and effort of the Red Army, while many Americans conversely seem irritated that Russia “takes credit” for winning the war. Frankly it is a little odd to me, simply in the sense that the bravery of a Red Army tanker dicing it up with the Tigers outside Warsaw is unrelated to where the aluminum in the tank came from. It’s perhaps become even harder to speak objectively about this now, because people frequently assume that you are trying to make a thinly veiled point about American aid for Ukraine, even when you are not.

I sometimes frame Lend-Lease as a profligate luxury that comes from America’s unique pair of strategic blessings: immense wealth and strategic standoff. I made a similar point about the withdrawal from Afghanistan (which irritated many people), that America is uniquely able to simply walk away from a long war, and even when the withdrawal goes poorly it does not impact the material conditions of life at home. America is safe, and America is rich, and this generally means that Americans don’t suffer the consequences of mistakes. So in the case of Lend-Lease and the Soviet Union, we can debate the significance of the aid and the wisdom of it, but at the end of the day it was mostly Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Germans who suffered, not Americans.

Do you think that played at all into American decision-making vis a vis Lend-Lease? Is there a tendency, owing to America’s wealth and standoff, to make these sorts of decisions almost casually? One of the impressions that I got from Stalin’s War is that the Soviets were simply much more serious, diplomatically aggressive, and precise about their objectives than the Americans. Is that a fair reading?”

Dr. McMeekin: “I think that is fair. Certainly Roosevelt and Hopkins acted as if U.S. resources were infinite, that ramping up the U.S. war economy to supply the Red Army was just a kind of noblesse oblige which cost them nothing and might win Soviet friendship, beyond which – they simply had no idea what the consequences were and did not much care. And yes, Stalin and the Soviets were more precise in their aims and demands and therefore far more effective. Unfortunately, I think many policymakers in Washington still think this way, despite the U.S industrial base, economy, and financial position being dramatically weaker today than in the 1940s or 1950s, which helps explain why (on top of myopia about the dangers of provoking the country with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal) they are so casual about ginning up a hugely expensive proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. For the record, I was certainly not “trying to make a thinly veiled point about American aid for Ukraine” when discussing Lend-Lease in Stalin’s War, as I was writing the book between about 2017 and 2019, long before the war began (if not the longer U.S.-Russian struggle for influence over Ukraine, which one could date back to 2014 or 2004 or earlier).”

Big Serge: “Stalin’s War made quite a splash, and among the friends of mine who read it I would say there was no small degree of outrage at the idea that the Roosevelt administration was sort of taken to the cleaners by Moscow, or that FDR gave the farm away because he had a sort of nagging sympathy for socialism. If you’ll allow me to play devil’s advocate, I’d like to put the most generous framing on this. Roosevelt and Hopkins, were they here, might point out that they rented the world’s biggest army to use against Germany, and that the Germans and the Soviets chewed each other to pieces. The Soviets lost tens of millions of people and emerged with their economy in shambles, while America loses maybe a quarter of a million men in Europe and ends the war with an intact economy that dwarfs all competitors. So we might say, yes Stalin managed to squeeze huge amounts of aid out of the US, and he gets Poland and the Baltics and Romania and so forth, but the flip side of this is that America gets to win the largest war in modern history, and we do so essentially for free, with economic and human costs that are miniscule compared to other belligerents. Is that a fair framing? Was there an alternative course of action for the United States that didn’t likely lead to much larger American casualties?”

Dr. McMeekin: “These are all fair points, and I do play devil’s advocate for Roosevelt at times in Stalin’s War, pointing out that in his own mind he was saving American lives – or, perhaps more cynically, as you suggest (and as the Russians have complained ever since) using Red Army troops as cannon fodder. The issue I have always had with this argument is – cannon fodder for what? When Roosevelt (at first, secretly) opened the spigot for Lend-Lease aid to the USSR in July 1941, the United States was neutral in the war, and most Americans had no strong preference for either side in the Nazi-Soviet war – or thought, like Truman, that the U.S. should help whichever side was losing (though still hoping the Nazis would lose the larger war in the end). Had the power to tap the vast hydraulic forces of the U.S. economy been in Churchill’s hands, the “cannon fodder/saving lives” argument would have made more sense: Britain was already at war but saw no way to defeat Germany, and now here was the world’s biggest army to do what the smaller British armies couldn’t do, grind down the Wehrmacht while saving British lives. In the circumstances of July-November 1941, however, none of this logic applied in Washington DC.

After Pearl Harbor on December 7 and Hitler’s declaration of war on the U.S. four days later, of course the equation changed. What Hitler expected (this helps explain his foolish and otherwise inexplicable decision to do this; he thought the U.S. and Britain were about to get sucked deeply into the Japanese war instead of Europe), and what most Americans expected, was that Roosevelt would respond to Pearl Harbor by unleashing American fury – and more to the point, America’s vast war-industrial economy – against Japan. Instead, inexplicably to ordinary Americans (who were never consulted), FDR chose to respond to Pearl Harbor with the ARCADIA resolutions, which declared that the Anglo-American strategic priority was not only “Germany first” but, inside the European war, “assistance to Russia’s offensive by all available means.” Even the phrase is suggestive – not Russian “survival” but “Russia’s offensive”: to munition and supply Soviet offensive operations. To what purpose? I suppose one would have to ask Roosevelt, because there was no reason this was the logical, political, moral, or strategic imperative for the U.S. after Pearl Harbor. The obvious alternative was that the U.S. would have focused its war-industrial production, merchant-marine and shipping capacity on the war against Japan, and secondarily supporting the Kuomintang in China, which was fighting and tying down most Japanese land forces. Certainly Lend-Lease aid to Britain, and some Lend-Lease aid to the USSR, would have continued, but almost any other administration in Washington would have prioritized the war against Japan over Stalin’s needs on the eastern front.

Would this have affected the outcome of the war in Europe? Almost certainly it would have. And maybe Roosevelt was right to view Europe as more strategically important than Asia to the United States in 1941 (if not today): despite his oft-stated sympathies for China, she was a secondary power. Perhaps the Red Army really was the cannon-fodder blunt instrument needed to destroy the seemingly unstoppable Wehrmacht, which consideration overruled any concerns about Japan, China, or Britain, for that matter. Still, I think that a more cautious and well-thought out U.S. Lend-Lease policy would have done enough to ensure Soviet survival, but not so aggressively motorized Stalin’s armies that eastern Europe was consigned to a future under Communism. And by cutting off Chiang Kai-Shek in 1943 and 1944 at a time when Lend-Lease shipments to Stalin were peaking, the U.S. gravely weakened nationalist China and postponed Japan’s defeat long enough for the Soviets to take a grotesquely opportunistic hand in it.

None of these were easy decisions to make in the circumstances. Still, I hesitate to say that the outcome of FDR’s policy choices was in the best interest of either Americans or Europeans. Setting aside more sensible U.S. policy vis-à-vis Japan that might have led to a settlement before the “Hull note” ultimatum of late November 1941 – for the sake of this exercise, I’ll assume Pearl Harbor has happened – I do think there were other courses of action that would have led to a better outcome in Europe, which in turn would have benefitted the United States. I think Roosevelt’s dismissal of, and refusal to negotiate with or even acknowledge the existence of, the anti-Hitler resistance in Germany, was a huge blunder. In the wake of Stalingrad, when more and more German generals realized the war was lost, a tremendous opportunity was lost when Roosevelt cut off contacts with these plotters. A coup in Berlin in either 1943 or 1944 would have saved millions of lives, and possibly prevented the Red Army from crashing into eastern Europe. Some kind of Cold War-esque conflict would still have emerged, but on far less equal terms: the Soviets would have infinitely weaker, confined at some point near or even inside the Soviet borders of 1941, maybe even inside those of 1939. Meanwhile, a greater U.S. focus on Japan, greater Lend-Lease and other logistical support for Chiang Kai-Shek, and the absence of those 8.244 million tons of gifted American war materiél shipped to the Soviet Far East, would have made far less likely Mao’s Communist takeover of China in 1949.

More broadly – focusing now on domestic consequences for the U.S. – I think that a more transparent administration, without all of the Roosevelt-Hopkins skullduggery with Lend-Lease, with clearer and more clearly defined strategic priorities and war aims, would not have midwifed the vast American security state and militarized global quasi-empire that emerged after 1945. The passage of the Lend-Lease Act by Congress in March 1941, with its open-ended “good faith” clause allowing the President to commandeer American agricultural and industrial production on behalf of whatever foreign governments he chose to (in the end 36 of them!), basically killed off the constitutional order when it came to U.S. foreign policy. It is no accident that Congress has not declared war according to proper constitutional procedure since the winter of 1941-42. Maybe the U.S. was always fated to become a global power or “empire” of some kind, but the policies of the Roosevelt administration during the Second World War greatly accelerated the process and deprived Americans of any say in the matter, even through their elected representatives. Yes, the U.S. won the largest war in history, certainly at far lower human (if not financial) cost than the Soviets, and inherited the spoils – the ruins, really – of western Europe and the British empire, a war in which much of its industrial competition was flattened. But the price was paid in myriad other ways that Americans still live with today.”

Big Serge: “I like your point about China in particular, as it raises the broader point that the forgotten or ancillary theaters of the Pacific War (Indochina, Korea, and China) directly became flashpoints for America in the postwar era. You could almost argue that current security concerns in Taiwan are merely the third in a sequence of American crises in the former Japanese periphery, following the Korean and Vietnam Wars. We also know that the Mediterranean theater tends to get short shrift, both in popular histories and in real time during the war. The Italian theater, for example, tied up dozens of German divisions, and yet Stalin essentially ignored its existence when he demanded the opening of a second front. We also know that Churchill advocated for Mediterranean-oriented strategy (as a way of preserving British post-war influence) and was largely brushed off by the Roosevelt team.

This all ends up seeming a bit odd, because when you look at the First World War, the western allies were perfectly willing to probe ancillary theaters and peripheral fronts (the Shatt al-Arab, Gallipoli, Salonica, and so forth). Yet in the second war, despite enormous American resources, these peripheral fronts in Asia and the Mediterranean were largely written off, which of course leads directly to communist domination in both the Balkans and China.

So it would seem to me that the lines along which the Cold War was drawn were the direct result of strategic choices and resources allocation, almost exclusively by the United States. Do you think that this was due to short-run strategic thinking in Washington (win the war against the Axis and then figure out what comes next), or did the Roosevelt administration genuinely believe that stable, or even friendly relations with the Soviets could persist after the defeat of Germany? It’s essentially indisputable that American choices caused the Soviet Union to emerge much more powerful from the war than it would have otherwise, correspondingly making America’s cold war position more tenuous. Were these choices the result of myopia, or naivety?”

Dr. McMeekin: “A bit of both, I should think. FDR was certainly naïve about Stalin, perhaps Hopkins a bit less so – I think Hopkins genuinely admired Stalin and the Soviets and wanted unambiguously to help them become more powerful. The myopia came in in just the way you suggest – Roosevelt simply did not want to think about peripheral theaters or spheres of influence, and thus he dismissed Churchill’s Mediterranean proposal at Teheran (though initially showing some interest, until he was scolded by an insidious note under the table, probably from Hopkins) and agreed to write off Chiang Kai-Shek, despite having expressed great sympathy for China.”

Big Serge: “I have one final question for you. As my use of the Sergei Witte avatar hints, I have reactionary inclinations and correspondingly strong anti-communist sensibilities. I find the Lenin-Stalin regime essentially horrifying, with an enormous litany of crimes on the ledger. However, when I read a book like Stalin’s War, or Dr. Kotkin’s biographies, it’s difficult not to come away with a begrudging sense of respect for Stalin. Not in a moral sense, of course, but in his capacity for work, his ability to micromanage foreign policy and military developments, while also having his fingers in minutia like textbooks, movie scripts, and economic planning. It’s as if an American President was not only micromanaging the Pentagon and the State Department, but also chairing the Federal Reserve, running the New York Stock Exchange, and managing Hollywood.

It’s difficult not to find some sort of grudging, slightly horrified sense of respect for Stalin. He was clearly a unique and extraordinarily competent man, and his imprint on history is in a rare weight class. So my question is: do you respect Stalin? If you’d be so kind, give me a word or two to summarize your general impression of the man.”

Dr. McMeekin: “I suppose I have grudging respect for Stalin, as one might appreciate a worthy adversary. I would certainly not wish to be his subject, and I have great sympathy for his manifold victims. But about Stalin’s competence, his curiosity, work ethic and often energetic interventions in the varied fields you mention, and his imprint on history there is no question. As a historian, I’ll admit that I have a sneaking admiration for Stalin’s dry, mordant sense of humor that emerges from transcripts of wartime summits. He was clearly highly intelligent, in addition to being ruthless and cunning. The great men of history are seldom humanitarians.”

Big Serge: “I think it would be hard for me to come up with a better closing line than that. For myself and for my readers, thank you for your time and for the thoroughness of your answers.”

Dr. McMeekin’s books can be found at Basic Books or his author page on Amazon.

Share

As late as 1939, it was still possible for a citizen of Great Britain to take a global voyage and take pride in the readily apparent trappings of Britain’s global power. Boarding a steamer in Bombay, he might take a long voyage past a variety of critical global chokepoints and bases - crossing the Indian Ocean to Aden, sailing up the Red Sea through the Suez Canal, stopping over at Malta in the Mediterranean before passing through Gibraltar, and then reaching home in Southampton - and along the way he would have seen nothing except British bases, British ships, and British power.

This was a centuries old system of geopolitical power projection, preserved very carefully to give the impression of a stable and predictable world. The essence of this system was very simple: this was a Eurocentric (and I use the word without the pejorative connotation) world system in which sea power was the medium of global influence, and the main way to measure that influence was in battleships and the bases that allowed them to operate at vast distances. In other worlds, the scenes that awaited our passenger were largely unchanged from the 18th Century. Sailing ships of the line had of course given way to the steel of the big-gun battleships, but the axis of global power was still a network of British naval bases occupied by British capital ships. The world’s other sea powers had the capacity to project force regionally (Japan in East Asia, Italy and France in the Mediterranean, and so forth) but only Britain was everywhere, all at once, with big guns.

By 1950, this world would be unraveling on virtually every level. Enumerating the many ramifications of the Second World War is a monumental task, but when it came to sea power the result of the war was fairly simple: after generations of British supremacy at sea, World War Two destroyed (either completely or practically) virtually every naval force of consequence in the world with the exception of the American Navy, which grew exponentially and came to predominate absolutely. On the eve of the war, in 1938, Britain was still widely recognized as the greatest sea power in the world, but there were no less than six navies of either real or potential consequence regionally. By 1945, however, the board had been swept so clear of competitors that the American Navy was now not only more powerful than any rival, but more powerful than all the rest of the world’s navy’s combined. Having lost is position at the apex of the naval power structure, the rollback of Britain’s imperial infrastructure was sure to follow.

In short, our fictional passenger voyaging from India to England was passing through a a world which gave the impression of continuity and stability across centuries, but which was in fact on the verge of total collapse. The physical experience of sailing from India, through the Suez, past Malta and Gibraltar, and then on to England, Canada, or the Caribbean - transiting thousands of miles and seeing only British battleships in British harbors - reflected implicit underlying assumptions about the world: a hierarchy of state power predicated on sea power, in which Britain sat at the apex and status was largely measured in big gun battleships. All of these assumptions were ripped apart by the Second World War. It was not only that Britain lost her spot at the top of the hierarchy, but that the hierarchy itself largely ceased to exist; America did not simply move ahead of her rivals, but came to overpower the notion that she had any rivals at sea at all. From 1945 onward, a pivotal reality of world affairs was the fact that only the United States could project force by sea and air anywhere in the world, almost with impunity. The United States Navy was not only the strongest force anywhere in the world, but the strongest naval force everywhere, all the same time. It was the destruction of all potential rivals in the Second World War that made America, in the second half of the century, the single most powerful state that has ever existed. Furthermore, the old currency of sea power - armored battleships fighting with lung range naval gunnery - came to be radically overshadowed by new platforms which had finally reached technical and tactical maturity, like submarines and naval aviation.

What made the interwar period odd was not simply the fact that it presented a false mirage of stability, but also that there was a conscious effort by naval policy makers and statesmen to suspend the situation and hold it in stasis. Naval construction was regulated by treaties which aimed to not only preserve the relative status of the sea power hierarchy - allocating specific shares of battleship tonnage to create a carefully calibrated naval balance of power - but also explicitly rated and regulated sea power in terms of battleships.

Subscribe now

On the eve of war in 1939, then, sea power resembled a living relic of a dying past: a fossil of a passing age, waiting to be smashed on a technical, tactical, and geostrategic level. Until the bombs began to fall, however, they gave a continued impression of life. Few suspected that big gun capital ships, long the accepted currency of global power projection, were on the verge of tactical obsolescence, and fewer still could have predicted that the global network of European naval bases - keystone positions like Singapore, Dakar, Malta, Saigon, and Aden - were about to be wiped out. In real time, it is surprisingly hard to tell when one era is ending and another is beginning.

Freezing the Fleets

The Second World War carries the unusual distinctive of containing with in it two separate wars of different sorts, both of which were the largest conflicts in history of their respective types. In Europe, the Nazi-Soviet War was by far the largest and most destructive land conflict in history, while the Great Pacific War, fought by the Imperial Japanese and American navies, was the largest naval conflict ever seen, both in the scale and destructive power of the fleets and the colossal distances involved. There is, however, a relatively curious disconnect in the preparatory intensity. The Nazi-Soviet War was anticipated by intensive rearmament programs by both Germany and the Soviet Union, as both Hitler and Stalin scrambled to arm themselves to the teeth with modern weaponry. In the Pacific, however, there was nothing that can be deemed a proper arm’s race. In fact, rather the opposite was true, and in the interwar period the navies of the world were regulated by a deliberate global program of naval arms control.

It is perhaps a bit counterintuitive and ironic that history’s largest naval-amphibious conflict was preceded by a long period of negotiated arms control and limited naval construction, but there was a fairly straightforward logic to the program. Naval building lent itself to an attempt at negotiated control, because the totem items - particularly battleships - were very expensive, had long construction timetables, and were relatively easy to count for purposes of compliance verification. Limiting capital ship construction therefore had strong appeal as a way to control costs - and this was very appealing indeed to governments that were cash strapped from the Great War - and the relative ease of counting ships and verifying tonnage limits meant that agreements could be entered into with some degree of confidence that they would be honored.

A further curious element of interwar shipbuilding was the fact that every navy of consequence, either globally or regionally, belonged to states that had been allied in the Great War. In the interwar period there were exactly five navies worth considering, belonging to Britain, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy. To this extremely limited and exclusive club, Germany and the infant Soviet Union had to be added as states that were theoretically capable of fielding battlefleets, though in the interwar period they were unable to do so owing to the general collapse of their power in the aftermath of World War One. With only five powerful fleets afloat, and two potential additions at a much later date, it proved relatively straightforward to codify the relative balance of power on the seas.

The outcome which emerged from this milieu, in which both public aversion to militarism and the need of governments to restrain spending, was an entirely novel arrangement of negotiated restraint known simply as the Washington System, after the Washington Naval Treaty, which was signed by the British Empire, the United States, the Japanese Empire, France, and Italy on February 6, 1922 in Washington DC. The drafters and signatories were rightfully proud of what they had accomplished, which was accurately hailed as the most comprehensive and ambitious arms control treaty ever devised.

What stands out about the Washington Naval Treaty was not simply that the five remaining naval powers of the world agreed to limit their construction programs, but they did so in an unequal manner which aimed to explicitly enshrine a particular balance of power in the world. The essence of the treaty was a threefold restriction on capital ship construction, which established limits on both the total tonnage of capital ship fleets and the tonnage of individual ship classes, while stipulating a “naval holiday” of ten years in which no existing capital ships could be replaced. The holiday was later extended by five years at the 1930 London Naval Conference, so that for the majority of the interwar period there were no new capital ship classes launched. The net effect of this was to cap both the aggregate size of battle fleets and the size of their constituent ships, while also temporarily freezing modernization by delaying the rollout of new classes.

Remarkably, however, the parties that convened in Washington agreed to a disproportionate allocation of naval power which explicitly created something like a formal geopolitical system of sea power. Under the Washington System, in essence, the US Navy and the Royal Navy were each given about 30 percent of the world’s battleship tonnage (and by extension firepower), while the Japanese got 20 percent, and the Italians and French got 10 percent each.

The allocation of total tonnage, combined with limits on the maximum tonnage of individual warships, synergized to create extremely transparent arithmetic governing the numbers of warships in the relevant fleet. Because battleships were capped at 35,000 tons of displacement, the 525,000 total tons allocated to the US and Royal Navies meant that they could possess fifteen large battleships each, while Japan’s 315,000 total tons allowed for nine. In order to come into compliance with the tonnage limits, both the British and the Americans were forced to scrap many of their older dreadnought and pre-dreadnought battleships, and the British had to conduct a redesign of their new Nelson-class to slim her down.

The allocation of tonnage was an attempt to formally recognize the variegated strategic needs of the treaty parties, while accepting the realities of the extant balance of power. The United States and the British received disproportionate tonnage allocations as the two powers with truly global commitments: the US Navy with its two oceans, and the British with their global chain of bases. Japan, as a “single ocean power”, received a healthy allocation, while the French and Italians were balanced against each other as regional rivals with equal tonnage. The Washington System therefore presented a concrete understanding of world affairs with the following picture: two large, essentially equal global Anglo-American navies, a Pacific power in Japan which was not so far behind the world powers, a pair of mid-sized Mediterranean navies in France and Italy, and a humiliated former naval power in Germany.

Judged purely as an instrument for putting a much needed brake on the growth of the world’s battlefleets, the Washington system was an unbridled success. After decades in which battleships had been continuously laid down while growing larger and larger, the treaty era locked naval construction in stasis, as if the party navies had been flash frozen. More than a decade passed between the design of Britain’s 1922 Nelson class battleships (the last of the pre-treaty classes) and a wave of post-holiday classes designed in the late 1930’s, including Britain’s King George V, the French Richelieu, Germany’s famed Bismarck, and the Japanese Yamato super-battleships.

The point at which we are driving, more broadly, is that the treaty era worked to temporarily preserve the impression of global British supremacy, allowing our fictional voyager to experience the world of his grandfathers, circuiting the world and seeing only British battleships in British bases. Britain’s position atop the world was preserved not only due to the explicit tonnage ratios of the treaty system, but also due to the geostrategic disposition of the other parties. The United States, for example, was granted an equal tonnage to the Royal Navy, but America’s return to an insular stance following World War One worked against robust American construction. Consequentially, by the time the treaty system expired, the US Navy was actually below its allocated tonnage total.

Geostrategic interests around the world dovetailed to create the impression of British supremacy. Japan was clearly an ambitious, revisionist power, but she was contained to East Asia for the time being, and pouring ever greater resources into a continental strategy predicated on the Asian mainland. America’s voluntary return to a reclusive foreign policy left her underweight. Closer to home, the French and Italian navies were thinking almost exclusively in reference to each other - indeed, the Italian navy was by far the most modern and professional arm of the Italian military, and was designed specifically for a scenario in which Italy would fight France for control of the western Mediterranean without the involvement of the Royal Navy. Thus, although British power projection faded east of Singapore, there was no discernable reason to believe that the core nodes of the imperial system were threatened.

Planners in all of the world’s great navies made miscalculations with varying levels of consequence and egregiousness. Virtually all, with the exception of Japan, would come to lament that their post-treaty battleship designs were not all ready for action in 1939. Admiral Raeder, in Berlin, trusted Hitler’s word that war would not come so soon, and was thrust into action with a half fleet. The British, for their part, were taken aback by the rapid fall of France, which gave the German submarine fleet an easy access to the Atlantic which had been lacking in the previous war. As for the American and Japanese miscalculations, they are well known and need no enumeration.

The point was not that the treaty era successfully prevented war, as it plainly did not and could not. The treaties did, however, fill an important role in the interwar context. Domestically, governments faced both financial pressure to control their armaments budgets as well as pressure from a public opinion that had turned, sharply in many cases, against militarism. The Washington Naval Treaty and its London addendum created an explicit answer to these pressures, while also apparently offering an acceptable balance which considered the relative force generation needs of the powers. Britain and the United States, with their commitments in multiple oceans, could take comfort in the superiority granted to them in the treaties. As for Japan, their fleet could muster perhaps 70% the strength of the Anglo-American fleets, but this was a number that they could live with for a time on the basis that neither the Royal Navy nor the US Navy could be expected to concentrate all its strength in the East Asian theater.

This created the illusion of at least a tenuous stability, but above all it allowed material strength to be inventoried and assessed in a relatively transparent and uniform way. The basic currency was battleships, but other ship types - like destroyers, cruisers, and submarines - were well understood, filled discrete roles, and could be counted with relative ease. What stands out most about the treaty system was that it created a balance sheet of combat power that was apparently very easy to understand.

What was not well understood was that not only was this tenuous balance of power about to be smashed by the revisionist states - Germany and Japan, above all - but also that the measurement system upon which this balance rested was about to be bashed into total obsolescence. Interwar planning was based on inventories of capital ships and the expected strength of the main battle line. In Japan and in the United States, there was talk of fighting a “second Jutland” in the Pacific: a titanic duel of naval gunnery, in the tradition of Tsushima and Trafalgar. The Admirals would get something like what they were expecting, and the looming Pacific War would be intensely battle-centric - but it would be the carriers that would decide the outcome.

The Rising Sun: Japan and the Carrier Revolution

It is a trivially obvious point that aircraft carriers became pivotal, defining weapons systems in the eventual Pacific War between the Japanese Empire and the United States. Their potency was underscored from the outset by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which demonstrated the unprecedented striking power of naval aviation, and in the years to follow the aircraft carrier has become the seminal American weapons system: America’s naval supremacy was achieved by winning the world’s first and only great carrier war, and American power projection today finds its most imposing and infamous form in its carrier groups, which give the US Navy the unique ability to bring colossal kinetic power to bear almost anywhere in the world.

Indeed, the aircraft carrier is such an obviously powerful, expensive, and unique platform for force projection that it seems trivial to us that naval aviation should have created a total revolution in naval combat, but that was not at all immediately obvious to admiralties in the interwar period. It was, of course, obvious that naval aviation would play an important role in future conflicts, but the idea that carriers would almost immediately push big gun battleships into near total obsolescence was widely viewed as absurd. Carrier design, theories of carrier operations, and the tactics of naval operations instead followed in incremental evolution during the interwar period, advanced largely by the Japanese and American Navies, which saw the carrier take the leap from an ancillary ship type to become the keystone kinetic platform.

Naval aviation was still in a decidedly rudimentary state when the Great War ended, with allied navies - primarily the British - operating a handful of improvised carriers and seaplane tenders, which served mainly as reconnaissance systems. Carriers only began to proliferate during the treaty era due to provisions which allowed battleship hulls which were then in progress to be converted into carriers. Japan’s Akagi and Kaga and the US Navy’s Lexington and Saratoga were among the fleet carriers to be built out in the treaty area on hulls intended for battlecruisers. Aircraft had not yet demonstrated any ability to deliver firepower even remotely on par with the powerful naval artillery of the day’s capital ships, however, and so initial theories of carrier operations centered on the potential for aircraft to magnify the firepower of the main battle line. Due to the small numbers of carriers that where then in service, these theories were mainly worked out on tabletop games rather than through fleet exercises.

In the 1920’s, during the treaty era, Japanese thinking began to converge on the expectation of an “air battle” over the battle zone of dueling surface fleets. This line of thought predicted that, in a future clash between battleship fleets, aircraft would serve a critical role as spotting platforms, providing an eye in the sky to dial in the accuracy of the fleet’s big guns. As naval gunnery was by now designed to operate at extreme ranges which strained even cutting edge shipboard optics, the advantage of maintaining a screen of spotting planes over the battle zone was obvious. Per the Japanese thinking, therefore, the side that could control the sky over the surface battle would enjoy significantly better gunnery and so be expected to prevail in the artillery duel. If you had asked a Japanese admiral in the mid 1920’s, then, what the role of the aircraft carrier might be in a future fleet engagement, he would have suggested launching fighter aircraft to chase away enemy spotting planes while protecting friendly spotters, expecting that the side which won control of the airspace would enjoy more accurate and thus more deadly gunnery as a reward.

The theory that control of the airspace above the gunnery battle would provide a potentially decisive advantage naturally gave way to the next stage in thinking about naval aviation, in which it could prove decisive to attack the enemy’s carriers at the outset of the battle and so gain control of the air from the very beginning. The hinge element here was the relative vulnerability of aircraft carriers to air attack. In the early 1930’s, it was hardly expected that aircraft would be able to easily sink or neutralize heavily armored battleships. Carriers, however, did not need to be sunk in order to be neutralized as combat assets: simply dealing enough damage to the flight deck and hanger facilities to prevent the enemy carrier from launching its planes was enough. In this operational sketch, Japanese carriers would launch an attack on enemy carriers at the outset of the battle, striking their flight decks to either delay the enemy’s launch or prevent it outright. Having seized control of the aerial battlespace from the beginning, Japanese fighters and spotters would therefore be free to loiter over the gun battle and range in the fire of Japanese battle line.

The Japanese were hardly alone in reaching such a conclusion. As early as 1921, the US Naval War College had similarly determined that sinking or neutralizing enemy carriers at the outset of battle was the bet way to achieve air control over the battlespace; as in the Japanese case, however, this was viewed as desirable as a means to provide spotting for surface gunnery. While battleship enthusiasts continued to dominate in both navies (the so-called “gun club”) it is notable that by 1930 theorists in both the Japanese and American fleets had come, with varying levels of commitment, to believe that preemptive attacks on enemy aircraft carriers would be a decisive element of battle.

The question then becomes, rather plainly, why was it the Japanese - much the poorer and less industrialized power - that first and most fully developed the massed carrier packages which would prove so decisive in the Pacific? The reality - and the paradoxical point at which we are driving with this entire discussion - was that the development of Japan’s massed naval aviation utterly upended interwar calculations about naval power. The Washington System of the treaty era had been designed to calcify a perceived hierarchy of naval power which put the Anglo-Americans at the apex, but this hierarchy was explicitly measured in battleship tonnage. Judging purely on the weights and inventories of the battlefleets, the Royal Navy justified its self-perception as the most powerful naval force in the world. In reality, however, by 1941 the Japanese Naval Air Arm constituted the single most powerful offensive asset fielded by any of the world’s great navies.

Japan’s path to developing the world’s most formidable naval striking force was characterized, unsurprisingly, by a unique admixture of theory, material opportunism, and combat experience which in this case took place in China. In this case, the problem was particularly multivariate, because it required not only the development of the carrier fleet and appropriate tactical systems, but also the aircraft and pilots required to make them work.

Japan’s aircraft carriers of the Great Pacific War were predominately an offensive weapon, capable of projecting enormous striking power over long distances. Nevertheless, Japanese naval aviation was animated at first by problems of a defensive nature. The question, very simply, was how Japan might be able to prevent an adversary from bringing his own battleships and aircraft carriers right up to the littoral of the home islands. In early 1930, Commodore Toshio Matsunaga (then an officer on one of Japan’s first carriers, the Akagi) penned an article in the naval journal Yushu, which argued that long-ranged, land-based bombers could fill an essential defensive role by allowing Japan’s ground based aviation to attack, attrit, or even destroy an incoming enemy fleet while it was still at sea. He argued - hyperbolically, but still in a generally correct direction - that an adequate force of long ranged bombers operating from the home islands, supplemented by a handful of aircraft carriers, would make Japan nearly impossible to invade.

Read more

Note: This article will be relatively short compared to my standard offerings, but I wanted to get some thoughts on paper as the situation north of Pokrovsk develops. Ukraine is facing one of the worst operational crises of the war and the situation is liable to change rapidly. We clearly do not have a perfectly comprehensive picture of how the front is moving, but I think taking the pulse in real time is still valuable.

After three years of war, with the commentariat on both sides eagerly predicting the looming collapse of the enemy, it behooves one to develop a prudent aversion to histrionic predictions. However, it seems fairly obvious that the war in Ukraine is at a critical juncture, and August 2025 will receive considerable play in retrospective accounts of the conflict, as perhaps the last opportunity for Ukraine to cut a deal and slither out of its strategic grave.

On Friday, August 15, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are slated to meet in Alaska to discuss steps to end the war. Whether those talks will be productive remains to be seen, although Trump’s acknowledgement that Ukraine will have to cede territory to Russia signals that the White House is at least drifting towards a realism. Predictably, the Alaska meetings are being decried by the Europeans and the Professional Fascism Noticers as a redux of Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement with Hitler, but this does not really matter. In the same sense that, for the alcoholic it is always five o’clock somewhere, for a certain type of person it is always 1938. For these people, World War Two is the only thing that ever happened, it is always happening, and it is always just about to happen.

Subscribe now

Just as a brief aside, this is one reason why Alaska is actually a meaningful and pointed place to hold the meetings. The more paranoid sorts believe that there’s some sinister meaning owing to Alaska’s origins as a Russian colony, but the actual symbolism of the site lies in the fact that America does not need to interact with Russia through Europe, and indeed never has. America and Russia can relate to each other bilaterally, without Brussels or London or Kiev as an intermediary.

On the ground, the Alaska meetings coincide with a major rupture of the front. We want to avoid using overly dramatic verbiage, particularly the much dreaded “collapse” label. To be clear, it should not be expected that the AFU is on the verge of being routed completely from the field. Russian forces are not going to roll over the Dnieper next week or sweep into Kiev or Odessa. Ukraine is not “collapsing”, but it is losing, and more specifically it is about to suffer a major defeat at Pokrovsk.

What is happening is not the wholesale disintegration of the Ukrainian army, but we are clearly at a major inflection point with two separate dimensions. First and foremost, the front has ruptured around Pokrovsk (and to a lesser extent around Kupyansk and Lyman), creating one of the most severe operational crises of the war for the AFU. The second dimension is more structural and is the cause of the first: Ukraine’s mounting manpower crisis and its severe shortages of infantry have reached the point where they can no longer properly defend a continuous frontline. Indeed, it may no longer be proper to speak of a “front” at all, but rather a sequence of urban strongpoints with major seams in between them, held together only by the transient threat of drones striking exploiting Russian elements.

The critical development is relatively easy to understand. Over the last week or so, Russian forces worked into a seam in the Ukrainian line north of Pokrovsk and have penetrated deep into the AFU’s rear areas. Notably, the breach is both deep and wide in the context of this war. The gap stretches roughly between the villages of Rodynske and Volodymyrivka and is thus nearly 8 miles wide, and Russian forces have exploited as far as Dobropillya (some 10 miles to the west) and Zolotyi Kolodyaz (11 miles to the north). They have thus exploited on two axes and wedged open a sizeable hole in the Ukrainian front, crossing several unmanned defensive belts which were designed to be Ukrainian fallback positions, and severing one of the main highways connecting the southern front to Kramatorsk.

There is quite a lot that we do not know about the state of the exploitation right now. At this point, the level of Russian presence in the breach area would seem to vary substantially. Around Dobropillya, for example, the Russian presence is currently limited to intermittent DRG teams (essentially reconnaissance and sabotage units). It is to be expected that the Ukrainians will roll back this advance to some extent. In many ways, however, the extent of the penetration to the north is of secondary importance, because the gash in the front has allowed the noose around Pokrovsk to tighten significantly. In the last 24 hours, Russian forces moved into Rodynske, cutting yet another arterial highway into Pokrovsk.

While the attention has been drawn to the Russian “arrows” fanning out to the northwest, Pokrovsk has been put into a severe salient, with only the E50 highway still open to Ukrainian forces. The presence of Russian light infantry teams around Dobropillya is almost immaterial compared to the firebag around Pokrovsk. We are almost certainly in the terminal phase of the battle for the city, and the Russian breakout to the north provides a screen for the net to tighten around the city. More explicitly, I would argue that the thrust through the gap to the north is essentially a screening move designed to bring Pokrovsk to the brink, and our attention should be on the coming fall of the city, rather than on some Russian exploiting maneuver to the north.

Things look no better for Ukraine in other sectors of front. They are continually giving ground around Kostyantynivka and on the approach to Lyman (there is a steady rollback of the front around the Donets River). At the far northern end of the line, however, there is a secondary operational crisis brewing, with the Russians firmly dug into northern Kupyansk. The situation here has received far less attention than the central Donbas, but it is deeply threatening for the AFU. Russian positions on the western sideof the Oskil are currently about a mile away from the only bridge over the river, while the Ukrainians are still attempting to defend a salient on the eastern bank. As in Pokrovosk, the stubborn defense of untenable positions continues for far too long.

All of this has been examined in detail already, by me and by others. The geometry of the front has been fairly predictable up to this point, and around Pokrovsk in particular things are developing largely as expected. What we’re seeing is something very similar to what I predicted earlier, with a runaway double envelopment of the cities facilitated by movement into the seam between them. Pokrovsk is on line to develop into one of the more complete encirclements of the war. There is a distinct possibility that Russia will seal the city off in the coming week, turning Pokrovsk into a mass casualty debacle for the Ukrainians. The situation is particularly dangerous for the AFU forces defending Myrnograd (to the east of Pokrovsk), as they are now ten miles *east* of the only remaining exit from the pocket, and they therefore have no way to safely leave.

What is perhaps even more important, and the point toward which we are working, is the matter of why this happened in this particular way, at this particular time, and this of course relates to the question of attrition.

Attrition has become a major buzzword in this war, but it’s important to understand that “attrition” as such does not simply mean taking casualties, or even the disparity between casualties and replacement personnel. What we are seeing in Ukraine is the fairly textbook degradation of the force via attrition, which has a variety of components to it.

We can begin, of course, with the raw input and output of homo sapiens, which is losses measured against replacements. The math here is dreadful for Ukraine; the UA losses project has counted roughly 158,000 permanent casualties to this point (confirmed killed or missing in action), and estimates of the total wounded are closing in on 400,000. Some wounded will inevitably be able to return to action, but most will not (particularly given the exorbitantly high rate of amputees reported by Ukrainian sources). Even being conservative and taking Zelensky’s numbers at face value, Ukraine has absorbed at least 420,000 casualties to this point. It is important, furthermore, to remember that these casualties will disproportionately occur among the infantry. If roughly half of Ukraine’s million personnel are infantry, it is not unreasonable to presume that something like 50-60% of Ukrainian infantry have become casualties, if not more.

It has been unable to offset these losses with conscription. Ukraine’s mobilization drive has been badly misunderstood, largely due to a failure to correctly interpret the many videos of conscription teams grabbing men off the street. The idea of Ukrainian officials driving around in unmarked vans and press-ganging men at random suggests the idea of a highly extractive state that is mobilizing everyone, but the truth is rather the opposite. Physically abducting conscripts is a very inefficient way to intake personnel, and it’s a method that is only resorted to because the bureaucratic mobilization system is failing. It has been widely reported that many Ukrainian districts are hitting only 20% of their mobilization quotas, and even after passing an intensified mobilization law last year, Ukraine’s intake of new personnel has slowed down. Only a fraction of Ukraine’s conscription summons are answered, and the meat busses that prowl city streets looking for infantry are a poor, half hearted substitute for a functioning personnel system.

Ukraine has a problem with the brute mathematics of the situation: casualties far exceed intake of men. It has exacerbated these issues, however, by choosing to expand its force structure, creating new mechanized brigades rather than allocating new personnel as replacements for existing formations. It has political reasons for doing so: since Ukraine insists that it is fighting not merely to hold the line, but also to go back on the offensive and roll the Russians back, it must appear to be raising and hoarding fresh forces for that purpose. By allocating freshly mobilized personnel to new brigades, however, Ukraine artificially constrained the flow of replacements (already inadequate) to the front line. Thus, we arrive at the current situation, where the Ukrainian Army is short 300,000 men, with frontline brigades at as little as 30% of their regulation infantry strength.

When shortfalls mount like this, the attrition of the force becomes self-reinforcing and continues at an exponential rate. This, in particular, seems to be unappreciated by many: attrition creates a positive feedback loop, for several reasons.

1. Cannibalization of the tail: as infantry complements wear down without replacement, individual formations are compelled to cannibalize their support personnel to fill out the frontlines. Rear area personnel and artillerymen are sent forward to reinforce brigade infantry complements, and eventually this process spreads from individual brigades to the armed forces writ large. Replacing infantry ad-hoc with personnel who are not trained for that purpose not only reduces the quality of the infantry, but cannibalizes, distorts, and dismantles the structure of the army. Brigades gradually lose their suitability for the full range of combat tasks as they eat themselves for infantry.

2. Increased wear due to lack of rotations: Ukraine has significant difficulty providing regular rotation of frontline units (parlance for pulling units out of the line episodically to rest and refit). There are a variety of reasons for this, including a lack of reserves to replace units in the line, persistent Russian pressure, and the use of drones to restrict movement behind the lines. The lack of rotation not only reduces the combat effectiveness of Ukrainian units (simply due to mounting fatigue) but increases the depletion of frontline formations by keeping them pinned in the line for extended periods of time.

3. Increasing Desertions: The rising rate of desertion was already becoming a point of significant concern in 2024, and has increased further this year. Disproportionate casualties, forced mobilization, accelerated training timetables, and long stays at the frontline without rotation all encourage infantry in particular to desert their posts.

4. Misallocation of premiere assets: Ukraine has a limited inventory of the critical brigades that form the mainstay of its combat power: namely the mechanized, air assault, marine infantry, and assault brigades. In 2023 and 2024, these were the formations expected to provide the heft to Ukraine’s counteroffensives, both in the south and in Kursk. Due to the general shortage of infantry, however, these premier brigades regularly become pinned in the line and are wasted in positional defense. The majority of Ukraine’s premier assets are currently defending in the line in Sumy and the Donbas. This prevents Ukraine from accumulating resources to take the initiative, and essentially downgrades the AFU’s mechanized package from a strategic asset (which can be used for proactive operations) to tactical assets for positional defense. The situation can be likened to Germany in 1944, where dwindling force generation compelled the Wehrmacht to waste their valuable panzer divisions and specialized formations by using them as line infantry.

Russia has fed into this cycle by maintaining a steady attacking tempo in no less than 6 sectors of front: Pokrovsk, Kostyantynivka, Chasiv Yar, Lyman, Kupyansk, and Sumy. Consistent pressure has left the Ukrainian front bleeding from multiple cuts, so that in some areas it no longer makes sense to speak of a continuous front at all. In the breach area north of Pokrovsk, several miles of Ukrainian front were more or less unmanned. The AFU has maintained enough strike capability (mainly with FPV drones) to limit Russian exploitation, but this is ultimately a half measure. Drones can kill, but only human beings can hold positions.

The summer campaign has now put Ukraine in an untenable position. The Russians are staged to assault as many as four cities at once, and we should see concurrent operations to take Pokrovsk, Kostyantynivka, Kupyansk, and potentially Lyman, creating pressure at widely separated points. The AFU can only react to so many crises before it ceases to react at all, and the dissipated threats to multiple strategic cities creates command paralysis for Ukraine, which is only exacerbated when the Russians thrust forces into unmanned seams in the line, as they just did north of Pokrovsk.

The broad picture that emerges is one where Ukrainian units are attrited to the point where the AFU is being thrust into a state of permanent reactivity. Constant pressure on the line is absorbing all the available combat power, and the demands placed on Ukraine by their attempts to defend four strategic axes will leave them without the reserves or resources to attempt a meaningful counterblow of their own. The front will be squeezed from all directions until it begins to pop. It is popping in Pokrovsk, with Kostyantynivka, Lyman, and Kupyansk to follow soon.

Putin will descend on Alaska with full confidence, as events on the ground proceed in Russia’s favor. Ukraine has already made it known that they are categorically refusing to cede the Donbas, and it is easy to see how Kiev’s pathologically devotion to its “territorial integrity” will upset the prospects for a settlement. Both Ukraine and Russia insist that the four disputed oblasts are nonnegotiable and sacrosanct territories, enshrined in their respective constitutions. Fair enough, one supposes, but constitutions have no real power. Armies do, and the Ukrainian army is looking increasingly threadbare, as it cannibalizes its own force structure in a desperate search for warm bodies to hold the line.

Share

The outbreak of World War One delivered an astonishing blow to the collective psyche of political and military leadership in Europe, as the carnage of the war’s opening months shattered illusions about industrial war and lifted the proverbial veil from their eyes. It was not merely the collapse of the “short war” illusion which so famously pervaded, but also the unprecedented and unexpected casualty levels, which rapidly surpassed anything that the armies of the old continent had ever experienced.

This was particularly the case because, notwithstanding the infamous carnage of the war’s later great sieges - Verdun, the Somme, and so forth - the war’s opening months were among its very bloodiest. This was because it was in the opening months that the war was still fought in a somewhat mobile and attacking manner, with forces fighting largely in the open. The French, for example, lost just over 300,000 men killed in action in 1914 (despite the war beginning in August), at a loss rate of some 2,200 killed per day. It was only the following year, once the armies had properly dug themselves in, that loss rates stabilized, and in 1915 French casualties were “only” 1,200 killed on a daily basis. These loss patterns reveal, among other things, that the role of trench warfare is frequently misunderstood. Trenches and fortified belts did not lead to the failure of attacking operations; rather, they were dug in response to the astonishingly high casualties suffered in the war’s mobile phase in 1914. Trenches and positional warfare were a reaction to an unprecedented butcher’s bill, rather than its cause.

In any case, the shattering of prewar illusions about both the length of the war and its human costs led to all manner of improvisation and groping problem solving. This occurred at many levels of war making, with belligerent parties seeking ways to lever new allies into the war, open new fronts, and find innovative tactical solutions. In the technological realm, military leadership looked for ways to leverage emerging technologies to gain an edge on the battlefield. This was particularly the case for the Germans, who were strongly incentivized to find an edge wherever they could. The vastly superior human reserves of the Entente - which included not just Europe’s most populous state in the Russian Empire, but also powers in France and Britain that could mobilize vast reservoirs of manpower in their colonies - meant that Germany was always at a stark disadvantage in an attrition game predicated on trading human lives, and it was always Berlin therefore that felt the stronger pressure to change the game.

Thus, in the spring of 1915, the world saw three watershed moments on the battlefield in the span of only six weeks, all of them initiated by the Germans. On April 22, French and Canadian soldiers at Ypres became the first men on the western front to endure a battlefield gas attack after the Germans lit upwind canisters of chlorine gas. A few weeks later, on May 7, 1,198 passengers of the Lusitania perished when the ship was torpedoed off the southern coast of Ireland by the German submarine U-20. To cap off the tactical-technological experiments, on May 31 the city of London endured the prototype of what we might recognizably call strategic bombing, when the German zeppelin LZ-38 dropped 3,000 pounds of bombs on the city, killing seven people.

One of the sick ironies of those wretched weeks is the fact that of the three new technological-tactical methods, the gas attack at Ypres was by far the most deadly and terrifying and yet in time it would prove to be by far the most useless. Poison gas produced a powerful psychological effect which was outsized relative to its tactical use, simply because poisoning was such a cruel and spectacular way to die. Men were rightfully afraid of gas, which produced contorted, gasping, agonizing deaths, but countermeasures were quickly developed, particularly against inhaled agents like chlorine and phosgene (mustard gas, which could harm simply from contact with the skin, was somewhat more difficult to cope with). British casualty records indicate that among gas casualties, only 5% were killed or permanently invalid, while a full 70% were fit to return to service within six weeks. The result was a weapon that had a jarring disconnect between its tactical expediency and the horror and moral outrage which it inspired; consequentially, gas never had a real future in warfare and was used on only a handful of isolated occasions in World War Two.

Subscribe now

Compared to the gas cloud at Ypres, Germany’s other two technical breakthroughs of 1915 - submarine attack and strategic bombing from the air - had little immediate tactical effect and killed relatively few people in their debuts. The first gas attack at Ypres killed 5,000 allied troops (being the first gas attack against defenseless men, it was the most devastating gas attack of the war) and wounded 15,000. In contrast, the attack on the Lusitania and the aerial bombing of London killed just over 1,200 civilians combined. As we well know, however, the submarine and the strategic bomber - unlike the gas cannister - were emerging weapons that would have major roles to play in future conflicts. More to the point, however, the actions of U-20 and LZ-38 that fateful spring brought a new dimension of terror and range to war, in that both the submarine and the zeppelin killed exclusively civilians.

With their novel and ethically dubious experiments of 1915, the Germans had opened the vertical axis of war. Fighting forces on land and sea had been maneuvering and fighting in two dimensional space from time immemorial, but now aerial bombing dealt death from above, while submarines hunted below the waves. Humanity was now a three-dimensional killing machine.

Age of Immaturity

The submarine is a technological development which is so self-evidently revolutionary that it can be easy to gloss over what it is, precisely, that makes it such a potentially powerful weapons system. In the early 20th Century, it was obvious that the emergence of a viable submarine arm had tremendously complicated the tactical situation at sea, but the great navies of the world still predicated their combat power on capital ships delivering long range gunfire, and submarine fleets were generally undersized, technologically fussy, and tactically immature. To begin, then, we should establish what, precisely, a submarine is. Obviously, a submarine is a watercraft which is capable of operating independently underwater, but in the military sense this is not particularly interesting. It is more important to ask why the ability to submerge a boat (submarines, as a linguistic quirk, are always called boats rather than ships no matter how large they are) might be advantageous.

From the perspective of a fighting navy, a submarine is a vessel which, in comparison to a surface ship, offers a colossal tradeoff between concealment and survivability. That is to say, submarines offer the unique potential to launch essentially undetected attacks, at the expense of extreme fragility. The vulnerability of submarines, which are highly susceptible not only to any direct impact on the hull, but also shockwaves or powerful water pressure, is an important factor in their operational applications and their tactics. As if to underscore the point, the first submarine in history to sink an enemy vessel, the experimental Confederate boat Hunley, was destroyed by her own munitions: by igniting a powder keg at the end of a boom arm, the Hunley did successfully sink a US Navy sloop, but the shockwave caused by the blast killed the entire crew instantly.

What submarines lack in survivability, however, they more than make up for in concealment. This was particularly the case at the outset of the First World War, when there was neither a reliable means of detecting submarines while underwater nor destroying them once they had submerged. Primitive hydrophones offered a modicum of underwater reconnaissance, but most submarine detection occurred via visual detection of either the boat or its periscope - or worse still, by tracking the wake of the submarine’s torpedo once it had been fired.

The essentially undetectable profile of submarines, especially when submerged, was of great importance when the World War broke out due to the extant relationship between naval gunnery and torpedoes. The self propelled torpedo was, very obviously, a novel and extremely deadly weapons system which initially promised to overturn the conventional calculus of combat power at sea. The prospect of sinking expensive, heavily armed battleships with relatively cheap, light, and fast torpedo boats was a tantalizing prospect that had enormous cachet, particularly with the French, who saw torpedo craft as an opportunity to even the odds with the Royal Navy at relatively miniscule costs.

The early promise of fast torpedo boats as dirt cheap battleship killers was scuttled, however, by counterbalancing developments driven primarily by the British. Specifically, three major innovations around the turn of the century substantially dampened the prospects for surface torpedo boats attacking capital ships. In 1887, Armstrong & Company developed a new quick-firing gun capable of firing 12 times per minute, targeting torpedo boats beyond the range of existing torpedoes. This gave battleships an organic fires capability capable of targeting the small and speedy torpedo boats before they could attack. Secondly, a new class of ship - dubbed the Torpedo Boat Destroyer, later shortened simply to Destroyer - was developed to screen the mass of the battlefleet, intercepting and destroying torpedo boats before they came into range. Finally, the transition to the all-big-gun Dreadnought battleships, with their exorbitant firing ranges in excess of 10,000 yards, gave capital ships the prospects of fighting at extreme distances far beyond torpedo ranges.

In short, battleship fleets had developed layered protection which seemed to offer adequate protection from the torpedo boat threats. Battleships would fight from extreme ranges, which would compel attacking torpedo boats to come to them, at which point they could be neutralized by the destroyer screen. If any torpedo craft made it through the screen, they could be engaged by the quick firing guns of the battleships. There was still a torpedo threat to ships that loitered too close to the enemy’s coast, where it might be possible for torpedo boats to quickly dart out, discharge their tubes, and then dash back to safety. The dual threat posed by minefields and by short range torpedo craft operating in the littoral formed an important motivation for the British to adopt a long-range blockade, with the Grand Fleet moored in the safety of Scapa Flow, but on the whole there did not appear to be an existential torpedo threat to a fleet operating far from the enemy’s bases.

Submarines were a novel, potentially game breaking weapons system because they had the potential to neutralize this layered system of torpedo defense by surfacing and attacking undetected at what amounted to point blank ranges. Prewar planning presumed that it would, perhaps, be possible to keep submarines from penetrating into the heart of the battlefleet using the destroyer screen, but this assumption was predicated on visually spotting the enemy’s periscopes. Needless to say, basing the security of monumentally expensive capital ships (with their thousands of crew) on successfully spotting a thin metal tube poking out of the water was a shaky proposition.

The “problem” of the submarine was ably summarized by one of the first attempts to experiment with them in organized maneuvers. First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher was an early champion of submarines, but he envisioned them primarily as coastal defense assets (a theory based on the limited range of early submarines, which forced them to keep near to their bases). In early 1904, therefore, the Royal Navy conducted fleet maneuvers intended to simulate the use of submarines to intercept and attack an enemy fleet approaching the British coast. The exercise pitted Britain’s relatively meager force of just six class-A boats against the battleships of the Grand Fleet, but the submarines - commanded by Captain Reginald Bacon - proved so stealthy and tactically lithe that they were able to score repeated hits with dummy torpedoes. At the conclusion of the maneuvers, the umpires were forced to scratch off two battleships as “sunk.” However, the exercise also served as a reminder of the boats’ fragility: the submarine A-1 was sunk when a merchant ship, which had wandered into the exercise area, drove right over the top of her while she was shallowly submerged.

Notwithstanding the impressive results of the 1904 exercises, the overall promise and role of the submarine remained subject to debate. Admiral Fisher was an enthusiastic proponent, declaring “I don’t think it is even faintly realized - the immense impending revolution which the submarine will effect as offensive weapons of war.” He was fixated on the novel and self-evidently powerful capability to destroy asymmetrically expensive ships via an essentially undetected attack: “Death near - momentarily - sudden - awful - invisible - unavoidable! Nothing conceivably could be more demoralizing.”

Of course, Fisher’s enthusiasm, however effusive and grandiloquent it may have been, was not equivalent to a naval construction policy. Indeed, Fisher’s endorsement of submarines ought to be taken with a grain or two of salt, because it was only a year after the 1904 exercises that his masterpiece, the monster battleship Dreadnought was laid down, at which point the construction of big gun battleships became the guiding animus of the British fleet. Other admirals, however, did not even share Fisher’s theoretical interest in submarines. Admiral Lord Charles Beresford derided them as “playthings” - interesting experiments with no practical application - while Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson went even further and decried submarines as cowardly weapons which besmirched the honor of the Royal Navy by stooping to an “underhanded method of attack.” He concluded his remarks by arguing that the service ought to “treat all submarines as pirates in wartime… and hang all the crews.” Remembering this remark, British submariners would later take to flying the jolly roger while returning to base after successful missions.

Such traditionalist objections to the submarine as an ungentlemanly weapon - “the weapon of cowards who refused to fight like men on the surface” as one officer put it - come across as bizarrely charming to the extent that they are remarkably ungrounded in reality. As we well know now, service on a submarine was not a task for cowards or for the mentally weak, as it entailed grueling work in cramped and uncomfortable quarters on a fundamentally fragile vessel from which there was no escape in the event of being hit. Seamen crewing a surface vessel might have a reasonable chance of abandoning ship, but in the confines of a submerged submarine casualties were invariably total. Submariners have traditionally had strong idiosyncrasies and a unique service culture that sets them apart from the rest of the navy, but they are unequivocally not cowards.

Nevertheless, the submarine arm did have real problems in the prewar period, chief of which was the simple fact that it was an immature technological system. Early British submarine classes - the logically named A’s, B’s, and C’s - were fundamentally coastal vessels with low seagoing endurance and underwater cruising speeds of just 8 knots. It was not until 1907 that the British unveiled the D class, which boasted diesel engines and an impressive 500 ton displacement which made it truly oceangoing, and by extension capable of proactive operations away from the British coast. The 1912 E class was even better, with a displacement of 660 tons, a punchy surface speed of 15 knots (10 knots submerged), and an operating range of some 3500 miles.

Rattling off the ranges and speeds of the various submarine classes is perhaps mildly interesting, but it raises the relevant point, which is that submarines displayed a promising trend, growing larger, more seaworthy, faster, and with much longer ranges. All of this was absolutely necessary for them to become meaningful weapons systems capability of operating at range. However, as the submarine grew larger it also became much more expensive, at a time when navies - particularly the British and German services - were clawing for funds to construct expensive battle fleets of Dreadnought equivalent ships. Many British officers raised the point that the newer models, like the D Class, cost as much as a destroyer while still offering much lower speeds and ranges.

It was difficult to justify massive investment in a weapons system that was still maturing, particularly because the specific tactical application of submarines had yet to be resolved. It was undeniable that torpedoes offered massive destructive potential, but getting submarines into position to attack was much more difficult than it sounds. This is largely due to their relatively slow speed, particularly when submerged. Given their poor underwater speeds, submarines had to move into position ahead of their moving targets. The submarine “attack area” thus necessarily lay in the path of the oncoming enemy, which in turn helped the enemy’s screening destroyers know where, exactly, they needed to screen. The difficulty that submarines had in both locating targets and moving in position to attack is one reason why both the British and the Germans pondered the idea of “submarine traps”, which implied laying a net of submarines in waiting and leading the enemy fleet into them. If submarines had difficulty catching up with the enemy, it was just as well to lead the enemy to them. Other suggestions included the use of submarines to enforce a close blockade of enemy ports, as a submerged submarine was the only type of vessel that could loiter safely near the enemy coast for any extended period of time. For this, of course, they would need ever greater range and endurance.

The crux of the issue, in other words, was that submarines offered a very powerful capability which had not yet been converted to a definitive tactical methodology. In other words, this was a novel weapons system which was the subject of imagination and experimentation, and cash strapped navies - already trying to scrape together every possible pound or mark to build battleships - were disinclined to spend heavily on imagination, and in any case the shipyards could not easily scale up to produce subs at scale.

Given the muddled tactical schema, it was perhaps natural that the Submarine services fielded a wide variety of models with limited production runs. For the British, the true workhorse was the E class, of which eleven were in service with the Royal Navy at the outbreak of war. The beginning of actual hostilities has a way of clarifying priorities, and in the case of the Royal Navy it induced a decision to simply serialize production of their most successful model, which was the E. Consequentially, a total of 58 E boats would be built by the end of the war.

However, the British continued to muck about with experimental designs, including the so-called “Oceangoing” Submarine, which was intended to have the requisite surface speeds to sail with the Grand Fleet. These models, which included the experimental Swordfish and Nautilus, eventually spiraled into the misbegotten wartime K class. The K’s were true monstrosities; driven by Admiral Jellicoe’s demands for a submarine that could keep pace with the surface fleet, the Ks metastasized into behemoths far larger than any extant submarines, capable of making some 24 knots and operating with the fleet. The cost of this speed, however, was a sprawling hull with poor dive handling, and above all - the true insanity - a steam powerplant in place of the diesel which had become ubiquitous on submarines.

The problem with steam on a submarine is simple: a steam powerplant generates enormous heat and furthermore requires a complex of funnels, exhausts, and air intakes, all of which have to be closed up in order for the submarine to dive. In order to actually submerge the boat, the crews had to extinguish the boiler fires and conduct a lengthy procedure to close up all the various ports and exhausts feeding the powerplant. The Ks therefore took half an hour to prepare for a dive, making it impossible for them to rapidly submerge upon sighting the enemy. Furthermore, the boat was always at risk of sinking if even one of these ports was not properly sealed. This was the fate of K13, which sank in 1917 with total loss of life after an air intake failed to seal properly and flooded the engine room. To make matters even worse, the Ks were so long, and tended to dive so steeply, that it was possible for the bow of the boat to be at the maximum dive depth while the stern was still practically at the surface. In short, this was a submarine that could not really submerge very well, which would seem to be an important capability for such a vessel. One officer complained that, for a submarine, the Ks simply had “too many holes”, while Ernest Leir, the Captain of K3, joked that “the only good thing about K boats is that they never engaged the enemy.” After six of the eighteen Ks were lost to accidents, the series was rather appropriately nicknamed the “Kalamity class.”

Taken together, the state of the British submarine force was somewhat confused, but not necessarily confusing. Early construction schedules consisted largely of the relatively cheap but limited early classes (A-C), which were useful mainly for coastal defense roles. The strongest proponents of submarines at this time included Admiral Fisher and Winston Churchill, who received routine recommendations to “build more submarines” from Fisher after the latter’s retirement in 1910. By 1912-14, the British had landed on a truly suitable workhorse design in the E class, but misguided demands from the admirals - for example, Jellicoe’s ask for a submarine capable of cruising with the fleet - led to a variety of unproductive side projects, like the steam powered Ks, which would prove essentially useless as military assets.

On the far side of the North Sea, the German attitude towards submarines was much different, and ensured that the Imperial Navy’s submarine fleet was far too small for the tasks that would be thrust upon it during the war. The architect of Germany’s fleet, Admiral Tirpitz, famously had little interest in submarines, quipping that he could not afford to finance “experiments.” This comment is frequently interpreted to cast Tirpitz as an unimaginative man with a hyper fixation on battleships, but there was a coherent framework to his thinking. Tirpitz was manifestly interested in building a “visible” fleet to build deterrence, and submarines did not contribute to this objective. Tirpitz was also focused on building a blue-water fleet capable of fighting on the high seas, which naturally dampened interest in early submarines, with their short ranges confining them to coastal defense roles. So, while the Royal Navy had a modicum of interest in early short-range submarines (As, Bs, and Cs) for littoral operations, Tirpitz did not. It was not until improvements in diesel engines gave submarines longer legs that they became systems of interest for Germany. The upshot of all this is that while the famous U-boats (for the self-explanatory Unterseeboot) are thought of as an iconic German weapons system, Germany had far too few of them when the war began.

German submarine construction was also hampered by the structure of German naval building, which was predicated on “naval laws” passed by the Reichstag which enshrined naval construction timetables over the course of many years. Germany’s 1912 naval law called for a fleet of 70 U-boats to be completed in 1919, and an expanded program proposed in 1915 looked for a completion date of 1924. Obviously, given the timetables of World War One, this was not a particularly realistic or useful timeframe, but it reflected both the improperly low priority initially given to the U-boat force and flawed assumptions about how long the war in Europe would last. The expanded U-boat fleet proposed in 1915, for example, was designed on the assumption that the war would end soon and submarines would be needed for some unscheduled later war with England.

First World War U-boats were generally adequate vessels largely equivalent to British E class submarines, with strategic ranges in the thousands of kilometers. German boats accrued significant advantages from their efficient diesel engines, particularly a 4-stroke supplied by MAN (Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg). Sufficient range was particularly important for the Germans if they wished to operate beyond the North Sea and seriously interfere with naval traffic to Britain. Given the efficiency of their diesels, however, the Germans were able to operate U-boats in the Irish Sea, the north Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. The issue was that, given Germany’s inability to conduct a crash building program, there were simply never enough U-boats to go around.

On April 1, 1915, when the German naval command first began exploring the possibility of using U-boats to implement a blockade of the United Kingdom, there were only 27 oceangoing boats on hand. Counting ships ordered and under construction (and accounting for expected losses) the Germans could count adding 13 additional boats by the summer of 1916. At the same time, however, naval planning estimates indicated that a full blockade of Great Britain would require at least 48 U-boats, plus an additional 56 for other fleet operations and replenish expected losses. This put the overall ledger at 104 boats needed against just 40 available.

The estimated requirement of 104 U-boats, however, turned out to be a somewhat deliberate underestimate designed to provoke accelerated construction. In February 1916, the German Admiralstab prepared a much more comprehensive plan for unrestricted submarine warfare against the British, which called for a far larger fleet. This plan called for no less than 27 U-boat operating areas (analogous to hunting grounds) occupied by 170 oceangoing boats. To this were added boats required for patrolling the Heligoland Bight (tasked with keeping it clear of British boats to allow the U-boats to get in and out of their bases), a reserve, minelaying U-boats tasked with mining against both Britain and Russia, and a force of boats that could operate with the fleet. When everything was added up, the navy’s 1916 plan called for an eyepopping 366 torpedo U-boats and 117 minelayers. Reading this proposal must have been disorienting. In fact, Germany by this point could count a grand total of 119 torpedo U-boats and 14 minelayers.

The exorbitant estimates of 1916 were obviously so far beyond Germany’s potential force generation that, in real time, they served almost no real purpose. For us, however, they are interesting because they indicate what the German admirals thought they needed to successfully prosecute a war-winning submarine campaign. Despite having a force that was far short of their estimated requirements, they ended up attempting an unrestricted submarine campaign anyway. The First World War upset most of Europe’s assumptions about how future conflicts would be fought, but in light of the German Admiralstab’s 1916 proposals, submarines surely stand out as one of the key misses. After being treated as an essentially ancillary system during the prewar naval buildup, particularly by the Germans, who were guided by Tirpitz’s emphasis on a visible fleet of blue water capital ships, by 1916 they had come to be a critical arm on which Germany’s hopes increasingly rested.

The Multivariate Problem

By far the most famous use of submarines, at least in their pre-nuclear iterations, was as platforms for sinking commercial vessels. The imagine of U-boats prowling the Atlantic, preying on helpless merchant shipping, came to utterly overshadow the other, more theoretical tactical applications, which included coastal defense, minelaying, submarine traps in concert with fleet operations, screening lines, and so forth. However, at the outset of the Great War it was not at all obvious that attacking merchant shipping was a proper role for submarines, and the concept faced serious obstacles which required a revolutionary radicalization of war at sea.

At the turn of the century, naval warfare was governed by various conventions and treaties which apparently made submarines utterly unsuitable for operations against merchant shipping. Chief among these were the so-called Prize Rules, which governed the “taking” of civilian vessels under wartime conditions. These regulations originated in attempts by the European powers to delineate between lawful blockade and piracy, particularly as the world moved to abolish the ancient practice of privateering (the granting of a license allowing private warships to lawfully board and raid the enemy’s shipping). Extant rules governing blockades stipulated that there were various grades of contraband that were lawfully subject to seizure, but even more importantly they dictated that blockading vessels were obligated to stop the target merchantmen and conduct an orderly inventory (to ascertain if the cargo was indeed contraband) while guaranteeing the safety of the civilian crew and passengers.

The rules of interdiction dictated by the prize rules underpinned theories of long-range cruiser warfare, which supposed that speedy armored cruisers could range into sea lanes to intercept and capture the enemy’s shipping. This had obvious appeal in any war against Great Britain, which by the 20th Century had become heavily dependent on imports of vital industrial inputs and raw materials. Germany, however, had eschewed a cruiser-based raiding strategy on the grounds that it lacked the overseas bases and coaling stations required to sustain these vessels, particularly if they were cut off from German home ports by the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet.

Submarines, it would seem, offered a substitute for cruisier warfare, particularly as the new diesel models with their extended ranges came online. Unlike a cruiser, a U-boat had good odds of slipping out of the North Sea, and their powers of concealment made them much harder to run down. The problem, however - leaving aside the fact that Germany had just 28 U-boats when the war began - was that submarines were extremely fragile, which made it very dangerous for them to follow the prize rules. This was particularly the case once the British began adding concealed guns to merchant ships, creating the so-called “Q-ships”. A surfaced, immobile submarine was a very vulnerable target indeed, even against the modest guns carried by the Q-ships. It does not take much imagination to picture a German submarine surfacing, flagging down what is believed to be a defenseless merchantman, and then taking shots at point blank range as she pulled alongside to board.

The Q-ships proved more than capable of sinking U-boats attempting to implement the prize rule. In June, 1915, the Inverlyon sank the submarine UB-4 with the loss of all hands in the North Sea, after raking her with shots from a single 3-pound gun. A few months later, the HMS Baralong sank U-27, in an incident that became somewhat infamous after the Baralong’s captain ordered the surviving German sailors to be shot in the water. Incidents like this demonstrated how dangerous it was for U-boats to operate under the prize rules, and deeply embittered German attitudes towards British merchantmen - particularly because the Q-ships concealed their armament to look like ordinary cargo ships, which was taken as essentially equivalent to perfidy. The upshot of all this was that, for the U-boats, it was tactically senseless to surrender their greatest advantage - concealment - by openly surfacing and attempting to board and search the enemy. The solution, obviously, was to simply treat enemy shipping like military targets and sink it, unannounced, with a concealed torpedo attack.

Tactically speaking, therefore, submarines could only be a substitute for cruiser warfare if they did away with the prize rules altogether and sank shipping outright as a matter of course. This was manifestly a violation of international law, and a tactic which ultimately hinged on an element of terror and randomness. The decision to wage “unrestricted submarine warfare”, which functionally meant the unannounced sinking of all naval traffic entering the declared “war zone” around Great Britain, was therefore not merely a tactical question, but a rather nebulous strategic problem which had to take into account the danger of angering neutrals, and in particular the United States. These calculations took place parallel to a more concrete tactical math problem, related to the actual quantity of shipping that could be sunk by the limited German U-boat force.

In other words, unrestricted submarine warfare presented a nested set of difficult calculations. On the purely tactical level, the issue was that submarines were not exactly a direct substitute for an effective naval blockade. Submarines could not seize contraband cargoes, they could not capture ships and install prize crews, and they could not maintain a permanent and visible present off the enemy’s coast. What they could do was sink ships, and the relevant question was whether they could sink enough enemy shipping to *simulate* the effects of a blockade. This was always a shaky proposition, given the relative scarcity of U-boats, the fact that only a small portion of the force could actually be on patrol at any given time (the remainder being either in port or transiting between their bases and their patrol areas), and the surprising difficulty that submarines had in locating targets on the open seas. These tactical calculations occurred within the context of a larger risk-reward calculus which weighed the diplomatic costs of attacking neutral shipping against the potential economic damage imposed on the British. These were all questions without clear answers, to the effect that unrestricted submarine warfare became a method that the Germans would dial up and down as their sense of strategic frustration and the strength of the U-boat force fluctuated.

When the war began, the cost-benefit analysis on unrestricted submarine warfare was not particularly strong. One of the idiosyncrasies which shaped early war operations were the vastly different assumptions animating the British and German fleets. Admiral Jellicoe of the Royal Navy presumed that mines and torpedo craft would make it cost prohibitive for capital ships to operate openly in the North Sea, and he based the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow, far to the north of Germany’s bases. The Germans, on the other hand, were fully anticipating an attempt by the British to engineer a decisive fleet battle at the outset. Given the limits of the U-boat force, the German preoccupation was therefore how to use submarines in the anticipated general fleet action.

The initial German deployment scheme utilized a screening line of destroyers stationed some 30 miles out at the edge of the Heligoland Bight, with a secondary line of submarines 10 miles inside this outer screening line. These U-boats were spaced at roughly equidistant intervals, tied up to mooring buoys on the surface. The notion, apparently, was that as the British Grand Fleet approached, the outer line of destroyers would immediately withdraw back into the bight; the retreat of the screening line would be the signal for the U-boats to cut loose of the buoys and submerge, in preparation to launch torpedo attacks on the oncoming British ships. On paper, it was hoped that the U-boat screen would be able to score a modicum of hits and even the odds before the fleets engaged in the Bight. In other words, U-boats were viewed as a supplementary component of the Bight defense, rather than an independent arm for waging proactive operations.

The first proactive use of the U-boats was as a reconnaissance force. Commander Hermann Bauer, who commanded the submarine force, organized a flotilla of ten U-boats which were tasked with sweeping the North Sea to locate the Grand Fleet and, if possible, identify the disposition of British blockading lines. They ran northward across the sea on a 60 mile front, attempting to probe all the way to the Orkneys north of Scotland. Beginning on August 6, 1914, nine U-boats (one had encountered engine trouble shortly after departing and had to turn back) made a 350 mile sweep across the North Sea. Remarkably, despite ostensible searching an area of some 21,000 square miles, the seven submarines that returned to base on August 12 reported that they had not encountered a single British warship. As for the two missing U-boats, U-15 had encountered the light cruiser Birmingham in the Orkneys and been sunk by the British ship, and U-13 had apparently simply vanished. Unfortunately for the Germans, U-15 actually had something interesting to say: she had reached the Orkneys and ascertained that the British Fleet was loitering there, safely out of reach of the German Navy. Obviously, however, her ill-fated encounter with the Birmingham prevented her from relaying this insight to the Naval Staff.

The reconnaissance mission of August did little to instill confidence in the U-boats. Ten boats had conducted a relatively wide-ranging sweep of the North Sea and returned without damaging, let alone sinking, a single British ship, while losing two submarines. Not only that, but they had returned with no actionable intelligence of any kind, other than confirming that the British were not implementing a close-range blockade. Prewar expectations for the submarine force were not high, and this experience did little to raise them. As one German officer put it, “Our submarine fleet was as good as any in the world, but not very good.” Given the denigration that the Germans initially laid on their own U-boat force, it is truly remarkable that the submarines soon became a critical arm on which Germany laid much of its hopes for victory.

The paradox of the naval war was the plain fact that, notwithstanding the enormous resources that had been poured into the German and British fleets, the North Sea was relatively devoid of ships. Jellicoe was adamant that torpedoes had turned the North Sea into a dead zone, and the German High Seas fleet - expressly built to contest at the edge of the Bight - lacked the range to strike out in a meaningful way. Not everyone shared Jellicoe’s caution, however, and several British ancillary forces continued to operate in the Channel and the southern end of the North Sea with relatively lax protection against submarines. One such force was a squadron of Bacchante class armored cruisers - worn out and weary ships built in 1889, hastily mobilized out of the Reserve Fleet at the outbreak of war and tasked with screening the entrance of the Channel, ostensibly to protect the convoys ferrying the British Expeditionary Force and its supplies to France.

The Bacchantes were slow and old, crewed by men called up from the Fleet Reserves, with their officer ranks filled out by cadets from the Royal Navy College. Plodding along a patrol line off the Dutch Coast, it is difficult to imagine more accommodating targets. Captain Roger Keyes wrote to the Admiralty’s Operations Division: “Think of two or three well-trained German cruisers… For Heaven’s sake, take those Bacchantes away! The Germans must know they are about and if they send out a suitable force, God help them….” What is interesting about Keyes’s warning is that he was worried about the Bacchantes coming under attack by German surface ships. This is unusual because Keyes was himself the head of the British submarine service, yet he apparently did not consider submarines to be the pressing threat. The Bacchantes were not withdrawn from their patrol duties, though officers in the Grand Fleet (which was safely ensconced in the Orkneys) took to calling them the “live bait squadron.”

At 6:30 AM on September 22, three of the Bacchantes - the Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy - were steaming along their patrol line when a massive explosion ripped apart the Aboukir’s starboard side. She had been torpedoed by the hitherto undetected German submarine U-9, which had sighted the British cruisers on the horizon at dawn.

U-9 was captained by one Otto Weddigen, who was something of a legend, at least as far as early submariners went. In 1911 he had survived the sinking of U-3 during a training exercise in Kiel Harbor (somebody left a ventilator open) by using pressurized air to vent the boat’s forward buoyancy tanks, temporarily floating the bow of the vessel to the surface. Weddigen then led his crew of 28 men on a precarious climb up to the bow (the boat was now suspended at a sharp incline with the bow at the surface and the stern in the deep), before they escaped from the sinking boat by crawling through an 18 inch wide torpedo tube. Weddigen therefore understood better than most the risk of being a submariner, but he took his profession with deadly seriousness, and was well known for drilling his handpicked crew relentlessly.

Weddigen was, in other words, a fitting character to score one of the submarine’s first great tactical coups. He was eating his breakfast that morning when the word came down that the Bacchantes had been spotted. He immediately abandoned his meal and ordered a dive to periscope depth. He steered the submarine towards the cruisers, aiming for the middle of the three ships, alternately raising and lowering his periscope to maintain concealment. At 6:20 AM, he came to the surface, fired a single torpedo at the Aboukir and immediately dove. The torpedo hit the cruiser amidships below the water line and immediately flooded the engine rooms, and the Aboukir began to sink rapidly. Within 25 minutes, she capsized completely.

As the Aboukir went belly up, the well-intentioned captain of the Hogue, Wilmot Nicholson, steamed at low speed towards the wreck to take on the many survivors who were by now spilling in the water. He ordered his men to throw tables and chairs overboard for the men in the water to grab on to while he prepared to lower his boats to recover them. Before he could begin the rescue, however, the Hogue was ripped by a pair of blasts from two torpedoes. After hitting the Aboukir, Weddigen had gone back down to periscope depth and reloaded his discharged tube. Although he noted, with some regret, the plight of the “brave sailors” now struggling in the water, he fired both his forward tubes at the Hogue. She too began to sink, and Weddigen and his crew watched with unease as the remaining cruiser - the Cressy - loitered and did her best to recover the mass of flailing men now struggling in the water. Now with just three torpedoes left on board (two in the stern tubes and a reserve for the bow), Weddigen rotated U-9 and fired both stern tubes at the Cressy, scoring one hit. He then came back around and fired his last torpedo off the bow, putting a capper on his shooting spree, before hightailing back to base. The Cressy sank at 7:55 AM.

Weddigen’s exploits on September 22nd spoke for themselves. The Bacchante class were old warships with limited value in fleet operations, but this did not abrogate the spectacle of a single submarine sinking three armored cruisers in the space of barely 90 minutes. Although a few hundred sailors were rescued, first by Dutch civilian boats and then by British destroyers responding to the distress call, the vast majority were killed. A total of 837 men were fished from the water alive, while 62 officers and 1,397 sailors drowned. Jacky Fisher raged that U-9 had killed more of his men than Nelson had lost in all of his battles combined. The scene was shocking, and it made a deep impression on Weddigen, who felt deep admiration for the British sailors, and reported: “They were brave and true to their country’s sea traditions.”

It was revolutionary for a single submarine to achieve something so impressive. Weddigen instantly became a hero in Germany, and both he and his crew were lavishly decorated by the Kaiser. The British at first refused to believe that the attack had been the work of a lone submarine. The Times reported that German submarines always operated in groups of six, and “If it is true that only one, U-9, returned to harbor, we may safely assume that the others are lost.” However, Weddigen’s coup served as a bolt of lightning to the submarine war, inducing the British to roll out new regulations and countermeasures (for example, zig-zagging to confound torpedo ranging and prohibiting large warships from stopping in place to take on survivors from sinking ships) and it produced a new German interest in U-boats as a potentially decisive weapon.

The realization that submarines were serious weapons, and not “experiments” as Tirpitz had famously called them, dovetailed with growing frustration at the British blockade to push the Germans into their first foray with unrestricted submarine warfare. The foundational fact to understand in this regard is the simple reality that Britain’s blockade of Germany was “illegal.” This is a term which is always precarious to introduce in the context of war; at the risk of going down a lengthy and potentially unproductive tangent, there is really no such thing as “laws” of warfare. What matters, ultimately, is winning. A brief perusal of individuals and states brought to account for violating the “laws of warfare” reveals essentially a list of losers. However, within the parameters of international convention at the time, Britain’s blockade was clearly illegal, in that it operated at great distance from the German coast and attempted to interdict all traffic into the North Sea. The declaration of the entire North Sea as a warzone was not something that international treaties proscribed, and neither was the British interdiction of items like food, which were not considered war-related contraband.

The legality of Britain’s blockade did not end up mattering very much, because Britain won the war and successfully managed its diplomacy to avoid alienating neutral powers like the United States. The USA, just as an aside, did complain frequently about Britain’s blockading practices, but as we know America ultimately entered the war as a British ally. Therefore, though the “illegality” of the blockade is essentially indisputable, it ought to be classified as an extremely successful and calculated violation, which is the best kind.

What did matter a great deal, however, is that the British blockade greatly irritated and outraged the Germans, and Britain’s perceived indifference towards the “rules” of blockading encouraged the Germans to retaliate with their own violation of international law by unleashing the U-boats. In December, 1914, Tirpitz gave an interview to an American correspondent in which he complained about America’s failure to intervene against the illicit British blockade, and argued that Germany could retaliate with a U-boat campaign. “We have the resources”, he claimed, “to torpedo every English or allied ship approaching a British port.” This was not exactly true, but it underscored the German belief that unrestricted submarine warfare was an appropriate response to Britain’s blockade.

The first German attempt at a submarine blockade, which began in February 1915, can be thought of as a cathartic reprisal against the British blockade which went terribly wrong. To begin with, it seems fairly obvious that submarine warfare always threatened to be a more inflammatory violation of international law than the blockade, simply because sinking ships unannounced is a far more violent and shocking act than conducting an orderly seizure of their cargoes. Furthermore, the decision to take recourse to submarines completely reversed a growing frustration with the British on the part of the neutrals. Opinions in America were strongly against the British blockade and the “insolent aggressions” which the British displayed when they seized America’s “peaceful trading ships.” The Secretary of the Interior, Franklin Knight Lane, griped: “The English are not behaving very well. They are holding up our ships; they have made new international law… Every day… we seethe a little more at the foolish actions of the English.”

The Germans failed to understand, however, that the most decisive battleground of the war was neither the North Sea, nor the trench lines in France, nor the rolling front in Eastern Europe: rather, it was the war for American sympathy. Mounting frustration with the English blockade, the loss of U-boats attempting to comply with the prize rules, and a growing sense of impotence on the part of the German navy compelled them to roll the dice with what was, apparently, the best weapon that they had. In particular, the decision to attempt unrestricted submarine warfare was goaded by a pair of British policies which the Germans viewed as underhanded treachery: namely, the practice of concealing weaponry on merchant ships (the Q-ships) and a January 1915 order from the British Admiralty that British merchant vessels should fly the flags of neutral countries to evade German submarines. With the British now both disguising armed warships as unarmed merchantmen, and disguising their own vessels as neutral ships, the frustration had reached a boiling point. On February 4, 1915, Admiral Hugo von Pohl published a warning:

The waters around Great Britain and Ireland, including the whole of the English Channel, are hereby declared to be a War Zone. From February 18 onwards every enemy merchant vessel encountered in this zone will be destroyed, nor will it always be possible to avert the danger thereby threatened to the crew and passengers. Neutral vessels also will run a risk in the War Zone, because in view of the hazards of sea warfare and the British authorization of January 31 of the misuse of neutral flags, it may not always be possible to prevent attacks on enemy ships from harming neutral ships.

Similar warnings were published in the United States by the German embassy. The policy was highly cathartic, and was imagined in Germany as a proportionate response to Britain’s own illegal blockading measures and their perfidious use of neutral flags. The campaign suffered from the beginning, however, from twin defects: namely that there were simply not enough U-boats to enforce an effective blockade, and the spectacle of simply sinking civilian vessels unannounced was taken as an act of barbarism. To neutral powers, even those like the United States that strongly opposed the British blockade, unrestricted submarine attacks did not appear to be a proportional response at all.

Read more

Among the many memoirs left behind by participants in the First World War, a ubiquitous motif is a profound sense of disorientation. The experience of the war was starkly different, depending on what node of the command hierarchy one inhabited, but enlisted men, officers, and political authorities all generally shared a sense that Europe was gripped in a death machine which had escaped the control of man. Humble infantrymen at the front experienced this the most acutely, in the intense physical disorientation that accompanied sustained bombardment by modern artillery, and also in the creeping spiritual numbness that accrued from years of siege in muddy trenches filled with detritus, rats, and corpses.

For officers in the upper echelons, the disorientation of the war was characterized less by the physical disorientation of the front and its endless cacophony of gunfire and explosions, and more by the breakdown of longstanding assumptions about how to conduct military operations, with operational planners groping in ignorance for solutions. In hindsight, it is easy to write off the brutal and ineffectual offensives (particularly on the western front), as an exercise in butchery and ignorance. In real time, however, the armies of Europe were attempting to solve tactical and operational problems which nobody had ever confronted before, and nobody scored particularly better on this test than anyone else, particularly in the early years of the war. Ypres, the Somme, and Verdun all blend together into a dissipated veil of death.

Given the apparent senselessness of these operations, the mass casualties that they produced, and the gridlocked nature of a front that moved very little over timeframes measured in years, it is easy to think of World War One as a fundamentally sterile and static conflict. This would seem to be as true at sea as it was on land, with the costly battlefleets of the combatants fighting engagements that were few, far between, and indecisive.

Nevertheless, if the war was relatively static on the operational scale, the immense strains of the war drove relentless experimentation. The Great War, while plagued by glacial fronts, positional combat, and intense attrition, saw the birth of new forms of combat which would become central to the conduct of later wars. These included Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare against enemy shipping, innovative infantry tactics centered on small unit tactics and infiltration, and primitive variants of strategic bombing. It is impossible to tell the story of the Second World War without these concepts, and all of them were birthed in the seemingly static trauma of the prior war.

One of the Great War’s new forms of combat, which like the others would reach maturity in the second war, was the operational form that we know as the amphibious assault. The idea of amphibious operations itself was not new, of course - militaries had been using the sea as a maneuver space for the deployment of troops dating back to antiquity. One of the earliest battles that most people have heard of - the Battle of Marathon - began with a Persian amphibious landing in central Greece. Nevertheless, it was in the First World War that amphibious operations first took the form recognizable to modern peoples: landing an assault force against a prepared defense, in concert with naval support, with the intention of permanently holding the beachhead.

Like the great sieges of the primary European fronts, such seaborne operations were an entirely new combat problem, and complications abounded. Like virtually all other aspects of offensive combat in World War One, amphibious assaults were clearly an immature operational form, to the point where many interwar planners would draw the lesson that such assaults could not be successfully conducted at all. Of course, they were wrong, and amphibious operations became cornerstones of World War Two in a wide variety of theaters. Indeed, the single most famous American battle of all time, the invasion of Normandy, was conducted essentially along the lines pioneered in the first war. For better or worse, Spielberg’s unsparing treatment in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan is perhaps the best known depiction of American combat.

Subscribe now

Here we will trace the birth of this operational form, which was midwifed - like virtually all of the Great War’s military disasters - by a combination of strategic frustration, diplomatic imbroglio, hubris, and an overwhelming tactical nexus for which nobody had yet devised a solution. As Europe groped for solutions in 1915, some men, like the British First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, thought they had found one. Instead, they merely opened a new venue for slaughter in the place where earth and water meet.

A Brief Note on Amphibious Operations

Then God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

~ Genesis 1: 9-10

The sea has always been a combat zone for the warring states of the world, and one of the first privileges accruing to the state that holds sea power is the power to use the water as a maneuver space, to project combat power onto dry land across vast distances. This projection of power, by moving combat forces from the sea onto a hostile shore, what we call an amphibious operation, is one of the oldest combat tasks in the human experience, and one of the most perilous. One of the first battles in the general western consciousness, the Battle of Marathon, was an Athenian action to contest a Persian amphibious landing in Central Greece, and in the centuries that followed the Mediterranean frequently became a highway for armies sailing (and rowing) back and forth across the interior space of the ancient world.

The Great War, which began in 1914, marked a seismic shift in the nature of the amphibious combat task, which seemed to evolve overnight into something almost entirely new. The long history of amphibious combat had generally emphasized the role of the sea as a space for free maneuver, for the preferential landing of forces in unexpected or undefended places - in effect, using the long range and flexibility of seaborne transportation to outflank the enemy. In many ways, the entire point of seaborne force projection was to leverage its enormous range to land troops where the enemy was not.

The British, of course, were no strangers to this. As the world’s preeminent naval power over many centuries, few could boast such a vast experience moving troops to the dark corners of far flung theaters. The ability to deposit forces on the littoral had played a key role in Britain’s many colonial conflicts; in one of Britain’s most famous feats of arms, forces under General James Wolfe landed on the banks of the St. Lawrence River in 1759 and scaled the cliffs near Quebec, taking the French by surprise. That victory, which greatly accelerated the British acquisition of Canada, was punctuated by the famous last words of the French commander, Montcalm, who dismissed the amphibious threat by quipping: “It is not to be supposed that the enemies have wings so that they can in the same night cross the river, disembark, climb the obstructed acclivity, and scale the walls.” Indeed.

While the landing at Quebec was perhaps the most cinematic example of the operational form, it was hardly unique. In both the American Revolutionary War and the Napoleonic Wars, British control of the sea allowed them to deploy and support forces in theaters of their choosing. British control of the Chesapeake allowed them to penetrate inland from the American seaboard (leading directly to the burning of Washington DC in 1812), and in their wars against France they supported disconnected theaters of ground fighting in Iberia, including Wellington’s famous campaign in Spain.

All of this is perhaps interesting, but the key point from Britain’s long experience with amphibious operations was this: the benefit of sea control was that the sea became a maneuver space, by which forces could be inserted into advantageous positions to gain leverage over the enemy. Whether this took the form of a small scale venture, akin to modern special operations, as in the case of Wolfe’s task force scaling the cliffs on the St. Lawrence, or on a more strategic scale, like Wellington inflaming the Iberian front against Napoleon, the point was that, because the sea could allow you to insert forces at the place of your choosing, it could be used to outflank or avoid the enemy’s positions of strength.

In other words, the point of amphibious operations was certainly not to use the sea as a platform to launch direct assaults on enemy strongpoints. Even in the days of shot and sail, littoral fortifications, and especially proper forts, had intrinsic advantages over seaborne forces which were horribly difficult to overcome. Apart from the basic durability differential that accrued from a stone fort exchanging cannon fire with a wooden ship, forts enjoyed advantageous elevation and much larger and better protected magazines.

Therefore, in most historical cases where amphibious forces had to tangle with coastal strongpoints, they aimed to outflank the enemy by landing at a distance. This had been the case at the Siege of Louisbourg (1758) and the Battle of Beauport (1759). When Winfield Scott led the American invasion of Mexico in 1847, he landed his entire force several miles up the beach from the fortifications at Veracruz and then marched overland to assault it. This was considered an essentially textbook and idealized method for coping with a powerful coastal fortress. In the rare incidents where a direct assault from the sea was unavoidable, the results were frequently disappointing. In the 1797 Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Horatio Nelson lost his arm leading a botched amphibious assault on Spanish fortifications in the Canary Islands. It was on the basis of this defeat that the famous saying was later attributed to Lord Nelson, although he almost certainly did not actually say it: “A ship’s a fool to fight a fort.”

What we are driving at with all of this is a relatively simple point: there was a great deal of experience with amphibious operations as such, but these generally aimed to use the sea as a maneuver space to deposit troops into undefended beachheads. In contrast, there was not an encouraging or systematic body of work that suggested that it was desirable to launch an assault from the sea directly into the strength of prepared enemy defenses. Even in more recent case studies, like the Crimean War, French and British naval forces had been unable to subdue Russian fortifications in places like Sevastopol and Petropavlovsk through seaborne assault, and the operations around Sevastopol transformed into a grueling overland siege that looked eerily like a preview of First World War positional warfare. In the American Civil War, likewise, naval power allowed Union forces to penetrate into the Confederate heartland via the great inland rivers, but was inadequate for a direct assault on the powerful defenses at Vicksburg, which was ultimately subdued, like Sevastopol, with overland operations.

When World War One broke out, the British were in the process of systematically studying such past examples of amphibious operations and considering how they could be applied to operations against the Germans. In January 1913, Winston Churchill - as First Lord of the Admiralty - tasked Admiral Lewis Bayly with studying the feasibility of using amphibious operations to seize an advance flotilla base on the Dutch, Danish, or Scandinavian coastline, which Bayly later narrowed down to the island of Borkum, some 18 miles off the German coast. Churchill then additionally tasked Bayly with studying the feasibility of a German force landing undetected on Great Britain, which remained a concern on the basis of exercises which had shown that it might be possible for a German landing fleet to reach the British coast undetected. Thus, when war broke out, Bayly was already in the process of evaluating the potential for amphibious operations in both directions - that is, of British landings on the far side of the North Sea, and of German landings in Britain.

On the basis of his analysis of past amphibious assaults, Bayly drew several important conclusions: namely, that feints and other methods of deception would be absolutely necessary to cover any potential landings, and secondly that the Royal Navy had to acquire specialized flat-bottomed landing craft. In effect, he had produced a feasibility study which, while it did not ultimately lead to any amphibious operations at Borkum or anywhere else on the North Sea coastline, did provide the first intentional sketch of future amphibious assaults. The theme was picked up by First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher, who advocated a landing on Germany’s Baltic Coastline.

However, systematic planning was undermined by the general sense of strategic paralysis which afflicted the British Navy in the first year of the war. No consensus emerged among the admirals as to where, how, or even if the German fleet ought to be drawn out for a decisive fleet battle, or how forward deployment of forces could be used to bring this about. Fisher was banging the drum for his Baltic option, and ordered a variety of landing craft and shallow draught gunboats, while others advocated offensive minelaying, submarine traps, and operations on the North Sea Littoral - there was even a speculative study of a raid to destroy the locks on the Kiel Canal. In short, there seemed to be practically as many suggestions as there were personalities involved. The general sense was that Britain’s seapower accrued immense operational flexibility and the ability to project combat power in any number of places, but there was little consensus as to how to capitalize on this. What mattered, however, was that the navy was already in the process of thinking systematically about amphibious operations, beginning with Bayly’s historical survey of 1913, when an opportunity presented itself in the apparently soft underbelly of the enemy.

The Decision for the Straits

The great military catastrophe that we know as the Battle of Gallipoli is something of a historiographical paradox. The reason for this is fairly straightforward. Because the decision makers responsible for Britain’s Dardanelle’s campaign were later compelled to defend themselves before an investigatory committee, an enormous amount of written evidence about the planning process was produced. Consequentially, the battle is one of the best documented incidents in military history. However, because those same defendants included a particularly verbose and famous individual named Winston Churchill, that same prolific body of evidence has been heavily colored by the energetic efforts of the aforementioned gentleman to clear his name. In particular, Churchill devoted an extensive word count in his six-volume history of the war to defending his decision making regarding the Dardanelles. Thus, the paradox is that when it comes to Gallipoli and the Dardanelles, we actually know a great deal about the campaign, but the things that we know are clouded by Churchill’s widely circulated version of the story.

To understand the military debacle that unfolded in the Turkish straits, we may as well go back to the beginning. Conveniently, the straits campaign can be ascribed a clean date of origin. On December 30, 1914, the British military attaché to Russia, Major General Sir John Hanbury-Williams, was summoned to the Stavka (army high command) in Baranovichi (modern Belarus) to meet with the Tsar’s cousin and Russian commander in chief, Grand Duke Nicholas. The Grand Duke informed his guest that the Turks had deployed a large army to the Caucasus which was now advancing across the front. The Grand Duke wove a thick cloud of melodrama, complaining that Russia had “been forced to deprive the Caucasus of the better part of its troops” in order to fight the Germans. He suggested, however, that “there were many places in the Ottoman Empire where any force brought to bear could broadly compensate for Turkish victories in the Caucasus”, and suggested in particular that a threat to Constantinople could be very helpful in this regard.

Without explicitly saying so, the Grand Duke was asking for a British diversionary attack against the Ottomans, and in a moment of remarkable diplomatic efficiency, this ad hoc meeting at the Stavka snowballed into full fledged operational planning in London in a matter of days. Almost immediately after concluding his meeting with the Grand Duke, Hanbury-Williams boarded a train for Petrograd, accompanied by Prince Nikolai Kudashev (the head of the Stavka’s diplomatic bureau). Upon arriving in the Tsarist capital, the pair met with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, and the British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan. On New Years Day, Buchanan dispatched an urgent telegram back to the British foreign ministry in London asking that Britain contrive precisely such a diversionary operation to relieve the pressure on the Russians. The following day (January 2), the foreign ministry passed this request to Churchill (First Lord of the Admiralty) and Kitchener (Secretary of State for War). By the end of the day, Kitchener and Churchill had concluded that the only suitable operational schema was an assault on the Dardanelles.

The efficiency of this communication chain was breathtaking. The Grand Duke’s speculative and thinly veiled request for a diversion spiraled into serious operational planning in London in a matter of days. In a strange way, however, these discussions were moving so fast that they were outpacing events on the ground. It was precisely during those three days of urgent communication and discussion that the Ottoman Third Army was brought to the verge of total disintegration at the Battle of Sarikamish, presaging a decisive Russian victory on the Caucasian front. By January 2nd, the “urgent” situation in the Caucasus had been completely reversed, and the very premise of the Grand Duke’s request for a diversionary strike had become obsolete. This, however, had no meaningful effect on the planning process, which in just a few days had already taken on a powerful momentum of its own.

The reason was fairly straightforward. Even before the Grand Duke’s request for a diversionary strike, the British war cabinet was already thinking about where new fronts could be opened to evade the stalemate which had descended on the heavily fortified western front. While Churchill, at the time, was still an advocate of operations in the Baltic, other parties on the British War Council had already come around to the idea that the best way to undermine Germany might be to open a front against Turkey, particularly because Allied victories against the Turks might compel neutral Balkan states like Bulgaria and Greece to enter the war on the side of the Entente. A December 28th memorandum from Maurice Hankey, the secretary of the War Council, argued that “Germany can perhaps be struck most effectively, and with the most lasting results on the peace of the world, through her allies, and particularly through Turkey.” The Grand Duke’s request, then, served only to accelerate a discussion that was already happening in London.

Churchill, for his part, was initially skeptical about an operation against the Dardanelles, and in their initial discussions on January 2 it seems that he and Kitchener were thinking only of a demonstrative attack, rather than a real effort to break into the Turkish straits. However, in the two weeks that followed Churchill made an abrupt turn and became an energetic advocate of the emerging operation, and eventually the “owner” of much of the blame.

What happened was this: on January 3rd, Churchill wired Admiral Sackville Carden, commander of Britain’s Mediterranean squadron, asking bluntly if he considered “the forcing of the Dardanelles by ships alone a practical operation.” This was a crucial point, as in January 1915 the British had no troops to spare for a new land front of any real scale. To Churchill’s surprise, Carden replied that, while the Turkish straits could not be “rushed”, he believed it was possible to systematically break them open from the sea. Then, on January 7, Churchill received an intelligence report that the most powerful ship in the Turkish fleet had been put out of action for several months after hitting a mine. This was the SMS Goeben, a powerful German battlecruiser which had taken refuge in Constantinople and been “adopted” into the Turkish navy after being caught out in the Mediterranean at the outbreak of hostilities; in fact, the refusal of the Turks to evict the Goeben had been a proximate cause of Turkey’s formal entry into the war. Finally, on January 12, Jacky Fisher suggested to Churchill that Britain’s new super-dreadnought, the Queen Elizabeth, which was en route to the Mediterranean for gunnery trials, could participate in the operation and test her massive 15-inch guns on the Turkish fortifications. The availability of the Queen Elizabeth significantly improved the prospects, in Churchill’s eyes, given that the Mediterranean fleet (a deprioritized British command) consisted mainly of lighter battlecruisers and aged pre-dreadnought battleships.

The net effect of all this information was to completely change Churchill’s mind about the feasibility of a Dardanelles operation. He seems to have been surprised that Admiral Carden answered favorably about the prospects of breaking into the straits, and the sudden prospect of conducting the operation with greatly more favorable force ratios (that is, with the addition of the Queen Elizabeth and the subtraction of the Goeben) made a strong impression. Thus, on January 13, Churchill surprised everyone on the War Council by submitting a four point plan to force the Turkish straits from the sea. He concluded his proposal by arguing: "Once the forts were reduced the minefields would be cleared, and the Fleet would proceed up to Constantinople and destroy the Goeben. They would have nothing to fear from field guns or rifles, which would be merely an inconvenience.” Famous last words, but the operation was on.

Unfortunately, having started down the Turkish path, twin factors were conspiring to drive the British into a full fledged military disaster. First, diplomatic and strategic considerations forced the British into a naval-only assault on the Dardanelles by excluding other operational choices. Meanwhile, intense efforts by German officers working with the Turks were turning the Dardanelles into the single best defended and most professionally manned position in the Ottoman Empire. In other words, despite having enormous operational range and many choices, Churchill and his colleagues were unwittingly driving directly for the most impregnable Ottoman position on the map. All of these factors were independent, but they had a deadly synergy. We will review them in turn.

The Ottoman Empire had a vast littoral which was exposed to British naval power. In fact, at the time that the Dardanelles Operation first began to gain momentum, the British were already fighting the Turks in the Shatt Al Arab, and of course staring them down across the Sinai from the Suez Canal - and there were other potential places to open a front. In fact, Lloyd George (soon to be Prime Minister, but at the time Chancellor of the Exchequer) had suggested back in December that Britain might land forces on the Syrian coastline, where they could sever the Baghdad railway and slice apart Ottoman internal lines of supply and communication. In innumerable ways, this was a much easier prospect than forcing the Dardanelles, but diplomatic concerns precluded it.

The problem lay with the French, who had postwar claims on the region and were already greatly irritated with the question of command in the Dardanelles Operation. Per the terms of an agreement signed in August 1914, France had overall allied naval command in the Mediterranean, with Britain taking the reins in the North Sea, Atlantic, and the Channel. Yet, because the British would be committing the bulk of the force to the Dardanelles, Churchill insisted that Admiral Carden must have command, much to the chagrin of the French naval minister. In order to assuage French suspicion, Churchill had to pledge that the French would have command of any operations “in the Levant” (meaning Syria), and the British foreign ministry had to give an assurance that no British troops would be landed on the Levantine coast. Thus, the idea of severing Ottoman communications with an assault on the Syrian coastline - militarily, a highly sensible solution - had to be ruled out simply to keep the French happy.

It was not just the French, however, who factored into the decision to force the straits. The strategic concept had already escalated far beyond a simple diversion or demonstration, and London was now thinking about opening the straits to allow Russian grain exports to ship out of the Black Sea, and munitions for the Russian Army to flow in. The question of forcing the Dardanelles was also intrinsically linked with Britain’s Balkan policy. In early 1915, countries like Greece, Romania, and Bulgaria were still neutral, and it was greatly hoped that British operations against the straits could bring one or more of these powers into the war on the side of the Allies. In particular, the British had high hopes that Greek troops could participate in the operation and form the bulk of the ground force.

Unfortunately, Greek participation was ruled out by the Russians, who unequivocally vetoed any Greek contribution to the operation. The issue for the Russians was very simple: Constantinople (which they called Tsargrad) was the ultimate war prize for the Tsarist government, and they would not under any circumstances allow it to be taken by the Greeks. Sir Edward Grey had the unpleasant task of informing the war council that “the last thing the Russians wanted was to see anyone else making a triumphal entry into Constantinople.”

The Russians had the British over a barrel when it came to Constantinople. The city had to be unequivocally earmarked as a Russian prize in any postwar arrangement, to the point where the Russians threatened (on multiple occasions) to make a separate peace with Germany and simply drop out of the war if this condition was not met. This meant that the Greeks could not contribute ground troops, but the Russians were similarly unwilling to commit to provide troops of their own. There was a general sense that ground troops would have to be involved at some point - as Churchill pointed out at a January 28 meeting, even if the British fleet managed to force its way into the straits, “they cannot open these channels to merchant ships so long as the enemy is in possession of the shore.” Kitchener gave a vague assurance that he would “find the men”, whether in the form of Commonwealth troops from Australia and New Zealand, or the reserve 29th Division in England, but the idea was that ground forces would be made available only after the fleet had opened the straits.

This was a mess, but it is not hard to take the sum of all these factors. Churchill and Kitchener had set the British on the path to open a new front against the Turks, but the need to pacify French outrage ruled out any operations against the Levantine coast. The strategic import of opening naval traffic into the Black Sea further ensured that only a direct assault on the straits would do. Finally, Russia’s veto of Greek participation, Britain’s general lack of troops, and Russia’s own inability to contribute, ensured that there were no ground forces available to participate at the outset. Add it all up, and you get the Dardanelles plan: an attempt to break open the Turkish straits with a naval assault. Nelson’s apocryphal adage be damned. The ships would have to fight forts.

Unfortunately for the British, they were now on a course to attack the most formidably defended sector of the Ottoman coast. At the outbreak of war, the defenses on the Turkish straits were considered highly vulnerable, but much had changed since then. Russian intelligence had already ruled out an attack from the other side (against the Bosporus), noting that “the favorable moment for seizing the Straits has been lost.” This conclusion was, for some reason, not shared with the British.

The critical development for the Turks had been the arrival of German Admiral Guido von Usedom, who was dispatched from Berlin in the autumn of 1914 to head up Sonderkommando (Special Command) Turkey, bringing with him a host of naval defense specialists, nearly 200 gunnery experts, and several batteries of heavy guns, including 14 inch Krupp models. In the months following his arrival, Usedom and his team conducted a major remodeling of the Turkish defenses: camouflaging guns, reinforcing casemates, erecting dummy batteries to draw enemy fire, and establishing eight mobile batteries which could deliver plunging fire on enemy ships and were very difficult for the enemy to target. The net result of all this was that the Dardanelles defenses, which in August 1914 possessed just twenty shore howitzers, now boasted 235 guns dispersed between fortifications and mobile batteries. Meanwhile, no less than eleven lines of naval mines, with a total of 323 mines, had been laid in the strait.

Furthermore, Usedom’s gunnery experts had been hard at work instructing the Turkish gun crews, instilling not only the requisite technical skills but also a thoroughly German sense of discipline. The Turks, for their part, profoundly impressed Usedom with their work ethic and rapid improvement, and he wired reports back to Berlin gushing about the great success bringing the Turkish gunners up to speed. Usedom then dispersed his German noncommissioned officers around the Dardanelles command, so that each gun crew had at least one German in it. While the British had a generally poor view of both the Turkish proclivity to fight and the state of the Dardanelles defenses, Usedom felt, with justification, that he had organized a motivated, disciplined, and schematically sound defense.

Taking the balance of all these factors, we get a fairly straightforward proposition. The British fleet (with a small French attachment) massed at Lemnos in the Aegean Sea was preparing to batter its way through a gauntlet of fortresses, augmented by mobile shore batteries, to clear the path for minesweepers to enter the straits and unblock the lane. No ground troops were initially available to assist the operation, although Churchill was holding on to vague promises from Kitchener that troops would be made available later, at an unspecified date for an unspecified purpose. The British did not seem to have an accurate assessment of the Turkish strength, or the many improvements that Usedom had made to the position. On the whole, strategic inertia had simply drawn the British into this course, with Churchill insisting repeatedly that the fleet could get through the straits on its own, while hedging his bets by maintaining that ground troops would eventually be necessary to fully secure the channel. All that was left was to give it a try.

The Dardanelles

The Dardanelles campaign began at 9:51 AM on February 19, 1915 with a farcical exchange of long range fire. The allied fleet which had massed at Lemnos was a formidable, if aged force. Admiral Carden had at his disposal a sizeable armada of 18 capital ships. Of these, the two hardest hitters were the brand new superdreadnought Queen Elizabeth, armed with eight 15-inch guns, and the battlecruiser Inflexible with eight 12-inch guns. The bulk of the fleet was comprised of pre-dreadnought battleships, twelve British and four French, armed with a total of fifty six 12-inch and eight 10-inch guns. This was hardly a fleet to rival the powerful British Grand Fleet or the German High Seas Fleet, which glared at each other across the North Sea, but for a secondary theater it was certainly an imposing force.

The Dardanelles defenses consisted of two critical zones. The more imposing by far was the section of the strait some ten miles upstream of the entrance, known appropriately as the Narrows. Here, the strait tightened significantly, so that it was less than a mile wide in places, and it was here that the bulk of the Ottoman firepower (and all of the minefields) were arranged. At the mouth of the Dardanelles, however, where the strait opens into the Aegean Sea, the passage was much wider (2.5 miles), and defended by a small cluster of forts: Seddul Bahr and the Cape Helles forts on the Gallipoli peninsula (the northern, European side of the strait) and Kum Kale on the southern, Asian side. All of these forts were of relatively archaic build (Seddul Bahr, for example, was a seventeenth century edifice), and modestly armed. All told, the Turkish emplacements at the mouth of the straits disposed of sixteen heavy guns and seven medium tubes.

Bearing in mind that Carden disposed of a significant volume of naval artillery, the results of the opening action on February 19 left much to be desired. Reducing the defenses at the mouth of the straits ought to have been the easiest phase of the operation, due to both the lack of minefields outside the straits, the relatively manageable size of the Turks batteries, and the fact that the allied fleet - firing from the Aegean - had a room to maneuver that would be sorely lacking once they progressed into the strait itself. The initial British attack, however, had little effect. Carden’s battleships, led off by the HMS Cornwallis, opened fire from extended ranges in the mid-morning and met no response from the defenders. The British ships were beyond Turkish ranges, but at such long distances it was impossible for the Allies to assess the damage that their opening salvos had done. At 2:00 PM, Carden closed to six thousand yards and fired again. Shortly after 4:00, the British finally came into range and the Turks opened up, with the British immediately pulling back. By 5:00 PM, Carden abandoned the attack and withdrew.

With the opening bombardment of February 19, Carden had wasted the element of surprise and fired 139 shells, which did virtually no damage to the Turkish batteries and killed only four defending personnel (two Germans and two Turks). The basic problem, as such, was that the defending batteries could really only be knocked out by striking the guns directly, but at long ranges the unspotted naval fire was woefully inaccurate against dug in targets on land. If Carden was hoping to open up the operation with a bang, he had failed.

With the element of surprise lost, Carden was now foiled by bad weather which forced a five day delay before he could attack again. As the fleet waited for the weather to clear, the British renewed their diplomatic offensive and sent out feelers to see if either the Greeks or the Russians wanted to get a piece of the action. The Greeks answered favorably, with the Anglophile Prime Minister offering three divisions to deploy to the Gallipoli Peninsula to provide a much needed land component for the operation, but the proposal was again scuttled by the Russians, who were playing a very effective diplomatic game. The Russians again categorically vetoed any Greek involvement, and counterbalanced this with a vague and non-binding offer to contribute an Army Corps which would get involved only after the British had forced the Dardanelles and destroyed the Turkish fleet. To make matters worse, Sazonov issued a threat (relayed through the French ambassador, Maurice Paleologue) that unless Russia was guaranteed Constantinople and the straits, he would resign. The meaning of this threat was clear: Paleologue informed Paris that if Russia’s demands were not met, Sazonov would be replaced by Sergei Witte, who was widely known as a Germanophile. Per Paleologue’s interpretation, Sazonov was essentially threatening that Russia would sign a separate peace with Germany unless she was guaranteed Constantinople.

The upshot of all this was immense strain on the British decision makers, who were being pressed on one side by Sazonov’s diplomatic offensive, and on the other by the surprisingly tenacious Turkish defense. On February 25th, Carden set back to reducing the outer forts and remained frustrated by the ineffectuality of gunfire. The British were only able to gain access to the entrance of the straits after landing demolition parties, which were able destroy several Ottoman batteries. This suggested, of course, that a mixed-amphibious solution would eventually be necessary, but as Carden’s entire ground complement consisted only of a few companies of Royal Marines, his ability to employ this strategy at scale was lacking.

Having broken into the mouth of the strait, Carden might have felt that he was gaining momentum. He was not. Once inside the straits, the British ships had come into the teeth of Usedom’s mobile batteries, for which they simply did not have a good answer. The problem was a basic matter of spotting. The mobile howitzer batteries, located at a good distance inland, could unleash “plunging fire” - high arcing shells that crashed down on the British ships - from firing points beyond the British line of sight, compelling the British to fire blindly back. British seaplanes, attempting to fly over the defenders to spot the batteries, were chased off by raking rifle fire. Meanwhile, the allied minesweepers (converted fishing vessels) now attempting to move into the channel served as veritable sitting ducks for the enemy howitzers.

At this stage in the operation, the crucial days of March 10-13 reveal the emerging British discomfort and the looming operational crisis. On March 10, Lord Kitchener at long last agreed to assemble a ground force to support the operation, which would be built around the 29th Division (to be dispatched from England a few days later) augmented by units of Australian and New Zealand origin which were now beginning to assemble on Lemnos. Although the belated decision to form a ground component, under General Sir Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton, was most welcome, it would not be available for many weeks, and its particular purpose was not yet clear. On March 12, Sazonov’s diplomatic squeeze (still directed mainly through Paleologue) finally paid off, and the British foreign ministry endorsed Russia’s postwar claim on Constantinople and the straits. Finally, on March 13 Admiral Carden and his second in command, Admiral de Robeck, reached the conclusion that their slow and systematic attempt to reduce the defenses was simply not working, and that “a heavy concerted bombardment and rush through the Dardanelles was to be considered.”

Taken together, it is clear that the British were on the verge of an operational crisis. On the one hand, Kitchener had finally agreed to assemble a ground contingent in Lemnos, which opened up a range of new possibilities. However, the accumulation of the ground force was progressing slowly, and it began at precisely the same time that the Naval commanders in the Mediterranean, particularly Carden, displayed fraying nerves and an increased sense of urgency. British planning was now pulling in two directions. Admiral Sir Henry Jackson, for example, counseled that the straits could not be forced in earnest until troops had been landed to clear out the enemy’s mobile howitzer batteries, while Churchill took the opposite approach and urged Carden to abandon “caution and deliberate methods” in favor of an aggressive push to “overwhelm the forts at the Narrows.”

Taken together, the second week of March ought to have been the moment for a systematic reevaluation of the operation. By signing off on Russia’s postwar claim to Constantinople and the Straits, Britain had essentially committed to expanded strategic goals which now implied the total defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman state. Almost simultaneously, Carden and Churchill had come to the conclusion that their existing approach to systematically reducing the forts was not working, but somewhat surprisingly they did not seem inclined to amend their thinking based on Kitchener’s decision to organize a ground force. The unfortunate result was that the British opted to attempt a more aggressive push to open the straits with the fleet before the ground force was staged. This created immense operational confusion, particularly for the ground troops now beginning to accumulate in Lemnos. Hamilton recalled that Kitchener told him, rather unhelpfully, that “he hoped I would not have to land at all”, and that “he thought there was no great hustle.” In effect, the Army was forming a contingent on Lemnos under the rosy assumption that the fleet would succeed in forcing the straits alone, leaving Hamilton with the relatively easy task of mopping up and occupying a defeated Constantinople.

On March 17, the mood in the British camp had improved significantly. Hamilton had just arrived in Lemnos to oversee the assembly and preparation of the ground force, while the previous day Admiral Carden had resigned his post (citing poor health), bequeathing naval command to de Robeck, who was a much stronger and more aggressive personality. The general assumption, according to the War Council, was that a renewed naval attack would succeed in breaking open the straits, leaving Hamilton’s ground force available for “subsequent operations” of an unspecified nature.

The following day, March 18, began well enough, with a clear sky and a light, warm breeze dissipating the morning fog. De Robeck, energized by his new command, was fully prepared for what he expected to be the final push through the narrows. The plan, as such, was for a leapfrogging reduction of the Turkish defenses throughout the day. First, a line of the most powerful ships (including the Queen Elizabeth and the Inflexible) would advance into the narrows and destroy or suppress the forts from long range. Having silenced the guns in the forts, the second line of battleships would move forward to engage the smaller batteries on the shore and provide cover for the minesweepers to plod into the narrows and clear a channel 900 yards wide in the minefields. With the minefields cleared, the narrows would then be open for the battleships to advance to near point blank range and finish off the shore defenses. If everything went well, de Robeck expected to be through the strait, loitering in the Sea of Marmara and bombarding Constantinople the following day.

The attack commenced at 11:00 AM on March 18 and began much like the opening action of the campaign, with the first line of British ships bombarding the defenses from beyond the range of the Turkish guns. With no return fire coming from the shores of the narrows, it was difficult for the British to gauge the damage they were doing. It was clear that they had scored some strong hits on the forts, and just past noon de Robeck judged that it was time to dice things up at close range. He sent his second line (comprised of the four French pre-dreadnoughts) forward to see what they could do at more intimate distances, with his powerful first line trailing them and continually pouring on the fire.

It was at this point, as the battle spilled over into the afternoon hours, that things began to go horribly wrong. As the allied fleet finally pulled into range, Turkish guns opened up from both sides of the narrows, choking the channel with smoke, splashes, and splinters. Most of the Turkish guns were too small to do mortal damage to a well armored battleship, but they played havoc on the superstructures of the ships and confused the allied spotting.

A direct hit to the Inflexible’s fire control station, for example, sent fire and splinters streaming through the lightly armored post, which was perched high on her forward mast. Three men were killed and five wounded, including the battlecruiser’s gunnery officer, Rudolf Verner, who suffered a partially severed hand, fractured skull, a shattered leg, and a “pulped” arm. Retaining consciousness, Verner put on one of those remarkable displays of stoicism and bravery which often get washed out in the grand stories of war. He said “Thank you, old chap”, to a man who helped him lay down, then reported to the bridge: “Fore-control out of action. We are all dead and dying up here. Send some morphia.” Verner and the other wounded in the fire control station were eventually rescued, with Inflexible’s second in command suffering severe burns ascending the steel ladder to the post, which was scalding hot from the flames that now raged around the mast. These little vignettes - Verner politely asking for morphine, and a rescuer scorching his hands ascending a superheated steel ladder - are a poignant reminder that, for all the interest accruing to grand operational histories and designs, war is always the accumulation of innumerable human dramas which are life and death for those involved.

Worse still was the fate of the French battleship Bouvet, which was suddenly roiled by an enormous explosion at around 2:00 PM. The scene was practically surreal: in less than sixty seconds, she keeled, capsized, and disappeared entirely, taking her captain and 639 men down with her. Some 66 men were rescued (those that had been fortunate enough to be on or near the deck when the sinking began), who survived by running down the side and across the bottom of the ship as it rolled over, like hamsters on a wheel. Losing a battleship in the blink of an eye was bad enough, but for de Robeck and the other watching crews, the chilling element was that it was not clear what exactly had killed the Bouvet. Most assumed that a shell had penetrated into her magazine, but nobody had seen it happen.

The attack was misfiring badly. At 4:00, noting a slackening in the Turkish fire, de Robeck sent his minesweepers in. Their performance left much to be desired; having cleared a grand total of three mines from the first belt, they came under withering howitzer fire and retreated frantically back towards the entrance of the Straits. At 4:11, precisely as the minesweeping operation was collapsing, the Inflexible struck a mine near the Asian shore, in an area where no minefields had been expected. Now listing, Inflexible was forced to withdraw. The heavily bleeding Verner, still conscious, was transferred to a hospital ship to have his shattered arm amputated. He told the surgeon: “Tell my people that I played the game and stuck it out.” He died from his accumulated trauma a few hours later.

Shortly after the Inflexible limped out of the battle, Irresistible also struck a mine, but in her case the engine rooms flooded almost immediately, leaving her adrift. Her captain, notably, ran up a green flag which indicated that he believed he had been torpedoed. Fortunately for the crew, a destroyer was on station which allowed most of the men to safely abandon ship, but Irresistible was now left adrift. When HMS Ocean tried to pull alongside to tow the listless ship away, she likewise hit a mine and her crew were forced to evacuate.

It was at this point, as afternoon wore on into the evening, that de Robeck pulled the plug on the attack and withdrew. Of the twelve battleships that comprised his three main battle lines, three were now total losses (the Bouvet, which had sunk in such spectacular style, and the Ocean and Irresistible which were now drifting and abandoned), and three more were out of action, including the Inflexible and the French Gaulois and Suffren, both of which were partially flooded after taking hits near the waterline. De Robeck did have ships in reserve, but on the whole the action of March 18 had scratched off six of his eighteen capital ships. The worst part of all this, for de Robeck, was that he did not truly understand what was happening to his ships. Four of the lost or disabled ships (Bouvet, Ocean, Irresistible, and Inflexible) had apparently struck mines in places where they were not expected. Suspecting some sort of trick, he came to the conclusion that the Turks had devised a way to send floating mines downstream from the narrows.

In fact, unbeknownst to Allied command, the Turks had secretly laid an undetected minefield (the 11th such belt) under cover of darkness on the nights of March 7, 10, and 11. This minefield, very cleverly, was arranged much differently than the others. The first ten minefields in the Dardanelles were laid horizontally across the narrows (that is, perpendicular shore to shore) to block British access. The 11th, however, was arranged parallel to the Asian shore further up the strait, so that as the allied fleet came towards the narrows there was an undetected minefield to their right. It was upon this lateral minefield that all four of the aforementioned ships had fallen, striking mines as they attempted to maneuver under fire.

The attempt to crack open the straits had failed, and failed spectacularly. In enumerating the causes of the allied defeat, three distinct factors stand out, with important implications for future operations.

First and foremost, it had become clear that, although the firepower of modern naval artillery was extremely powerful, its use against land-based targets was limited in the absence of robust spotting and fire control. In the ideal use case, these guns were to be fired against other ships with an unobscured field of vision, with the open sea providing a clear horizon. The British had plenty of firepower, but they struggled to dial in accurate gunnery against concealed Turkish firing positions and especially against the mobile howitzer batteries which were firing “over the horizon” beyond the Allies’ field of vision. Although some efforts were made to provide spotting with aircraft and small landing parties, the communications and fire control of the day was simply inadequate for the task. In short, the British had very powerful guns which were frequently firing blind at targets they could not really see.

Secondly, the allied armada had woefully inadequate minesweeping capabilities. The minesweeping force consisted of 21 fishing trawlers requisitioned from the North Sea, with their civilian fishing crews assigned naval reserve personnel grades. Equipped with minesweeping arms and protected by improvised steel plates, the sweepers proved both skittish under fire and - even more importantly - unimaginably slow. In calm waters, they could sweep at a speed of 4 to 6 knots, but due to the gentle current that flowed out of the narrows, they could make no more than 3 knots when making their sweeping runs upstream, which is approximately the speed of a brisk walk. Furthermore, the draft of the converted trawlers was deeper than the lay of the mines, which meant they ran a constant risk of blowing up if they happened to bump an unswept mine. The makeshift armor, dangerous draft, and agonizingly slow speed combined to create a sense of intense vulnerability, particularly once they came under artillery fire. Perhaps, rather than wondering why they failed to clear the minefields, it is more appropriate to marvel that these civilian crews were able to make the attempt in the first place.

In short, therefore, the lack of accurate spotting prevented the fleet from successfully silencing the Turkish guns, and the inadequately of the sweeping vessels ensured that the mines could not be cleared, to the net effect that both elements of the Ottoman defense remained intact. When the dust cleared on March 18, only 9 of the 176 Turkish shore guns had been put out of action, and combined Turkish and German casualties were a mere 29 killed and 66 wounded. Finally, the third major intruding factor - the presence of an undetected parallel minefield running along the Asian shoreline - ensured that the failure of the allied attack carried an exorbitant cost, with these undetected mines claiming four battleships in the space of only a few hours.

Churchill remained unmoved, and expressed his belief that the Turks were running low on ammunition and that their morale was on the verge of breaking. The former point is debatable (the defenders were beginning to run short on shells for their biggest guns, but overall shell stocks were still healthy), and the second point is a farce. However, Churchill’s enduring enthusiasm for the naval-only attack plan was now a moot point. After conferring on March 22, de Robeck and Hamilton decided that the naval assault had categorically failed, and it was time for the army to get in on the action and destroy the shore defenses so that the sweepers could finally work in relative safety. The British would have to land on the Gallipoli peninsula.

Gallipoli

The Battle of Gallipoli was shaped in the first instance by a pair of nearly simultaneous discussions which occurred among the opposing leadership groups. On March 22, Admiral de Robeck hosted a small meeting aboard the Queen Elizabeth, which included General Hamilton (in overall command of the Mediterranean ground forces), Hamilton’s chief of staff, Major General Walter Braithwaite, and Lieutenant General Sir William Riddell Birdwood, who commanded the forces of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) which, along with the 29th Division which was still en route from England, was to form the bulk of the Gallipoli ground force. The conclusion of their discussion was twofold: first, de Robeck agreed that the time had come to scrap the naval-only assault and land troops on the Gallipoli peninsula; secondly, they decided against the more aggressive plan proposed by Birdwood to immediately land Anzac forces without waiting for the 29th Division to arrive. The net result, then, was a decision for a full scale joint army-navy assault on the peninsula which would necessarily be pushed out until mid-April (at the very earliest) in order to allow Hamilton to stage his full army group.

The timing, both of this British command conference and their proposed landing, was rather serendipitous, because it was just two days later, on March 24, that the Ottoman War Minister, Enver Pasha, summoned the German General Otto Liman von Sanders and offered him command of the newly formed Ottoman Fifth Army group for the defense of the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli Peninsula. Thus, after several weeks of letting the Admirals hash things out (first Carden and then de Robeck for the Allies, and Usedom for the Turks and Germans), both sides had decided almost simultaneously that it was time to let the Generals (Hamilton and Sanders) take over.

Liman von Sanders had extensive experience working with the Turks, having been appointed to head a commission from Berlin aimed at helping with Ottoman military modernization in the prewar period. Indeed, the “Liman von Sanders Affair”, as it came to be known, was a major friction point in the prewar diplomatic breakdown, with the Allies fearing German penetration into the Middle East. Notwithstanding the long relationship between the Turks and Liman von Sanders, it was no small thing for Enver Pasha to swallow his pride and give command of his best and most strategically critical army group to a German.

The Turks, however, had a good stream of intelligence which had tipped them off that a big amphibious operation was in the works, and Enver knew that the stakes were high. The intelligence aspect of the Dardanelles-Gallipoli campaign was rather unique, owing to the bizarre administration status of the British bases. The British had set up shop on the Aegean islands of Lemnos and Imbros, which were Greek territories. Notably, however, Greece had not taken possession of the islands (formerly longtime Ottoman holdings) until very recently, with the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. What this meant, in effect, was that the British bases supporting the Straits campaign were on islands with sizeable Turkish populations, with the civilian administration in the hands of the neutral Greeks. The upshot of all this was that the British forces were essentially subject to persistent surveillance by local Turks, who were free to pass along what they saw to contacts in mainland Turkey. Enver Pasha was therefore fully aware that a sizeable allied ground force was assembling offshore in the Aegean, and that it was an appropriate time to swallow a bit of Turkish pride and give the Dardanelles command to the best man available, whom he judged to be Liman von Sanders.

In the aftermath of the Gallipoli Campaign, as we have previously noted, command decisions at every step were thoroughly autopsied and roundly criticized, and Hamilton’s choice of landing zones was no exception. A fair evaluation of the options, however, reveals that both Hamilton and Liman made essentially sensible decisions in a difficult situation.

The foundational fact to understand is that there were really only four suitable places on the “outer face” of the Gallipoli Peninsula which had terrain suitable for landing troops at scale. These were Cape Helles, on the southwestern tip of the peninsula; Gaba Tepe and Suvla Bay on the western face; and at the northeastern “neck” of the Peninsula, near the village of Bulair. Of these, the neck at Bulair was by far the most interesting. The neck of the Gallipoli Peninsula where it adjoins Thrace is very narrow, pinching to just under three miles wide at the narrowest point. A British landing here carried the obvious possibility of severing the peninsula’s connectivity to Thrace, which would cut off the bulk of Liman’s Fifth Army and trap it. Liman was acutely aware of this, and noted that a landing at Bulair could leave Fifth Army “cut off from every land communication.” This was not just a theoretical exercise for Liman - having established his headquarters in the town of Gallipoli in the center of the peninsula, he risked being cut off and trapped along with his troops. For Hamilton, however, there was a counterbalancing risk from the Bulair option: by landing his troops on the northern end of the peninsula, he would be exposing them to possible counterattack from the Turkish First Army, which was stationed in Thrace. Essentially, among the few possible landing spots in Gallipoli, Bulair and the “neck” was far and away the high risk, high reward option.

Knowing, then, that he needed to defend a few critical points, Liman chose what was an essentially sensible deployment plan, albeit weighted by a preoccupation with ensuring that the British did not cut him off at Bulair. Liman had six divisions at his disposal, two of which (the 3rd and 11th) had to be stationed on the Asian side of the straits to defend the forts. That left four divisions to defend the Gallipoli Peninsula on the European side of the Dardanelles. Liman opted to position one division (9th) at the southwestern tip, around Cape Helles, while holding two more (7th and 5th) at the northern end to defend Bulair, which he clearly understood to be the most sensitive spot on the map. That left his last division (19th, under the command of the future Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal) which he posted inland in the center of the peninsula, where it could be rerouted where it was needed as a sort of operational reserve.

The upshot of all this was that, among the possible landing spots in Gallipoli, the best defended was far and away Bulair. Cape Helles was adequately manned by the 9th Division, while Gaba Tepe and Suvla Bay were thinly manned, though Kemal’s 19th Division was in position to reinforce the defenses if needed. Ironically, Liman’s preoccupation with Bulair ensured that it was so robustly manned that Hamilton decided not to land there at all. Instead, the Allied landing scheme called for landings essentially everywhere else: French forces would land on the Asian side of the straits, the British 29th Division would assault five different beaches at Cape Helles, and the ANZAC forces would land at Gaba Tepe. Bulair would receive no landings, but a naval detachment would approach the shore to make a demonstration bombardment, hopefully fixing much of Liman’s force in place in anticipation of a landing that would never come.

Thus, criticisms of Hamilton’s landing scheme tend to miss the point. From a purely geographic schema, Bulair was certainly the best place to land, as it offered the opportunity to cut off all the Turkish forces on the peninsula and win the “big victory.” Since the sea was fundamentally a maneuver space in this campaign, critics of Hamilton emphasize his failure to leverage this mobility. Liman, however, was well aware of the vulnerability at Bulair, and had positioned two of his six divisions in the area, with the potential for additional forces scrambling in from Thrace. If the sea is indeed a maneuver space, in this instance it was almost certainly correct for Hamilton to use it to avoid the strength of the enemy’s defense.

In the Second World War, a nagging doctrinal disagreement lingered, centered on whether it was appropriate to support amphibious landings with preparatory naval bombardment. On paper, it obviously seems wise to soften up enemy defenses with heavy artillery fire, but skeptics argued that the results of such bombardments were not worth the downside of alerting defenders to the incoming landing. The Allies in the second war would try it both ways, at times applying a generous preparatory barrage, and at times attempting to gain the element of surprise by rushing the beach unannounced.

Gallipoli showed from the beginning why this debate existed in the first place, and why there was no cut and dry answer. As the allied armada approached the Gallipoli Peninsula in the early morning hours of the 25th, Admiral de Robeck noted that the night was “calm and very clear, with a brilliant moon.” Clear visibility makes it easier to oversee a complex landing operation, but it also helps the enemy. At 3:20 AM, a few hours before the first British troops made it ashore at Cape Helles, Turkish sentries from the 26th Regiment had already alerted command that the enemy fleet was approaching on the horizon. When the British naval guns opened up from extreme ranges at 4:30 AM, it was unmistakable that something big was coming. The troops that hit the shore at 6:00, therefore, ran into a defense that was essentially fully alert, with predictably deleterious consequences.

Read more

“It is impossible to hold an olive branch in one hand and fire a pistol with the other.”

So quipped Wilhelm Solf, a diplomat with the Imperial German Foreign Ministry. As Europe groped its way through the mass casualties and civilizational exhaustion of the First World War, Solf was one of the few key personnel in the German government to advocate for a negotiated peace in early 1917, as the war crossed its halfway mark. Of course, we know that World War One did not end in 1917 - attempts to negotiate a settlement collapsed almost instantly, with the allies rejecting German proposals outright. Strangely, one of the main points of discontent did not even relate to war aims or the particular terms of peace, but rather to the issue of blame. Both the Central Powers and the Allied Entente were adamant that the other side ought to formally accept the blame for the war, and talks never really progressed farther than that.

The abortive peace process was further muddled by the intervention of US President Woodrow Wilson. Riding the confidence won by his victory in the 1916 election, Wilson felt that he had political freedom of action to intervene more actively in Europe, and the United States - perhaps alone among all the powers of the world - seemed to have levers of influence over both parties in the conflict. Wilson’s agenda, as such, was to negotiate a “peace without victory”, with neither side annihilating the other, in the spirit of comity and mutual respect. A harsh victory’s peace, according to Wilson, would be felt as a humiliation by the defeated party, and breed the conditions for future war by seeding intractable resentment and revanchism.

Knowing what we know about the Treaty of Versailles, which was just this sort of deeply resented punitive peace, Wilson’s comments seem prescient. Unfortunately, the idealistic (some would say naïve) American President had failed to read the room. His Peace Without Victory speech was well received by the domestic American audience, but rejected as anathema by virtually everyone else, including not only the Germans but also the Anglo-French Entente.

Wilson, aloof across the ocean, failed to understand two very important things. First, that Europe’s blood was up after years of carnage. This was particularly the case after Germany’s botched attempt to extend peace feelers to the allies; the Entente was outraged at what they saw as insulting German terms, while the Germans in turn were in a defiant mood after the Entente’s abrupt rejection of those same terms. Secondly, Wilson failed to grasp that he was not viewed as an impartial mediator, particularly by the Germans. While he may have viewed himself as a statesman with a gifted touch, uniquely positioned to halt the bloodshed, Berlin fundamentally did not trust him or the allies, and preferred instead to ruthlessly exploit all its kinetic powers. Peace Without Victory may sound charitable and cozy, but victory was much more appealing. After millions of casualties, all parties preferred to go for the win rather than limping away with a draw.

At the risk of forcing the analogy too bluntly, we find ourselves with a very similar situation in Ukraine. President Trump, like Wilson, came off the high of his election victory fully determined to insinuate himself into the war as a peacemaker. His commitment to ending the war, like Wilson’s speech of January 22, 1917, played very well with his domestic audience, but resonated little across the Atlantic. Like the Germans a century ago, Russia does not see the American President as an honest broker, and he has discovered that his leverage is not so great as he thought. More importantly, it is as true now as it was in 1917 that it is damnably difficult to convince warring states to stand down when their blood is up, and to walk away from the sunk cost of so much bloodshed. The motif of blame has even made its return, with many European parties writing off the idea of concessions to Russia simply on the basis that Moscow is the guilty party in this war.

Subscribe now

We have a First World War problem, and it will resolve itself with a First World War solution, when one warring party succeeds in exhausting and breaking the other. As Ukrainian and Russian negotiating teams met in Istanbul for their brief token negotiations, which were predictably non-productive, the two parties continued to exchange strikes in the usual ratios, and the Russian Army ground forward along the line of contact. Wilhelm Solf’s olive branch was never seriously in play, but the pistol remains operational. Blood is up in Ukraine, and it will continue to soak the ground.

The Collapse of Diplomacy (Again)

The recent Istanbul “peace talks” between Ukraine and Russia began and ended in the blink of an eye, making it obvious (as if it were not already) that nothing productive could come from the discussion. The second round of talks, which took place on June 2nd, lasted for about an hour, which is scarcely enough time for diplomatic niceties. Predictably, nothing was agreed upon except for a tentative deal to exchange POWs and a KIA remains swap, which has already begun to come off the rails.

The problem with diplomacy right now is that there is little appetite to actually negotiate a deal, but all three major parties (Ukraine, Russia, and the United States) are willing to engage in performative diplomacy with objectives that are orthogonal to each other. It is unlikely that any of the negotiating teams actually arrived in Istanbul with an expectation or intention of ending the war, but they did have genuine objectives that they were trying to achieve. The issue is further obfuscated by the ancillary issue of the mineral rights deal between Ukraine and the United States, which is not directly related to the prospects for a negotiated peace, but is nonetheless an aspect of President Trump’s performative negotiating.

For Russia, the purpose of performative diplomacy is to publicly reiterate its war aims and assert confidence in its battlefield dominance. It is critical to remember that at every stage of this war, when given the opportunity, Moscow has restated the same fundamental terms, which constitute the Russian “bottom line”: these include the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the four annexed oblasts, recognition of Russian annexations, limits on the size and armaments of the Ukrainian armed forces, a ban on Ukrainian membership in military alliances, including NATO, Russian protection as an official language of Ukraine, and the lifting of international sanctions on Russia.

This amounts, in concrete terms, to Ukrainian surrender. Moscow has been hesitant to use language like this, and has certainly avoided bombastic World War style language like “unconditional surrender”, nevertheless this is what these terms represent. This is particularly the case when it comes to those cities in the annexed oblasts that are still under Ukrainian control - Kherson, Zaporizhia, Slovyansk, and Kramatorsk. Ukrainian possession of these cities remains the most important card in Kiev’s hand, and indeed the only real leverage that they have vis a vis Russia is their ability (for the time being) to force the Russian Army to sustain additional casualties to take these cities. Once Russia has those cities, Ukraine has nothing to offer in negotiations. Russian reiteration of these war aims, then, amounts to a demand that Ukraine hand over its most important negotiating assets, which is equivalent to surrender.

We should therefore understand Russia’s actions in Istanbul as an ostentatious display of force, making a thinly veiled demand for Ukrainian surrender in an act of performative diplomacy. This performance is directed squarely at Kiev and Washington.

Ukraine, however, is engaged in its own form of performative diplomacy, but the Russians are not Kiev’s intended audience. Rather, Ukraine “negotiates” as a form of signaling towards Washington (and to a lesser extent Europe). This is seen in the fact that, while Russia is demanding de facto Ukrainian surrender, Kiev is asking for stopgap measures like limited ceasefires. The goal, for Ukraine, is not to end the war, but to paint the Russians as the intransigent party, unwilling to even agree on a temporary ceasefire. As the Ukrainians see it, this creates a win-win scenario: if Russia does agree to a ceasefire, this blunts Russian momentum on the battlefield and provides an opportunity for the AFU to recalibrate; if Russia does not agree, this can be presented to the west as proof of Russian bloodthirstiness.

The result, then is, that Moscow and Kiev are approaching the question of negotiations with incompatible paradigms. Kiev, ideally, would like a ceasefire without any negotiated obligations; Moscow wants negotiations without a ceasefire. Russia has demonstrated that it is perfectly comfortable negotiating while military operations are ongoing. If the discussion collapses, it can always be resumed later, and in any case the Russian Army can continue advancing. This flexibility comes from Russian confidence that it will achieve the same strategic objectives in either case. For Ukraine, on the other hand, negotiating against a backdrop of ongoing combat is bad math, because it is the AFU that is steadily being rolled back and seeing its strategic position weaken.

Taking this to its paradigmatic conclusion, Russia and Ukraine have fundamentally different views of the relationship between military operations and negotiation. Ukraine seeks to negotiate to improve its military position: using performative diplomacy to leverage additional support from its western backers, and seeking a ceasefire to reconstitute its forces. Russia, on the other hand, uses military operations to improve its position in negotiations. The particular war aims and demands of the two parties are almost inconsequential, as the two sides do not even agree on what negotiations are for.

Meanwhile, the United States is engaged in its own equally performative form of diplomacy, which is aimed at giving Trump strategic flexibility in Ukraine. By arranging negotiations between Russia and Ukraine (and delivering Moscow his own labyrinthian peace plan), Trump can argue that he made a good faith effort to end the conflict. If it works, and a negotiated peace can be reached, he will be hailed as a great peacemaker. If it does not work, he is well positioned to wash his hands of Ukraine by passing Kiev off to the Europeans. We already see the signs of this, with Washington threatening to walk away from the peace process, preparing to wind down military assistance to Kiev, and Trump adopting increasingly apathetic language towards Ukraine.

Trump is no doubt eager to avoid turning Ukraine into his own Afghanistan, and he has the benefit of a junior partner (Europe) which is perfectly willing, if not fully able, to hold the bag for him. All in all, Trump has managed Ukraine fairly well, if one understands that his chief objective has been to gain political flexibility, rather than ending the war at all costs or achieving some sort of Ukrainian victory. Simply by getting Ukrainian and Russian negotiators into the same room (no matter how performative the proceedings), he’s gained the leeway to tell the American public that he gave it his best shot; when the negotiations collapse, he can begin washing his hands of Ukraine and hand the flaming bag to the Europeans.

With the rapid and predictably unfruitful talks in Istanbul now over, it looks like we are finally ready to move past the charade - particularly given the latest news that the US is cancelling unrelated bilateral discussions with Moscow. The thing that stands out the most from all of this, of course, is that virtually nothing has changed in the relative negotiatory stances. Notwithstanding Vice President Vance’s assertion that Russia is “asking too much”, Moscow is making exactly the same demands that it has been making for years, and it is running into the same brick wall.

Neither Trump’s election, nor the failure of Ukraine’s offensives on the Zaporizhian steppe and Kursk, nor the ongoing Russian progress clearing the Donbas has had any material effect on the negotiating calculus. These things all mattered in their own right, but curiously none of them have moved the needle on diplomatic prospects in Ukraine. The negotiations are a strangely static, sterile, performative enterprise, serving mainly as forums to allow Ukraine and Russia to publicly reiterate their aims and complaints. In that respect, they are mostly harmless. Meanwhile, the war will be fought to its conclusion.

Ukraine’s Blockbuster: The Strike War in Context

By far the biggest headliner moment of the year, at least in western media, was Ukraine’s unexpected attack on Russian strategic aviation assets at dispersed airbases deep within Russia itself. The attack, codenamed Operation Spider’s Web, was certainly notable for three distinct reasons. First, it degraded Russia’s strategic aviation (strategic bombers and Airborne Early Warning and Control), which are assets that had been essentially unscathed to this point. Secondly, the strike affected Russian bases as far afield as the Russian Far East, which damages the sense of Russian geographic standoff and the inviolability of the country’s vast dimensions. Third and finally, the platform for the attack was highly novel, with the Ukrainians launching small drones from truck-carried launchers which were assembled within Russia itself, at a covert Ukrainian base in Chelyabinsk.

One item which is interesting to note off the top is that, although the use of such a truck-mounted launching system is new, the idea itself is not, and in fact originated with the Russians themselves. More than a decade ago, Russia began playing with a system, affectionately dubbed “Club K”, which purported to fire cruise missiles from a launch platform which appeared in all respects to be an innocuous shipping container. Originally marketed as an anti-ship weapon, Club K drew scathing reviews as an exercise in perfidy, and China’s ongoing work on the theme has received similar criticism.

This, of course, makes it rather funny that Ukraine has received such widespread acclaim and unqualified praise for Operation Spider’s Web. The complaints levied against Russian and Chinese experiments with Club K type systems are essentially that it is unlawful to disguise strike systems as innocuous civilian cargo. Clearly, the Ukrainian strike is not particularly different, and merely swaps a shipborne cargo container for a truck. Now, those who have been reading my work for some time know that I am not the type to wring my hands about “international law”, which I view as an essentially nonsensical concept. International Law is not really law, but only an institutionalized mechanism for the strong to constrain the weak. Nor, for that matter, does hypocrisy really matter. What matters, and particularly in war time, is not what a state is “allowed” to do by international law, but what it is able to do, and what sort of risk appetite it has. In the case of Club K and the Spider’s Web, we see that their perfidy is our audacious covert operation. The hypocrisy does not really matter, but it is at least a little funny.

So, on to the damage from Spider’s Web itself. Initially, much of the Ukrainian infosphere was bandying numbers that were patently absurd, claiming that something like 70% of Russia’s strategic bombing fleet had been destroyed. The official claim from the Ukrainian government was that 40 bombers and early warning aircraft had been badly damaged or destroyed, which would amount to perhaps a third of the Russian inventory. A review of the video published by Ukraine, as well as satellite imagery, confirms around a dozen total losses, and western defense officials have landed on the number 20, including six destroyed TU-95s and four TU-22s.

Putting this in context, it means that Russia lost approximately 12% of its TU-95 fleet and 7% of its TU-22s, with the inventory of TU-160’s escaping unscathed. All told, that is approximately 8.5% of Russia’s strategic bombers. The issue, which constantly emerges on the Ukrainian side, are absurdly high expectations and a gross misunderstanding of what “success” means. In any realistic paradigm, destroying nearly 10% of Russian strategic bombing assets with relatively cheap drones would be viewed as a considerable success, but the ongoing expectation that Russian capabilities can simply be wiped out prevents such a realistic assessment.

We should acknowledge that the upsides here for Ukraine, lest we fall into the trap of “coping.” It’s manifestly obvious that Spider’s Web was both a schematically ingenious and technically innovative operation on the part of Ukraine. Striking at five widely separated Russian airbases with assets staged deep in the Russian heartland, Spider’s Web was both bold and ambitious, and it did not require risking particularly valuable Ukrainian assets. From a risk-reward calculation, this was clearly a success for Ukraine.

Furthermore, it must be plainly admitted that the destroyed Russian aircraft are, in fact, mostly irreplaceable. The TU-95 has been out of production for years, and the extant fleet was expected to serve a workhorse role for the foreseeable future. Russia has some production of the TU-160, with perhaps four aircraft scheduled for delivery in the near term, but this will obviously not fully replace the recent losses. Still, things could have been much worse. Losses were minimized by the total failure of strikes on two of the five target airfields. At Dyagilevo airfield near Ryazan, Russian air defenses were effective and no aircraft were hit; meanwhile, the attack on Ukrainka airfield in Amur Oblast failed when the launch container blew up. It also appears that the strike on Ivanovo Severny hit a pair of A-50 (AEWAC) aircraft but did destroy them.

We’re left with something of a mixed bag. Ukraine demonstrated a novel and ambitious ability to strike Russian assets and did destroy several irreplaceable aircraft, but the results were certainly far short of what Kiev was hoping for. The Russians have good reason to feel that they escaped the worst of it. Certainly, this will be an inducement to accelerate the construction of hardened aircraft shelters, which has been underway at a plodding pace, though obviously not at all airfields, since 2023. Thus far, the Russians have mainly prioritized hardening airfields in range of conventional Ukrainian strike systems (in places like Kursk and Crimea). Spider’s Web will likely prompt similar hardening at far flung airfields that were once thought to be relatively safe.

Add it all up, and the ledger on Spider’s Web is fairly straightforward: it was a significant success for Ukraine, in that it destroyed a good number of valuable Russian assets while risking very little. However, multiple Russian airfields escaped without losing aircraft, thanks to a mix of successful Russian air defense and Ukrainian malfunction. The Ukrainians are left with a success, but one that was much smaller than they might have hoped for.

More significantly, however, Spider’s Web degrades Russian capabilities in a way that is very unlikely to make a material impact for Ukraine itself. Losing strategic bombers, especially models that are out of production, puts more stress on the remaining airframes and pinches capacity, but these losses are highly unlikely to make anything except the most marginal reductions in Russian strikes against Ukraine.

The first and most basic reason for this, of course, is that the air-launched missiles of the strategic bombing fleet form a relatively small fraction of the munitions that Russia fires into Ukraine. The vast majority have been, and continue to be, drones (like the venerable Geran) and the ground launched Iskander. Gerans, in particular, form the most numerous munition now in use, with hundreds launched per day amid rapidly increasing production. TU-95 participation in airstrikes is a relatively scarce occasion, and no matter how loud and cinematic the Big Bears may be, they are not remotely the primary launch platform in this war.

In fact, Spider’s Web provides an opportunity to pontificate on an ancillary point of considerable importance. Russia’s use of air launched cruise missiles has slackened significantly in 2025, as they stockpile missiles not only for use in Ukraine but also for other contingencies. In fact, mere days before Spider’s Web struck at the strategic bombing force, Ukrainian media was wondering aloud about the relatively scarce Russian use of these systems, noting that air launches by strategic bombers had occurred only a handful of times this year. At the moment, the key factor constraining Russian cruise missile strikes on Ukraine is neither a shortage of missiles nor a lack of airframes, but strategic decisions to stockpile assets.

In the grand scheme of things, the loss of irreplaceable bombers does compress top-line Russian capabilities, but not in a way that changes the calculus for Ukraine right now. Destroying a grouping of TU-95s on the ground is a success for Ukraine, particularly given the cheap assets that they expended for the task, but it does not address the problem, which is that Russia has established the ability to sustainably bombard Ukraine, particularly with Iskanders and Gerans, all while stockpiling strike assets. It is possible that, in the wake of Spider’s Web, Russia is compelled to make more frequent use of the TU-160 (which has been used extremely sparingly to this point), but it is clear that Russia has many strike options and its capabilities vis a vis Ukraine remain more than adequate. This is a war of industrial attrition, and Ukraine’s covert operations are not a substitute for the capacity to wage a persistent air campaign.

Ultimately, this brings us to the broader point. Spider’s Web was an innovative example of an asymmetric operation, but this merely speaks to the presence of a broader asymmetry in this war, as such. Russia is the far richer and more powerful fighter in this conflict, which paradoxically means that it has more assets both to use and to lose. Ukraine managed to destroy nearly a dozen Russian strategic bombers, but Ukraine has no strategic bombers at all. Russia will always be vulnerable to asymmetric losses of this sort, because it possesses assets that Ukraine does not. Losing strategic bombers is not good, but it’s better than not having them at all. In this conflict, there’s still only one party that has a vast and diverse arsenal of indigenously produced strike systems, and one party that has to resort to (admittedly very clever) truck launched drone attacks due to the exhaustion of its conventional strike capabilities.

Hitting the Seam: Donbas Front Update

On the ground, the primary axis of effort for the Russian Army continues to be the central Donbas front, around the cities of Kostyantynivka and Pokrovsk. This is particularly the case now that the two axes in South Donetsk and Kursk have been largely scratched off. A brief look at the situation map reveals a swelling Russian offensive in this critical central sector. The past few years ought to have given us a good sense of caution about using words like “breakthrough” and “collapse”, so I will instead simply argue that the Ukrainian Army is in serious trouble in this sector.

The reasons are fairly straightforward, and lie not only in the escalating manpower shortages facing Ukrainian formations, but also in a triple vulnerability that exists in this particular sector of front. In short, the Pokrovsk-Kostyantynivka axis suffers from what we will call a “triple seam” which makes it operationally very vulnerable, and the current Russian offensive is aimed directly at this seam, or operational joint. Let’s elaborate.

The first seam, or vulnerability, is geographic and thus by far the easiest to understand. The basic issue is that the urban belt in western Donetsk (running from Kostyantynivka up to Slovyansk) lies on the floor of a valley. In the Kostyantynivka sector in particular, there are local high points around Chasiv Yar, Toretsk, and Ocheretyne, all of which are now firmly in Russian hands and form the bases of support for advances towards Kostyantynivka. To the west of Kostyantynivka, there is a wedge-shaped plateau which separates the city from Pokrovsk, and it is into this elevated wedge that the Russians are now advancing.

The operational problem for Ukraine, however, goes much farther than the elevation map. In fact, the elevation issue dovetails with structural problems with Ukraine’s prepared defenses. To understand this, we must first remember the state of the front in 2023. Two summers ago, the main axis of Russian effort was through Bakhmut - that is, an advance due west across central Donetsk. At that point, the southeastern axis of the front (Avdiivka, Krasnogorivka, Ugledar) was holding steady for the AFU. Facing the prospect of a Russian advance directly from the east, the Ukrainians built up defenses around Kostyantynivka which face eastward, towards Bakhmut.

The collapse of the southern front creates a pivot in the Ukrainian defenses, so that the axis of the Russian advance is now from the southwest of Kostyantynivka, rather than from the east. Although the Ukrainians began building new defenses (oriented towards the south) after the collapse of the southern front, there remains a significant gap west of Kostyantynivka. Furthermore, the “joint” where Ukraine’s defenses intersect is essentially at the southwestern limit of Kostyantynivka itself.

Recent Russian advances have now put them behind the Ukrainian positions guarding the southwestern approach to Kostyantynivka. When the Russians reached Yablunivka (approximately June 4), they were firmly in the rear of the defensive belt southwest of Kostyantynivka, opening up the Ukrainian line here for entry into the city’s western flank and link up with the advance out of Toretsk.

Given Ukraine’s lack of manpower, these trench systems threaten to become highways for Russian forces, as we saw along the Ocheretyne axis in 2024. Once Russian forces break into these belts, they are able to roll along the length of the belts deep into Ukrainian space.

In short, a variety of structural weaknesses are all dovetailing in the same sector of front. The Russians are advancing from advantageous high ground into structural seams in the Ukrainian defenses, precisely into the area of front that wedges Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka apart from each other. The result is an emerging double envelopment, with the Russians plowing through the middle towards the rear areas behind these cities. The terrain and the orientation of the Ukrainian lines have accommodated an enormous Russian splitting wedge which will sever the lines of communication to both cities. This would be a major problem under ideal circumstances, but given Ukraine’s inability to properly man its positions, it has become a crisis.

In the coming weeks, Russian forces will continue their expansion into the interstitial space between Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka, probing their way into Ukraine’s operational liver. When they reach the space just to the southwest of Druzhivka, they will be positioned to cut the lines of communication into both cities. Simultaneously, they will continue the rollup of the defenses on Kostyantynivka’s southwestern flank. With Russian forces penetrating into the city’s southwestern flank, the city is already in an untenable position,

Of the two cities, Kostyantynivka is likely to fall first, with the Russians beginning to assault the city proper at some point in July. In what I would characterize simply as a command decision, the Russians have been patient about pushing Myrnograd and crumpling the shoulder of the Pokrovsk position. At this point, they seem unlikely to do so until the advance into the seam has compromised the lines of supply from the rear.

At the risk of being somewhat hyperbolic, this remains the only sector worth watching closely. Russian forces are exerting relatively minimal efforts on other axes of the front. There is incremental progress, pregnant with opportunity, around Lyman, and Kupyansk, and the expansion of the Russian “buffer zone” in Sumy oblast bears watching. It seems extremely unlikely, however, that Russia has intentions in the near term of pushing the front towards the city of Sumy itself; rather, the buffer zone is aimed at seizing a forward defensive line along the high ground on Ukraine’s side of the border, keeping an advantageous front open to dissipate Ukraine resources. The center of gravity in this war remains the central Donbas, and the key operational fact, as such, has been the pivot in the Russian strategic axis. After advancing westward through Bakhmut in 2023, they broke open the south in 2024 and are now advancing orthogonally into the Ukrainian defense between Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka, in the penultimate act of the Donbas campaign before they reach the prize in Kramatorsk and Slovyansk.

Conclusion: Strategic Clarity

I have written frequently about the critical importance of a “theory of victory” when waging a war. This refers, in the simplest sense, to the need for a state to have an overarching concept for leveraging power into its war aims. This is the strategic ligament which connects military operations and diplomacy to the state’s wartime objectives.

As the war moves on into its fourth year, Ukraine and her western backers have cycled through several different theories of victory which were quietly discarded after coming apart at the seams. In the first year of the war, the theory of Ukrainian victory centered on created an unacceptable cost-benefit calculus for Russia. If Ukraine and the west showed unexpected resolve, keeping the AFU fighting fiercely in the field, it was hoped that Russia would back down from fighting a long war, particularly as sanctions gnawed away at the Russian economy. Instead, Russia began mobilizing for a longer fight, and the Russian economy has thus far weathered the sanctions intact.

This theory of victory was then replaced with a model predicated purely on military operations, which supposed that a decisive victory could be won in the south by knifing through Russian defenses in the land bridge. This theory came apart in a much more visible fashion, with western armor burning on the steppe after a botched attempt to breach the Surovikin line. A second attempt to restart decisive operations met a similar end in Kursk.

In the last year or so, the theory of Ukrainian victory pivoted once again, particularly under the auspices of the new Trump administration, in favor of words like “attrition” and “stalemate” as a mechanism to gain a negotiated settlement. If the front in Ukraine can be locked into something approximating a stalemate - that is, if the cost of further advances can be made prohibitively high for Russia - the conditions will be set for a negotiated peace.

In contrast, Russia has had an essentially consistent theory of victory since late 2022, when it began mobilization. That theory is very simple: by establishing a basis for sustainable military operations against Ukraine, consistent pressure and ground advances can be maintained until either Ukrainian resistance collapses or Russia controls the Donbas. To this point, Ukraine has not demonstrated capabilities - either to go on the offensive or to halt the Russian advance in the Donbas - that change this basic calculus.

Commentators in the west rarely try to view the conflict from Russia’s perspective, but if they could they would quickly see why Russian confidence remains high. As Russia sees it, they have absorbed and defeated Ukraine’s two best punches on the ground (the 2023 counteroffensive and the Kursk operation), and they have weathered a long and steady infusion of western combat power without the trajectory of either the ground campaign or the strike war fundamentally shifting. Meanwhile, Russia has essentially scratched off the entire southern Donbas, pushing the front across the border into Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, and they are poised to wrap up the central sector of front as the advance around Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka blooms.

We’re left, then, with a jarring disconnect. On the one hand, the Trump Administration approached Ukraine as if their election fundamentally changed everything and instantly raised the probability of a negotiated peace. Russia, however, rather rightly feels that nothing has changed at all. They have absorbed everything the west has thrown into the conflict, and they continue to both advance on the ground and relentlessly strike Ukraine on a material basis that they clearly view as sustainable, without unduly burdening civilian life in Russia.

If anyone was surprised, then, that Russia came to Istanbul only to reiterate the same terms they’ve been presenting from the beginning, they were clearly not paying attention. Russia has no inducement to soften its stance so long as it feels that the battlefield calculus is unchanged, and nothing that the west (or Ukraine) has done since 2022 has given Moscow a valid reason to revise its views. Russia’s baseline demands ought to be well understood by now, as is Russian willingness to achieve those aims kinetically. If Ukraine will not give up the Donbas at the table in Istanbul, it can be taken by the Russian Army. In the end, there’s very little difference.

We are left with Woodrow Wilson’s formulation. Not, of course, his high minded “peace without victory”, which is a nonstarter today just as it was in 1917. Rather, we’re left with the hardened and embittered Wilson of 1918. With the United States now an active belligerent in the conflict, Wilson’s outlook had darkened immensely, and he now categorically opposed negotiating with an undefeated Germany at all. He had concluded instead that “If Germany was beaten, she would accept any terms. If she was not beaten, he [Wilson] did not wish to make terms with her.”

If the olive branch has wilted, the pistol will do.

Share

It is probably not a good sign when an article has to begin with an editorial note that breaks the fourth wall, but here we are. I have analyses of the frontline in Ukraine and a new entry in our naval history series currently in the works, but I’ve been derailed by a challenge that emerged from Twitter (I refuse to call it X) which I’ve been unable to shake out of my mind. People were arguing, as they seem to endlessly do, over what Germany could have done to win World War Two. This is a sort of evergreen topic that is easy bait for engagement, but I had an irresistible urge to give it a treatment of my own.

My motivation, as such, is largely the persistent myth that Germany lost the war when it delayed its offensive to capture Moscow in 1941. This is a grossly misunderstood topic, which assumes unrealistic German freedom of action at the critical moments in August and September 1941. In fact, Germany had no possibility of moving on Moscow earlier than it did. Furthermore, the obsession with Moscow obfuscates the real crisis facing the Wehrmacht, which was the attrition of its most important units, a shortage of replacement personnel, and fuel shortages. So, rather than falling back on the popular motif that the war was decided at the gates of Moscow, we will look more holistically at the crisis of the Wehrmacht and plot a better course.

Subscribe now

To keep such analysis grounded in some sense of realism, we will try to speculate about German decision making within their historical constraints, particularly as it relates to manpower, logistical lift, and military intelligence. In other words, we will not alter the strength of the original German force or presume any foreknowledge about the USSR’s reserves. We will, however, examine ways that the German Army could have greatly increased its force generation and logistical strength, based on solutions that they adopted later in the war. We will demonstrate that it was reasonable for German leadership to have “pulled the trigger” on such measures much earlier than they actually did. Thus, while we will not award Germany more forces than they were able to mobilize in the aggregate, we can demonstrate that it was reasonable for Germany to have frontloaded mobilization efforts. We will also do our best to treat the maneuver scheme realistically, and not assign objectives that were far beyond the striking reach of the army. The result is an alternate version of 1941 that, while not probable, was at least possible, and this will have to do.

Preventative War: Barbarossa’s Strategic Logic

Any discussion of the Second World War which asks “why” Germany lost will almost immediately devolve into the cliche of Hitler’s great strategic bungle: the big mistake was attacking the Soviet Union in the first place.

As a groundwork for the broader discussion of Barbarossa, and at the risk of making an apologetic for the single most destructive and violent war in recorded history, it is not actually difficult to understand that the German invasion of the Soviet Union was not only strategically defensible, it was perhaps the only possible course of action given the broader strategic crisis facing Berlin.

It is relatively common for Barbarossa to be defended on the grounds that it was a “preemptive strike”, operating under the assumption that Stalin was preparing his own ground invasion of the Reich. There are elements of truth worth following there, but in general such discussions fail to differentiate between “preemptive” and “preventative” war: similar, but distinct concepts with important nuances. Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union was preventative, but not preemptive, and understanding the difference is worth the ink.

The difference between preemptive and preventative attack is primarily one of timetable. The term “preemptive” is used to denote a military operation undertaken in anticipation of an imminent threat from the enemy. This stands in contrast to preventative war, which implies war for the purpose of preventing an expected conflict in the future, at which point the enemy is projected to enjoy more favorable circumstances and force ratios. The difference largely reduces to a question of freedom of action and the immediacy of the threat. Preemptive action is, to a large extent, forced by the prospect of an imminent enemy attack, while preventative war is undertaken somewhat more voluntarily in order to prevent the long-term strengthening of the enemy. While preemptive action is forced by a specified immediate threat, preemptive war is predicated on longer-term strength calculations and the fear that the other party will initiate war at an unspecified later date under more favorable conditions.

In this case, there was certainly no plan for an imminent attack by the Red Army. While a host of circumstantial evidence is offered to buttress the idea that Stalin was planning an attack on the Reich, it generally founders on a misunderstanding of Soviet military thought. It is true that the Soviet military vocabulary was offensive-minded, but this is largely because the Red Army had a strong cult of the offensive which presumed - as if by magic - that any enemy attack could be quickly absorbed, allowing Soviet forces to quickly go over to the attack in the event of war. It is undeniable that Soviet leadership was anticipating war with Germany at some undetermined date in the looming future, but this is entirely different from claiming that the Soviet Union had concrete plans to attack Germany in 1941.

To take but one example, a common data point raised to support the Soviet attack hypothesis was a May 1941 proposal by Zhukov which sketched out a secretive deployment of the Red Army for offensive operations against the Wehrmacht. The proposal was real enough, but mention is usually neglected of the fact that the Zhukov deployment plan was never signed off on by Stalin, nor was it the deployment scheme in use by the Red Army on the eve of war.

More to the point, the proper establishment of the timeline makes it clear that Hitler and the Wehrmacht prepared to attack the USSR on their own recognizance, rather than in response to a perceived imminent threat. Hitler’s decision to attack the USSR is usually traced to a July 31, 1940 meeting at the Berghof where he for the first time declared his intention to smash the Soviet Union “once and for all.” The first operational sketches for the campaign had already been submitted by Major-General Erich Marcks on August 5, 1940, and the operation had received its designation of “Barbarossa” in December.

In contrast, data points suggesting Soviet aggression generally date from the following year (1941, the year of the invasion). In March, German military intelligence began submitting reports related to Soviet mobilization in the border regions. Moreover, on March 14, 1941, German Foreign Armies East noted in its situation report that the Red Army was in a state of partial mobilization. Observing the ongoing Soviet deployments throughout the spring, in May Hitler and the Wehrmacht operations staff acknowledged that Red Army formations were much larger than originally anticipated, and that it was possible that the Soviets might take their own preemptive actions to disrupt the staging for Barbarossa.

Taken on aggregate, three key facts emerge which ought to strongly disabuse us of the idea that a Soviet attack on Germany was planned for 1941. First, German planning for Barbarossa began in the summer of 1940, months before German intelligence began delivering steady reports about Soviet accumulation of forces near the border. Secondly, in the spring of 1941 German intelligence still assessed that the Red Army was in a state of partial mobilization; to the extent that they feared a Soviet attack, they were concerned about limited Red Army operations to disrupt preparations for Barbarossa. Third and finally (and much more to the point), as of yet there is no documentation of an anticipated Soviet strategic offensive from either side - either in the form of German intelligence warning of a Soviet attack, or Soviet plans for such an operation.

Barbarossa was not a preemptive strike. This does not mean, however, that it did not have fundamentally sound strategic logic as a preventative war.

Germany’s problem, as such, was not that Stalin was preparing to attack the Reich in 1941, but rather that the USSR’s strength was increasing over time relative to Germany, while both ideological and geopolitical contradictions made it essentially impossible to craft a stable accommodation between the two states in the long run. Particular friction points lay in both the terms of German-Soviet trade, and escalating friction over spheres of influence in the limitrophe states.

The structural problem from the German perspective was that trade with the USSR was broadly predicated on swapping German technology for Soviet natural resources. In the short run, this did give Berlin a way to circumvent the British blockade, but the basic issue was that the commodities brought in from the Soviet Union - grain, oil, and metallurgic inputs - were consumables which did not strengthen Germany in the long run: on the contrary, they put Germany in the painful position of abject dependence on Moscow. The Soviet government, for its part, was hardly shy about emphasizing this point. In 1940, the USSR temporarily suspended grain and oil exports to Germany in response to a delay in German coal shipments. The threat of delayed or cancelled Soviet deliveries was so severe that Goring issued a directive stipulating:

All German departments must proceed from the fact that the Russian raw materials are absolutely vital to us… According to an explicit decision by the Fuhrer, where reciprocal deliveries to the Russians are endangered, even German Wehrmacht deliveries must be held back so as to ensure punctual delivery to the Russians.”

This sense of ongoing and interminable dependence on an ideological anathema like the USSR was felt to be essentially intolerable, and there was little prospect of relief. A report from the Reich department for economic development concluded that, even if the British could be ejected from North Africa and the Middle East (bringing those resource fields under German control), the Reich would still face shortages in 19 out of 33 identified vital raw materials. In other words, even the successful resolution of the war against Britain could not be expected to bring economic self sufficiency.

Meanwhile, Germany shipped a steady stream of sensitive technology and industrial capital to the Soviet Union. In 1940, the Soviets demanded (and were granted) delivery of a complete plant for the production of synthetic rubber and fuel, followed by a demand that they be given IG-Farben’s innovative process for the producing toluene, which was a critical input in Germany’s high grade aviation fuel. German tank, bomber, and artillery prototypes were also shipped off to the USSR. This was the price of grain.

In short, Stalin had Hitler over a barrel. There was absolutely no question that the German war economy could not function without Soviet raw materials, but - lacking real leverage over Moscow - Germany had no choice but to send a steady flow of sensitive industrial secrets, military prototypes, and machine tools to the east. Germany had evaded the British blockade, at the cost of turning itself into an economic vassal of the Soviet Union. This was an almost exact reversal of the stated objective of a self sufficient German economy, and even more importantly it promised a long-term increase in the USSR’s power as it absorbed German industrial technology.

Matters truly came to a head, however, with the visit of Vyacheslav Molotov to Berlin in November 1940. The Molotov-Hitler summit was perhaps the last real chance for Germany and the Soviet Union to reach some sort of stable coexistence, and in this it was an abject failure. The general point which emerged, as if it were not already obvious, was that Moscow had enormous leverage over Germany which Hitler could not reciprocate. Despite a grandiloquent attempt to derail Molotov with rants about the hateful “Anglo-Saxons” and a fanciful encouragement for the USSR to seize British India (it was not clear how or why this could be achieved), Molotov remained tightly focused on Europe and presented the Germans with a series of demands which amounted to a geopolitical checkmate.

Among the demands stipulated by Molotov, the USSR insisted that Germany withdraw all her troops and military advisors from Finland, accede to Soviet occupation of the Turkish straits, and acknowledge Bulgaria as a “security zone” of the Soviet Union, implying Red Army occupation at a near date. For obvious reasons, this was a nonstarter for Hitler, as it implied further Soviet encroachment on vital German trading partners. Finland, for example, was an irreplaceable source of nickel and timber, while a Red Army position in Bulgaria would put Stalin’s forces right up the road from Romania’s oil fields, which were Germany’s only significant source of non-Soviet petroleum.

When one considers Molotov and Stalin’s demands of late 1940 in the broader context of the German-Soviet relationship, it becomes extremely clear that Germany was geostrategically cornered. The core dynamic of this relationship was Germany’s abject dependence on Soviet raw materials, and Stalin’s attempt to muscle in further on Finland, Bulgaria, and Romania threatened to exacerbate this dependence. Hitler had few levers that he could lean on to counter this, particularly because he (still locked in a war with Britain) lacked options, while Stalin (who was not nominally in a state of war) had time on his side.

This, then, was the basic logic behind Operation Barbarossa, and it was sound enough. Germany had fought its way into a strategic trap, conquering vast territories in Europe which simply lacked the natural resources to bring the economic self sufficiency that Hitler craved; instead, he was now economically dependent on Moscow and faced the prospect of further resource strangulation as Stalin pressed his demands for further encroachment into the Baltic and the Balkans. Hitler lacked commensurate strategic or economic leverage to push back, and so he chose to lean on the strongest lever in his hands: the Wehrmacht.

It was clear that no arrangement could be contrived that could bring a stable coexistence between the USSR and the German Reich, given the vastly disproportionate resource bases of the two countries. Facing the prospect of a future war (perhaps in 1942-43) under less favorable circumstances, or an immediate strike against a Red Army that was still in the process of reorganization and armament, Hitler chose preventative war.

Force Generation and Total War

At last we come to the interesting part, where we probe alternative realities. How might Germany have defeated the Soviet Union, if this was even possible at all?

Any discussion of Germany’s defeat in the east and its causes must begin with one of the greatest military intelligence misfires of all time: the German assessment of Soviet reserves and force generation potential. The totem figure, which I cite frequently as the nucleus of Germany’s great disaster, was the assumption (built into the Wehrmacht’s wargaming) that the Red Army could feasibly mobilize 40 fresh divisions in response to the invasion, while the actual number was approximately 800. This 20:1 underestimate of Soviet force generation lay, either implicitly or explicitly, at the heart of Barbarossa's failure and the continual bewilderment expressed by German leadership at the appearance of fresh Soviet formations in the field.

The other side of this question relates to Germany’s own capacity to generate fighting power, both by mobilizing men and managing the wartime industrial economy. Here, however, a significant discrepancy exists in the conventional understanding of the war: a discrepancy which originates in Germany’s abysmal mismanagement of the conflict, beginning in the summer of 1941.

The standard presentation of the war in the east emphasizes the horrendous attrition of the Wehrmacht in 1941 as it was ground down first by a tenacious Soviet defense, followed by a series of Red Army counteroffensives during the winter. The impression is that of a weary and threadbare German Army reduced to a shell of itself. Elements of this story are certainly true, with the ledger revealing that many of the eastern army’s divisions were clinging to perhaps half of their regulation strength. What this story misses, however, is that the Wehrmacht was consistently able to reconstitute its strength and even increase the total number of active personnel - not just in 1942, to recover from Barbarossa and the Soviet winter offensives, but again in early 1943 after the disaster at Stalingrad. Armaments output also rose significantly, reaching its peak in 1944.

Reconciling these contradictory pictures requires probing the depths of German strategic ineptitude, particularly the inability of German leadership to understand the war that they were fighting in the east and their schizophrenic management of human resources. At the core of the issue lay German confidence in a rapid victory over the Soviet Union through a planned blitzkrieg, which left little impetus to plan for a protracted war which would require continued mobilization. When Barbarossa began, German leadership was planning to demobilize personnel for release back into the labor force. Despite the fact that it should have been apparent by July 21st at the latest (a date upon which we will elaborate later) that the war was not going to plan and more manpower would be needed, Hitler and the high command were still operating under the impression that much of the army could be released from service in the coming year. It was not until the spring of 1942, in fact, that Germany began to work seriously on its manpower problems by releasing additional workers for military service, intensifying conscription, and mobilizing foreign workers and POWs to provide needed labor for industry. Furthermore, it was not until 1943 that Germany adopted what might be called a total war economy, with rationalization, tight central planning, and restrictions on civilian production.

A core element of Germany’s botched war, then, was a fatal delay in transitioning to a fully mobilized war economy and wider mobilization of personnel for the army. This dovetailed with misallocation of personnel to ensure that the field army in the east was needlessly starved of personnel. The cause was a deadly amalgam of political trauma and overconfidence. The trauma originated in the First World War, which brought widespread deprivation to German civilians as the economy was fully mobilized for war while being squeezed by a British blockade. While the effects of the blockade are often overstated, in that the German field army remained broadly solvent and adequately supplied, the memory of civilian shortages lingered, and German leadership in the second war was loathe to disrupt civilian production. Simultaneously, Hitler and the high command remained foolishly confident in imminent Soviet collapse and were therefore unwilling to kick mobilization into a higher gear in 1941.

The upshot of all this was that, while the Soviet Union was undergoing a total mobilization of virtually all its human and economic resources (aided by that wonderful instrument of power, the Communist Party), Germany was shockingly lethargic. Hitler did not seriously contemplate mobilizing deferred industrial workers (offset by employing prisoners of war, restricting production of civilian goods, and exploiting the workforce of occupied territories) until March, 1942, and even then the mobilization process proceeded slowly. Given the scale of the war that was unfolding in front of their very eyes, the German failure to launch an energetic mobilization in 1941 stands out as a crucial turning point in the conflict which starved the eastern army of personnel during its crucial window of opportunity.

Any alternative history of the Nazi-Soviet War, then, ought to begin with the suggestion of a much earlier German mobilization. This is particularly appealing because it does not require much speculation: more aggressive exploitation of the manpower reserve relies only on mechanisms that the Germans ended up utilizing in reality. These were capabilities that the Germans demonstrated in 1942-44, and in our scenario, we need only pretend that they were faster to recognize the crisis in front of them and adopt these policies in the summer of 1941.

In particular, the immediate employment of prisoners of war, the rationalization and adoption of a war economy, and the release of protected industrial workers for military service would have freed up nearly 1 million personnel for the eastern army by the end of 1941. This is evidenced by the fact that, on July 1, 1942, total Wehrmacht personnel was some 1.1 million higher than at the beginning of Barbarossa, despite the severe losses suffered over the previous year.

In reality, the Wehrmacht took in a shocking number of replacements in 1942 and reconstituted its fighting power much more effectively than many historians acknowledge. However, this influx of personnel was not efficiently allocated, particularly because the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine were able to successfully lobby for more men. The Luftwaffe, for example, increased its personnel by some 355,000 men between June 1941 and July 1942, with most of the increase occurring in the early months of 1942. Remarkably, Goring’s haul of men came largely on the momentum of increases that were planned before Barbarossa began.

This is emblematic of Germany’s gross mismanagement of its human resources. Before the invasion of the Soviet Union, there were idealistic plans to demobilize army personnel, releasing men into the economy while increasing the strength of the Luftwaffe. By mid-1941, it should have been obvious that the war was going wrong and the army needed every man that it could get, yet German leadership remained unwilling to begin pulling men out of the industrial labor force, and they allowed the Luftwaffe to absorb roughly a third of the increase in the Werhmacht’s total personnel.

One needs to tinker with the timeline only a very little to drastically increase German combat power on the eastern front during its crucial window of opportunity (1941-42). First, by initiating the expanded callup of industrial workers and beginning the transition to a war economy in July 1941 (a date which, to reiterate, I will defend further on), one can pencil in roughly 560,0000 trained reservists released to the army in the latter half of 1941 (in reality, these men were not mobilized until the spring of 1942), which could have been augmented further by restricting the Luftwaffe’s access to personnel in favor of the eastern army. If German leadership had responded with more clarity and appreciation for the crisis that it faced, on the whole at least 750,000 additional personnel could have gone to the field army in the Soviet Union by the winter of 1941 - and all this largely by making the decisions of March 1942 in July of the previous year. The army would have then undergone further replenishment and expansion by calling up the 1942 draft class.

We are taking liberties, of course, with such hypotheticals. The reality was that the Nazi regime was significantly less reactive and unified than its opponent. Hitler lacked levers of control equivalent to those wielded by Stalin, and long after Barbarossa began the German regime continued to see its energies dissipated by feuding fiefdoms. The Luftwaffe and the navy continued to lobby successfully for access to personnel and industrial labor, and in general the leadership group was psychologically incapable of admitting that the planned blitzkrieg was failing. As late as November, there were still illusions that - rather than funneling reinforcements to the east - troops might be withdrawn to Germany over the winter, or even demobilized. As the official German history of the war puts it:

The bureaucracy of the Third Reich was unable to respond in a flexible manner to changes in the military situation. Initially, the political leadership maintained a rigid loyalty to the concept of blitzkrieg. These facts can be demonstrated with particular clarity in the case of the system of deferrals. Despite rising casualty rates in the army in the east during the summer of 1941, the number of deferrals continued its dramatic increase. In September 1941 it reached its highest total of the first half of the war at almost 5.6 million men.

The regime would not be shaken from this stupor until the Soviet winter offensives made the crisis impossible to ignore. If the need for expanded mobilization was the elephant in the room, the winter of 1941-42 was when the elephant grabbed somebody with its trunk and tore his limb off. Action was taken, belatedly, in March 1942 which finally saw the faucet of manpower open. For our hypothetical, however, let us proceed as if Hitler noticed the elephant in July and acted accordingly.

Logistics at the End of the World

The prior segment demonstrated, hopefully, that although Germany faced dire manpower shortages at many moments in the war, it had the capacity in 1941 and 1942 to regenerate its combat power, but was unable to do so in a timely manner due to political neuroses. The Wehrmacht would indeed reconstitute its strength on the eastern front on two occasions, but in 1941 it did not, and consequently it plunged into the winter in a threadbare state.

The second element of German defeat in the east which generally gets headline treatment is logistics. Here, the conversation generally takes two separate tracks. One version of the story treats the logistical breakdown of the Wehrmacht as a matter of German incompetence, as if they simply didn’t contemplate the challenges of supply. This is usually where people get a good laugh at the idea that the German army forgot its winter gear, as if they did not know that it gets cold in Moscow. Another version of the story treats the logistical lapse as a sort of inevitability, as if there was simply nothing to be done in the face of the USSR’s distances, harsh climactic and terrain conditions, and underdeveloped road and rail network.

As is often the case, the truth lies somewhere in between. It is certainly the case that, no matter what the Germans did, it was going to be a difficult lift to adequately supply vast armies in Central Russia. The Wehrmacht simply had an inadequate motorization component to maintain a proper truck lift, and shortages of fuel and rubber (combined with frequent breakdowns due to the poor condition of Soviet roads) exacerbated their organic shortage of motor transport. Supplying the eastern army required a delicate balance of lift via railway, trucks, tracked vehicles, and humble horse-drawn carts, all of which were strained in unprecedented ways in the east.

While it is an inescapable conclusion that German logistics were never going to be fully satisfactory in the east, it must be acknowledged that, once again, dysfunctional management exacerbated the problem. Many of the technical problems with the railways in the east are overstated in popular histories. For example, it is common to note that the gauge on the Soviet track was different than the standard European rail, forcing the Germans to relay the rail lines. This is true, but in fact the conversion of the track was a fairly simple engineering task for German railways troops. By December, 1941, German engineers had re-gauged 15,000 kilometers of track, and had raised the total to 21,000 by May, 1942. Compared to altering the track gauge, the more complicated task turned out to be repairing and building service centers and other railway facilities, but this was accomplished in time as well.

The biggest problem with the rail network in the east was not the difficulty of converting and repairing track, but a shortage of locomotives, insufficient personnel among the railway troops and logistical staff, and chaotic management (which frequently devolved into commanders “hijacking” supply trains for their own purposes). As in the realm of manpower, where the Germans responded lethargically, the remediation of the logistical system was slow in coming primarily due to mismanagement and unresponsive leadership. Amid the general congestion of the rail net, the civilian railway authorities (the Reichsbahn) and their military counterparts (the Eisenbahntruppen) devolved into a toxic mire of finger pointing, jurisdictional competition, and mistrust.

German efforts to strengthen the logistical lift on the railways did not seriously kick into gear until November, 1941: long after the supply situation had become dire, and much too late to benefit the push towards Moscow. It was not until late November that the Reichsbahn was ordered to dispatch additional resources to the eastern army. The subsequent arrival of more railway personnel and 1,000 locomotives almost immediately boosted the daily rail traffic to the front by 50%, and these gains were augmented by the steady release of more locomotives in the early months of 1942. It was not until May, 1942, that Albert Speer was tasked with energetic remediation of the eastern railnet, which he tackled by dedicating more resources to repairing facilities in the east, rationalizing and accelerating unloading procedures, and withdrawing rolling stock from occupied territories in the west. By the summer of 1942, the War Economy Department assessed that rail traffic to the east was adequate to supply the army at the front.

As in the case of manpower for the army, there was hardly a magic button that the Germans could press to instantly provide infinite personnel and supply. Again, however, the lethargy of German leadership in responding to the crisis at the front suggests that things could have been different. Critical decisions, like the allocation of civilian railway resources and Speer’s managerial changes, did not occur for many months after the supply crisis should have become obvious: a delay which can be attributed, once again, to German leadership’s unwillingness to admit that the campaign was not going according to plan.

If German leadership had been more cognitively flexible and responsive to the unfolding military crisis, many of these decisions could have been frontloaded to the summer of 1941. In a world where Berlin admits in July that the war is going to be much longer and more resource intensive than anticipated (a world where Germany is willing to transition to a full war footing before it is too late), more railway personnel, engineering resources, and locomotives could be dispatched over the summer, resulting in a more robust supply lift during the critical autumnal months.

In the case of both the railways and the manpower crisis, the general theme that emerges is that of German leadership which responds only to extreme crisis, particular in the form of the Red Army’s winter offensives. It was only the intense pressure of these winter offensives - which brought Army Group Center to the verge of collapse - which finally jolted Hitler awake and forced a belated callup of reservists from the labor force; similarly, it was only once the supply crisis reached a breaking point in November that Germany began to mobilize additional resources for the eastern railway.

The result was that both Germany’s manpower balance and logistical chain were largely restored, albeit much too late. The rigid belief in rapid victory and looming Soviet collapse left German leadership without the intellectual toolkit to acknowledge the crisis while it was in its early stages. We are left with a remarkable juxtaposition. It is difficult to imagine a state that better embodied total war than Germany in 1944 and 1945 - mobilizing underage youth and old men, cannibalizing virtually every demographic and economic resource as it defied oblivion. Yet in 1941, when the strategic crisis first manifested, this same regime was shockingly complacent about mobilizing additional resources for the eastern army. The German economy did not transition to a full war footing until mid-1943, and during the crucial operational window the eastern army was denied access to critical logistical and manpower resources.

Turning Point at Smolensk

The general impression that we are attempting to make is that, although German resources were certainly limited (and woefully inadequate for a war against two enemies with continent-spanning resources), the Wehrmacht had reservoirs of human, industrial, and logistical resources which were left untapped in 1941, creating a general military crisis in the winter. In general, German leadership intensified the war effort in response to the winter catastrophe, rather than anticipating it with timely mobilization of resources.

The logical following question then emerges: was there a point in 1941 where it was reasonable for German leadership to have comprehended that it was caught in an emerging military catastrophe? Was it possible to discern the elephant in the room before it went rampant? While any treatment of this topic must fairly note the peculiar institutional neuroses of the German regime - driven by both the unique personalities involved and the dissipated and quarrelsome command structure - I argue unequivocally that such an opportunity for course correction did exist.

Specifically, the the second half of July, 1941, presents itself as the moment where the German campaign not only began to go wildly off track, but also the point where the mounting strategic crisis should have become apparent. A somewhat more rational and cognitively flexible German leadership, less blinded by its faith in rapid victory and Soviet collapse, should have course corrected at this point. The fateful period dates specifically to July 21-31.

During this critical period, four important milestones were checked off in rapid sequence:

1. The Red Army began a broad counteroffensive with newly deployed field armies that the Wehrmacht did not expect to encounter, proving definitively that prewar assumptions about Soviet force generation and reserves were wrong.

2. German high command, including Hitler, for the first time became divided and uncertain about next operational steps. No consensus could be reached about the shape and priority of following operations.

3. The critical formations of Army Group Center proved unable to complete keystone operational tasks.

4. The first glaringly obvious operational misstep of the war was committed, with Heinz Guderian’s panzer group contributing materially to German defeat by attempting to seize and hold the Yelnya Bridgehead (more on this momentarily).

Taken together, late July can clearly be seen as the point where the campaign began to derail at every level. Strategically, German command began to exhibit paralysis and confusion as to how to continue the campaign, while Army Group Center began to sputter both in its operational choices and in the diminishing combat power of its critical formations. This was the moment where a somewhat more rational German leadership group could have and should have held honest internal discussions and responded by both mobilizing additional resources (deploying more rail personnel and assets to the east and beginning the callup of trained reservists in the civilian labor force) and making rational amendments to the maneuver scheme.

The Wehrmacht’s catastrophe unfolded as follows.

The opening phase of Barbarossa is fairly well understood, with Army Group Center (the largest and most lavishly equipped of the three German army groups, with two of the eastern army’s four panzer groups) caught a grouping of Soviet armies in an enormous pocket around Minsk, which bagged hundreds of thousands of prisoners and tore an enormous hole in the Red Army’s western front. On this basis of the victory at Minsk, German leadership made its famous pronouncements that the Soviets had already been practically defeated, with Halder (Chief of Staff of the Army High Command) famously writing in his diary that the war had been functionally won in two weeks, and that farther east the Germans would encounter “only partial” forces.

By July 4th, however, as the enormous pocket around Minsk was in its final stages of reduction, the two key striking elements of Army Group Center - Hermann Hoth’s 3rd Panzer Group and Heinz Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group - were already departing from the Minsk area, moving rapidly at 45 degree angles to each other. Hoth was driving to the northeast to seize a crossing over the Dvina River, while Guderian was moving eastward towards the Dnieper. Although the general shape of these advances suggested a concentric move towards Smolensk, the combat power of Army Group Center was now subtly dissipating, with two commanders in Hoth and Guderian who had their own ideas at play. However, the danger seemed to be relatively low, given the assessment that the Soviets were incapable of building a new and coherent defensive line. As Hoth would later bemoan, however, “the consequences of an inaccurate assessment of the enemy became readily apparent.”

While we will comment on a few of the operational particulars, the general theme that would now emerge was a strange unwillingness on the part of both key commanders in the field (Guderian perhaps most of all) and the German high command to react appropriately to the discovery of an entirely new grouping of Soviet field armies around Smolensk.

As late as July 6th, key German figures like Hoth and Halder were convinced that they would encounter only partial or “scraped together” Soviet forces to the east. The German situation map for July 4th identifies only two Soviet field armies around Smolensk: the 11th and the 13th, with many of the Soviet divisions marked with the word “Reste”, which means remnants or leftovers, implying partial units that had been previously mauled. By July 12th, however, the German maps depict new armies like the 19th, 21st, and 22nd, to which the 20th would be added a few days later.

These were the newly arriving forces of the Soviet Reserve Army which had been freshly dispatched to reinforce their Western Front (a “front” being the Soviet parlance for an Army Group.) The appearance of what amounted to an entirely unaccounted for army group (with thousands of tanks), ought to have been the moment that German leadership began to awaken to reality and begun acknowledging that they had badly underestimated Soviet force generation, but they did not.

More importantly, the German failure to react to the new Soviet armies around Smolensk occurred at two critical levels of command. At the strategic level, there was no revision of the expectation that the Red Army was collapsing, and consequently there could be no attempt to begin shifting towards a footing for a longer and bigger war by mobilizing reservists and redirecting logistical assets to the east. At the operational level, however, field commanders like Guderian made a series of poor choices which turned the ensuing Battle of Smolensk into a hollow, pyrrhic victory which largely doomed the German war.

The first domino in the emerging operational crisis was a series of Soviet counterattacks on the flanks and joints of the advancing Panzer Groups. A pair of Soviet mechanized corps attacked in the area around Lepel and Syanno (in modern Belarus) near the boundary between Hoth and Guderian’s groups. Although the Soviet attack collapsed with heavy casualties, it compelled Guderian to reroute 17th Panzer Division to fall on the flank of the attacking Soviet formations. Meanwhile, the Soviet 21st Army attacked Guderian’s exposed southern flank, which was dangling out in open space due to the great distance by which Army Group Center had outrun its southern neighbor.

Guderian was utterly fixated on continuing his drive to the east, and he resented the fact that forces on both his flanks were now being diverted by Soviet counterattacks. On July 7th, he ordered that the battles on both flanks be broken off with the enemy “kept under observation”, as he began funneling troops over the Dnieper to drive further east. This greatly irritated Hoth, as there were still strong Soviet forces fighting along their operational boundary. With Guderian’s 17th Panzer Division now departing to drive east, Hoth was left “holding the bag”, as he put it. Furthermore, in his haste to get over the Dnieper as quickly as possible, Guderian bypassed pockets of Soviet troops which were still defending along the river line, and in particular left a strong Soviet grouping behind him at Mogilev. The reduction of these positions would fall to the infantry divisions following in Guderian’s wake, and in turn delayed their arrival at the front around Smolensk.

The German situation map for July 20th already reveals all the ways that this battle was going wrong. Guderian had pushed his panzer divisions over the Dnieper and advanced the 10th Panzer Division to Yelnya, which he perceived as a critical staging ground for the next phase of the objective (aimed at Moscow). Unfortunately for the Germans, Guderian’s fixation on diving for the Yelyna bridgehead had created major problems and marks the first point where German operational choices were clearly wrong.

First and foremost, by pushing his panzer divisions east toward Yelnya, Guderian left the encirclement which was now forming around Smolensk unfinished. Army Group Center’s commander, Fedor von Bock, was aghast, writing: “There is only one pocket on the army group’s front! And it has a hole!” It would take weeks for the Germans to close off the pocket around Smolensk, with Hoth’s panzer group doing almost all of the hard work. On August 1, under heavy pressure from Soviet counterattacks, the encirclement was broken back open. Nearly half of the encircled Soviet troops would escape, with some 50,000 trickling out to the east in the early days of August.

The basic problem was that Guderian was an officer with a strong predisposition for insubordination, who had his own ideas about which direction the campaign was heading. He continued to believe that a thrust directly towards Moscow was the best course of action, and he prioritized holding his bridgehead at Yelnya over essentially every other operational priority. In the closing week of July, with the encirclement around Smolensk still leaking Soviet troops to the east, Guderian would actually shuttle units away from Smolensk into Yelnya, rather than the other way around.

In the end, Guderian’s position at Yelnya turned out to be one of the most counterproductive operational choices of the war. Not only did it directly contribute to a pyrrhic victory at Smolensk, with much of the encircled force escaping, but it also accelerated the attrition of the panzer units in Army Group Center. This happened for two reasons: first, by neglecting the encirclement, Guderian shifted the burden onto Hoth’s Panzer Group, which took correspondingly high casualties. In particular, 7th Panzer Division ended up doing most of the heavy fighting, trying unsuccessfully to seal off the Smolensk-Moscow road.

More importantly, however, the Yelyna bridgehead became a killing field for Guderian’s forces. The bulging salient, some 60 km wide, was subjected to heavy attacks on a 180 degree arc. On July 26, Panzer Group 2’s war diary recorded:

At the fighting around Yelnya the situation is especially critical. The corps has been attacked all day from strongly superior forces with tanks and artillery… Constant heavy artillery fire is inflicting heavy casualties on the troops… The corps has absolutely no shells available… The corps can maybe manage to hold on to its position, by only at the price of severe bloodletting.

Army Group Center would eventually take some 100,000 casualties in August and September in the face of persistent Red Army counterattacks. Of these, a little over 40% came in the Yelnya bridgehead, which was the single most exposed position on the German front. The Germans would eventually abandon the position in September, but only after taking heavy losses and allowing the position to divert resources away from finishing encircled Red Army forces in Smolensk and Mogilev.

In short, the Yelnya Bridgehead cost the Germans valuable material as well as time. As a direct result of Guderian’s indifference towards sealing the encirclements, it took several weeks to stabilize the front and reduce the various pockets, and all the while the forces around Yelnya remained exposed to heavy Soviet fire. Taking the basic ledger of the Yelnya position, Guderian’s decisions cost the Wehrmacht approximately ten days of delay (by prolonging the battle around Smolensk), allowed something in excess of 50,000 Soviet troops to escape encirclement, and greatly increased the attrition of the panzer groups.

German leadership was aware of all these things. Halder wrote in his diary that the fighting around Yelnya had been brutal and was inflicting heavy losses on the German forces holding the bridgehead, and Bock was certainly aware that the Smolensk pocket was leaking. Despite this, nobody at the higher echelons of the command chain intervened to force Guderian to withdraw from Yelnya. Why?

The answer lies in the emerging strategic paralysis gripping the Germans. A strong block of officers (including Halder, Bock, and Guderian) had emerged which favored preparations for an immediate renewal of the offensive towards Moscow. They stood in opposition to Hitler, who was committed to detaching the Panzer Groups from Army Group Center, wheeling Hoth’s grouping northward to assist Army Group North in its drive for Leningrad, while Guderian cut south into Soviet Ukraine. The decision to hold the Yelnya Bridgehead, despite its exorbitant costs, constituted a mechanism for the “Moscow officers” to advance their schema by committing to the axis of attack towards the Soviet capital. Guderian, in particular, was highly skilled at insubordination and strongly opposed any diversion of his forces southward. Fuhrer Directive 33, issued on July 19, was the first document to explicitly instruct Panzer Group 2 to prepare to detach from Army Group Center to wheel south, but Bock and Guderian would for weeks treat this order as if it was subject to negotiation.

It was this debate which usually forms the basis of the “when did Germany lose the war” discussion. A very popular theory essentially argues that Halder and Guderian were correct, and that Hitler lost the war when he turned Guderian’s panzers south into Ukraine rather than continuing up the road towards Moscow. This theory is utterly incorrect, and we are left with the uncomfortable fact that Hitler was correct.

The basic issue was that the road to Moscow was not clear, and Army Group Center was in no position to continue its offensive at the beginning August. The basic reason for this was the arrival of a phalanx of Soviet reserve armies which would keep up relentless attacking pressure well into September, as the Red Army attempted a broad front counteroffensive around Smolensk. Although Army Group Center generally held (albeit by abandoning the bloody salient around Yelnya), the most important aspect of this offensive was that it kept Army Group Center locked in high intensity combat which prevented it from accumulating supplies or refitting for a renewed offensive. At this point, logistical connectivity to the army at the front was adequate to supply Army Group Center in the defense, but far too weak to allow supply dumps to be built up to support a new offensive. It was not until the Soviet offensive finally collapsed in September that Bock was able to sort his forces out to renew the attack.

Therefore, when officers like Guderian complain that the road to Moscow was “open”, and that they failed to take the city only because Hitler intervened, they are lying. In fact Army Group Center spent virtually all of August and early September defending itself, and was in no position to perform the requisite staging to resume the attack. Therefore, Hitler’s decision to divert Guderian to the south to encircle Soviet forces at Kiev was essentially correct. No offensive towards Moscow was possible in August 1941.

The problem, however, was that even where his strategic sensibilities were generally correct, Hitler exhibited indecision and paralysis which created a confused strategic direction. On August 4th he flew to Army Group Center’s headquarters at Borisov to meet with Bock, Hoth, and Guderian. All three generals echoed Halder’s arguments that the correct choice was to strike for Moscow as soon as possible. The meeting seemed to momentarily deepen Hitler’s indecision, and Guderian flew back to his own headquarters bent on preparing for a drive on Moscow.

Overall, the command conferences of early August strongly hint at the general shape of the German crisis. The field commanders - and Hitler, by extension - remained preoccupied with operational choice between an immediate offensive towards Moscow and diverting the panzers south to clear Soviet Ukraine. Little attention was given to the attrition of the panzer forces and the falling combat power of the army at the front. No credit was given to the Red Army, which had proven far more tenacious with vastly deeper reserves than expected. At this point, Germany still had substantial uncommitted panzer reserves - for example, the 2nd and 5th panzer divisions were still loitering in Germany - but no serious discussion was given to deploying them. The key question, in short, remained a matter of tinkering with the maneuver scheme, and Hitler’s indecision and failure to decide on a clear direction cost the Wehrmacht valuable time and resources.

How might it have been different? Here we come to the point of departure, which relies in the first place on Hitler exhibiting decisiveness and making his directives much more explicit. We also must assume that German field commanders, with their strong independent streak, actually follow orders. This is a tenuous assumption, but for the sake of our thought experiment it will have to do. Consider the following changes to the German operational schema:

1. On July 19, explicit orders are issued stipulating that the Yelnya Bridgehead was not to be pursued, with 10th and 17th Panzer Divisions rerouted north to link up with Hoth’s forces to seal the Smolensk encirclement.

2. Orders from Hitler make it clear that Guderian’s instructions are to prioritize sealing the Smolensk encirclement, followed by refitting preparations for a diversion south into Ukraine.

3. After the August 4-5th command conference, Hitler releases the panzer reserve to the eastern army. 2nd and 5th panzer divisions arrive to reinforce Army Group Center in September.

4. On August 11th, Guderian begins his strike south towards Kiev - note: in actuality, this order did not come down until August 25th due to Hitler’s indecision and the delays caused by Guderian’s failure to seal the Smolensk pocket.

Taken together with our decision to mobilize reserves and railway assets earlier (with the trigger being the discovery of unexpected Soviet field armies at Smolensk), this puts the Wehrmacht in a significantly stronger position. The attrition of Army Group Center would have been significantly lower in both relative and absolute terms, both because the severe losses suffered in the Yelnya salient would have been avoided, and due to faster and more comprehensive reduction of the Smolensk pocket. More decisive leadership would have also put the Wehrmacht two weeks ahead of its timetable, with the Kiev operation beginning on August 11th rather than the 25th.

This accelerated timetable is not hard to justify, and may in fact be conservative. As events actually played out, Guderian reported that his forces were staged for action on August 15th, but the order to turn south towards Kiev did not come until the 25th due to indecision in the high command. We can accelerate the operation even more by assuming a more rapid resolution to the Smolensk pocket (easily possible if Guderian had cared), and a faster rotation of the panzer units: as matters actually turned out, Guderian had great difficulty pulling his mechanized units out of the line due to the aggressive Soviet attacks on Yelnya. Defending further west in a less exposed position, he could have more quickly inserted infantry into the line to allow the panzers to refit and prepare to attack.

Settling in: Final Operations in 1941

Thus far, we’ve elaborated a scenario where Army Group Center averted needless attrition, won a more complete victory at Smolensk, and wrapped up its operations there at least two weeks ahead of schedule. This would have in turn accelerated the German operation towards Kiev, which became perhaps the single largest German victory of the war. With Guderian’s panzer group slicing south into central Ukraine, the Wehrmacht encircled almost the entirety of the Red Army’s Southwestern Front, capturing some 650,000 Soviet troops in addition to hundreds of thousands killed and wounded. This was undoubtedly one of the great victories of the war, which wiped out a Soviet army group and overran critical economic regions. Hitler made many mistakes, but the diversion towards Kiev was not one of them.

So far, on balance, we have gained two weeks for the German timetable, modestly reduced the attrition of the panzer groups, and made an appropriate reaction to Red Army mobilization by beginning remediation of the manpower, material, and logistic crisis at the end of July, rather than waiting for the Soviet offensives in the winter. These are important changes, but how can they translate into a different outcome?

The fixation with Moscow tends to cloud the conversation. Arguably, the steps we have taken here increase the Wehrmacht’s odds of capturing Moscow by allowing Operation Typhoon to begin two weeks early. With the Battle of Kiev now concluding around September 10, rather than the 26th (as a domino effect of Guderian being able to move out early), theoretically Typhoon may have begun in mid-September, rather than on October 2nd, as it actually did. As events actually played out, Guderian began his movements northward on September 30th - but what would have happened if he had been two weeks ahead?

It’s easy to weave a cascading scenario. Perhaps, with an early launch to Typhoon, the Germans approach Moscow before Soviet reserves arrived, during the October panic. Perhaps 2nd SS Division Reich arrives at the Borodino crossroads before the Red Army’s 32nd Rifle Division (in real life, the Soviets won this race by a nose). Perhaps perhaps.

Or perhaps we are getting too far ahead of ourselves. Arguably, the limiting factor preventing Typhoon from launching earlier was not the need to wait for Guderian to clean up at Kiev, but rather the Soviet counteroffensive which raged well into September, preventing Army Group Center from building up a supply base for a fresh offensive. During the prolonged Soviet attack, the Germans continued to expend resources heavily on the defense, which precluded the necessary refitting and restocking for Typhoon. Even with Guderian two weeks ahead of schedule, the supply basis for Typhoon may not have accommodated an accelerated timetable.

Instead, we redirect much of Typhoon’s offensive punch. Rather than scrambling Guderian back to the north to participate in Typhoon, we keep 2nd Panzer Group in Ukraine to continue the drive eastward. Therefore, rather than belatedly deploying the panzer reserve to Army Group Center for a failed push toward Moscow, the panzer groupings of Army Group South (including Guderian’s group) are reinforced, and the primary German focus in September and October becomes the attainment of the Donets line and the midcourse of the Don, which can serve as defensive anchors for the winter. In actuality, German forces were able to reach Rostov, at the extremities of the Don and Donets confluence, in November, but were forced to withdraw due to Soviet counterattacks. With an accelerated timetable, the benefit of 2nd Panzer Group, and additional tank forces scrambling from Germany, our proposed line is in reach.

In our scenario, the offensive resources hoarded for Typhoon (including 2nd and 5th Panzer Divisions) are instead allocated to Army Group South, with our critical two weeks of lead time used to make a more forceful lunge for the Donets and the Don around Voronezh. Having attained this objective (which the Germans came close to reaching anyway, despite less time and far weaker forces), the Wehrmacht would be much better positioned for operations in 1942, holding both a much stronger defensive position, with much earlier mobilization allowing for replenishment of the armies over the winter, and stronger logistical connectivity.

Such a scheme would have accrued significant advantages for the Germans during the winter and the early months of 1942. The winter of 1941-42 was the first crisis of the Wehrmacht, when an overextended Army Group Center came under intense pressure from the Soviet winter offensive. It was during these months that the manpower shortages began to reach critical levels, with frontline strength falling as low as 2.5 million (from 3.3 million in September).

In our scenario, the more prudent decision to dig in Army Group Center’s front across the Smolensk-Bryansk corridor would have reduced the exorbitant losses of the winter. The Army Group would have been much better supplied in this position, far closer to its railheads and sheltered by river lines. This represents a further economization of manpower, in addition to the lesser attrition on the panzer units by better management at Smolensk and the decision to resist the fateful plunge through the mud towards Moscow. This, combined with our decision to release reservists from the labor force in the autumn and prioritize replacements for the eastern army would have had the Wehrmacht in a significantly stronger position entering 1942.

More importantly, keeping Guderian’s panzer group in Ukraine and directing combat power towards Rostov would have placed the Wehrmacht in an incomparably stronger position to launch the summer campaign of 1942. As events played out in reality, Germany’s lunge for the oil fields in 1942 began from a start line that was simply too far from the objective to be feasible. The Wehrmacht wasted the summer months simply clearing the Don bend, so that much of their fuel and time had frittered away before they were able to move into the Caucasus and the Volga bend. In our scenario, the start line for Case Blue is pushed forward significantly, so that the first half of the operation is no longer even necessary. Army Group South also begins in a much stronger position thanks to the decision to mobilize reserves in a more timely manner, rather than awaiting the winter crisis.

In our scenario, with the 1942 campaign starting from a much more advantageous scenario, the Wehrmacht actually has the oil fields within striking distance, and is able to lunge for the Caucasus in June 1942, rather than in the autumn. With less ground to cover, it is also within reason that the inner bend of the Volga could have been cleared in the opening phase of the operation, avoiding the disaster at Stalingrad. Germany gets the oil fields, and a fuel-starved Red Army is unable to take advantage of its growing motorization. This is a different world indeed.

Summary: Alternate History

What I’ve endeavored to show here is a twofold argument about Operation Barbarossa. First, it is certainly true that the Germans had options that could have put them in a much stronger position entering 1942, with both a more favorable line and significantly stronger forces. Secondly, the common argument that Germany’s mistake was delaying the attack on Moscow is incorrect.

After the Battle of Smolensk, it is simply not true that the road to Moscow was “open” in any sense. An echelon of newly deployed Soviet field armies attacked Army Group Center relentlessly for weeks, and the expense of warding off this Soviet offensive prevented Bock’s army group from accumulating the supplies and material needed to renew the offensive. It did not much matter what Guderian did in August 1941, because the Soviet counteroffensive sapped the German momentum.

However, German mistakes during the Battle of Smolensk strained their timetable and caused wasteful attrition of the panzer groups. Guderian’s insistence on holding the Yelnya bridgehead prevented the timely sealing and reduction of the pocket at Smolensk. Army Group Center wasted time and combat power at Smolensk. However, Guderian held the Yelnya bridgehead because he falsely believed that Smolensk would be followed up by a rapid thrust for Moscow, despite the fact that Hitler was leaning firmly towards a diversion to the south. There is blame enough to go around. Guderian was insubordinate on many occasions and erred greatly in his decision to grab and hold Yelnya, but Hitler by the same token failed to provide decisive leadership during those critical weeks, and did not clearly articulate the strategic roadmap.

We have demonstrated, however, that better battle management at Smolensk would have gained the Wehrmacht valuable time and reduced the attrition of keystone units. Furthermore, Germany had reservoirs of manpower and logistical resources that it failed to mobilize until the winter crisis had reached its most dire. This too caused the eastern army to be much weaker than it needed to be. Solving these problems would have required decisive leadership from Hitler in moments of growing strategic confusion, and this was not forthcoming.

We can therefore outline the following amendments to German conduct of the war in 1941:

1. Germany initiates escalated mobilization on July 21st in response to the discovery of fresh Soviet armies around Smolensk. This includes immediate measures to mobilize reservists, rationalize economic management, curtain civilian economy production, transfer prisoners of war to industrial work, and deploy railway assets to the east. We would argue that the appearance of a new Soviet echelon at Smolensk presents a rational moment where German leadership could have discarded their flawed assumptions about Soviet collapse and manpower availability and begun intensified mobilization which, in reality, did not begin until 1942-43. This results in 750,000 additional personnel deployed to the eastern army and 50% higher railway capacity by the autumn.

2. Germany adopts a more rational personnel policy which places the eastern army in a place of absolute priority, curtailing Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine access to new personnel. This frees up at least 250,000 additional personnel for the army.

3. During the opening stages at Smolensk, Hitler issues explicit orders that Guderian abandon the drive for the Yelnya bridgehead and link up with 3rd Panzer Group to fully seal and reduce the Red Army grouping at Smolensk. The strategic trajectory is laid out unequivocally: there is no immanent drive on Moscow; priority is resolving the encirclement at Smolensk to free up Panzer Group 2 to wheel south towards Kiev.

4. Guderian now begins the encirclement at Kiev two weeks ahead of schedule and with greater strength (due to avoiding losses at Yelnya.) After clearing the Kiev Encirclement, Guderian remains attached to Army Group South, which is further reinforced with 2nd and 5th Panzer Divisions.

5. The now-heavily reinforced Army Group South drives for the Donets and the midcourse of the Don, with the critical autumn objectives being the capture of Voronezh and Rostov.

The Wehrmacht would begin 1942 with both greater strength, more time, and a shorter distance to go in order to reach the Caucasus and the oil fields, achieving the only “war winning” blow that was actually possible against an enemy like the Soviet Union.

These suggestions illustrate two things. First, it is obvious that Germany’s margin of error was razor thin, in that even relatively small miscues promised to spiral the strategic situation out of control like so many dominoes toppling into each other. The fact that it is tenuous to sketch a path to victory, even in hindsight, suggests that the likelihood of finding the path in real time was slim indeed. However, we should remember that even with all their missteps, the Wehrmacht miraculously found itself within tantalizing reach of victory again and again. In 1941, they made it to the suburbs of Moscow, and in 1942 they came within two kilometers of the oil fields at Ordzhonikidze. History is often a near run thing.

Share

There is limited room for historical revision in respects to the naval dimension of World War One. The Great War was predominately a land war fought by mass armies. Germany was victorious in the east, toppling Tsarist Russia through a mixed strategy of conventional ground campaigns and political subterfuge, in particular supporting a revolutionary antiwar millenarian named Vladimir Lenin. Although this mixed German strategy did largely secure the eastern flank and win a vast empire in East-Central Europe, the German victory was frittered away by a failure to achieve a decision in France before the arrival of American manpower, and by the collapse of the Central Powers in the Balkans. Broadly speaking, there is no “secret” history of World War One in this sense. Germany won in the east and was exhausted everywhere else.

Nevertheless, the naval theaters of the Great War do hold considerable interest: not so much in that they fundamentally determined the outcome of the war, but in the way that they probed and explored emerging techniques and principles in naval warfare which would be critical in future conflicts, and in particular the Second World War.

Naval warfare was in a state of flux when war broke out in 1914. Two important technical revolutions around the turn of the century had thrown the entire enterprise into a state of rapid flux. First, the advent of fast ships armed with torpedoes (supplemented by naval mines) had raised the possibility that expensive capital ships could be easily sunk by relatively cheap and expendable countermeasures. This threat directly provoked the second technical shift, which was the emergence of the all-big-gun battleship (inaugurated by the British Dreadnought) which promised to overcome the torpedo threat by fighting from astonishing ranges, measured in thousands of yards, thus firing safely beyond the reach of enemy torpedoes.

In 1914, dreadnought equivalent battleships were in short supply. Only Great Britain and Germany had any meaningful battlefleets to speak of. The enormous expense of these ships made them inherently very precious, and admirals on both sides of the war fretted endlessly about the idea that a wrong step - being caught out of position, running through a minefield, or being ambushed by torpedo boats - could almost instantly neutralize sea power through the loss of these expensive ships. Paradoxically, then, Dreadnoughts - which had been the measuring unit of sea power in the prewar years and were widely understood to be the most powerful combat system in the world - were subjects of extreme caution and strategic hesitation. Winston Churchill would famously refer to Admiral John Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet, as “the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.”

The conduct of the main battlefleets in the war served to upend longstanding strategic sensibilities, exemplified in the writings of Mahan, which anticipated that decisive action by combatant battlefleets would determine the outcome of the war at sea. As it turned out, those fleets were now so expensive and precious that there was low tolerance to risk them in battle. This created a feedback loop of futility, particularly for the Germans. German naval policy in the prewar years had been focused maniacally on the idea that only a competitive battlefleet of Dreadnought equivalent ships could secure sea control for Germany, but once war broke out that same fleet represented such an enormous and irreplaceable investment of resources that it could not be risked in battle except in near perfect circumstances, which never presented themselves.

The German failure to generate strategic value with such an expensive asset dovetailed with new British blockading strategies, which flaunted established international law to interdict merchant shipping at great distances from the German coast. This bred extreme frustration in Berlin, which in turn provoked a new interest in unrestricted submarine warfare as a method to counter-blockade the British isles. Meanwhile, both the British and German navies would experiment with an entirely novel operational problem: how to amphibiously land ground forces against well defended enemy positions.

In short, naval operations in the First World War generally sort into two different categories. The first comprises those technical and operational forms which were disappointments: namely, economic blockade and battlefleets comprised of capital ships fighting in line. These were expected to be central elements of the naval war which exerted a decisive influence on the overall trend of the conflict, only to fail to live up to lofty prewar expectations. The second category consists of surprises: new operational tasks which received very little energy and investment in the prewar military buildup, only to assert unexpected potency and importance in wartime. These consisted primarily of long range submarine warfare and amphibious operations. For narrative purposes, this article is centered on the disappointments.

Subscribe now

Taken collectively, the First World War - despite its enduring reputation as a sprawling land war par excellence - saw naval warfare evolve rapidly during the conflict, in ways that greatly surprised prewar planners and theorists. The popular Mahanian understanding of naval conflict, which placed economic blockade and decisive battle between concentrated capital ship fleets at the center of strategic logic, came unraveled. Both the battleship and the blockade proved to be indecisive and inadequate levers, while previously overlooked concepts like contested amphibious landings and unrestricted submarine warfare began to emerge as critical operational capabilities. At sea as on land, this war was not as expected.

Strategic Standoff: The British Blockade

Blockades and cargo interdiction had a long established place of pride in naval warfare, as the veritable raison d'être of naval forces as such. Britain won a series of wars against the Dutch and the French in previous centuries through the strangulation of enemy seaborne trade, and more recent blockades involving the United States Navy (against the Confederacy and the Spanish in Cuba) demonstrated that the principle was still in effect. This was a point of particular emphasis in the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who served in the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron in the American Civil War. For Mahan and his disciples, the ability to interdict enemy trade, conferred by the sea control which was won in pitched fleet battles, was the whole point of having a fleet to begin with.

That the Royal Navy would attempt some sort of blockade against the Central Powers was therefore an axiomatic element of war planning for most parties, but the particular form of the blockade was much more complicated than is generally appreciated. This was due to developments in both the technology and tactics of naval warfare and in the legal-bureaucratic sensibilities governing trade. Making matters even more complicated, Germany was Great Britain’s largest trading partner, and unwinding the mutual dependence of the two economies was not easy even after war had broken out. Furthermore, the British had to reckon with the interests and views of a variety of neutral countries, including the United States, in its efforts to choke off German commerce.

Above all, it was clear that a blockade of Germany would be fundamentally different from past efforts due to the advent of torpedoes and mines. The asymmetrical threat posed by cheap and plentiful torpedo boats against expensive capital ships was a well established concept dating back to the mid-19th Century, but the effect was made unmistakably real in the Russo-Japanese War, which saw both minefields and torpedoes put to effective use. During his tenure as First Sea Lord, Jacky Fisher came to the unequivocal view that a close blockade, which would station British ships on a permanent basis around the German coastline, was nonsensical given the treat posed by torpedoes, and any plan which relied upon long term exposure to German torpedo boats had to be excluded categorically. War plans drafted in 1910, for example, rejected outright the idea of a close blockade, though they were somewhat confused and contradictory as to what the alternative might be.

The inability of the Royal Navy to conduct a close blockade of the German coastline dovetailed with the emerging international consensus around the legality of blockading action. The 1856 Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law, in particular, had put important parameters around blockades. The purpose of that convention, above all, had been an effort by the French and British to abolish the ancient practice of privateering (once common), which had come to be seen as little more than thinly veiled piracy. The Paris agreement, however, had to find some way to distinguish between illicit piracy and a lawful form of blockade, and stipulated that blockades constituted a lawful act of war so long as they were effective, a parlance which referred to a blockading force permanently sealing off an enemy port.

The strange upshot of this was that, per the Paris declaration, a full close blockade was considered lawful, but a partial blockade was not. The logic is fairly easy to understand, in that it served to protect neutral ships and differentiate between a blockade and piracy. If a belligerent navy could station a sufficient force to declare the enemy port closed, this would be deemed lawful, and it would create no ambiguity as to whether neutral shipping could freely enter. The concept here was that a lawful blockade ought to be explicit and complete: either the blockading force could seal off and close the enemy port, or it could not. If it could not, then it was considered unlawful to interfere with neutral shipping.

A second concept which emerged, first from the Paris declaration and later from the 1909 London Declaration concerning the Laws of Naval War, was a growing distinction between types of contraband. This question related not only to the explicit seaborne trade of a belligerent, but also cargoes carried by neutral countries. Early attempts at defining “contraband” separated cargoes into those that were absolute contraband, which meant explicitly military products like munitions, and conditional contraband like raw materials and grain.

The biggest problem, from the British perspective, was the existence of neutral trading partners. In the prewar years, British war planning was heavily preoccupied with the predicted capacity of Belgian and Dutch shipping to make up the difference in German trade. There were even parties within the British government who went so far as to suggest that a blockade was a futile enterprise to begin with for precisely this reason. The British consul-general in Frankfurt, for example, wrote:

It would be a matter of great importance whether a blockade of the German ports could at the same time be extended to the Dutch and Belgian ports… If there are reasons for not so far extending the blockade a great part of the traffic intended for Germany would make for Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Antwerp, etc.; the goods would then enter Germany by way of the Rhine.

Although prewar thinking was fixated on the Dutch and the Belgians as the anticipated leak in the blockade, wartime revealed that the problem was far more expansive, and Germany was able to import significant quantities of critical materials though countries like Sweden and Denmark. By far the most important neutral, however, was the United States, which vehemently protested interference with its shipping. The British government would pursue a variety of diplomatic-bureaucratic workarounds in an attempt to contain neutral trade with Germany, but the results were less than impressive.

In short, changes to both the technical and diplomatic context of blockading created something of a strategic crisis for the British. On the one hand, the rise of torpedoes and modern naval minefields made a close blockade more or less untenable, and the Royal Navy was forced - after many debates and revisions of their war plans - to adopt a long-range blockade enforced at strategic standoff distances. Rather than loitering off the German coast to close German ports directly, the Royal Navy established screening lines at the Strait of Dover and in the North Sea between Scotland and the Norwegian Coastline.

The distant blockade solved the operational problem by keeping the Royal Navy’s screening fleets at standoff range from German bases, and it allowed the mass of the Grand Fleet to be stationed far to the north at Scapa Flow, where it was safe from surprise attack at anchor. It did nothing, however, to answer the question of how German access to world markets could be satisfactorily reduced without violating the rights of neutral countries. This, indeed, became a thorny strategic question which tormented the British war effort for years.

When war broke out in 1914, the plan for the distant blockade was immediately put into effect. Popular historiography of the war, in glossing over the naval dimension more generally, tends to take the effectiveness of the blockade for granted, evidenced by the food shortages which gripped Germany in the latter years of the war - particularly the infamous “turnip winter.”

In fact, the Royal Navy’s blockade of Germany, although achieved in its technical parameters, became a bitter disappointment and a source of great internal disagreement in Britain. It could not achieve its highest strategic objectives - neither crippling the German economy nor compelling the German High Seas Fleet to come out for a fight.

In technical terms, the blockading scheme was simple enough. A series of minefields were laid across the northern entrance to the North Sea, right up to Norwegian waters, and around the Strait of Dover. This created extremely manageable choke points for shipping which allowed British cruiser squadrons to stop and search merchant vessels passing through. On November 2, 1914, the British government declared that the entire North Sea was a “war zone” through which merchant ships could transit only if they followed specified routes through the minefields, where they could be detained and searched for contraband. As events turned out, almost all of these vessels were either allied or neutral: simply the threat of the Royal Navy sent the German merchant marine scurrying for safe harbor at the outbreak of war, and they spent the entirety of the conflict laid up either at home or in neutral ports. There was no meaningful effort by German shipping to test the blockade at any point in the war.

In 1915 (the first full year of the war), the Royal Navy would intercept some 3,000 ships in the North Sea, with only a very small number slipping through unmolested. Judged purely on the capacity of the British to interdict traffic, the blockade was nearly hermetic - and yet there was no collapse of the German economy or degradation of the German war effort. This failure was owed first to the ring of neutral countries which remained perfectly willing to prop up German imports, and secondly by the success of German scientists and engineers in finding substitutes for embargoed raw materials.

The former problem was chiefly diplomatic in nature, though it had a military component: namely the inability of the Royal Navy to penetrate into the Baltic Sea, which kept the sea lanes open for German trade with Scandinavia. The so-called “northern neutrals”, including the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, continued to trade intensively with Germany after the war began, with Sweden providing iron ore, Norway selling cooper and nickel, and the Dutch and the Danes exporting food.

The British did hope that the blockade, even if it did not create general economic collapse in Germany, might produce shortages in critical materials that could cripple the German war effort. These hopes were largely stymied by the success of German engineers in finding substitutes. One early projection by the British anticipated that the Germans would exhaust their stockpiles of manganese, which was an essential metallurgic input for gun manufacture, by late 1915. German chemists, however, were able to identify substitutes in addition to bolstering manganese stocks by recycling and refining old slag. Nitrates were another potential bottleneck, essential for the manufacture of both high explosives and fertilizer. Again, however, German chemists were able to devise a method for fixing atmospheric nitrogen. This method was more expensive than prewar sourcing (which primarily derived nitrates from bat guano sourced from South America), and it was never able to fully meet German needs: consequently, German agriculture suffered from lower availability of fertilizer. Nevertheless, the German army never ran seriously short on highs explosives, and by some estimates the German breakthrough in nitrate production managed to prologue the war by two years.

The upshot of all this was that the British blockade, while producing economic dislocation in Germany and greatly complicating many aspects of their economic management, was simply inadequate to bring Berlin to its knees. This bred a growing sense of frustration, particularly over the ongoing trade through neutral countries. By the middle of 1915, British policy was at war with itself, with the Navy advocating a more hermetic crackdown on neutral trade, and the Foreign Office, which prioritized friendly relations with neutrals, pushing back.

A March 1915 order attempted to tighten the blockade so that any goods suspected of being en-route to Germany could be seized, whether or not they were passing through neutral countries along the way, but the Foreign Office made repeated intrusions to weaken the enforcement, particularly in the face of American complaints. As one memorandum from Lord Grey, the Foreign Secretary, later put it:

Blockade of Germany was essential to the victory of the Allies, but the ill-will of the United States meant their certain defeat… Germany and Austria were self-supporting in the huge supply of munitions. The Allies soon became dependent for an adequate supply on the United States. If we quarreled with the united States we could not get that supply. It was better therefore to carry on the war without blockade, if need be, than to incur a break with the United States…. The object of diplomacy, therefore, was to secure the maximum of blockade that could be enforced without a rupture with the United States.

British enforcement was therefore roiled by a naval faction which advocated the strictest possible blockade, and the Foreign Office which continually intervened to neuter the blockade to preserve friendly relations with neutrals. More specifically, the Foreign Office instructed that detained ships were to be given “the benefit of the doubt” as to the destination of their cargoes, which in effect meant that neutral ships could be released after giving a simple guarantee (not subject to verification) that the contents were not bound for Germany. Thus, despite the March effort by the navy to button up the blockade, most neutral ships continued to be let through. Between March 1 and May 14, the Royal Navy halted and inspected 340 neutral vessels at the northern blockading line, of which only 6 were detained. Admiral Stanley Colville, who commanded the blockading bases in the Orkney and Shetland Islands, expressed his frustration:

It is inexplicable to me why cargoes are allowed to proceed to Copenhagen, and other ports, which it is obvious are intended for Germany.

It was not until the middle of 1916 that serious progress was made on tightening the blockade. The reason, put simply, was growing disillusionment with the Foreign Office’s approach, with both the Navy (particularly commander in chief of the Grand Fleet, Admiral Jellico) and the public growing increasingly vocal about what they saw as cowardice and unbecoming deference to neutrals on the part of Lord Grey.

Two polices implemented in 1916 finally went a long way towards remediating the deficiencies. The first was a system of “forced rationing” for neutrals, which essentially aimed to limit neutral imports to their pre-war levels, reasoning that any excesses were likely bound for Germany as their ultimate destination. The second policy, known as the black lists, prohibited business between British firms and neutral countries or firms suspected of trading with Germany. This formed an obvious precursor to modern systems of sanctioning. The black lists gave the British government enormous leverage to force neutrals to disaffiliate from Germany, not only by depriving them of access to British markets, but even more importantly by allowing the Admiralty to deny bunker coal to the ships of any blacklisted firm. Finally, the British established a system of certification whereby their embassies in neutral countries (most importantly the United States) could issue certificates to “innocent cargoes” which would allow them to pass through the blockading lines without being detained for inspection.

Taken together, these policies finally laid the groundwork for substantial strangulation of German trade as the war plunged on into 1917. Nevertheless, the early years of strategic paralysis and ineffectuality revealed the extent to which the world had changed from the heady days of the close blockade, when a squadron of ships could simply loiter outside the enemy port. It was not just that the technology of war had changed, forcing experimentation with long range blockading, but also the geopolitical substrate. The interconnectivity of the global trading system, with its myriad nodes and competing interests, confounded the British blockade in numerous ways, and left the world’s largest and most powerful battlefleet with little to do but sit in its harbor at Scapa Flow while its admirals fought the politicians.

Anticlimax: The Battle of Jutland

The naval theater of the Great War was, much like the sprawling fronts on the continent, subject to indecision and stasis. Unlike the front in France, however, which was locked up by the operational difficulties of exploitation and maneuver, the sea was inactive due to general lethargy and prohibitive force ratios which left the belligerents with little incentive to fight. The navies of Europe had, in the prewar era, sorted themselves into starkly differentiated power tiers which discouraged them from seeking or accepting battle. Just as the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet, based at Scapa Flow, was much more powerful than the German High Seas Fleet, the German fleet was in turn substantially more powerful than the Russian Baltic Fleet. The effect was that everybody was content to stay in the safety of their bases, with the weaker fleets having nothing to gain from coming out for battle. The Germans had, in effect, built a fleet that was simultaneously too weak to accept battle with the British, but in turn too strong for the Russians to accept battle in the Baltic. Similar conditions accrued in the Mediterranean and Black Seas, where the Russians held a preponderance of force over the Turks, and the French and British bottled up the Austrians.

On the German side, this general predisposition towards inaction was influenced by the outsized role of the Kaiser, who was torn between a desire to see the fleet take more aggressive actions and a strong personal aversion to losing ships. In August 1914, only a few weeks after the beginning of the war, several smaller German vessels, including light cruisers and a patrol boat, were sunk in a British ambush in the Heligoland Bight - a rather clever operation on the part of the Royal Navy, which entailed using submarines to bait German destroyers and catch them out at sea. Although the Battle of Heligoland Bight was strategically ancillary (involving, as it did, mainly cruisers and screening ships with no battleships taking part), the loss of vessels in combat seemed to have decisively spooked the Kaiser, who prohibited future fleet operations without explicit approval from himself. Tirpitz would later complain in his memoirs:

The Emperor did not wish for losses of this sort… The loss of ships was to be avoided; fleet sallies and any greater undertakings must be approved by His Majesty in advance. I took the first opportunity to explain to the Emperor the fundamental error of such a muzzling policy. This step had no success but on the contrary, there sprang up from that day forth an estrangement between the Emperor and myself which steadily increased.

Had such an order remained in place, it might have utterly neutered the German Navy for the remainder of the war. As matters played out, however, relentless lobbying from the admirals convinced the Kaiser to relax the instructions, authorizing the Commander in Chief of the High Seas Fleet (Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl) to make sorties on his own initiative, albeit with a strong admonition not to lose ships and to avoid operating too close to the British coast. In particular, German operations were impeded by a dogmatic assumption that the fleet had to remain within close range of its own bases, for a variety of reasons. These included the desire to fight within the range of German destroyers (which were viewed as an important equalizer against the larger British battlefleet), the need to be close enough to base for damaged ships to return safely for repair, and the fear that if the High Seas Fleet ventured too far out, it might be ambushed while returning home.

In effect, these assumptions, combined with the Kaiser’s tremendous aversion to losses, made the Germans even more cautious than the logic of the force ratios might have dictated, and trended the North Sea towards a stalemate. The Germans had built their fleet with an intention to fight in close proximity to their own bases and were unwilling to venture further out in force, while the British were content to remain at strategic standoff and sort out their blockade. British fears of a German invasion of Great Britain proved unfounded. Exercises conducted in the prewar years by the Royal Navy had revealed that it was possible for German ships to evade British patrols and reach Great Britain undetected and the prospect of a landing on the home island continued to weigh heavy, but this was unnecessary and showed that the British attributed far more strategic aggression to their adversary than was warranted. Early war German excursions were limited to attempts to shell and mine British naval facilities, but these attempts did little damage.

With the Kaiser finally making the decision to allow limited operations at the end of 1914, von Ingenohl planned a limited excursion designed to probe the outer edge of the German Bight. The operation was as limited in scope as one can imagine; the objective was to reconnoiter the shallow region in the central North Sea known as the Dogger Bank, clear out British trawlers (which the Germans believed were a source of reconnaissance and surveillance for the Royal Navy), and destroy any British patrol ships encountered. Admiral Franz von Hipper was tasked with the excursion and given the four battlecruisers of the High Seas Fleet, along with an armored cruiser. Because the Germans assumed that the British battlefleet remained stationed at Scapa Flow enforcing the blockade (with a secondary detachment guarding the mouth of the Thames), it was believed that the German battlecruisers could make the trip to the Dogger Bank, clear it out, and return home without encountering British capital ships. Instead, they were caught in the open by five British battlecruisers under Admiral David Beatty. What had gone wrong?

Although the Germans did not know it, almost from the outset of hostilities their communications had been compromised by British signals intelligence. In contrast to the Second World War, where British intelligence cracked German communications through extensive cryptographic research, in the Great War the coup was a matter of wonderful luck. Within the first weeks of the war, the British obtained several German naval codebooks. One codebook was seized from a German cruiser which ran aground on the Russian coast after it became lost in dense fog (the Russians passed it along to the Royal Navy). A second was obtained in the far east when the Australians captured the steamship Hobert, which remarkably had not been informed that the war had started. Thinking there was nothing amiss, the Hobert allowed Australian personnel to board under the guise of a quarantine inspection and promptly had her codebook stolen. Finally, the captain of a a sinking German torpedo boat in the North Sea threw his codebook overboard in a lead-lined chest, which was soon dredged up by a British trawler. Any one of these three incidents would have been an exceptional stroke of luck for the allies, but all of them together were a signals intelligence windfall that soon had the British codebreakers taking a leisurely reading of the German Navy’s wireless traffic.

The Germans were very slow to understand the extent to which the Royal Navy’s operations were driven by their signals intelligence, and the ensuing Battle of the Dogger Bank was no exception. The German plan to reconnoiter and clear the bank was driven by assumptions about British deployments, while the British were reading much of the German wireless traffic and, while not having a truly comprehensive picture, reacting with an informed look at German movements. Thus, Hipper’s battlecruisers found themselves ambushed on the open sea by their British opposites in what became the war’s first encounter between capital ships.

Schematically, the ensuing battle was extremely simply and represented little more than a chase, with the British battlecruisers catching the Germans astern and pouring fire on them from the rear. Technically, however, the fight revealed both surprising capabilities and unexpected deficiencies. To begin with, the range of effective fire surpassed all expectations. Whereas prewar British assumptions placed the extremes of firing ranges at some 15,000 yards, Beatty’s flagship, HMS Lion, opened fire at 21,000 yards and scored a hit at 19,000. Unfortunately, British optics and rangefinders were largely useless at such extreme ranges - a particularly disquieting notion, given a prewar British decision not to invest in a costly fire control system (the famous Pollen system) which promised improved accuracy at these extreme ranges. The result was a mixed bag for Beatty: his guns could do astonishing damage at previously unthinkable ranges, but the rate of fire and the fire control system proved unsatisfactory.

The outcome for the British was further diminished by problems of command and control. British fire ripped the Blücher, which was in the rear of the German line, to shreds, and she was soon drifting out of the line in a wreck. Unfortunately, German return fire had heavily damaged Lion, and Beatty’s flagship began to fall out of the battle. Lion was not mortally wounded and she would not sink, but Beatty lost communication with the rest of his battlecruisers and had to resort to archaic signal flags to transmit orders. Beatty’s Flag Lieutenant, however, failed to transmit the Admiral’s orders, so despite Beatty’s wish to continue the pursuit of the German line, the British fleet pulled away to finish off the flailing Blücher. As a result of this command and control foul up, the remainder of Hipper’s force was able to slip away to safety.

In his post-battle reports, Beatty overlooked the signaling failure but could not avoid the conclusion that the victory was less complete than it should have been. In his view, however, the key problem was that the British rate of fire was too low - a problem that he attributed to standing instructions to conserve ammunition. This may or may not have been a contributory factor, but curiously Beatty seems to have failed to realize that the fire control on his ships was insufficient at extreme ranges, and that overall the British gunnery was unimpressive. The Germans, meanwhile, opted to simply hope that they had sunk a British ship to make up for the loss of the Blücher. Two British Battlecruisers - Beatty’s Lion and HMS Tiger - had been badly chewed up, and the German post-action report announced, incorrectly, that Tiger had sunk, allowing the Germans to falsely claim a draw. Even this was not enough to save Admiral von Ingenohl, who was removed from his post of February 2nd and replaced by Admiral Hugo von Pohl.

Shortly before he was promoted to Commander in Chief of the High Seas Fleet, von Pohl had received a memorandum from Admiral Tirpitz. The role of the venerable old Tirpitz in the First World War was strangely minimal; in the prewar period he had been the respected and powerful architect of German naval building in his post as State Naval Secretary, but once conflict broke out he was relegated to the sidelines, for the State Naval Secretary had no operational command whatsoever. From his perch on the sideline, Tirpitz became something of a one-man peanut gallery, offering criticisms and suggestions of naval operations that he had no authority to implement.

In his 1915 memo to von Pohl, Tirpitz made an abrupt about-face on Germany’s strategic conception of the naval war. Whereas in the prewar period Tirpitz had preached the Mahanian ethos of decisive battle by capital ships, he now argued that the navy had to pivot towards operations aimed at crippling the British economy. As he saw it, Germany had four options:

1. An air offensive (using airships) aimed at the dockyards and warehouses around London, to disrupt shipping into the city.

2. An unrestricted submarine blockade, using U-boats to sink all possible shipping into Britain.

3. A robust submarine and destroyer operation against the Channel and the mouth of the Thames, operating out of the bases captured in Belgium.

4. Long range cruiser raids in the Atlantic, aimed at both sinking enemy shipping and drawing British warships out of the North Sea.

This radical course change was quite notable, if for no other reason than that it contradicted the entire premise of Tirpitz’s prewar building program. The old Admiral had for years systematically eschewed submarines and cruisers in favor of battleships, only to advocate plans premised on the former ship types within the first few months of the war. In any case, Tirptiz’s call for a more aggressive prosecution of the economic war against Britain dovetailed with a general trend which saw the German operational sensibility grow more aggression. The Imperial Admiralty Staff was pressing for an operation to draw part of the British Grand Fleet into the Heligoland Bight, though von Pohl was skeptical that the British could be coaxed into doing something so patently stupid.

Read more

If you ask someone to name the worst military or geostrategic blunders in history, the standard answers will tend to center on doomed invasions of the Russian interior, either in the form of Napoleon’s 1812 campaign or the Third Reich’s invasion of the USSR. Someone with a deeper well of knowledge might point to a more esoteric and specific blunder: perhaps Erwin Rommel’s failure to neutralize Malta, the Byzantine division of forces at Manzikert, or Britain’s Gallipoli campaign. Perhaps we could return to the age of heroes and cite the Trojans bringing that wretched wooden horse into their city without inspecting its interior.

What most of these mistakes (perhaps with the exception of the Trojan Horse) have in common is that, although they all misfired spectacularly, they at least possessed a certain strategic logic which made them defensible on theoretical grounds. Mistakes, the actions of the enemy, and bad luck can all compound to create a disaster, but usually there is no sense that decisions were made for no reason at all. Usually.

Between 1897 and 1914 Imperial Germany conducted its own geostrategic blunder of the highest order, when it unilaterally launched a naval arms race against the greatest sea power of the age in the Royal Navy. What is remarkable about the German naval buildup is that it was justified on tenuous strategic speculations about the British response; despite the fact that it was apparent in real time that these speculations were untrue, the buildup continued for its own sake, and Germany repeatedly eschewed opportunities to turn aside from a dead end path.

Prewar Germany stands out among the annals of the great powers for all the wrong reasons. It was, to be sure, an impressively powerful state with remarkable industrial and military power. Institutionally, however, it was a train wreck which allowed its strength to be commandeered in the name of an armaments policy that was conducted separately from its war planning and diplomacy. In the space of two decades, the Germans did succeed in building the second largest battlefleet in the world, but it did so with no sense of how such a fleet might figure into its broader geostrategy, or how to deploy it in wartime.

Subscribe now

The result was an expensive military boondoggle which backfired on virtually all of its theoretical justifications, significantly worsened Germany’s strategic position, and demonstrated virtually no military utility when war came to Europe in 1914. This grand debacle was embarked upon as a willful and unilateral experiment driven by a few key personalities in Germany. Neither widespread organic domestic support, nor international pressure, nor critical strategic vulnerabilities compelled Germany to launch an arms race with Great Britain. She did so willingly, in an act of profligacy so profound that it astonished observers at home and abroad, with Winston Churchill naming it the German “Luxury Fleet.” Adrift from a coherent geostrategy and lacking institutional mechanisms for course correction, the Germans plunged ahead into a strategic trap of their own making.

Upstart: The Rise of the Germany Navy

One of the great peculiarities of the First World War, and in particular its nautical dimension, is that Germany and Great Britain, as late as the 1890’s, had no real sense that they were preparing to fight a war with each other. Well towards the end of the century, both German and British naval policy continued to view France (and to a lesser extent Russia) as the chief objects of anxiety. Yet in the span of barely a decade, their strategic animus became redirected and the two forces - the Royal Navy on the one hand, and the Kaiserliche Marine, or Imperial Navy on the other - were thinking almost exclusively of war against the other.

This mutual strategic pivot was predicated on changes in both Britain’s alliance policy and strategic outlook and on a wholesale revolution of the German Imperial Navy. In the early 1890’s, Germany’s navy was viewed fundamentally as a limited coastal defense force, designed and tasked with keeping the French and Russians away from Germany’s North Sea and Baltic coastlines, respectively. In 1900, the German fleet included just 36 effective fighting ships and ranked a distant fourth in Europe, behind not only the Royal Navy (by laughable margins) but also the French and Russians. By 1914, the Germans had the second largest navy in the world, with more dreadnought equivalent battleships than all the other non-British navies of Europe combined.

The rapid expansion of the German surface fleet, and its strategic shift against Britain, was a complex process, and certainly too complex to wave away by simply saying: “The Germans decided to build lots of battleships.” The process was intimately tied to the Imperial Navy’s unique position in the German state, and the personal predilections of two individuals: Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.

To begin, it is important to understand that the German Imperial Navy had a unique relationship to the rest of the state which made it strategically erratic. It was, to be sure, very unlike either the German Army or the Royal Navy. As an institution, it was practically unique. While perhaps less interesting than battleship design and deployment plans, a brief overview of the institutional peculiarities of the German Navy provides an important starting point for the broader topic of the prewar naval buildup.

The German Kaiser was both the head of state and the head of the armed forces, and he wielded power through his cabinets and the senior appointees within them. In practice, however, the Kaiser had limited authority over the land forces. The General Staff maintained absolute authority over war planning, and was free to appoint Chiefs of Staff to the field commanders (who were appointed by the Kaiser). The army thus had strong institutional control over both personnel and operations planning which were largely immune to the Kaiser’s direct interference.

The navy was much different, and far more subject to the Kaiser’s direct control. As a result, he tended to view it as something of a personal plaything. In wartime, the Kaiser had to personally approve naval operations, and he generally did so with great trepidation over losing “his ships.” Unlike the army, the navy had no institutional insulation from the Kaiser, and it lacked a strong central planning body akin to the army’s general staff.

Instead, the navy had a variety of different leadership bodies which frequently shuffled in relation to each other, under the overall command authority of the Kaiser. Initially, there was a conventional admiralty, generally called simply the OK (for Oberkommando, or Naval High Command), which was nominally responsible for planning and combat operations. The OK was parallel to a separate office known as the RMA (for Reichsmarineamt, or Imperial Naval Office), which was responsible for the navy’s building program. Finally, there was a a Naval Cabinet which was responsible for personnel and appointments, and was directly subordinate to the Kaiser. In a sense, we can think of the Germany Navy as having its three critical functions (operations planning and command, material and shipbuilding, and personnel) split into three separate bodies which did not have direct institutional connections, and instead were separately suborned to the Kaiser.

This suggests, from the beginning, a fragmented command structure with the Kaiser at its nexus, and in the absence of a unified naval command it was inevitable that the Kaiser - mercurial, easily influenced, and largely ignorant of naval operations - should have dominated the navy as a service. Furthermore, the lack of unified command and clear lines of communication largely froze the navy out of war planning and made it a strategically autonomous service, which did not coordinate with the General Staff of the army and generally lacked a sense of how it could fit into Germany’s larger war plans.

In short, the trajectory of Germany’s naval policy was always strongly influenced by several important institutional idiosyncrasies, which differentiated the service from both the German Army and from competing navies. These could be aptly summarized as follows:

1. The German Navy suffered from a dissipated command structure, with different bodies of authority including the OK and the RMA. This meant that war planning and fleet building were conducted by separate bodies which did not coordinate well with each other, with only the Kaiser in a position to adjudicate and give orders to all the different parties.

2. Ultimate authority over the navy was vested in the Kaiser, with no independent command (like the Army’s General Staff) able to plan operations independently of the monarch. The Imperial German Navy utterly lacked a single senior admiral, akin to the British First Sea Lord or the American Chief of Naval Operations, who could issue commands directly to operational commanders or engage with the Chief of the Army General staff on equal terms.

3. The head of the RMA (responsible for the design and construction of the fleet) was an Admiral, rather than a civilian. This stands in stark contrast to, for example, the American Secretary of the Navy or the British First Lord of the Admiralty, who were almost always civilians with little experience in naval operations. Rather than appointing a civilian with advising admirals, the German system vested this power directly in an Admiral.

Finally, we can add that because the German navy began as a strongly subsidiary service (relative to the army, which was always the main pillar of German strength), the navy was forced to actively promote itself to ensure its own survival and growth as a service. This made the German Navy intensely political, locked as it was in a perennial fight to get the Reichstag to appropriate money for shipbuilding. We can say, with little exaggeration, that the primary activity of the German Navy was shipbuilding, rather than war planning or tactical innovation.

This was particularly the case because the dominant figure in the prewar Imperial Navy was Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. Undoubtedly a titanic figure, Tirpitz more than any other man was responsible for transforming the German Navy from a modest coastal defense force into a world class service capable of threatening (at least on paper) the Royal Navy. However, the methods that he used to do so had the ancillary effect of further warping the institutional peculiarities of the service, such that in wartime the High Seas Fleet proved to be much less than the sum of its parts.

Tirpitz was a Prussian, but in contrast to the usual Prussian pedigree he had joined the Navy as a young man, at a time when - by his own admission - it was not a particularly popular institution. He began his first serious leap towards high power in the 1880’s as the head of Germany’s torpedo program - notwithstanding his background in torpedo boats, however, he would become a staunch advocate of battleship construction and became the driving figure in the naval arms race which Germany would launch, almost unilaterally, against Great Britain.

Two broader aspects of Tirpitz’s career and character stand out which bear commentary before the particular process of the naval arms race can be evaluated. First and foremost, Tirpitz was a skilled political operator who demonstrated a perfect willingness to take a hatchet to institutional niceties in order to advance his program. This can be seen clearly in the way his views pivoted as he moved from post to post.

For example, from 1892 to 1895 Tirpitz was Chief of Staff for the OK (naval high command), and during that time he argued incessantly and aggressively that it was madness to allow the RMA (the Marine Office) to have control over fleet development. During this period, Tirpitz and the OK were chomping at the bit to build battleships, but the RMA and the Reichstag were still nervous about the price tag and continued to build armored cruisers instead. Frustrated by the failure of the State Naval Secretary, Friedrich von Hollmann, to heed his advice, Tirpitz argued that fleet construction ought to be the remit of the admirals who would command the fleet in wartime: in essence, this was a call to neuter the RMA and give its responsibilities to the OK.

In 1897, however, when Tirpitz took control of the RMA and succeeded Hollmann as State Naval Secretary, he launched a coup the other direction, that is against the OK. In a near total reverse of his old arguments, he now lobbied the Kaiser to transfer command authority from the OK to the RMA. The culmination of this effort, in 1899, was the dissolution of the OK altogether with many command authorities distributed between the RMA and a new admiralty staff organized under the Kaiser’s supreme authority.

All of this can seem like esoteric bureaucratic infighting (and in many ways it was) with far too many acronyms and obscure titles. The point, however is relatively straightforward: Tirpitz was aggressive about aggrandizing power in whatever office he happened to hold at the time. During his years as chief of staff in the OK (Naval High Command), he argued that shipbuilding responsibilities should be taken away from the State Naval Secretary. Once Tirpitz was himself the State Naval Secretary, he lobbied to strip command authority from, and the ultimately dissolve, the OK. At both stops, he was skilled at manipulating the Kaiser - with whom he had an exceptional relationship - to get what he wanted, even threatening to resign on multiple occasions. For Tirpitz, the point was that he had a clear and singular vision for how to develop the Navy’s power, and he resented the dissipated authority - therefore, he was ruthlessly and pragmatically willing to attack the institutional structure in order to accumulate the power he craved to push his vision forward.

And what was that vision? In its simplest form, it was a surface fleet structured around battleships that would be capable of, if not directly fighting and defeating the Royal Navy, at least posing a credible threat. The evolution of the German fleet from a budget force designed for coastal defense into a world class force with only one real rival (the Royal Navy) was not an inevitable process. It was a choice, spawned in Germany largely through the auspices of Tirpitz and his staff, who adroitly maneuvered the Reichstag into embarking on an unprecedented shipbuilding spree in a nexus of evolving strategic thought, personal ambition, economic concerns, and national anxiety.

The pre-Tirpitz conception of the German Navy was aptly summarized in an 1873 memorandum from the first chief of the Admiralty, Albrecht von Stosch:

The mission of the battlefleet is the defense of the coasts of the nation… Against larger seapowers the fleet has only the significance of a “sortie fleet.” Any other objective is ruled out by the limited naval strength that the law provides.

The memorandum had a clean dual effect of not only stipulating the navy’s coastal defense mission but also noting that the limited German fleet would have no wartime role seeking battle on the high seas. The general sensibility is that the navy would have a purely defensive role preventing the enemy from landing troops on the German coastline and keeping the country’s ports and coastal installations open. This remained the general strategic animus of the navy until Tirpitz began to revise it in the 1890’s.

The embryo of Tirpitz’s evolving theory of naval power was his growing concern that, in some future war, the enemy might attempt to blockade German ports at long distance - that is to say, rather than conducting a close-in blockade of German harbors, the enemy fleet might loiter at strategic standoff and intercept German trade as it flowed through traffic chokepoints. It seems that at the beginning, the specific anxiety that preoccupied Tirpitz was the possibility that France might interdict German trade in the English Channel and the North Sea, at a distance beyond the fighting range of Germany’s coastal fleets.

If this were the case, then the entire German naval strategy might be obsolete. A blockade at range would compel the German fleet to come out from its own coastal areas to defeat the enemy on the open sea. This marked a conceptual shift from coastal defense to “sea control”, which necessitated in turn an entirely different sort of battlefleet prepared to fight a decisive battle far from German bases. In 1891, Tirpitz lamented that the naval officer corps did not grasp “the necessity to strike the enemy’s seapower in open battle.”

Tirpitz was thus already thinking along new lines early in the 1890’s, but the critical strategic pivot came specifically in 1894. In that year (while still Chief of Staff of the OK), Tirpitz drafted a series of memoranda for general distribution. Among these documents, the most important was memorandum (Dientschrift) number 9. Dientschrift IX would become perhaps the most important and influential doctrine in the history of the German Navy, announcing Tirpitz’s new strategic animus in unequivocal terms. The most important section of the memorandum was titled in a way that left no room for misunderstanding: “The Natural Purpose of a Fleet is the Strategic Offensive.” It read, in part:

In recent times, when the sea became the best highway for commerce between individual nations, ships and fleets themselves became instruments of war, and the sea itself became a theater of war. Thereby the acquisition of sea supremacy [Seeherrschaft] became the first mission of a fleet; for only when sea supremacy is achieved can the enemy be forced to conclude peace.

It is at this point that Tirpitz’s growing preoccupation with the thinking of Alfred Thayer Mahan first becomes readily apparent. Mahan, of course, was the American theorist whose famous book The Influence of Sea Power upon History argued in unequivocal terms that control of the sea was the central pivot in world affairs and an absolute prerequisite for victory in modern war. Mahan’s books remain recommended reading today, and it is difficult to do them justice in a short space, but he implied two conclusions above all that were highly actionable for Tirpitz: first, that control of the sea was the greatest coefficient for victory on a strategic scale, as it would allow the dominant sea power to conduct global commerce unmolested while choking off the enemy’s trade, and second that supremacy at sea was attained primarily through decisive battle between rival main battle fleets.

Mahan’s book (published 1890) was a sensation, and while its influence has been occasionally overstated, it did capture the imagination of many world drivers, including US President Theodore Roosevelt, the Kaiser, and of course Tirpitz himself. It seems most likely that Tirpitz (who was fluent and comfortable in English) first read the book in the spring of 1894, before a German translation became available, and thereafter Mahanian language began to saturate his own writings, including the famous Dientschrift IX. It was notable, for example, that Tirpitz frequently referenced the decline of the Dutch Republic as a warning of what could happen to a power once defeated at sea: the preoccupation is telling, as the Anglo-Dutch Wars are a major topic in Mahan’s writing.

From 1894 onward, then Tirpitz was preoccupied with what he saw as a pressing need for Germany to acquire a battlefleet that could fight a decisive battle on the open ocean and wrest “sea supremacy” away from the enemy. This marked a radical shift from the conventional German sensibility, which was predicated on a defensive war fought in proximity to the German coast. Tirpitz argued:

Advocates of a defensive fleet proceed from the assumption that the enemy fleet will come to them and that the decision must take place where they wish it. But this is the case only very infrequently. Enemy ships need not stay close to our coasts… but they can stand out to sea far from one’s own works. Then our own fleet would have only the choice between inactivity, i.e., moral self annihilation, and fighting a battle on the open sea.

At this time, German planning was still centered around scenarios involving a war against France and/or Russia. Dientschrift IX, therefore, called for a battlefleet designed to grant 1/3 superiority over either France’s Northern Fleet or the Russian Baltic Fleet, depending in which was expected to be bigger. The nucleus of this fleet was to be a striking force of 17 battleships (two squadrons of eight ships each, plus a fleet flagship) augmented by cruisers and torpedo boats.

Nothing about the German operational sensibility at this time was remotely realistic. A draft operations plan in 1895 envisioned a blockade of French channel ports designed to draw the French fleet out for battle. This was an elementary sort of formulation which ignored the fact that the French Northern Fleet would simply wait for reinforcements from the Mediterranean, and to make the plan work (even on paper) the OK assumed that repair and resupply could be done in English ports. This latter point is important, as it emphasizes that in 1895, rather than thinking of a war with the Royal Navy, the Germans were not only still preoccupied with France but even assuming that England would be a friendly neutral.

The movement in the German strategic concept occurred in two shift. The first shift, embodied in 1894’s Dientschrift IX, argued that the German fleet had to be prepared to proactively seek decisive battle and therefore needed a powerful nucleus of battleships, but it still envisioned France as the most likely enemy. The second shift, which began almost immediately after Tirpitz took office as the State Naval Secretary in 1897, moved the crosshairs onto the Royal Navy. In a top secret memorandum presented to the Kaiser on June 15, 1897, Tirpitz argued that the essential task of the German Fleet had to be seizing supremacy in the North Sea in wartime. This task implied that the measuring stick against which the German fleet had to size up was not the French Northern Fleet, but the most powerful force in the theater: the Royal Navy:

“For Germany the most dangerous naval enemy at present is England.”

The point, for Tirpitz, was not some particular hatred of the English, but simply the fact that the Royal Navy was the most powerful in the world. Therefore, building a fleet designed specifically to defeat the French was a half measure, since victory would still leave the Germans with only the second most powerful fleet in the theater. “Sea Supremacy” implied just that: supremacy did not mean second place.

The issue, however, went even deeper than this. Tirpitz was determined to build a viable and powerful fleet comprised of battleships, but to do so he needed a strategic vision that could justify such a program. Neither Russia nor France was a good fit for the Mahanian understanding of war, with its emphasis on “Sea Supremacy.” In any war against the Franco-Russian alliance, whatever the particular configuration, it was inevitable that the German Army would be the arm on which the country lived or died. A Navy designed for decisive fleet battle and sea supremacy implied, almost by definition, that the Royal Navy was an adversary. Russia and France could never be defeated by sea, therefore Tirpitz needed an adversarial standard which would require, unequivocally, a fleet of battleships.

Tirpitz had, in effect, locked himself into a strategic feedback loop akin to the famous chicken-egg question. He believed that Germany’s global power could only be guaranteed through sea supremacy, which would be won through decisive battle by powerful battlefleet. Thus the battleship was, in his mind, the indispensable platform for power projection. Building battleships, in turn, required measuring the fleet against the Royal Navy; conversely, however, it was only by identifying the Royal Navy as a rival that costly battleship construction could be truly justified. The choice of the Royal Navy as the enemy justified the expense of the battleships, and it was the building of the battleships that made the Royal Navy an enemy.

Of course, the 1897 memorandum to the Kaiser was top secret for a reason. Tirpitz could not come out and simply say explicitly that he wanted to prepare for a decisive showdown with the Royal Navy - and given the state of the paltry German surface fleet at the time, such an announcement might have been mistaken for comedy. There was also the matter of the Reichstag, which Tirpitz - now ensconced as State Naval Secretary - would have to cajole for every mark and every ship. As he would put it in 1899:

For political reasons the government cannot be as specific as the Reichstag would like it to be; one cannot directly say that the naval expansion is aimed primarily against England.

Nevertheless, it is clear from Tirpitz’s writings that by the end of the century, he (and the Kaiser) had the Royal Navy clearly in mind as a potential adversary, and the standard against which the German Fleet would have to measure itself. Given the fact that relations between Britain and Germany were generally good at this time, it is essentially indisputable that Tirpitz (and his brain worm, Alfred Thayer Mahan) began the Anglo-German naval race almost unilaterally, with the English serving as the necessary adversary to justify costly battleship construction.

One thing remained: Tirpitz would have to convince the Reichstag to pay for it all. Although Tirpitz did not conceive of himself as a particular political person, he proved quite adept at ramming his construction schedules through the legislature. His signature accomplishments were a pair of naval bills, known in the German parlance as the Naval Laws, which were passed by the Reichstag in 1898 and 1900 respectively, with a series of amendments coming at later dates.

The genius of the Naval Laws, and Tirpitz’s great political innovation, was that they laid out a long-term commitment to build a fixed number of ships over several years. This marked a radical departure from the established practice. Tirpitz’s predecessor as State Naval Secretary, Admiral Hollman, made it a practice to annually present the Reichstag with requests for a small number of ships. Hollman had considered it politically impractical to move at a larger scale: “The Reichstag”, he argued, “will never agree to be bound to a formal program for years in advance.”

As Tirpitz saw it, however, the protocol of annual shipbuilding appropriations prevented the navy from building out the fleet in a properly systematic way, and allowed the Reichstag to meddle needlessly in the particulars. He wrote:

“When I became State Secretary, the German Navy was a collection of experiments in shipbuilding surpassed in exoticism only by the Russian Navy of Nicholas II.”

The British, he noted, had a similar practice, but:

“There, money is of no importance; if they built a class of ships wrongly, they just threw the whole lot into the corner and built another. We could not permit ourselves that… I needed a bill which would protect the continuity of construction of the fleet.”

Convincing the Reichstag to approve a multi-year building program was no easy feat, which required Tirpitz to show both a deft political touch and justify the fleet on strategic grounds. Despite his previous disdain for the political process, the Admiral engaged in a flurry of activity plying German notables to support the Naval Law: he paid visits to the recently retired Bismarck, to the King of Saxony, the Prince Regent of Bavaria, and various and sundry Grand Dukes and municipal authorities, occasionally pledging to name ships after his hosts to cajole their support.

Strategically, Tirpitz validated his proposed battlefleet on the grounds of a supposed “Risk Theory.” Since he could not simply come out and openly say that he wished to be able to challenge the Royal Navy for control of the North Sea (in essence asking the government to sign on for an arms race with the strongest sea power in the world), he argued that a suitable battle fleet would act as a deterrent, forcing “even a sea power of the first rank to think twice before attacking our coasts.” He also stressed that, politically speaking, agreeing to a long term building plan would create predictability and free the Reichstag from worrying over endlessly expanding building plans being proposed year after year.

Tirpitz found an enthusiastic ally in his search for ever larger naval appropriations, in the form of German industrial interests - particularly the metallurgical behemoth, Krupp. The reason, once again, was a complex interplay of geopolitical concerns and economics - in this case, the emerging alliance between France and Russia and a subsequent explosion of French arms exports. What mattered for Germany in this instance, however, was not only the strategic implications of a French-Russian linkup (which intensified the German sense of encirclement and siege) but also export competition for Krupp.

Krupp’s enormous complex of machine shops and arms factories had a colossal output potential which was far beyond the demands of any one government - even Germany’s. Thus, Krupp relied extensively on foreign orders to keep its enterprises busy: in 1890-91, more than 85 percent of Krupp’s armaments sales were exports to foreign countries, and the Russians were one of their best customers. In 1885, however, the French government had lifted the ban on foreign weapons sales which had previously prevented French producers, like Schneider-Creusot, from competing with Krupp. Although Krupp was more price-competitive than the French, they were quickly squeezed out of the Russian market, thanks first to the consolidation of the Franco-Russian alliance, and secondly due to the eagerness of French banks to give the Russians loans to finance the purchase of French guns.

With the French government, banks, and manufacturers collaborating to outflank Krupp in foreign markets, the firm naturally needed to find alternative revenue streams, and it found a big one in the German naval construction program: if the German Army did not order enough artillery pieces to keep Krupp’s factories busy, they could make up the difference with naval guns.

Krupp would become an indispensable partner for Tirpitz in advancing ever larger naval construction bills (Naval Laws, in the German parlance) - not only through direct lobbying, but also by mobilizing broad public support. In 1898, the German “Navy League” was founded with Krupp money, for the purpose of organizing public support for the Navy. Within a year, it had over 250,000 fee paying members and some 770,000 affiliates. Mobilizing support from newspapers, industrialists, university professors, politicians, and patriotic citizens of every stripe, it provided a powerful apparatus of political pressure to drive Tirpitz’s construction schedule through the Reichstag.

Tirpitz’s full press on the Reichstag was too much to resist, despite continuing trepidation from many of the deputies - particularly those who anticipated, correctly, that the battle fleet program was putting them on a collision course with England. But Tirpitz had mobilized a great swathe of public opinion behind him, and on March 26, 1898, the First Navy Law passed with a vote of 212-139. The Kaiser was overjoyed and showered Tirpitz with praise:

There is the Admiral himself…. Cheerfully and alone, he took up the awesome task of orienting an entire people, fifty million truculent, short-sighted, and foul-tempered Germans, and of bringing them around to an opposite view. He accomplished this seemingly impossible feat in eight months. Truly a powerful man!

The 1989 Naval Law provided appropriations for the construction of 19 battleships, organized into two squadrons of eight ships each, along with a fleet flagship and two reserve ships, along with a bevy of cruisers. Of equal importance, the law provided for automatic replacement of vessels on a regulated timetable - it thus provided a sort of self-regulating strength for the fleet. It was, of course, not nearly enough. The Second Naval Law, passed in June 1900, ballooned the construction schedule with an additional pair of battleship squadrons: once all ships were completed, the German battlefleet would have a total of 38 battleships along with 52 cruisers.

Tirpitz’s master plan seemed to be coming along nicely. Although it was doubtful that the Germans could ever match the total strength of the Royal Navy, Tirpitz counted on the fact that British strength would be dissipated around the world protecting her far flung empire. In January, 1905, for example the British had three fleets in proximity to the North Sea: a Channel fleet, based at Dover, an Atlantic fleet at Gibraltar, and the reserve Home Fleet. If these three fleets joined for action, they could muster some 31 battleships. Tirpitz’s Naval Laws, then, could be deemed to give the Germans a fighting chance in the North Sea.

Then, the master plan came untracked. On February 10, 1906, Jacky Fisher’s monstrous creation came off the slipway at Portsmouth. The Dreadnought was here.

The Dreadnought Race

In his memoirs, Tirpitz attempted lamely to argue that the British had made a fatal mistake in launching the Dreadnought. She was an immensely powerful weapons system, to be sure, but her commissioning more or less rendered all the pre-dreadnought battleships obsolete overnight. In Tirpitz’s argument, this created an opportunity to overtake the Royal Navy: because all the older ships were now obsolete, the only thing that mattered was the number of Dreadnought equivalent ships in the fleet: therefore, the Dreadnought reset the naval clock to zero. Instead of needing to match Britain’s enormous lead in pre-dreadnought ships, the Germans only needed to match them in dreadnoughts. In essence, Britain’s naval advantage was now 1:0, and their dozens of pre-dreadnoughts no longer mattered.

A tidy argument, but untrue. In real time, the launching of the Dreadnought sent Tirpitz into a minor panic, as his entire master plan for the battlefleet was now subject to revision. The decision to build German dreadnoughts was not as simple as it seemed: it entailed not only a significant increase in unit costs (each dreadnought equivalent would cost nearly 20 million marks more than a pre-dreadnought battleship) but also costly infrastructure improvements to accommodate the larger vessels, including widening the Kiel Canal and dredging harbor channels. Furthermore, if Germany immediately scrapped its extant ship designs and began building dreadnoughts, this would be a clear and unmistakable challenge to the Royal Navy. If Tirpitz took the plunge and began a Dreadnought construction program, he would be committing to a costly and resource-intensive naval construction race with Britain. If he did not, then the entire fleet program was dead in the water and Germany would be abandoning her vision of sea supremacy in the North Sea. Tirpitz decided he had to have dreadnoughts.

The first German dreadnought was laid down in July 1906. She was the Nassau, the lead ship of her class, followed shortly by the Westfalen, Posen, and Rheinland. Although some particulars of her design were different than Fisher’s Dreadnought, she fulfilled the basic design parameters of an all-big-gun capital ship, armed with twelve 11-inch main guns. In 1908, Tirpitz would authorize four additional dreadnoughts, along with armored battle cruisers. On the whole, the German pivot to dreadnoughts was largely seamless - but if Tirpitz hoped to catch the British asleep at the helm, he was in for a rude awakening.

On December 8, 1908, the British cabinet settled in for its regular Monday morning meeting. For most of the assembled ministers, the morning seemed unremarkable, but one among them - the newly appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna - had come to lob a bomb into the proceedings. Based on alarming intelligence that was now trickling in concerning the German shipbuilding program, McKenna planned to ask Parliament to pay for six new Dreadnoughts in 1909, followed by another six in 1910, and a third six in 1911. As if the enormity of this request was not enough, McKenna also brought forward the unsettling revelation that unless this accelerated program was approved, both he the Sea Lords (including First Sea Lord Jacky Fischer) intended to resign. McKenna’s disturbing information about the German Navy, his demand for accelerated battleship construction, and the ultimatum from the Sea Lords marked the beginning of an episode known forebodingly as “The Navy Scare.”

McKenna's sudden and unexpected request to expand construction marked a stark shift from the prevailing sensibility, which had been for slim naval bills. The Liberals, who had swept the Conservatives out of power in 1905, generally resented the Dreadnoughts as staggeringly expensive and unnecessary, and had barely even formed their cabinet before they began slashing ships off the construction schedule: one battleship each was trimmed off the 1906 and 1907 programs (so that three instead of four ships were laid each year), and in 1908 the schedule was trimmed further to just two. As a result, by late 1908 the British had twelve Dreadnoughts either built, under construction, or approved, rather than the sixteen that had been anticipated by the old Conservative cabinet.

In this context, McKenna’s ask came as a genuine shock. Parliament had anticipated approving another two dreadnoughts in 1909, but here was the First Lord of the Admiralty not only requesting that this be tripled to six, but also that this accelerated pace be maintained for three years, and even threatening to resign his post if his demands were not met - taking the entire senior officer cadre of the Royal Navy with him. What could have provoked such a politically toxic maneuver?

The answer, obviously, lay in the acceleration of German shipbuilding. In 1907, precisely as the new Liberal government in London was trimming down the British battleship program, the German Naval Law (parlance for the annual shipbuilding appropriations) provided for four dreadnought equivalents, followed by an additional four in 1908. At the time McKenna was formulating his proposal for an expanded battleship schedule, the Admiralty had calculated that by 1912 (at which point all the approved ships would be completed), Britain’s lead in battleships would stand at just sixteen dreadnoughts against thirteen for the Germans. For McKenna, Fisher, and the other Sea Lords, this was clearly too slim a margin for comfort.

The publicly acknowledged German construction schedule, as approved by the Reichstag, was bad enough, and clearly indicated that the British lead in battleships would erode steadily unless corrective measures were taken. For the British Admiralty, however, the more ominous concern was the intelligence suggesting that German naval construction was been accelerated in secret.

The crucial question here was the peculiar timetable of dreadnought construction. The main constraint on battleship construction was not, in fact, the building of the hull, but rather the manufacture of the guns, turret systems, and armor, as these were both more expensive and laborious than the hull itself. What this meant, in practical terms, was that the construction of dreadnoughts could be accelerated if these intricate and expensive fittings were completed and staged ahead of time. The generally presumed timetable of three years for the completion of a German battleship could theoretically be compressed to just two, provided appropriate preemptive orders were placed for weaponry and armor.

What this meant, in practical terms, was that the Germans could theoretically have far more ships in the pipeline than advertised, if they were placing advance orders for guns, turrets, armor, and powerplants, or if the German Admiralty was placing preemptive orders before receiving authorization from the Reichstag. Rumors abounded - Krupp, it was said, was stockpiling vast warehouses of 12 inch gun barrels and buying up hoards of nickel - but ascertaining what was actually happening in the German dockyards and machining plants proved difficult. It did not help that London’s ear was bent by British industrialists (anxious to secure contracts of their own), like Herbert Hall Mulliner, managing director of Coventry Ordnance Works, who pestered McKenna with scare stories about a secret German acceleration.

One crucial nexus for information was the German ambassador to London, Paul Wolff-Metternich. Unfortunately, Metternich was frequently left in the dark by his superiors in Berlin, including Admiral Tirpitz, which put him in a compromised position and soured his relationship with Lord Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary.

The problem was fairly straightforward: the Germans were, in fact, ordering materials, laying keels, and stockpiling equipment in advance of the formal appropriations of the Reichstag. Their reason for doing so, however, was not to secretly build more ships than they were letting on, but for mundane reasons related to costs and contracts. Tirpitz, for example, had several battleship keels laid in advance (that is, before he was authorized by the Reichstag) because he wanted to get a lower price and prevent the yards from having to lay off workers (which might itself lead to a labor dispute and higher prices). In the aggregate, the Germans never did build more ships than the Reichstag’s naval laws allowed, but a cost conscious German Admiralty did stretch the timetables. Unfortunately, Metternich - posted in London and largely cut out of the loop on such matters - did not know any of this, and when pressed by Lord Grey he continually insisted that the German Navy did not place advance orders or lay keels before Reichstag approval.

Metternich was not exactly lying - he genuinely did not know that Tirpitz had been running ahead. But the British did know, and Grey confronted Metternich with the evidence. When Metternich urgently wired Berlin asking for clarification, Tirpitz belated explained the situation and allowed the ambassador to inform Grey that contracts were being placed preemptively only to secure better prices. Unfortunately, Metternich had by this time been humiliated and discredited, through no real fault of his own, by denying things that were actually true. Grey had concluded that Metternich - and Tirpitz by extension - were dissimulating. Berlin’s categorical refusal to allow naval attaches to visit dockyards to simply “count the ships” further poisoned the discussion. In the end, the British felt that they had no other option than to prudently assume that the Germans were secretly accelerating their building program, with Grey announcing that “We have got to have a margin against lying.”

Read more

The Russo-Ukrainian War is now three years old, and the third Z-Day, on February 24, 2025, was marked by a substantively different tone than prior iterations. On the battlefield, Russian forces stand significantly closer to victory than they have at any point since the opening weeks of the war. After reversals early in the war as Ukraine took advantage of Russian miscalculations and insufficient force generation, the Russian army surged in 2024, collapsing Ukraine’s front in southern Donetsk and pushing the front forward towards the remaining citadels of the Donbas.

At the same time, 2025’s Z-Day was the first under the new American administration, and hopes were high in some quarters that President Trump could bring about a negotiated settlement and end the war prematurely. The new tenor seemed to be made abundantly clear in an explosive February 28 Oval Office meeting between Trump, Vice President Vance, and Zelensky, which ended in the Ukrainian president being ignominiously shouted down and evicted from the White House. This followed an abrupt announcement that Ukraine was to be cut off from American ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) until Zelensky apologized for his conduct.

In an information sphere rife with rumors, inscrutable diplomatic maneuvering, and heavy handed posturing (clouded further by the distinctive style and personality of Trump himself), it is very hard to figure out what might actually matter. We’re left with a bizarre juxtaposition: based on the explosive vignettes of Trump and Zelensky, many might hope for an abrupt course change on the war, or at least a revision of the American position. On the ground, however, things continue much as they have, with the Russians grinding forward along a sprawling front. The infantryman entrenched near Pokrovsk, listening for the whirring of drones overhead, could be forgiven for not feeling that much has changed at all.

Subscribe now

I have never made any bones about my belief that the war in Ukraine will be resolved militarily: that is, it will be fought to its conclusion and end in the defeat of Ukraine in the east, Russian control of vast swathes of the country, and the subordination of a rump Ukraine to Russian interests. Trump’s self conception is greatly tied up in his image as a “dealmaker”, and his view of foreign affairs as fundamentally transactional in nature. As the American president, he has the power to force this framing on Ukraine, but not on Russia. There remain intractable gulfs between Russia’s war aims and what Kiev is willing to discuss, and it is doubtful that Trump will be able to reconcile these differences. Russia, however, does not need to accept a partial victory simply in the name of goodwill and negotiation. Moscow has recourse to a more primal form of power. The sword predates and transcends the pen. Negotiation, as such, must bow to the reality of the battlefield, and no amount of sharp deal making can transcend the more ancient law of blood.

The Great Misadventure: Front Collapse in Kursk

When the history of this war is laid out retrospectively, no shortage of ink will be lavished on Ukraine’s eight month operation in Kursk. From the broader perspective of the wartime narrative, Ukraine’s initial incursion into Russia filled a variety of needs, with the AFU “taking the fight” to Russia and seizing the initiative, albeit on a limited front, after months of continuous Russian advances in the Donbas.

Notwithstanding the immense hyperbole that followed the launch of Ukraine’s Kursk Operation (which I facetiously nicknamed “Krepost”, in an homage to the 1943 German plan for its own Battle of Kursk), in the months that followed this was undoubtedly a sector of great significance, and not only because it brought the distinctive of Ukraine holding territory within the prewar Russian Federation. Based on a perusal of the Order of Battle, Kursk was clearly one of the two axes of primary effort for the AFU, along with the defense of Pokrovsk. Dozens of brigades were involved in the operation, including a significant portion of Ukraine’s premier assets (mechanized, air assault, and marine infantry brigades). Perhaps more importantly, Kursk is the only axis where Ukraine has made a serious effort to gain initiative and go on the offensive in the last year, and the first Ukrainian operational level offensive (as opposed to local counterattacks) since their assault on the Russian Zaporizhia line in 2023.

With all that being said, March brought about the culmination of a serious Ukrainian defeat, with Russian forces recapturing the town of Sudzha (which formed the central anchor of Ukraine’s position in Kursk) on March 13. Although Ukrainian forces still have a presence on the border, Russian forces have crossed the Kursk-Sumy border into Ukraine in other places. The AFU has been functionally ejected from Kursk, and all dreams of some breakout into Russia have faded. At this point, the Russians now hold more territory in Sumy than the Ukrainians do in Kursk.

This would seem, then, to be a good time to conduct an autopsy on the Kursk Operation. Ukrainian forces achieved the basic prerequisite for success in August: they managed to stage a suitable mechanized package - notably, the forest canopy around Sumy allowed them to assemble assets in relative secrecy, in contrast to the open steppe in the south - and achieve tactical surprise, overrunning Russian border guards at the outset. Despite their tactical surprise and the early capture of Sudzha, the AFU was never able to parlay this into a meaningful penetration or exploitation in Kursk. Why?

The answer seems to be a nexus of operational and technical problems which became mutually reinforcing - in some respects these problems are general to this war and well understood, while in some ways they are unique to Kursk, or at least, Kursk provided a potent demonstration of them. More specifically, we can enumerate three problems that doomed the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk:

1. The failure of the AFU to widen their penetration adequately.

2. The road-poor connectivity of the Ukrainian hub in Sudzha to their bases of support around Sumy.

3. Persistent Russian ISR-strike overwatch on Ukrainian lines of communication and supply.

We can see, almost naturally, how these elements can feed into each other - the Ukrainians were unable to create a wide penetration into Russia (for the most part, the “opening” of their salient was less than 30 miles wide), which greatly reduced the number of roads available to them for supply and reinforcement. The narrow penetration and poor road access in turn allowed the Russians to concentrate strike systems on the few available lines of communication, to the effect that the Ukrainians struggled to either supply or reinforce the grouping based around Sudzha - this low logistical and reinforcement connectivity in turn made it impossible for the Ukrainians to stage additional forces to try and expand the salient. This created a positive feedback loop of confinement and isolation for the Ukrainian grouping which made their defeat more or less inevitable.

We can, however, go a little deeper in our postmortem and see how this happened. In the opening weeks of the operation, Ukraine’s prospects became severely untracked by two critical tactical failures which threatened from the outset to spiral into an operational catastrophe.

The first critical moment came in the days from August 10-13; after initial successes and tactical surprise, Ukrainian progress stalled as they attempted to advance up the highway from Sudzha to Korenevo. Several clashes took place throughout this period, but solid Russian blocking positions were held as reinforcements scrambled into the theater. Korenevo always promised to be a critical position, as the Russian breakwater on the main road leading northwest out of Sudzha: so long as the Russians held it, the Ukrainians would be unable to widen their penetration in this direction.

With the Russian defenses jamming up the Ukrainian columns at Korenevo, the Ukrainian position was already pregnant with a basic operational crisis: the penetration was narrow, and thus threatened to become a severe and untenable salient. At the risk of making a perilous historical analogy, the operational form was very similar to the famous 1944 Battle of the Bulge: taken by surprise by a German counteroffensive, Dwight Eisenhower prioritized limiting the width, rather than the depth of the German penetration, moving reinforcements to defend the “shoulders” of the salient.

Blocked at Korenevo, the Ukrainians shifted their approach and made a renewed effort to solidify the western shoulder of their position (their left flank). This attempt aimed to leverage the Seym River, which runs a winding course about twelve miles behind the state border. By striking bridges over the Seym and launching a ground attack towards the river, the Ukrainians hoped to isolate Russian forces on the south bank and either destroy them or force a withdrawal over the river. If they had succeeded, the Seym would have become an anchoring defensive feature protecting the western flank of the Ukrainian position.

The Ukrainian attempt to leverage the Seym and create a defensive anchor on their flank was well conceived in the abstract, but ultimately it failed. By this time, the effects of Ukraine’s tactical surprise had dissipated and there were strong Russian units present in the field. In particular, the Russian 155th Naval Infantry Brigade held its position on the south bank of the Seym, maintained its links to neighboring units, and led a series of counterattacks: by September 13, Russian forces had recaptured the critical town of Snagost, which lies in the inner bend of the Seym.

The recapture of Snagost (and the linkup with Russian forces advancing out Korenevo) not only ended the threat to the Russian positions on the south bank of the Seym, but more or less sterilized the entire Ukrainian operation by confining them to a narrow salient around Sudzha and constricting their ability to supply the grouping at the front.

It’s rather natural that road connectivity is poorer across the state boundary than it is within Ukraine itself, and this is especially true for Sudzha. Once Snagost was recaptured by Russian forces, the Ukrainian grouping around Sudzha had just two roads connecting it to the base of support around Sumy: the main supply route (MSR in the technical parlance) ran along the R200 highway, and was supplemented by a single road some 3 miles to the southeast. The loss of Snagost condemned the AFU to resupply and reinforce a large multi-brigade grouping with just two roads, both of which were well within reach of Russian strike systems.

This poor road connectivity allowed the Russians to persistently surveil and strike Ukrainian supplies and reinforcements making the run into Sudzha, particularly after Russian forces began the widespread use of fiber optic FPV drones, which are immune to jamming. One other advantage of the fiber optic drones, which is not as widely discussed, is that they maintain their signal during final approach to the target (as opposed to wirelessly controlled models, which lose signal strength as they drop to low altitude on attack). The stable signal strength of fiber optic units is a great boon to accuracy, as it allows controllers to control the drone until impact. They also provide a higher resolution video feed which makes it easier to spot and target concealed enemy vehicles and positions.

Operationally, the main distinctive of the fighting in Kursk is the orthogonal orientation of effort by the combatants. By this, we mean that Russian counteroffensives were directed at the flanks of the salient, steadily compressing the Ukrainians into a more narrow position (by the end of 2024, the Ukrainians had lost half of the territory they once held), while Ukrainian efforts to restart their progress were aimed at moving deeper into Russia.

In January, the Ukrainians launched a fresh attack out of Sudzha, but rather than attempting to widen and solidify their flanks, this attack once again aimed to punch down the highway towards Bolshoye Soldatskoye. The attack was repulsed on its own terms, with Ukrainian columns advancing a few miles down the road before collapsing with heavy losses, but even if it had succeeded it would not have fixed the fundamental problem, which was the narrowness of the salient and the limited road connectivity for supply and reinforcement.

By February, the Ukrainian grouping in Kursk was clearly exhausted and their supply linkages were under permanent surveillance and attack by Russian drones. It was perhaps predictable, then, that the Russians would close up the salient quickly once they made a determined push. The actual endgame took, at most, a week of good fighting. On March 6, Russian forces broke through Ukrainian defenses around Kurilovka, to the south of Sudzha, and threatened to overrun the secondary supply road. By the 10th, the Ukrainians were withdrawing from Sudzha proper, with the town falling back under full Russian control by the 13th.

It was during this brief period of climactic action that the sensational story of the Russian assault through the pipeline emerged. This become a totem anecdote, with Ukrainian sources claiming that the emerging Russian troops were ambushed and massacred, and Russian sources acclaiming it as a tremendous success. I think this rather misses the point. The pipeline assault was innovative and high risk, and it certainly involved tremendous grit on the part of the Russian troops who had to crawl through miles of cramped pipeline, but ultimately I do not think it mattered much in the operational sense.

On a schematic level, the Ukrainian position in Kursk was doomed by mid-September when Russian troops recaptured Snagost. If the Ukrainians had successfully isolated the south bank of the Seym, they would have had the river as a valuable defensive barrier protecting their left flank as well as access to valuable space and additional supply roads. As it happened, the Ukrainian flank was crumpled early in the operation by the Russian victories at Korenevo and Snagost, which left Ukraine trying to fight its way out of a very compressed and road-poor salient. The (correct) Russian decision to concentrate its counterattacks on the flanks further compressed the space and left the Ukrainians with inadequate supply linkages subject to persistent Russian drone strikes. One recent Ukrainian publication claims that by the end of the year, Ukrainian reinforcements had to move to the frontline on foot, carrying all their equipment and supplies, due to the persistent threat to vehicles.

Fighting in a severe salient is almost always a bad proposition, and is something of a geometrical motif of warfare going back millennia. In the current operating environment, however, it is particularly dangerous, given the potential of FPV drones to saturate supply lines with high explosive. In this case, the effect was particularly synergistic: the cramped salient amplified the effect of Russian strike systems, and this in turn prevented the Ukrainians from assembling and sustaining the force needed to expand the salient and create more space. Confinement bred strangulation, and strangulation bred confinement. Fighting with a caved in flank for months, the Ukrainian grouping was doomed to operational sterility and eventual defeat almost at the outset.

The world is still adjusting to the new kinetic logic of the powerful ISR-Strike nexus which now rules the battlefield. What Kursk demonstrates, however, is that conventional sensibilities about operations are hardly obsolete: if anything, they have become even more important in the age of the FPV drone. Ukraine’s defeat in Kursk ultimately reduces to well-established rules about lines of communication and flank security. Their early defeats in Korenevo and Snagost left their western flank permanently crumpled and thrust them back on a thin logistical chain which was easy for Russian forces to surveil and strike. In a sense, drones have made it possible to vertically envelop enemy forces, isolating frontline groupings with persistent overwatch on supply roads. This was a feature that was largely missing in Bakhmut, where Russian forces were still preferentially using tube artillery rather, but it seems to be a permanent feature of the battlefield going forward, making seemingly antiquated concerns like “lines of communication” more important than ever. Drones matter, but the spatial position of forces matter too.

So where does this leave Ukraine? They’ve now blown a pair of carefully husbanded mechanized packages: one in Zaporizhia in 2023, and now a second in Kursk. In both cases, they were unable to cope with the capability of Russian strike systems to isolate their groupings on the frontline, and with Russian surveillance and strikes on rear assembly areas and bases of support. Their position in Kursk is gone, and they have nothing to show for their efforts.

All theories as to why Ukraine went into Kursk are now a quaint point of speculation. Whether or not they intended to hold some token slice of Russian territory as a bargaining chip is irrelevant, as the slice is gone. More importantly, the theory that Kursk could force a major redeployment of Russian forces has gone awry and now threatens to boomerang on the Ukrainians. Most of the Russian forces in Kursk were redeployed from their grouping in Belgorod, rather than the critical theater in the Donbas (as we noted earlier, while the AFU was running its “diversion” in Kursk, the Russians completely collapsed the southern Donetsk front and pushed up the Dnipro Oblast border).

What’s important to note, however, is that the Kursk front is not going to be scratched off simply because the Russians have ejected Ukraine across the border. In his surprise appearance at the Kursk theater headquarters, Putin noted to need to create a “security zone” around Kursk. This is the Russian parlance for continuing the offensive across the Ukrainian border (and in fact, Russian forces have crossed into Sumy Oblast in several places) to create a buffer zone. This will have the dual purpose of both keeping the front active, preventing Ukraine from redeploying forces back to the Donbas, and preempting any attempt by the AFU to stage forces for a second crack at Kursk. Most likely the Russians will attempt to capture the heights along the border line and position themselves uphill from the Ukrainians, replicating the situation around Kharkov.

In short, having opened a new front in Kursk, the Ukrainians cannot now easily close it. For a force facing severe personnel shortages (read my previous analysis on the parlous state of Ukrainian mobilization if you’d like a refresher), Ukraine’s inability to shorten their frontline creates unwelcome additional stresses. With Russian pressure continuing unabated in the Donbas, we are left wondering whether a doomed 9 month battle for Sudzha was really the best use of Ukraine’s dwindling resources.

A Brief Tour of the Front

The Kursk salient is the second front to be fully collapsed by the Russian Army in the past three months. The first was the southern Donetsk front, which was completely caved in over the course of December and then rolled up in the opening weeks of the year, which had the effect of not only knocking the AFU out of longstanding strongholds like Ugledar and Kurakhove, but also safeguarding the flank of the Russian advance towards Pokrovsk.

At the moment, there are several axes of Russian progress which we’ll examine in more detail momentarily. More broadly, as Russia scratches off secondary axes like South Donetsk and Kursk, the general trajectory of the front is becoming more focused, as the arrows converge on the Slovyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration. Eyes on the prize. Russia currently controls roughly 99% of Lugansk Oblast and 70% of Donetsk.

We’ll take a brief tour of these axes of combat. One of the motifs which will immediately stand out is that in multiple critical sectors, Russian forces currently occupy operationally potent positions that give them powerful launchpads for further advances in 2025. In particular, the Russians currently hold multiple bridgeheads across river lines, putting them in position to outflank Ukrainian defensive lines, and they have consolidated control of dominating heights in places like Chasiv Yar.

We can begin at the northernmost end of the line, at Kupyansk. Kupyansk is a modestly sized town (prewar population of perhaps 26,000 people) located at a strategic crossroads on the Oskil River, which is the largest tributary of the Donets. More specifically, Kupyansk is at the intersection of the main east-west highway out of Kharkov and the Oskil highway corridor which runs south to Izym, and it is also the most important transit hub for crossing the Oskil in its northern course. The city was captured early in the war by Russian forces and served as an important plug to prevent the movement of Ukrainian reserves into northern Lugansk Oblast, and was later recaptured during Ukraine’s late-2022 counteroffensive, which saw them push the front away from Kharkov and across the Oskil.

Today, Kupyansk serves as the vital transit hub, base of support, and crossing point that supports a Ukrainian grouping fighting on the east bank of the Oskil. As the battlefield is currently shaped here, however, Russian forces have a tantalizing opportunity to collapse the Ukrainian position altogether. The critical feature here is the consolidation of a sizeable Russian bridgehead north of Kupyansk on the west bank of the Oskil (that is, the Ukrainian side), with Russian forces already positioned on the north-south highway. Although this northern front has been a decidedly de-prioritized theater in recent months, as the Russians scratched off the Kursk and South Donetsk fronts, the placement of Russian forces west of the Oskil creates serious problems for the AFU in Kupyansk.

An advance to the south and west out of the Oskil bridgehead would flank Kupyansk and, in combination with advances from the southeast, threaten to collapse Ukraine’s salient across the Oskil altogether. Depending on how much combat power Russia commits to this axis, we could see a similar situation to the one we saw in Kursk, with multiple brigades (currently fighting east of the Oskil) forced to attempt an ad-hoc evacuation across the river as the salient collapses, with their ability to extract heavy equipment potentially compromised by the complication of the river crossing.

Further south on this front, we see a similar situation on the Donets axis. The operational geography here is a bit complicated, so we will indulge in a bit of an elaboration.

The northern Donetsk theater (with its ultimate prize in the Kramatorsk-Slovyansk agglomeration) is dominated by two important terrain features. The first is the fact that the urban corridor (which runs from Kostyantynivka northward to Slovyansk) lies at low elevation along the course of the Kryvyi Torets River - while the river itself is not an important feature, the low elevation of its basin is. This means that the cities themselves are dominated by heights to the east, with Chasiv Yar forming an important hub and stronghold at a commanding elevation.

The second important terrain feature is the Donets River - unlike the diminutive Kryvyi Torets, this is an imposing barrier which bisects the Donbas and forms the northern shield for Slovyansk and Kramatorsk. Russian control of the Donets from the north bank (either at Lyman or, ideally, Izyum further to the west) unlocks the potential to outflank Slovyansk and Kramatorsk from the west and interdict road traffic.

In short, although Kramatorsk and Slovyansk together form an imposing urban agglomeration, their defense is intimately connected with the battle for both the heights to the east and the struggle for control of the Donets. At the current moment, however, Russian forces hold valuable positions which provide a launching pad to unlock this front.

When we zoom in more closely, we see that the Ukrainian defenses around the Donets have benefited from the terrain. On the north bank of the Donets, Russian forces must also contend with an ancillary waterway in the Zherebets River, which flows south towards the Donets and feeds several reservoirs which form formidable defense barriers. The gap between the Zherebets and the Donets is roughly five miles, forming a natural defensive bottleneck, and most of that gap is covered by the town of Tors’ke (now heavily fortified) and a dense plantation forest. For most of the past eighteen months, this section of front has been largely static, with Russian forces failing to make significant headway fighting into this bottleneck.

One way for Russia to undermine this strong defensive position might have been to advance along the south bank of the Donets, reaching the crossing near Yampil and outflanking the Tors’ke line from the southeast. This would have isolated the Ukrainian forces fighting in the forestry plantation and allowed the Russians to advance through the bottleneck. Ultimately, this did not materialize due to the low material priority placed on this front in addition to a very well-managed defense of the Siversk salient by Ukrainian forces. Siversk has been strongly held, and serves as the shield for the Ukrainian right flank.

What is different now, however, is that Russian forces have consolidated a bridgehead over the Zherebets River, which will allow them to outflank Tors’ke and reach Lyman - not from the south, but from the north. Recent weeks have seen the Russians moving into the small villages around the periphery of their bridgehead (names like Kolodyazi and Myrne), creating the space to move additional units over the Zherebets. Much like at Kupyansk, the bridgehead offers the launching point for a sweeping hook into the rear of the Ukrainian defenses.

What stands out about the Russian bridgehead here is that it is not only over the Zherebets (that is, Russian forces are firmly on the western bank of the river while the Ukrainians further south are still defending far to the east of it), but that it is also past most of the Ukrainian field fortifications in the area. Borrowing from the Military Summary Map, which conveniently includes fortifications and earthworks, we can see that there is very little built up in the space between the Zherebets and Lyman. Russian forces breaking out of this bridgehead are entering mostly open space, with only a few roadblocks in place.

If Russia can parlay the Zherebets bridgehead into an advance to Lyman, they can collapse much of the Ukrainian defense on both sides of the river. Not only would they outflank the defensive line at Tors’ke and roll up the northern bank of the Donets, but doing so would also precipitate the fall of the Siversk salient. Siversk has been well defended by the AFU to this point, but it is already firmly in a salient, and the capture of Yampil would put Russian forces firmly in Siversk’s rear and physically sever the main line of communication.

Further south still, the front is similarly well shaped for Russian advances in the coming months. The signature developments here have been the capture of Chasiv Yar and Toretsk, and Russia’s victory on the South Donetsk front. The latter is particularly important as it safeguards Russia’s flank to the south of Pokrovsk - rather than a Russian pincer flaring out into space to encircle Pokrovsk to the west, the entire frontline is now to the west of Pokrovsk.

Toretsk has been something of a sticky wicket. Russia made great progress throughout the winter advancing through this heavily fortified urban buildup, and in early February the Russian MoD announced the capture of the city. In the weeks since then, however, fighting has continued in the outer limits - at first, this was styled as Ukrainian infiltration back into the city, but it spiraled into rumors of a full fledged Ukrainian counteroffensive, with sensational claims that Russian forces were encircled or destroyed in Toretsk. The situation was strongly reminiscent of the late stages of Bakhmut, when Ukrainian phantom counterattacks were reported frequently.

It appears that what actually happened was rather that the Russian MoD announced the capture of the city while its extremities were still contested. Russian forces remain in control of the bulk of the city, but Ukrainian units remain dug at the periphery and fighting has continued in the “grey zone.” DeepState (a Ukrainian mapping project) confirmed that there was no general Ukrainian counterattack - rather, the fighting was simply part of a continuous struggle for the western periphery of the city.

Fighting a delaying action in Toretsk is inarguably the correct choice of action for the AFU. The reason that Toretsk and Chasiv Yar were so hotly contested is fairly simple: both occupy the high ground and will allow Russian forces to attack downhill, wrapping up large salients sitting on the floor of the battlespace. Pincers from Chasiv Yar and Toretsk will work concentrically towards Kostyantynivka, collapsing the strongly held Ukrainian line along the canal west of Bakhmut. Similarly, forces blooming west out of Toretsk and Niu York will link up with the Pokrovsk front and push the frontline well to the north of the city.

That is quite a bit to chew on, and I sometimes question the value of such analysis. For those who have been dutifully following this war from the beginning, this is all fairly elementary. For others with less investment in the front, it’s possible that the status of these settlements is not very interesting and devolves into esoteric minutia.

Broadly, however, the arrows are pointing up for Russia in the Donbas for the following reasons:

1. The collapse of the Southern Donetsk front for Ukraine secures the flank of Russia’s advances towards Pokrovsk and allows the front to be pushed far to the west of the city.

2. Russian bridgeheads over the Zherebets and Oskil rivers create opportunities to outflank and collapse Ukrainian positions around Kupyansk, Lyman, and Siversk.

3. The capture of Chasiv Yar and Toretsk, both of which lie on elevated ridges, provides the launching point for strong thrusts towards Kostyantynivka, collapsing multiple Ukrainian salients in the process.

All in all, this portends continued Russian advances in the next stage of the offensive. Pokrovsk is already a frontline city, and Kostyantynivka will become one very soon. The Russians have scratched off two important fronts in the last three months - collapsing first the South Donetsk axis, and then eradicating the Ukrainian position in Kursk. The next phase will see breakthroughs in the Central Donbas, as the Russians move through the next belt of cities and approach the final objectives in Kramatorsk and Slovyansk.

None of this is predetermined, of course. Both armies face continual force allocation problems, and at the moment large groupings are fighting around both Pokrovsk and Toretsk. But the simple fact is that the Russians have claimed victory on two strategic axes and have defeated a large and determined AFU grouping in Kursk. The captures of Toresk and Chasiv Yar are of great strategic importance, and the front is well shaped for further Russian gains. Russian forces are significantly closer to victory in the Donbas than they were a year ago, when the front was still mired in places like Ugledar and Avdiivka. The Ukrainian forces are still upright, fighting bravely, but the front is bleeding from an ever increasing number of wounds.

The Art of the Deal

Any discussion of the diplomatic sphere and the prospects for a negotiation peace must begin by noting the guiding animus of the American stance: namely, that President Trump is a practitioner of personal politics, with a fundamentally transactional view of the world. By “personal politics”, we mean that he places great emphasis on his own interpersonal dynamics and his self-conception as a dealmaker who can maneuver people into agreement, provided he can just get them to the table.

Trump is hardly alone in this; to take one example, we could look at his long-dead predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. FDR, much like Trump, took great pride in the idea that he was exceptionally skilled at managing, soothing, and charming people. A guiding principle of American policy during the Second World War was FDR’s sense that he could “manage” Stalin in face to face interactions. In one infamous letter to Churchill, FDR told the British Prime Minister:

I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.

Trump shares a similar sensibility, which postulates personality and transactional acumen as a driving force of world affairs. To be perfectly fair to President Trump, this has largely worked for him both in business and domestic politics, but it may not port over so well to foreign affairs. Nevertheless, this is how he thinks. He expressed it succinctly in his explosive February 28th meeting with Zelensky:

Biden, they didn’t respect him. They didn’t respect Obama. They respect me… He might have broken deals with Obama and Bush, and he might have broken them with Biden. He did, maybe. Maybe he did. I don’t know what happened, but he didn’t break them with me. He wants to make a deal.

Whether or not this is true, it is an important bedrock in the framing of the situation to remember that this is how Trump sees himself and the world: politics is a transactional domain mediated by personalities. With that in mind, there are two different issues to consider, namely the mineral deal between Ukraine and the United States, and the prospects for a negotiated ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.

The mineral deal is somewhat easier to parse, and the central motif that emerges is just how badly Zelensky bungled his meetings with Trump. It’s helpful first to examine the actual contents of the mineral deal - notwithstanding the enormous $500 billion price tag, it is actually a very scant agreement. The agreement, as it currently stands, seems to essentially give American companies the right of first refusal on the exploitation of Ukrainian mineral resources, with 50% of the proceeds from state owned resources going to an “investment fund” for the reconstruction of Ukraine under joint US-Ukrainian management.

The mineral deal ought to be understood as a manifestation of Trump’s immense aversion to acting at economic disadvantage. He is a fundamentally transactional man who complained at great length about the costs of American support for Kiev, and mineral rights are the easiest way for him to extract promises of “repayment” from a Ukrainian government that cannot actually afford to repay anything in the near term.

For Ukraine, entangling America in Ukrainian mineral wealth might seem like an opportunity to ensure ongoing American support, as it would potentially create direct stakes for American companies. It’s important to note, however, that the mineral deal does not contain any security guarantees for Ukraine, and is in fact explicitly tied to *past* support, rather than future aid. In other words, Trump wants to present the mineral deal as a way for Ukraine to repay the last three years of American assistance, and not as a deal guaranteeing American support in the future.

Given this, it ought to be obvious that Zelensky badly fumbled his encounter with Trump. The optimal strategy for Ukraine was to draw as close to the Trump administration as possible - sign the mineral deal, say thank you, wear a suit, and commend Trump’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war. Trump’s negotiations were guaranteed to run into a wall once the Russians themselves were brought into the discussion, but in this scenario (one where Zelensky came across as supportive and compliant towards Trump), Trump’s personal ire would be directed at Moscow, rather than Kiev. This might have enabled Zelensky to play Trump and Putin off of each other, parlaying the situation into more American support once Trump became frustrated at Russia’s unwillingness to quickly negotiate a ceasefire.

The operating principle is that Trump is a mercurial, personal politician who places primacy on the deal. Inability to solidify the deal breeds irritation, and Zelensky’s best play was to do everything possible to ensure that it was Russia that became the irritant in Trump’s attempted deal making. Unfortunately for Ukraine, a valuable opportunity was wasted by Zelensky’s inability to read the room. Instead, Ukraine was put in an ISR timeout and Zelensky had to come crawling back with an apology to sign the mineral deal.

This parlayed directly into tenuous diplomatic feelers, including a long phone conversation between Trump and Putin and a diplomatic roundtable in Riyadh attended by American, Russian, and Ukrainian delegations.

Thus far, the only outcome from these discussions has been the sketch for a climbdown in the Black Sea, which in its essence would end attacks on commercial shipping (presumably including Russian attacks on Ukrainian port infrastructure in Odessa) in exchange for American moves to rehabilitate Russian agricultural exports by reconnecting Russia to shipping insurance, foreign ports, and payment systems.

For those that have been following along, this is more or less a revival of the defunct Turkish-negotiated grain deal, which collapsed in 2023. There are still sticking points here: Ukraine is bristling at the promise to loosen sanctions on Russian agricultural exports, and Russia will want a robust inspection regime to ensure that the Black Sea ceasefire does not provide cover for weapons to be shipped into Odessa, but things appear on the whole to be returning roughly to the lines of the 2022 grain deal. Whether the rerun will last remains to be seen.

All of this is preliminary and perhaps even irrelevant to the main question, which is whether it is possible to negotiate a meaningful peace in Ukraine at this time, or even a temporary ceasefire. This, however, is a much larger hurdle to climb. As I see it, there are four structural obstacles to a negotiated peace which Trump has little or leverage to overcome:

1. Russian disillusionment with negotiation and the credibility of western promises

2. Climbing Russian confidence that they are on track to win a decisive victory on the battlefield

3. Mutual unwillingness between Moscow and the extant Kiev regime to engage in direct negotiations with each other

4. The status of Russian-claimed territories in the Donbas which are still under Ukrainian control

Many of these issues dovetail, and are ultimately linked to the trajectory of the battlefield where the Russian Army continues to advance. So long as Russian leadership believes they are on pace to capture the entirety of the Donbas (and beyond), Putin’s team is highly unlikely to accept a truncated victory at the negotiating table - the only way out would be for Kiev to cede objectives like Kramatorsk and Slovyansk. In many ways, Ukraine’s current possession of these cities are its best cards in any negotiation, but for cards to be useful they must be played, and it’s difficult to imagine Zelensky’s regime simply giving up cities that it has fought for years to defend.

Furthermore, Putin has made it extremely clear that he does not consider Zelensky to be either a legitimate or credible figure at all, arguing that because Zelensky has suspended elections under the pretext of martial law, there is in fact no legitimate government in Kiev. This is obfuscation by the Kremlin, of course: Zelensky is the President of Ukraine, and within the parameters of Ukraine’s laws, conditions of martial law do allow him to stay in office. But this is rather beside the point: what matters is that the Kremlin has more or less categorically ruled out negotiating with the current government in Kiev, and has even suggested an internationally supervised provisional government as a replacement.

A generous assessment is that, for there to be reasonable prospects for a negotiated settlement from the Russian perspective, at least four conditions have to be satisfied:

1. Regime change in Kiev to bring in a government more acquiescent to Russian interests.

2. Russian control of all annexed territories (either through the actions of the Russian Army on the ground or by Kiev withdrawing from them)

3. Broad sanctions relief for Russia

4. Credible pledges that western troops will not be stationed in Ukraine as “peacekeepers” - since, after all, one critical strategic objective for Russia was to prevent the consolidation of NATO on its flank, they will hardly accept a peace that features the deployment of NATO troops into Ukraine.

So long as Russia continues to advance on the battlefield, they have no incentive to (as they would see it) rob themselves of a full victory by accepting a truncated and premature settlement. Putin expressed this view very cogently and explicitly on March 27:

We are gradually, not as quickly as some would like, but nevertheless persistently and confidently moving towards achieving all the goals declared at the beginning of this operation. Along the entire line of combat contact, our troops have the strategic initiative. I said just recently: We will finish them off. There is reason to believe that we will finish them off.

Fair enough. Ultimately, Trumps’ transactional view of politics runs into the more grounded reality of what negotiations actually mean, in wartime. The battlefield has a reality of its own that is existentially prior to negotiations. Diplomacy in this context does not serve to transact a “fair” or “balanced” peace, but rather to codify the reality of the military calculus. If Russia believes it is on a trajectory to achieve the total defeat of Ukraine, than the only acceptable sort of peace would be one that expresses such a defeat through the fall of the Ukrainian government and a Ukrainian withdrawal from the east. Russia’s blood is up, and Putin seems to be in no mood to accept a partial victory when the full measure is within reach.

The problem for Ukraine, if history is any guide, is that it is not actually very easy to surrender. In the First World War, Germany surrendered while its army was still in the field, fighting in good order far from the German heartland. This was an anticipatory surrender, born of a realistic assessment of the battlefield which indicated that German defeat was an inevitability. Berlin therefore opted to bow out prematurely, saving the lives of its young men once the struggle had become hopeless. This decision, of course, was poorly received, and was widely denounced as betrayal and cowardice. It became a politically scarring watershed moment that shaped German sensibilities and revanchist drives for decades to come.

So long as Zelensky’s government continues to receive western support and the AFU remains in the field - even if it is being steadily rolled back and chewed up all along the front - it is difficult to imagine Kiev acceding to an anticipatory surrender. Ukraine must choose between doing this the easy way and the hard way, as the parlance goes, but this is not really a choice at all, particularly given the Kremlin’s insistence that a change of government in Kiev is a prerequisite to peace as such. Any successful path to a negotiated piece runs through the ruins of Zelensky’s government, and is therefore largely precluded at the moment.

Russian forces today stand significantly closer to victory in the Donbas than they did one year ago, and the AFU has been decisively defeated in Kursk. They are poised to make further progress towards the limits of the Donbas in 2025, with an increasingly threadbare AFU straining to stay in the field. This is what Ukraine asked for, when they willingly eschewed the opportunity to negotiate in 2022. So for all the diplomatic cinema, the brute reality of the battlefield remains the same. The battlefield is the first principle, and the ultimate repository of political power. The diplomat is a servant of the warrior, and Russia takes recourse to the fist and the boot and the bullet.

Share

The most famous warships in history tend to be known either for their wartime exploits or for their longevity and place of pride in their fleets. A few names that might come to mind would include the German Bismarck, which was pursued and sunk in a dramatic chase on the high seas by the Royal Navy; the HMS Victory, which served as Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar; the USS Constitution, in service today with the US Navy as the oldest commissioned warship still afloat; or perhaps the carriers that fought at Midway, like the Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown, or Japan’s Kaga and Akagi.

It is ironic, then, that perhaps the most famous warship of all time, the HMS Dreadnought, had a service career that was both short and entirely light on kinetic action. Launched in 1906, the Dreadnought had an active lifespan of just thirteen years - barely that of a small dog - and by 1921, after two years in reserve, she was ingloriously sold for scrap. Today, virtually no artifacts of the ship survive, apart from a few small items like a decorated gun tampion (essentially a plug for the barrel of a gun) at Britain’s National Maritime Museum. In the brief years that she was on active duty, the Dreadnought fought no real battles and never fired at an enemy ship: her lone kill was the German submarine U-29, which was sunk off the coast of the Orkney Islands in 1915 when the Dreadnought ran her over.

The Dreadnought had, by any measure, a short and quiet service career. But this has little bearing on the enormity of her significance in the history of naval warfare. When she was launched in 1906, the Dreadnought marked a watershed development in ship design. Her form was the culmination of a dramatic evolution in warship design, which had been moving steadily forward throughout the latter half of the 19th Century with the adoption of steam propulsion, armored hulls, and exploding shells. From the moment the Dreadnought came off the slipway and settled her hulking girth into Portsmouth Harbor, every other capital ship in the world was obsolete, and she left her mark on the world’s navies by conferring her name to a new era of ship design: every ship built before her was now designated a “pre-dreadnought”.

It is easy, in the historiography, to find any number of appellations and praises for the Dreadnought. The “most powerful warship in the world”, ushering in a “revolution” in naval design - on and on it goes. This can lead easily to the conclusion that the Dreadnought’s design was implicitly accepted, or that her innovations were readily apparent to all - in other words, that it was obvious to everyone that this new class of warship, the modern battleship, was the future.

It was not. Although the Dreadnought was indeed the most powerful ship in the world when she launched, and a central component of British plans to maintain naval supremacy, the new battleships were hardly an icon of British triumph. In fact, the design of the Dreadnought came about against a backdrop of British strategic crisis, in which Great Britain’s strategic position began to decay in significant ways - and although the Dreadnought was undoubtedly an impressively powerful weapons system, she did not ameliorate the British strategic conundrum.

Share

The Dreadnought, then, marked a departure point not merely in ship design, but in an emerging century characterized by geopolitical pressures and military-industrial processes that were virtually unrecognizable. The Industrial Revolution in Britain had uncorked a bottle and let out a genie wielding technological processes, financial considerations, and geopolitical pressures. The genie could give gifts and grant wishes, of course, in the form of bigger profits, bigger guns, bigger armies, and ever more powerful weapons systems, but the diffusion of this technology around the world looked ever more like a curse as time went on - and the genie could not be put back into the bottle.

Britain’s Strategic Crisis

At the core of the great naval developments occurring around the turn of the 20th Century was a systematic erosion of Great Britain’s strategic position. This strategic decay was of course a multivariate process which included the emergence of new great powers like Germany, Japan, and the United States, and the evolving industrial dynamics of the world. At its heart, however, the problem was very simple: in the latter half of the 19th Century, industrial technologies began to diffuse from Great Britain to the rest of the great powers, to the effect that British supremacy in industry and critical military technologies became an open question.

A brief perusal of the relevant economic statistics betrays a clear and sustained erosion of British supremacy. In 1880, Britain still accounted for nearly a quarter of global manufacturing output and was by far the leading industrial nation of the world. By 1913, it had fallen in absolute terms well behind Germany and especially the United States, which now boasted nearly 2.5 times Britain’s output. Already by 1910, Britain (formerly the world’s premiere steelmaking nation) produced only half as much steel as Germany and barely a quarter of American steel output.

The immense economic advantages enjoyed by the United States need little enumeration. America occupies a uniquely providential economic geography, being blessed with a pair of accommodating seaboards saturated with natural harbors, an internal Mississippi waterway that is both dense and far reaching to accommodate internal trade, superb growing regions, peaceful borders, and ample deposits of virtually every mineral resource thinkable. In short, it is a country with bountiful mineral and agricultural resources, internal waterways for moving them about, harbors for exporting them abroad, and no meaningful security threats.

The German case, however, bears closer scrutiny. Whereas the United States was characterized by boundless space, free of meaningful external security threats, Germany was intensely bounded in the middle of Europe, birthed into a firestorm of potential enemies all around it. German economic might was little like the American story, characterized by the uninterrupted exploitation of a vast geographic bounty, and more the product of powerful and aggressive German institutions - both of corporations and the state.

The German population grew rapidly into the 20th Century (German birthrates were forever a point of hand wringing for the French). The German population grew from some 49 million in 1890 to 65 million by 1910 - an increase of 32%, compared to an increase of just 3% in France (from 38.3 to 39.5 million) and 20% in Britain (37.3 to 44.9 million). Simultaneously, the consolidation of an impressive educational apparatus ensured that this growing population was highly literate and productive. Around the turn of the century, many European armies still reported high levels of illiteracy among recruits. In Italy, some 33% of recruits were deemed illiterate: the corresponding figure was 22% in Austria-Hungary and 6.8% in France, but a mere 0.1% in Germany. The rapid growth of such a young and educated population benefited not just the German army, but also the burgeoning roster of German industrial enterprises like Krupp, Siemens, AEG, Bayer, and Hoechst. Such firms dominated the emerging 20th Century industries like chemicals, optics, and electrics, and the intensive adoption of agricultural modernization and chemical fertilizers made German agriculture the most productive in Europe on a per-hectare basis.

The explosion of two industrial powers who could not only compete but even outstrip Britain (and one of them right in the heart of Europe) could have no effect other than directly undermining Britain’s strategic position. Matters were made worse, however, but the proliferation of advanced naval technology around the world - in many cases directly abetted by British firms.

In 1864, British military leadership had made the fateful decision to keep artillery production in the hands of the state-owned Woolwich arsenal, despite the emergence of private industrial firms, like the Armstrong company, who were capable of making state of the art naval artillery. Cut out of British government contracts, this let manufacturers like Armstrong with no choice but to seek foreign buyers. When Armstrong built an armored cruiser - the O’Higgins - for the Chilean government, it set off serious alarm bells about the basis of British naval supremacy. The O’Higgins was fast enough to easily outrun any capital ship of the day, but her powerful 8 inch guns made her more than capable of sinking targets in the lower weight class. This suggested a distinctive use case as a commercial raider, able to evade enemy battleships while preying on merchants. Chile, of course, was hardly a rival to Great Britain, but Armstrong’s exploits did not end there. All told, Armstrong would build 84 warships for twelve different foreign governments between 1884 and 1914, and frequently supplied technical systems more advanced than those in use by the Royal Navy at the time - for example, the powerful main battery of the Russian cruiser Rurik, launched in 1890.

The prospect of fast cruisers - optimized for speed and striking power at the expense of armor - was particularly alarming to Britain owing to emerging patterns of agricultural production. The advent of efficient steamships had drastically lowered seaborne transportation costs - a fact that was of the first importance for Britain, as it allowed for the mass import of cheap grain from places like North America, Australia, and Argentina, at costs far below the levels at which British farms could compete. As a result, between 1872 and the end of the century wheat acreage in Great Britain dropped by about 50 percent, and already by the 1880’s some 65 percent of Britain’s grain was imported from overseas. The prospect of swift enemy cruisers capable of intercepting grain shipments while evading the British battle fleets now assumed a potentially existential importance, as for the first time in history London contemplated the possibility that the interdiction of its trade could bring the island to the brink of starvation.

This raised the possibility of a dangerous asymmetry: might it be possible to nullify Britain’s centuries-old naval supremacy without building competing battleships at all? French naval theorists certainly thought so, and it was proposed that France could out-lever Britain on the seas with a fleet comprised entirely of fast cruisers and torpedo boats. Such a program had the additional advantage of being very cheap, with dozens of torpedo boats available at the cost of a single armored battleship. This financial calculus was particularly important to France: after the disastrous defeat at the hands of the Prusso-Germans in 1870-71, it was natural that building out the army should be Paris’s primary concern. Therefore, a naval program that promised to outmaneuver the British without eating into funds for the army had irresistible allure. In 1881, the French allocated funds for 70 torpedo boats (halting the construction of armored battleships), and in 1886 the new Minister of Marine, Admiral Aube, launched a new building program for 100 additional torpedo boats and 14 swift cruisers designed to raid enemy shipping.

Taken together, the decay of Britain’s naval supremacy is easy to sketch out. Great Britain had become uniquely vulnerable to asymmetrical warfare at sea, owing to its growing dependence on imported grain, at the same time that technical changes in the form of the torpedo and the fast cruiser gave her enemies the potential to exploit this vulnerability. To make matters worse, the diffusion of the industrial revolution to continental Europe and the United States raised the prospect that Great Britain might no longer be able to simply out-build her enemies. In a sense, the comforting and familiar dynamic of the blockade was now reversed: instead of a powerful British battlefleet insulating the home islands from invasion and blockading enemy ports, the home islands now faced starvation at the hands of fast and cheap enemy raiding vessels armed with torpedoes and modern naval artillery.

All of this was bad enough, but technical developments further conspired to make the mass of the British battlefleet obsolete. As late as the 1880’s, British battleships continued to use enormous muzzle loading cannon. These could do immense damage when fired at close ranges against accommodating targets (in essence, continuing the tactical methodology of Nelson’s day), but their slow rate of fire and inaccuracy threatened disaster in a fight against swift enemy torpedo boats and cruisers. It was not unthinkable now that a ponderous and expensive British battleship could be sunk by an enemy torpedo boat, darting in close to discharge its tubes and then zipping away again before the massive muzzle-loaders could be brought on target.

But it got even worse. In the late 1850’s, an American naval officer named Thomas Rodman discovered that propellant powder could be packed into grains with a hollow space on the inside, allowing the powder to burn on both the inside and outside of the grains simultaneously. This had the effect of stabilizing and equalizing the burn rate of the powder - instead of a massive initial burn that rapidly trailed off, the propellant would burn at a stable rate from ignition right down to the end of the burn. When combined with the introduction of nitrocellulose explosives (so-called “guncotton”), Rodman’s graining system promised a much more powerful, more stable, and essentially smokeless propellant system.

It was this leap which finally made the muzzle loading cannon obsolete. The more stable burn provided by Rodman’s system greatly increased muzzle velocity, because the burn rate of the charge remained constant after ignition (as opposed to older powder forms where the power of the charge rapidly decreased after firing). This required, in turn, lengthening the barrel to leverage this stable charge, providing both greater accuracy and range. Longer barrels, in turn, made muzzle loading obsolete at last - a series of powerful demonstrations by Krupp in 1878 and 1879 proved once and for all that breech loading steel cannon were the future.

The discomfiting reality was that the entirety of the British naval ordnance was on the verge of total obsolesce, both tactically and technically. Tactically, the muzzle loading batteries were too inaccurate and fired too slowly to engage fast enemy torpedo boats, and technically they could not compete with the new generation of breach loading artillery. In 1879, the British naval authorities decided that it was time to make the switch to steel breech loaders.

This, as it turned out, was much easier said than done. The sole provider of naval ordnance continued to be the state-owned Woolwich arsenal, which now faced not only the challenge of adopting entirely new gun designs, but also a total overhaul of its plant, which would have to be converted from wrought iron to steel. To make matters worse, the Board of Ordnance was under army control. Feeling intense pressure to renovate the navy’s artillery park, naval authorities now had to face both the physical limitations of the Woolwich arsenal and an army-led Board of Ordnance which was viewed as lethargic and unresponsive to the needs of the navy.

Frustrated by the intransigence of both the Board of Ordnance and the Arsenal officials, who seemed to be unapprehending of the severity of the situation, one enterprising officer decided to take matters into his own hands. This was Captain John Fisher - known to the British public and to history as Jackie Fisher. Recovering at home from a bout of malaria and dysentery developed on deployment, Fisher reached out to a journalist named W. T. Snead in 1884, and together they hatched a plan to force the government’s hand with a series of explosive articles under the heading “The Truth about the Navy”, published under the ominous pseudonym: “One Who Knows the Facts.”

These articles, which had a fantastic effect in Britain, argued in no uncertain terms that the Royal Navy’s supremacy was on the verge of extinction, and perhaps had already ceased to exist. It did achieve some measure of immediate results, with Parliament increasing the naval appropriations by some 50%. On a more historic scale, however, Jackie Fisher became a singular figure in both modernizing the Royal Navy and in breaking down the traditional barriers that had existed between the service, private industry, and politics, creating a nexus between them that is very familiar to us. Fisher, in effect, ushered in the military industrial complex.

Fisher’s rise was meteoric, born of his own ambition, his political acumen and willingness to flaunt convention, and his intense preoccupation with what he saw as a technological crisis. While older and more conservative officers felt that it was their duty to simply make the most of whatever funds the political authorites chose to allocate, Fisher was willing to go the mat - first anonymously and then publicly - to argue for the Navy. His ascension furthermore tracked very closely with the conversion of the naval artillery: in 1883 he had been made commandant of the naval gunnery school, and in 1886 he made the leap to Director of Naval Ordnance, and in 1892 he was an Admiral, Third Sea Lord and Controller of the Navy - in control of all naval procurement. By 1904 he was First Sea Lord: the highest ranking officer in the navy.

Throughout this ascent, Fisher served as the icebreaker plowing a new path of relations between the navy, private industrial firms, and politics. This was partially the result of a changing British political substrate. In 1884, the British franchise widened dramatically without a commensurate expansion of the income tax. This meant that there were now millions of new voters with a keen interest in economic conditions - particularly reducing unemployment - who were little concerned with how this might be paid for.

As a result, after 1884 there was a clear turn in British politics towards what we would now recognize as fiscal stimulus - particularly because there was a depression in 1884 precisely as the franchise widened. Economic depression suddenly made it seem more pressing to pass large naval appropriations to generate work and employment in private industry. In October 1884, the First Lord of the Admiralty suggested to Parliament that “if we are to spend money on the increase of the navy, it is desirable in consequence of the stagnation in the great shipbuilding yards of this country, that the extra expenditure should go… to increase the work by contract in the private yards.” The idea of a senior officer stumping for a larger naval bill on the basis of job creation, unthinkable just a few decades ago, now had a sudden sublime logic to it that was irresistible to politicians.

At the same time, Fisher pioneered a growing nexus between the military and private industry. The most important change in this regard came in 1886, after Fisher’s promotion to director of naval ordnance. Frustrated with the lethargic Woolwich arsenal and fixated on what he viewed as a critical technological gap, Fisher demanded (and was given) permission to purchase anything from private manufacturers that Woolwich could not supply more quickly or cheaply. On paper, Fisher hoped to stimulate competition between the arsenal and private producers, but the reality was that Woolwich would never be able to match the capital investment needed to match private lines. Armstrong, for example, had reacted to the emergence of Krupp as a competitor in foreign markets by investing in both a new steel mill and a shipyard, and was thus willing and able to immediately begin delivering guns to the Navy while the Woolwich arsenal was only beginning its foray into breech loading guns.

In essence, Fisher’s tenure as Director of Naval Ordnance allowed private manufacturers, of whom Armstrong was the most famous but not the only, to systematically undercut the more expensive and cumbersome arsenal system, granting a de-facto monopoly to private industry. This was the birth of the British military-industrial complex, with the feedback loops and personnel sharing that still characterize this system today, albeit much stigmatized.

Today, it is common to read outraged complaints about the incestuous relationship between armaments manufacturers, politicians, and military officers. At the risk of making an apologetic for this system, it is critical to understand that in the late 19th Century this system emerged more or less as an imperative of state security, without the negative connotations of corruption that exist today. In other words we could say that while there are many distasteful aspects of the modern military-industrial complex, no great power could survive the 20th Century without one.

Indeed, from very early on it became necessary to inculcate a close cooperation between Naval leadership and military industrialists, largely because of the sheer complexity and cost of naval engineering. Fundamentally, the Navy was buying very large, complex, and expensive products, which necessitated a close working relationship between procurement officers and private industrialists. Most famously, William White, who served as the Admiralty’s Director of Naval Construction, came directly from Armstrong, where he had worked as the company’s chief ship designer. But White was hardly the only such example, as personnel moved back and forth between state and private employment in an estuary of armaments design and fabrication.

The effect was not only to align private designs more closely with the needs of the navy, but also to accelerate the pace of change. Prior to the 1880’s, engineering and innovation had been largely driven by private inventors performing autonomous experimentation. This was a highly speculative enterprise with no guarantee of financial return - Armstrong discovered this firsthand in the 1860’s, when his breechloading guns (although definitively the superior system) were passed up by conservative officers in favor of muzzle loaders from the Woolwich arsenal.

In such an environment, technological change was bound to be relatively incremental, simply because private industrialists were unwilling to spend heavily on R&D with no assurance of return. By the mid to late 1880’s - the start of the “Fisher Era”, if you will - the growth of naval budgets and the close cooperation between Navy and industry provided an escape route. Now, the Admiralty could provide financial assurances to reduce the risk of expensive research and development, and even guide the process of innovation. Technological progress thus became a top-down, guided affair, rather than a process driven by private experimentation. In effect, the Admiralty set parameters for new systems - performance metrics for a gun, or an engine, or a torpedo, or an optical sight, and so on - and the engineers at private firms worked to meet them. It was now possible for invention and technological changes to respond to the needs of the service, rather than the service adopting its tactics around available technology.

The most famous example of this - and a truly revolutionary one - was a weapons system designed to counter the rising threat of fast torpedo boats: the quick firing artillery gun. The Admiralty asked for a very specific weapons system: a gun capable of firing at least twelve rounds per minute, with the range, accuracy, and power to destroy an enemy torpedo boat beyond the 600 yard range limit of the day’s torpedoes. By 1887, Armstrong had a gun that met all the design criteria, utilizing a hydraulic recoil system to automatically return the gun to its firing position after each shot. When combined with improvements to the breech system, this became the recognizable prototype of most modern artillery systems, which can fire in quick succession while remaining trained on target.

The quick firing gun was not only an effective tactical solution to enemy torpedo boats, but a powerful example of command technology, with innovation progressing towards concrete objectives laid out by naval authorities, rather than moving haphazardly at the auspices of private experimentation. Another such example was a new class of ship - the torpedo boat destroyer, which morphed into the vessel that we simply call the destroyer. Essentially a marriage of the quick firing gun with innovative new tube boilers, the concept was a fast and agile vessel that could screen battlefleets to intercept enemy torpedo boats before they could close to threaten capital ships. By 1897, the Royal Navy was fielding destroyers capable of making 36 knots - more than doubling the speed of warships just a decade earlier.

Taken together, it is clear that the mid-19th Century created a strategic crisis for the British which they answered by unleashing a military-industrial revolution, with the encouragement of Jackie Fisher. The diffusion of industrial capacity abroad, the development of new asymmetric warship types like torpedo boats and fast cruisers, and Britain’s growing dependence on imported grain all threatened to upend a centuries old calculus of British naval supremacy. Matters further came to a breaking point when developments in gunnery made the Royal Navy’s muzzle loading naval artillery (and the Woolwich arsenal that manufactured it) obsolete.

Facing both a technical and a strategic crisis, the British opened up a new nexus between political bodies, naval authorities, and private industrialists which promised to propel the Royal Navy to future glories. Close working relationships with major manufacturers like Armstrong allowed the Navy to drive innovation and procure ordnance in quantities that the old Woolwich arsenal, venerable though it was, could never hope to match. Meanwhile, the political apparatus discovered that naval appropriations were popular both on patriotic grounds and as a mechanism for job creation. Taken together, the entire apparatus of industry, technology, and finance were reaching the escape velocity needed to propel warfare at sea to a higher form.

The Rising Sun at Sea: Tsushima

While Britain busied herself responding to a systematic decay of her strategic position, unleashing an embryonic naval revolution in the process, equally dramatic changes were happening on the far side of the world in another island nation. The emergence of Japan as a modern and assertive power was among the most important geopolitical developments of the 19th Century, rivaled only by the American Civil War and the unification of Germany. The Japanese story, however, was endlessly surprising. Germany and the United States were well understood and intimately familiar nodes in the European mental map, with obvious potential as future powers - the question was only one of what sort of political arrangement would emerge to harness that power. Not so with Japan.

The Japanese revolution generally features in history books under the innocuous name of the “Meiji Restoration”, which belies the enormity of the changes in Japanese society which occurred in relatively short order. When the future Meiji Emperor, Mutsuhito, was born in 1852, Japan was still a pre-modern and fundamentally feudal country characterized by an extreme level of feudal decentralization, with over 270 minor polities ruled by petty warlords (Daimyos). Nominally ruled by a military head (the famous Shogun) who exercised power in the name of a politically neutralized emperor, the reality of Japanese political life was decentralization, warlordism, and strict isolation from foreigners.

The lifespan of a single man, then - in this case, Mutsuhito the Meiji Emperor - contained the wholesale transformation of Japan into a virtually unrecognizable modern state. The Boshin War (1868-1869) successfully overthrew the Shogunate and returned power to Emperor, and in the following decades the Meiji court would unleash a flood of reforms on Japan which reversed, practically in their entirety, the previous trajectory of the country. Japanese isolation, formerly a strict policy, was abolished and replaced with an intentional program to solicit foreign advisors and engineers, as Japan sought to remake itself into a modern state. Heavy land taxes on the peasantry and burgeoning silk exports financed the construction of modern industrial plants, railroads, and shipyards. Simultaneously, old feudal power structures were dismantled and the Imperial government pressured the privileged Samurai class (which numbed in the millions) into becoming productive civil servants and army personnel.

In short (and we can never do such a monumental event justice in such a short space), Japan transformed itself from prototypical colonial prey into an embryonic imperial power. Pre-Meiji Japan was precisely the sort of state which had traditionally been devoured by European powers: insular, fractured, and listless. Under the Meiji government, this Japan was transformed into a centralized Imperial state which consciously and aggressively sought modernity by adopting the best technological and bureaucratic practices of the day, even at the cost of transgressing ancient Japanese social taboos and coming into direct conflict with conservative Samurai.

Conveniently, the navy was one of the few areas where Japan had already opened itself to foreign influence even before the Meiji restoration got underway. A series of mid-century dustups with European fleets had highlighted the need for naval modernization, such that even the conservative Shogunate could not ignore it. In 1862, a British merchant was killed by the retinue of a local Daimyo, and when a small British armada appeared offshore the following year to demand restitution, it was able to bombard the city of Kagoshima with impunity. Almost simultaneously (in 1863), a joint western armada was able to force control of the Shimonoseki Strait, which separates the Japanese home islands of Honshu and Kyushu.

Basic prudence dictated that Japan, as an archipelago, would have to become a naval power to have any prospects in the world, and so the Shogunate had already begun soliciting foreign engineers (primarily British and French) to assist with the construction of modern naval arsenals, with a handful of warships purchased from Dutch, British, and American shipyards. We could say, then, that the Navy was one of the few arms of the Japanese state that was already open to foreign influence and modernization even before the Imperial restoration made this the norm.

Naturally, however, the development of the Imperial Japanese Navy (formally established in 1869) accelerated amid the more widespread reforms of the Meiji Period. Although the Royal Navy was widely seen as the gold standard to be emulated, it was in fact the French that provided the most powerful influence in the early Meiji period. This was precisely the time that the French were espousing their ideas for a budget fleet comprised of fast torpedo boats and cruisers which, in theory, could sink expensive capital ships at a fraction of the cost. This had obvious appeal to the Japanese, who were modernizing the entire state on a shoestring budget, and Japan’s 1882 naval appropriations bill laid the foundations for a fleet predicated on torpedoes, naval mines, and fast cruisers.

Both Japan’s foreign policy and the design of her fleet would take a sharp turn in the last decade of the 19th Century, with China serving as a crucial fulcrum. The Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) featured a series of largely unbroken Japanese victories, but there were still important lessons to be learned.

In particular, the Battle of the Yalu River (September 17, 1894) revealed the limitations of the French-style fleet design predicated on cruisers and torpedo boats. The Japanese did win the battle rather handily - shattering a Chinese fleet in the bay at the mouth of the Yalu, off the coast of Korea. However, the Chinese armada did possess a pair of German-built ironclad battleships which proved largely impervious to Japanese gunnery: they were only defeated after the remainder of the Chinese fleet had been swatted away, permitting torpedo boats to come in at close range.

This is not to remotely imply that the Yalu River was anything but a decisive Japanese victory, but for Japanese senior officers observing the battle, the resilience of the two Chinese battleships was slightly discomfiting, and seemed to indicate that a fleet comprised entirely of torpedo boats and cruisers was inadequate. It followed logically, then, that future phases of fleet expansion would incorporate capital ships, and the Japanese turned towards a more conventional, Mahanian battle fleet along British lines.

Secondly, the outcome of this first Sino-Japanese War did much to embitter Japan against the European powers and intensify their proclivities for a kinetic foreign policy. The chief cause of this was the so-called “Triple Intervention”. What happened was this: in the wake of Chinese defeat, a treaty was signed renouncing Chinese influence over Korea and ceding both Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula to Japan. Almost immediately after these terms were ratified, however, a joint diplomatic intervention by Russia, Germany, and France urged Japan to renounce its claim on the Liaodong Peninsula in exchange for a larger financial indemnity from China. Japan acquiesced under this European pressure, only to watch the Russians swoop in afterwards and obtain a 25 year lease on the peninsula, where they established a naval base at Port Arthur in 1898.

The Japanese, rather fairly, felt that they had been bullied and swindled, with the Russians taking a critical position that had been rightfully won with Japanese blood. To make matters worse, the new Russian position at Port Arthur, along with the new Trans Siberian Railway (which opened in 1904), put Russia in a position to move into Korea, which was now the main theater of empire for Japan.

In short, the Sino-Japanese War marked an important first chapter in Japan’s imperial story. Her victories against the Chinese fleet gave the modernizing Japanese navy an important base of experience and demonstrated that the growing fleet could not rely completely on torpedo boats but would require proper battleships, and the subsequent diplomatic wrangling embittered Japanese opinion against the European powers, particularly Russia. In the wake of this war, Japanese foreign policy would become increasingly muscular. Tokyo would sign an alliance with Great Britain in 1902, intended to deter further meddling by the French and Germans, and the Japanese battlefleet would be built out even further with capital ships. The stage was set for Japan to try her strength against a European power, and avenge herself on Russia.

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, then, constituted an attempt by Japan to sterilize the encroachment of Russia towards Korea and Manchuria. The war began with a surprise attack on the Russian base at Port Arthur, with the Japanese beginning their assault several hours before a formal declaration of war. While Americans would later be scandalized and outraged at the undeclared attack on Pearl Harbor, this was in fact a well established trick in the Japanese playbook: at Port Arthur and at Pearl Harbor, Japan began its two largest wars against outside powers with a surprise attack on the enemy’s main naval base.

The full scope of the Russo-Japanese War is beyond our remit here, but we will make a few brief comments on its overall character. Japan’s surprise attack failed to capture Port Arthur, but they were able to successfully bring it under siege and largely sterilize Russia’s Pacific Fleet in the process. The Russians made a variety of attempts to break out and concentrate their fleet for action, but were unable to do so. Naval mines - a relatively new technology - played an important role for both sides, serving to both keep the Russian fleet in Port Arthur and the Japanese out.

On land, this war was a muddled affair. The Russians and the Japanese each had a difficult problem to solve. For the Russians, the main issue was that their operational possibilities were narrow and left little room for creativity: the Russian armies railed into the region had a singular objective (break the siege on Port Arthur), which left them no other course of action than to try and fight their way down the rail line from Harbin (see the map above). Thus, the largest land battle of the war, Mukden, was fought precisely on this rail line. Fighting literally thousands of miles from home in Russia’s remote far east, it was impossible to supply these armies without rail, and this fact meant that the Russians simply could not maneuver or try anything clever. In a word, their operational planning was extremely predictable, with their line of advance and supply chained to the rail line.

For the Japanese, the problem was that their tactical aggression and initiative were giving them a preview of the First World War, and Russian rifle fire and artillery frequently inflicted terrible losses. At the Battle of Nanshan, for example (which cut off the land approach to Port Arthur), the Japanese suffered more than 6,000 casualties in the process of overrunning a relatively small Russian defending force of perhaps 3,800 men. Although the Japanese were victorious at Nanshan, in that they did capture the Russian positions, their losses were thrice that of the Russians. At the Battle of Mukden, Japanese casualties were likewise very heavy, with more than 75,000 killed or wounded.

In essence then, the overland campaigns of the Russo-Japanese War had a unique and frustrating logic, in that the Russian Army was tactically proficient (it could inflict significant casualties on the Japanese), but operationally sterile, trying as it was to advance in a linear and predictable fashion down the railway line to rescue the besieged garrison at Port Arthur. Mukden was a paradoxical battle which was superficially indecisive; but to win the war, the Russians had to break through to rescue Port Arthur, therefore even a stalemate at Mukden constituted defeat for the Russians.

It was in this context that we come to our topic of interest here: the Battle of Tsushima. The strategic framework for the Russians was very simple: Port Arthur was besieged and therefore needed to be rescued. The overland rescue had come untracked at Mukden, with the army unable to proceed any farther. Therefore, all hopes for the salvation of the Port Arthur garrison came to rest on the Russian Baltic Fleet, which was dispatched at ultra-long range from Petersburg to Port Arthur. There is a persistent myth that the Russians were denied the use of the Suez canal by the British after a jumpy Russian captain opened fire on British fishermen in the North Sea, thus needlessly extending the voyage by forcing them to circumnavigate Africa. While the incident with the British fishing ships did occur as reputed, it had no relation to the ability of the Russian fleet to traverse Suez: the journey around Africa was necessary from the start, as the draught of the newer Russian ships was too deep for the canal.

With Suez closed to them, albeit by engineering particulars rather than British remit, the Russian Fleet was compelled to steam out into the North Sea, around Iberia, and thence down the entire length of Africa, across the Indian Ocean, around Indochina, and then north towards Korea. In total, this was a voyage of about 18,000 nautical miles which took seven months. Without any exaggeration, we can therefore call the Baltic Fleet’s attempted rescue of Port Arthur the longest range combat operation of all time. The logistics of the voyage were complicated even farther by the idiosyncrasies of the Russian Navy. First and foremost, Russia - unlike, say, the British - did not possess a network of far flung coaling stations to support the fleet - which meant the Russians had to manage a tending force of colliers and supply ships. Secondly, because the Baltic Fleet had been designed as a coastal defense force intended to fight in the littoral of the Baltic, many of its ships were simply not designed for a global voyage nor crewed by sailors with robust experience on the high seas.

This cumbersome fleet, now asked to operate at the absolute limits of thinkable range, was put under the command of fifty-three year old Vice-Admiral Zinovi Petrovich Rozhdestvensky. He certainly cut a striking figure - tall, dignified, and energetic, known for being a high strung workaholic (he regularly went sleepless for days at a time). A British rhyme described him thusly:

And after all this, an Admiral came,

A terrible man with a terrible name,

A name which we all of us know very well

But no one can speak and no one can spell

Russia is by convention a land power, and given its geography it is natural that the army should always have place of pride and importance in the country’s defense and power projection. In 1905, however, the Russian Navy - and the Baltic Fleet in particular - had elements that were essentially modern and capable. The core of the fleet sailing to far east consisted of four Borodino Class Battleships, which had been completed in 1901-02, and were thus slightly newer than their Japanese equivalents. The Borodino class was equipped with what was, at the time, state of the art weaponry, armor, and powerplants, much of it designed in collaboration with French and German engineers. On the whole, although the Japanese had significantly more ships on aggregate, much of this came from armored cruisers and torpedo boats, while the Russians had more battleships.

Functionally, the Russian fleet was at a disadvantage in almost every area: it had fewer ships, fewer mid-caliber guns (like the 6 and 8 inch batteries on Japan’s cruisers), and it was operating very far from home. Furthermore, the Borodino class had been designed with an eye towards protection from torpedoes, which meant that its heaviest armor was below the waterline. Much of the superstructures above the water, including the coning towers and gun turrets, had little armor to speak of. This indicates, in general, that around the turn of the century the design of modern battleships was still in flux, and there was no consensus as to whether armor ought to be optimized to defend against torpedoes or against the enemy’s big guns. The Russians did, however, have one distinctive advantage: they had more big guns (of the 10 and 12 inch varieties). Therefore, if the ensuing battle was fought at longer ranges, to take the Japanese cruisers out of the action, the Russians would have a boxer’s chance.

What the ensuing Battle of Tsushima would demonstrate (beyond the obvious fact that the Japanese were to be treated with deadly seriousness), was the critical importance of two specific capabilities: speed and fire control. We will make a brief digression to examine fire control in particular before treating with the battle itself.

Fire control, as such, simply refers to the ability to coordinate accurate fire at range, and entails a spectrum of technical capabilities including range finding, optics, and correction. At Tsushima, the Japanese fleet utilized a new system of fire control which decisively demonstrated its superiority over older methods. There were certain technological advantages in play, of course - electric firing mechanisms, superior telescoping sights, and state of the art rangefinders - but beyond this, the Japanese had pioneered a new methodology which proved to be decidedly superior.

Traditionally, the fire control system was dissipated: an artillery officer and his assistants would estimate the range to the target and transmit the data to the gun crew commanders. After firing the first shot, these gun crew commanders would make adjustments to the range by observing the splash of their shells in the water - splashes behind the target meant the range had to be reduced, and vice versa for splashes in front of the target. The problem with this system of fire control is that, by giving responsibility for adjusting range to individual gun crew commanders, the turrets became desynchronized, with each turret commander independently tinkering with the range. Furthermore, with all the gun crews adjusting their fire independently, it quickly became difficult to tell which splashes came from your shells and which came from the other turrets on the ship.

At the Battle of the Yellow Sea in 1904, the Japanese began to implement centralized fire control, which gave responsibility for calculating new ranges to the ship’s artillery officer and his team. Under this system, all the gun turrets used the same range for each subsequent salvo - the result was that there was now a single set of splashes (with all guns firing in unison). Instead of each gun crew commander straining to watch the splashes and then make his own adjustments on the fly, the ship would fire a synchronized salvo and then wait for the adjusted firing parameters to be calculated by the artillery officer and his technical specialists. When combined with state of the art rangefinders and optics purchased from the British, this would give the Japanese a considerable advantage in accuracy. The rate of fire might be slightly reduced, since the gun crews had to wait for the new firing parameters to come down from the artillery officer, but the Japanese had learned that the increase in accuracy was well worth the slight delays that came from centralizing the range calculations.

A memorandum from Fleet Admiral Togo expressed the new system thusly:

Based on the experience of past battles and exercises, the ship's fire control should be carried out from the bridge whenever possible. The firing distance must be indicated from the bridge and must not be adjusted in gun groups. If an incorrect distance is indicated from the bridge, all the projectiles will fly by, but if the distance is correct, all the projectiles will hit the target and the accuracy will increase.

The Japanese fleet was also faster. In this case, the matter was not merely a difference in the technical capabilities of the ships, but the fact that the Russian fleet (having sailed tens of thousands of kilometers) had worn its boilers down to the bone, and the powerplants of the vessels were badly fouled by smoke and particulate pollution. This advantage in speed would prove crucial, particularly given the more numerous Russian big guns. If the battle was fought at extreme ranges, the Russians would have the advantage in firepower, but because the Japanese were faster, they were able to dictate the range of the engagement and fight at distances that kept their cruisers (with 6 and 8 inch guns) in play.

In short then, the Russians came to Tsushima with plenty of firepower and a powerful nucleus of modern battleships, but they were slower than the Japanese and at a significant disadvantage in fire control, owing to better Japanese rangefinders and the methodological advantages of centralized fire control. These two basic capabilities - speed and accuracy - would make all the difference.

Before the battle could be joined, Admirals Togo and Rozhdestvensky had to make difficult deployment decisions. The Russian fleet had departed its Baltic ports in October of 1904, under orders to relieve the besieged garrison at Port Arthur by sea. These orders had become obsolete on January 2, 1905, when Port Arthur surrendered to the Japanese Army. This did not, however, prompt a recall of the Baltic Fleet, and Rozhdestvensky proceeded under revised orders to reach Vladivostok, link up with the surviving squadron of Russia’s Pacific Fleet, and bring battle to the Japanese navy.

From this accrued an obvious geographic problem. Vladivostok lies on the continental coastline of the Sea of Japan - so named because it is an almost entirely enclosed sea, walled off in all directions by the Japanese home islands. Only three deepwater channels offer access to the Sea of Japan: these are the Soya, or La Pérouse Strait (between the islands of Hokkaido and Sakhalin), the Tsugaru Strait (between Honshu and Hokkaido), and the Tsushima Strait which separates the Japanese home islands from the Korean Peninsula.

To reach Vladivostok, Rozhdestvensky had to choose between taking the straight route through Tsushima and circumnavigating Japan to slip through the Soya strait in the north. The Soya route was significantly longer, adding more than 1,000 miles to a Russian voyage that had already strained the limits of long range operations. Despite the distance, there were factors recommending it, as the Tsushima straits would bring the Russians right past several major Japanese naval bases. If the Russians chose the longer route and were able to sweep around the Japanese home islands mostly undetected, there was a good chance that they could catch the Japanese fleet out of position and reach Vladivostok unmolested. In the end, however, Rozhdestvensky opted against the Soya route due to a combination of distance and fears that the Soya Strait (only 25 miles wide) might be heavily mined.

So, Rozhdestvensky chose to steam straight into the strait of Tsushima and head directly for Vladivostok. Unfortunately for the Russians, Admiral Togo had correctly guessed his intentions and based virtually the entirety of the Japanese surface fleet at Masan Bay, on the coast of Korea, where - like a spider waiting in the corner of a web - it could quickly sortie for action when the Russians entered the strait.

Togo’s decision to bet the farm on Tsushima spoke to extreme confidence and calm. Although the Japanese had virtually all the momentum in the war, there were larger strategic reasons to be nervous. The Japanese victory at Mukden had required committing virtually all of Japan’s trained reserves, and the country was generally running low on both manpower and cash (in fact, Japan’s looming exhaustion was the primary reason why the terms of the eventual peace were much less decisive than expected, given the scope of their victories). The Russian Army in Manchuria, although defeated, had been able to withdraw in good order to the north and was awaiting reinforcement. More generally, although the Japanese had won significant victories, they had no ability to defeat Russia strategically, given the scope of Russian manpower and their strategic depth. If Togo gambled wrong - if the Russians went east, around Japan, and evaded him - the war threatened to extend for another year, and the longer this war went on the better it was for Russia.

But Togo had not gambled wrongly. As the Japanese waited for weeks at Masan, waiting for some clue as to Rozhdestvensky’s whereabouts, there was increasing chatter that the Japanese fleet ought to redeploy northward and hedge its bets. Togo decided to wait. On the 27th, he received a vital bit of information that confirmed he had been correct. Intelligence arrived informing Togo that much of the Russian support fleet, including the colliers, had broken off from the battle fleet and arrived in Shanghai. This confirmed Togo’s bet on Tsushima: if the Russians were planning to take the longer route and sail to the east of Japan, they would have kept the supporting ships with them. At 2:45 AM on May 27th, the Japanese reconnaissance cruiser Shinano Maru managed to spot the Russian fleet, despite the foggy night. A radio message came crackling into Togo’s anchorage at Masan:

The enemy sighted in number 203 section. He seems to be sterring for the eastern channel.

By 6:30 AM, the Japanese fleet had spilled out of Masan Bay and was steaming into Tsushima to intercept the enemy. Togo’s flagship, the battleship Mikasa, hoisted a signal strongly evocative of Nelson’s famous exhortations:

The fate of the Empire depends on today’s result, let every man do his utmost.

Read more

The Ship of Theseus is a very old thought experiment, relayed to us by Plutarch in his “Life of Theseus.” In its original formulation, Plutarch relates that the ship used by the Greek hero Theseus (slayer of the Minotaur), was lovingly maintained by the Athenians, who honored the legendary hero by taking the vessel on an annual pilgrimage to make sacrifices to Apollo. Wooden Greek ships, of course, are predisposed to rot, which compelled the men of Athens over the years to replace the various timbers of the ship - removing rotted planks and beams and replacing them with new pieces, to preserve the ship in its original splendor. This, according to Plutarch, sparked a philosophical debate among the Athenian thinkers: if, after enough time had passed, literally every element of the ship - the mast, the sail, the ropes, and every timber of its hull - had been replaced, was it really Theseus’s ship, or was it an entirely different vessel?

This question is mildly interesting, of course, and relates to all manner of philosophical questions about forms and matter and various platonic minutia. For our purposes, however, it forms a useful place to begin an exploration of the remarkable ways that naval combat changed in the 19th century. In this case, the Ship of Theseus is useful because we are similarly talking about literal ships, and like the hero’s vessel, warships in the 19th century went through radical changes. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, warships looked essentially like they had two hundred years prior - wooden sailing vessels armed with banks of broadside cannon. By the turn of the century, however, they had been transformed into the essentially recognizable modern battleships that we know today: steel, propeller driven vessels armed with massive naval artillery batteries mounted in rotating turrets.

Both of these forms are very familiar to us - both the wooden ship of the line and the colossal steel battleship are iconic, instantly recognizable weapons systems. There are many places where you can tour one or the other. However familiar we may be with these vessels, at least in their general visible impressions, they are starkly alien from one another. The transition from the sailing broadside warships of Rodney and Nelson to recognizably 20th century battleships was the result of ruthless technological pressures driven in many cases by private inventors, innovators, and industrialists.

Like the ship of Theseus, the transformation of the warship entailed the obsolescence and replacement of literally every component of the ship. Wooden hulls were replaced first with iron and then with steel; muzzle loading cannon firing inert ordinance were replaced with breech loading and fantastically powerful naval artillery with exploding shells; sails were replaced with steam propulsion (powered at first by coal and later by fuel oil). These technological leaps seem logical and straightforward to us, but at the time they were frequently controversial (and often outright rejected at first by conservative naval authorities), incremental, and often connected in a vicious feedback loop. Unlike in previous centuries, this revolution in naval armament was frequently driven by private citizens - entrepreneurs and inventors eager to make their fortunes, who increasingly intruded on the prerogatives of conservative government arsenals and ancient cultures of artisanal weapons manufacture.

Subscribe now

Warships, in essence, made a variety of incremental changes that amalgamated old and new technologies - passing through hybrid forms which blended metal and wood, steam and sail - until they became something entirely new. But it was not only the structure of the warship that changed in this way - the economic and bureaucratic systems that built and supported them changed as well. Traditional admiralties and state operated shipyards and arsenals were challenged by the proliferation of private inventors, industrialists, and manufacturers, as society - particularly in Western Europe and the United States - made the leap to modernity and acquired all its signature attributes: mass production, mass politics, and mass mobilization.

The transformation of the warship became a visible symbol of the emerging age of modernity: gleaming with steel, belching smoke into the air, teeming with thousands of personnel, and knitting the imperial world more tightly together than ever with faster transportation and communications - and exponentially more powerful weaponry. With navies across the globe straining to float ever more and ever larger and more powerful vessels, the battleship became the totem weapons system of a world increasingly trapped in its own strategic logic, captive to the insatiable demands of bureaucratized and industrialized war at sea.

The Battleship of Theseus: Modernity at Escape Velocity

In 1807 - two years after the great battle at Trafalgar - Robert Fulton’s little steamship, the Claremont, made the first commercial demonstration of steam powered water transportation by ferrying passengers up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany and back again. The Claremont made the voyage (a round trip distance of about 350 miles) in 62 hours, which was considered a remarkable feat for the time, and developments in steam propulsion would come rapidly. Thirty years later the Atlantic would be crossed in just 18 days by the paddle wheeler Sirius. Although the Sirius also utilized sails (such hybrid propulsion was a standard of early steam vessels), this was the first demonstration of an oceanic crossing with continuous and sustained steam power. By the 1840’s, the clumsy and inefficient paddle wheels of the Sirius and the Claremont had given way to propellers and recognizably modern screw systems, and the power of engines began to increase exponentially. While Fulton’s little Claremont boasted a mere 24 horsepower (about as much as a modern riding lawnmower), the Sirius disposed of 320. By the 1850’s, the British had launched what was at the time the largest ship ever built by far - the 680 foot Great Eastern, which was driven by screw propellers and a massive 1,600 horsepower boiler complex.

In a few decades, then, steam powered ships had had already made the leap from small demonstration projects - essentially the province of hobbyist inventors and entrepreneurs - to fully scaled, if unrefined industrial products. The Great Eastern, for example, was an early but functional ocean liner, capable of carrying passengers from England to Australia under steam power without refueling. Despite these impressive achievements, the advent of steam initially made little impression on the navies of the world, particularly the vaunted British admiralty. The broader transformation of naval warfare would entail not only the radical redesign of the warship, but indeed a total revolution in the relationship between the institutional navy and society’s industrial and economic base.

The naval establishment in Britain had an extremely conservative temperament. This was not merely an ideological disposition, but was also derived from the structural and material apparatus of the navy. The Royal Navy had won global naval supremacy after many decades of war, with its crown jewel at Trafalgar. The British basis for global power rested, at its heart, on a system of naval combat that had not fundamentally changed since the Anglo-Dutch Wars in the mid-1600’s. A vast bureaucratic and manufacturing apparatus existed to support this system - a supply system to provide timber for hulls and hemp for ropes and sails, shipyards and docks for constructing and repairing ships, arsenals for casting iron cannon, and personnel arm finely tuned to produce the particular sailing and fighting skills that were the backbone of British dominance.

Given the scale of the British naval administration, and the fact that its material and human systems were finely calibrated for war in the age of sail, the British admiralty in fact had good reasons to resist the urge to plunge headlong into technological experiments. It (correctly) felt that it had no immediate peers at sea, and given the lack of urgency there was little reason to begin tearing up its powerful naval structures by the floorboards. On the contrary, there was a sense that rocking the boat (pardon the pun) could only serve to narrow the gap between Britain and her would-be rivals. An 1828 memorandum from the Admiralty argued:

“Their Lordships feel it is their bounden duty to discourage to the utmost of their ability the employment of steam vessels, as they consider that the introduction of steam is calculated to strike a fatal blow at the naval supremacy of the Empire.

This may seem like a classic case of “famous last words”, but the plainer truth is that an experienced naval administration, with no real rivals, was always unlikely to embrace speculative changes and abandon a proven and deeply entrenched methodology, in which they were heavily invested. The coming naval revolution would instead be spurred primarily by private actors and and by Britain’s rivals, with the Royal Navy (as the leading force of the day) responding to changes, rather than driving them. As it would turn out, Britain’s vastly superior industrial and financial capacity meant that it did not always need to be the prime mover of technological changes. British economic resources and her vast shipbuilding capacity meant that, even when a potential rival like France made an early breakthrough in ship design, the Royal Navy was never left behind for very long and found it relatively easy to imitate and adopt foreign innovations at scale.

In many ways, the 19th century revolution in naval warfare can be traced through a series of individual names, signifying men who - if not wholly responsible for major technological breakthroughs - are very nearly synonymous with these great leaps. Robert Fulton has gone to the history books as the father of the steam ship. After Fulton comes another singularly significant figure: the French artillery officer Henri Paixhans, father of the exploding naval shell.

Paixhans solved a thorny problem in military engineering. Explosive shells had been used previously, going back to the 18th Century, with Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel’s hollow casing which splintered and ejected shards of metal, but these weapons were used primarily in a siege setting, with mortars firing them at a high trajectory to injure personnel behind fortifications. Before Paixhans, no one had been able to work out how to safely fire explosive ordnance at the high velocities and flat trajectories used in naval combat. His first solution, which became the first functional exploding naval shell, was to rig an explosive shell with a fuse which would be lit by the blast of the gun firing - turning the cannonball into a sort of self-lighting bomb. In 1822, as he was preparing to showcase his newly finished design, he published a book entitled Nouvelle force maritime, which argued that in the near future wooden warships would be rendered obsolete by metal-plated warships armed with explosive shells.

In 1824, a French test confirmed the lethality of the Paixhans gun. The hulk of the decommissioned Pacificator was shot up with Paixhans’s shells, which lodged in the wooden hull before exploding, setting the entire ship alight in short order. The extreme vulnerability of wooden hulls to exploding shells - and in particular the fires that they would spark - was obvious to everyone, and by the late 1830’s both the French and British navies had begun the mass adoption of explosive shells, with other interested parties - like Russia - also placing orders.

On November 30, 1853, a small Russian naval squadron sailed into the harbor at Sinop, on the northern coast of Turkey. Russia and the Ottomans were again at war, and the Russian naval force had been instructed to interdict Turkish naval traffic bringing supplies to the Ottoman ground force in the Caucasus. Armed with a small complement of Paixhans guns with exploding shells, the Russian armada set almost the entirety of an equivalently sized Turkish fleet on fire with just a few volleys. Within two hours of the Russian entry into the Sinop harbor, 11 Ottoman ships had either been destroyed or intentionally grounded by their panicking crews. The Russian fleet then set its guns on the Turkish shore batteries and destroyed them as well.

At the cost of just 37 Russian dead, the little fleet (under admiral Pavel Nakhimov) killed nearly 3,000 Turkish soldiers and sailors and won virtually unimpeded operational control of the Black Sea. The Battle of Sinop - if we can call such a one-sided affair a battle - was the first operational use of the emerging explosive ordinance, and it made a deep impression on both a strategic and a technological level. Strategically, Sinop emphasized that the Ottomans were nearly powerless to oppose Russia and raised the thought that Constantinople was now realistically within Moscow’s reach. The battle became a major inducement to the entry of Britain and France into the conflict which would become the Crimean War. On a more technical level, however, Sinop emphasized the near total lethality of exploding shells brought to bear against wooden warships.

The 1850’s and the Crimean War, then would become a watershed decade for armaments manufacturing and warship design. Before commenting on this war and its ramifications, however, it is worth contemplating the domino chain which revolutionized ship design, and specifically the direction that it flowed.

We can roughly think of the transformation of the warship as consisting of three great changeovers: from inert cannonballs to exploding shells, from wooden hulls to steel with iron plating as an intermediary step, and from sails to steam. Although steam engines were demonstrated early, they were not the first system to be adopted en-masse by the great navies. Rather, it was exploding shells that set off the chain reaction of changes - particularly in that the French, who were far weaker at sea than Britain, were highly motivated to experiment with new technologies.

Exploding shells had made wooden hulls acutely vulnerable, and it was this fact which spurred experiments with metal plating on hulls - particularly in the aim of preventing primitive shells from embedding themselves in the wood and igniting fires. Metal, however, is very heavy, as were the enormous guns required to fire Paixhans’s shells. It is very easy to understand how an escalating race between protection and firepower, with larger guns provoking thicker plating and vice versa in a feedback loop, could very quickly make ships prohibitively heavy and immobile under sail power. It was the sheer weight of these ships which increasingly made steam power a necessity. In effect, then, the modern battleship emerged from a triparte arms race between firepower, protection, and mobility - manifested tangibly as the exploding shell, the steel hull, and the steam engine.

An excellent example of this process in action was the French warship Gloire - a hybrid ironclad warship par excellence. La Gloire had a wooden hull and sails, but also so much more. Outfitted with breech loading artillery and armored with nearly five inches of iron plating (backed by more than a foot of timber), La Gloire proved nearly impervious to any naval artillery then extant. She was also remarkably heavy, with a displacement of some 5,600 tons. This was no obstacle, as a screw propeller powered by steam engine allowed her to attain 13 knots. Most importantly, she was fully ocean-worthy. Her hybrid form - sails and steam, wood and iron alongside each other - spoke to the fact that this was a weapons system in transition, and though she would not remain so for long, at the time she was launched La Gloire was the most powerful naval weapons platform in the world. Protection, firepower, and mobility, all advancing, competing against each other and yet synergizing as the warship evolved.

The Spark: War in Crimea

The Crimean War (1853-1856) would spark the exponential acceleration of change in naval warfare - a fact that at first may seem odd, as it was largely a conflict fought on land. A full recounting of this conflict is beyond our remit here, but we will make do with a brief sketch of its strategic and tactical concepts, before examining in detail the ways that it accelerated technical change in the world’s navies.

The Crimean War was fundamentally a containment war. Russia had emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as the dominant land power in the world, with the largest army in Europe by far and a proven capacity to project its forces from Paris to the Caucasus to Central Asia. Although the aggregate power of the Russian Army concealed many weaknesses (like the need to defend a vast and sprawling border and an eroding economic basis), the general consensus was that Russia was the dominant power of continental Europe, and the events of the early 1850’s raised serious fears that Moscow would dismember the decaying Ottoman Empire, attain Constantinople, and turn the Black Sea into a Russian lake. The Crimean War, in its essence, was a war fought by France and Britain to prevent a strategic Ottoman defeat at the hands of the Russians, and it was fought in Crimea because this was the only place where the French and British could feasibly project armed power against Russia.

Discussions of the Crimean War tend to emphasize the fighting as a primitive preview of the Western Front of World War I. After a series of initial battles at Alma and Balaclava which forced the Russians back on the fortress of Sevastopol, the war transformed into a colossal siege, characterized by extensive field fortifications, trenches, and heavy artillery barrages. Accounts also frequently emphasize the emerging technological gap between Russian forces, who still utilized muskets, and the French and British troops with their newly issued rifled guns.

All of this is fair and of course interesting in its own right, but what matters most to us now is the naval dimension and the industrial base that would support its evolution. Therefore, two topics in particular are very important and ought to be teased out in full: namely, the enormous advantage in supply derived from Anglo-French naval lift, and the fact that the Crimean War served as a spark that ignited a revolution in arms manufacturing. Rather than focusing on the technical gap that existed between Russian and allied forces during the war, it is important to understand that the war set off an explosion of technological change in the field of armaments. These changes came too late to impact the war in Crimea, but would dramatically change the form of future wars.

Although naval combat was of secondary importance in Crimea, seaborne logistics were not. Anglo-French forces had a decisive and overpowering logistical advantage despite the fact that the war was fought on Russian soil. With fighting centered around Sevastopol, on the southern periphery of the empire, Russian forces had extreme difficulties ensuring an adequate delivery of munitions and other supplies, while the allies - supplied by sea - had access to an enormous logistical lift. French steamships were able to make the trip from Marseilles to the Black Sea in twelve to sixteen days (depending on the weather), while Russian reinforcements and supplies - traveling overland with thousands of animal drawn carts - could take months to reach the front from the Russian interior. Although allied supply was hardly unlimited, French and British forces were much more tightly connected to home, both logistically and in communications, than the Russians, who nominally *were* fighting at home.

In addition to the growing use of steam ships for logistical functions, the Crimean War was also the first major war to make use of the telegraph for communications. When combined with the presence of journalists embedded with the troops (again a first), this connected civilians in France and Britain with the fighting in an entirely new and intimate way, and provoked intense public interest in the war. This fact would have profound implications for weapons manufacturing, as we will see shortly. In contrast, the Russians - who had built up neither telegraph nor railroad connectivity to Crimea - were largely out of the loop. Tsar Nicholas I was said to regularly complain that he got better and more timely information from French newspapers than he did from his own commanders.

In short, the Crimean War prefigured the emerging totalization of war which would be made possible by the twin technologies of steam power (whether in locomotives or ships) and the telegraph. Steam ships and railroads would soon be able to move men and material in previously unthinkable qualities, while the telegraph would make possible the prospect of command and control of ever larger armies. These were the essential tools of mass mobilization and mass politics that would soon allow the states of Europe to fling armies of millions at each other.

In enumerating the consequences of the Crimean War, however, we at last come to (in my view) the single most important outcome: a total revolution in armaments manufacturing. The Crimean War, without exaggeration, led directly to the formation of what we might recognizably call the “military industrial complex”, though here I use the phrase without the negative connotation usually implied. The Crimean War sparked a revolution in arms production for two reasons: first, it exposed the utter obsolescence of existing models, and secondly it inculcated an immense interest among private citizens and inventors to offer something better. To demonstrate these changes, we will focus primarily on the British case.

Weapons manufacturing in Britain had long been the domain of a decentralized web of artisan craftsmen, located primarily in London and Birmingham. Making guns, in other words, was a craft, with artisans essentially working as subcontractors for the state-owned Woolwich Arsenal. Craftsmen specialized in making specific components of the finished weapon and delivered batches of these parts to trickle up the chain towards final assembly. This artisanal, dissipated system of manufacture dovetailed with the conservativism of the military establishment to freeze weapons technology. The British officer corps taught the same basic drill (that is, the process for synchronized marching, reloading, and firing), and British artisan gunsmiths made the same basic musket, and nothing changed. The mainstay British musket - “Brown Bess” as she was affectionately called - remained virtually unchanged from the time of Marlborough (the early 1700’s) all the way through the Napoleonic wars and into the middle of the 19th Century.

In the Crimean War, however, this artisanal system of gunsmithing showed its obsolescence, in that it proved unable to either expand its output or adapt to emerging new designs in firearms. When war broke out in Crimea, the British Army attempted to place large new orders for small arms - but to the artisans of London and Birmingham, this appeared to be the perfect opportunity to go on strike for higher wages. As a result, the Crimean War exposed the artisanal manufacturing system to be inelastic and unresponsive to the army’s needs. Precisely when the army was demanding a surge in production, work stoppages and strikes led to a stark drop in output. Simultaneously, these same workmen - accustomed to practicing a very old and unchanged manufacturing process to make Brown Bess muskets - proved resistant and inflexible when the government tried to make the transition to new rifled models.

Clearly, something had to change. Fortunately, there was already an alternative model of firearms manufacture being practiced in America. The American arsenal in Springfield, Massachusetts - and a bevy of private American gunmakers - had already proven the viability of mass production using milling machines to cut interchangeable components. The British had seen a demonstration of this up close: in 1851, at the Great Exhibition in London’s Hyde Park, Samuel Colt showed off his revolvers and demonstrated their interchangeability by dismantling a whole slew of pistols, mixing up the parts in a great pile, and then reassembling them into working guns.

The difficulties with the artisans, combined with the proven viability of American mass production, compelled the British to finance a new manufacturing plant at Enfield based on the “American system of manufacture”, as it was called. Expensive milling machines were ordered from the Americans, and although they arrived too late to impact the war in Crimea, by 1859 the Enfield plant was operative. Meanwhile, newly designed machines at the government Woolwich Arsenal were capable of manufacturing hundreds of thousands of bullets per day. The new breakthroughs in manufacturing were hardly limited to government enterprises, however - two major private manufacturers emerged in Britain in the 1860’s, located in the old artisanal manufacturing hubs in London and Birmingham.

The advantage of the emerging system of mass production was not only in the scale of the output, but also in the speed with which armies could produce and deploy new weapons. Before the Crimean War, the glacial speed of production discouraged innovation in design, because rolling out the new weapon required cajoling thousands of artisans in a decentralized production system to adjust their processes. Now, a new weapon could be produced en-masse simply by designing new jigs and forms for the automatic machine tools. Brown Bess changed very little over hundreds of years, but now a new rifle could be deployed en-masse in short order. Both France and Prussia, similarly, were able to totally reequip their armies with new rifles in about four years using American-style machining lines.

At the same time, the Crimean War had exposed conservative military officers to the fearful prospect that future wars would be fought with new weapons with which they had little or no direct experience. The power of the new breech loading rifles and exploding artillery shells jolted much of the European military caste out of its slumber, and in general made them much more open to innovation and change.

The Crimean War sparked a similar revolution in artillery manufacture and metallurgy, which was to have profound implications for our particular subject of naval warfare. The link to Crimea was first the powerful demonstration of exploding shells and armored warships (the French in particular made effective use of iron-plated floating artillery batteries to shell Russian fortifications), and secondly the intense interest of the public in a war which for the first time was being comprehensively covered in real time by embedded journalists connected to the home front via telegraph.

At least two of Britain’s great industrialists at this time - Henry Bessemer and William Armstrong - were provoked directly by their interest in the Crimean War. Bessemer spent the early part of the 1850’s experimenting with methods to cheaply produce steel at scale specifically for manufacturing artillery barrels, and finally broke through when he discovered a novel method of refining by blowing air through molten iron ore. Thus, the mass production of steel, which is both stronger and more easily worked than iron, was gifted to the world. This remains one of the most important technological breakthroughs of the modern world.

The “Bessemer Process” broke the world through to an entirely new age of metallurgy, which quickly made old methods of casting artillery utterly obsolete. This is not, of course, to imply that steel would never have come to predominate without the Crimean War, but it is worth emphasizing that Bessemer was specifically grappling with an application in armaments. In his autobiography, he wrote that the artillery problem: “was the spark which kindled one of the greatest revolutions that the present century had to record… I made up my mind to try what I could to improve the quality of iron in the manufacture of guns.”

Meanwhile, the industrialist William Armstrong remembered reading an account of British artillery in action at the Battle of Inkerman, in Crimea, and promptly sketched out a design for a breech loading artillery piece. His remark, similarly to Bessemer’s, was that it was “time military engineering was brought up to the level of current engineering practice.” Armstrong would soon become Britain’s most prolific private artillery designer, and although the Navy eschewed his guns and chose to continue procuring artillery from the state Woolwich Arsenal, Armstrong’s guns created a commercial pressure that drove engineers at the arsenal to develop new designs of their own.

Although government operated artillery arsenals fought to maintain their monopoly on the manufacture of heavy guns, it was impossible to ignore the developments being driven by private inventors and industrialists. Henry Bessemer had blown the game wide open by gifting the world cheap steel at scale, which made it possible to produce not only munitions and artillery barrels but eventually the hulls of ships to exacting standards without the brittleness characteristic of iron. Meanwhile, private manufacturers like Armstrong, his rival Joseph Whitworth, and the Prussian industrialist Alfred Krupp, pushed the envelope with new designs and were eager to point out the superiority of their guns.

Everything was now in place for warships to undergo their next phase of evolution - transitioning from the hybrid midcentury forms, which combined wood and iron, sail and steam - to recognizably modern battleships. The chain of innovations is, in fact, relatively straightforward to trace.

A race had already begun between protection and firepower, particularly between the French and British who, although allies in Crimea, continued to eye each other’s ship designs warily. When the French launched La Gloire in the late 1850’s and boasted that its iron plating was invulnerable to any extant naval gun, it naturally pushed the British to simply design a bigger and more powerful artillery piece. As armor got thicker and thicker (eventually giving way to hulls made entirely of thick steel), guns got bigger and bigger.

The increasing size of the guns forced a total reevaluation of the layout of the warship. Designing ships with rows of cannons laid out along the sides was now abortive, as the guns were so heavy and ponderous that placement on the outer hull threatened the stability of the ship. Guns therefore had to be placed midships along the deck of the vessel for purposes of stability, and that in turn meant that masts and sails had to be removed to give the guns a free field of fire. Thus, by 1871 the Royal Navy had launched the HMS Devastation - the first capital ship to be both powered entirely by steam (she carried no sails at all) and to have her guns mounted on the top deck, rather than below in the hull. When the Devastation shed her sails and the gunports in her hulls, the last vestiges of Nelson’s broadside sailing ships were finally gone.

Further developments were soon made. Mounting the guns on the top deck of the ship exposed the gun crews to enemy fire. The solution, obviously, was to encase the gun in an armored turrets, and these turrets needed to be able to turn in order to bring the gun to target. Therefore, the turret needed hydraulic power, and this by extension meant more steam, which required bigger and more boilers. Thus, we get the battleship.

In summary, technologies were emerging in the early 19th Century that would radically change naval warfare, transforming the venerable ship of the line into recognizably modern battleships, but Admiralties - particularly in Britain - were initially slow to adopt these changes given their long established systems of shipbuilding, training, and maintenance. The primary inducement to break this system open was the exploding shell - French tests indicated that wooden warships were highly vulnerable to these emerging weapons, and the Crimean War proved this beyond a shadow of a doubt, first in the Russian defeat of the Ottoman fleet at Sinop, and again with the Anglo-French use of exploding shells to reduce Russian fortifications in Crimea.

The advent of the exploding shell began an incremental race between armor and firepower which would take off fully after the Crimean War, as the conflict spurred private innovations in metallurgy and artillery design by men like Bessemer and Armstrong. Simultaneously, the war exposed the inflexibility and inadequacy of the old artisanal system of manufacturing and spurred state arsenals to pursue mass production along the American model, while making military establishments more open to innovation and input from private industrial enterprises.

The result was a fantastic acceleration of what we might refer to as weapon cycling times, or generation times: in other words, the rate at which weapons became obsolete and were replaced by newer models. Cycling times used to be measured in centuries: iconic weapons systems like the Brown Bess musket or the broadside sailing ship changed very little over very long periods of time. From the Anglo-Dutch Wars to Nelson, the broadside line ship remained generally the same and changed mostly by becoming larger. In the mid-19th Century, however, ships became obsolete faster and faster. In 1861, the Royal Navy launched the HMS Warrior - an iron hulled warship with mixed steam and sail propulsion. The most powerful ship in the world when she launched, the Warrior was made utterly obsolete just a decade later with the 1871 launch of the Devastation. The idea of a ten year old ship being essentially useless in combat would have been insanity to a 17th or 18th Century admiralty, but now it was unremarkable.

In regards to warships design more specifically, the interplay between protection, firepower, and mobility created a feedback loop that drove ships towards configurations that seem very nearly predestined by the nature of the underlying technology. Exploding shells necessitated armor plating which became thicker and thicker, driving the design of ever larger guns to defeat the thickening armor. The size of these guns eventually ensured that they would be moved from gun decks inside the hull to armored turrets on the deck, which made it impossible to maintain masts and sails. This implied steam both for propulsion and to power the hydraulic turrets, and the powerplants of ships grew correspondingly larger to accommodate the growing bulk of the heavily armored vessels. From Robert Fulton’s 24 horsepower engine in 1807, boiler complexes grew by leaps and bounds - the powerplant on the Devastation, for example, provided more than 6,600 horsepower.

In short, what I have endeavored to demonstrate here is that the design of warships followed an extremely logical course, and the transition from broadside sailing ships to early modern battleships - although astonishing in its totality - in fact consisted of a series of fairly predictable incremental changes, beginning with the introduction of exploding shells. To return to the Ship of Theseus, we can say that at midcentury warships still generally resembled the old line ships from the golden age of sail, albeit with larger guns, iron plating attached to the hull, and the odd smokestack poking out here and there. Shortly after the Crimean War, however, these ships became something entirely new, recognizable to us as early modern battleships: shedding the last vestiges of their masts, adding more boilers, housing their guns in turrets, and eventually boasting hulls made entirely of steel.

One could almost go so far as to say that the battleship was practically inevitable from the moment Henri Paixhans demonstrated his fuse shell. The Crimean War, which demonstrated in unequivocal terms the enormous combat power of shell artillery, sparked a revolution in weapons manufacturing, with mass production, steel (compliments of Mr. Bessemer), and private manufacturers driving the warship into a new era - the era of steel and steam and mass armies and terrible destruction. Or, as Victory Hugo (of all people) put it:

"Earth! The shell is God. Paixhans is his Prophet."

Earth and Water: Conjuring the Great Snake

While the British and the French led Europe into a total revolution in naval warfare, the old continent was mercifully spared a general continental war of the sort that had ravaged it in the Napoleonic era. Accordingly, after Trafalgar in 1805, there would be no general fleet actions by the great powers for the remainder of the Century. In fact, the broader irony is that despite the enormous advances made in ship design and armaments and the swelling industrialization of war, the 19th Century was remarkably light on naval combat of any kind - for Europe at least. The Battle of Sinop was a notable exception, but tactically it was hardly very instructive or elaborate: a Russian fleet more or less set fire to an Ottoman armada. If anything, Sinop was more like arson than a proper fleet battle.

Thus, although it was obvious that warships were changing in a very fundamental way and would provide astonishing combat power in future wars, European navies did not experience this firsthand and did not fully understand what naval battle would be like. However, there were hints and demonstrations to be seen, if one could cast a wider eye and look beyond the great powers of Europe. There were other navies, new emerging states, and looming powers.

Between the fall of Napoleon and the beginning of World War I (essentially a round 100 years), three particular geopolitical developments eclipsed all others in their importance. Two of these were the Meiji Restoration in Japan, which produced an assertive, consolidating, and rapidly modernizing power in East Asia, and the unification of Germany under Prussian headship, which created an extraordinarily powerful state in Central Europe, with consequences that are well known to us. The emergence of powerful Japanese and German states was of immense interest and importance to the traditional great powers of Europe, and in particular Russia, which now faced rapidly industrializing powers on both its western and eastern flanks.

The third great happening of the long 19th Century, however, was by far the most important. This was the American Civil War. The Civil War today is shrouded in trite political debates and heavy handed displays of historical erasure. Most people, if asked, would undoubtedly say that the most important outcome of the Civil War was the abolition of southern slavery, with perhaps some vague addendum about preserving the Union without a clear notion of what it meant. Between Confederate lost cause romanticism and the turbocharged civil rights regime, there is little common ground and a lack of interest in something as vague and tired as geopolitics.

The US Civil War was, as I would argue, the single most consequential act of empire building in modern history. The simple fact was that the Confederate South was a nation, or at least was in the process of becoming one, with a wealthy agrarian economy, peculiar social forms, and a patrician leadership caste that was largely alien to the industrial, urban north. Southerners affirmed their membership in this emergent nation with exceptionally high levels of military participation, the willingness to endure extreme privation, and a new schema of southern symbols and hagiography. This emerging southern nation was strangled in its cradle by the powerful north and then re-integrated into the Union in a complex political settlement - the cost of which was abandoning southern blacks to a postwar racial caste system.

The essential function of the Civil War was to preserve a growing American empire with continent-spanning dimensions and consolidate control of the vast American space under the increasingly penetrating power of Washington. The future would belong to powers with the ability to wield resources on a continental scale: super states able to exploit far flung resources and lands through the emerging power of the railroad and the increasingly sophisticated bureaucratic apparatus of state. On many killing fields across the Confederate heartland, the Union affirmed its control of a continent and preserved the embryo of America’s coming global supremacy.

Fought as it was in the interior heartland of America, the Civil War was generally characterized by set piece battles on land, and cursory accounts tend to emphasize, as the main cause of Union victory, the north’s overwhelming superiority in population, industrial capacity, and logistics - particular given superior northern railroad density. This is all fair enough, and the war was ultimately a clash between a populous, industrial north and a relatively thinly settled agrarian south. The Union had 70% of the prewar population, 70% of the rail network, and 90% of the manufacturing output, leaving razor thin odds for the South. A simple open and shut case, if there ever was one.

The Union struggled mightily in the early years of war, however, with the question of just how to bring this preponderance of force to bear against the Confederacy, and displayed no small measure of strategic indecision and even paralysis. Nowhere was this more evident than in the naval dimension of the war.

The naval theater offered immense opportunity for the Union. When secession began and signaled the outbreak of war in 1861, only two significant naval installations fell into Confederate hands - namely, naval bases at Norfolk Virginia and Pensacola Florida. The base at Norfolk (the Gosport Shipyard) was of particular importance, with the Confederates taking custody of the dry dock, considerable warehouses full of munitions, and the wreck of the Merrimack. The latter was a brand new steam powered screw frigate of the US Navy, which had been scuttled by evacuating Union forces, though not well enough: southern engineers were able to raise the wreck in salvageable condition and return it to combat.

Notwithstanding Norfolk and a determined effort by the Confederacy to build out its naval capabilities, the shipbuilding capacity of the North was vastly greater, almost to a laughable extent. The South began the war with roughly 14 seaworthy ships, and a herculean effort would manage to raise the force to 101 vessels throughout the war. In contrast, the North had some 42 combat ready vessels at the outbreak of war, and would raise this number to more than 670 ships by the time of Confederate surrender - in effect, the force ratios on the sea increased from a 3:1 northern ship advantage at the start of war to nearly 7:1 by the end.

The United States had a considerable amount of firsthand experience which demonstrated how potent sea power could be when leveraged properly to support overland forces, in what would we would now call joint operations. The British had made great use of sea power in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, in particular with the Royal Navy wrecking the American defense of New York in 1776, and British control of the Chesapeake leading to the climactic burning of Washington in 1812. Furthermore, the Union’s senior officer, Commanding General of the Army Winfield Scott, had gained intimate experience with joint operations in the Mexican-American War, when he conducted an amphibious invasion of Mexico. Scott became a particularly powerful advocate of joint operations and a naval grand strategy, and it was unfortunate that the venerable old General did not remain in command after the first year of the war.

The operational possibilities were myriad. In addition to a broader strategic campaign to blockade Confederate ports and isolate the under-industrialized southern economy, seaborne forces could ensure secure lines of communication for Union armies fighting in the Confederate littoral. They could be used to enhance Union operational mobility and turn enemy defenses by landing in the rear.

General Scott advocated a broad campaign predicated on joint operations which put naval combat power in a position of priority. In a formulation that Union newspapers would label the “Anaconda Plan”, Scott proposed a two-fold approach that would simultaneously blockade Confederate ports while launching a riverine campaign down the Mississippi, which served as the great arterial waterway and provided penetration deep into the Confederate heartland. As Scott put it, a campaign in the interior along the Mississippi would:

Clear out and keep open this great line of communications in connection with the strict blockade of the seaboard, so as to envelop the insurgent States and bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan.

Although Scott would leave his post late in 1861, to be replaced by the much-maligned George McClellan, his tenure in the opening months of the war was sufficient to set in motion strategic developments along these lines. Although the war did not proceed precisely as Scott envisioned it, two critical elements of his thinking - a riverine campaign along the Mississippi and a blockade of Confederate ports - would become pillars of the coming Union victory. Indeed, while the campaigns of Robert E Lee and the ferocious battles in the Virginia theater are generally among the most famous moments of the war, it is inarguable that the coming Union blockade and the conquest of the Mississippi were the most critical strategic developments of the conflict, and both were intimately dependent on naval combat power.

Although the Union boasted both a larger fleet at the outset of the war and a significantly greater shipbuilding capacity, blockading the Confederacy was much more difficult than it sounded. While Europeans continued to look on American military proficiency with a strong tint of smugness, the reality was that the Civil War was a military-logistical challenge far greater than any European army or state had ever attempted. This was because the United States was, in a word, huge. The eleven states which comprised the Confederate States of America cover some 780,000 square miles of greatly varied terrain - greater in size than Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain combined. The length of the Mississippi theater alone (running from the Union base of support around Cairo, Illinois all the way to the sea) is nearly equal to the north-south dimensions of France.

In short, the Confederacy was a vast state with 3,500 miles of coastline and many hundreds of miles of navigable rivers. Blockading such an enemy was an imposing task - by far the largest such blockading operation ever undertaken, and even more daunting given the miniscule naval force (42 combat-worthy ships) available at the outset of war. In addition to building up the forces needed to undertake the blockade, the intended campaign along the Mississippi would require building out a riverine force of both gunboats for combat operations and transports for troops and material.

Fortunately for the Union, the vast geography of the Confederacy also had implications that worked in their favor. The size of the Confederacy, and the growing paramount importance of rail transportation, meant that the Union did not have to blockade the entire coastline - only those ports with the infrastructure and rail connectivity to serve as viable transit hubs for the enemy. By far the most important Confederate port was New Orleans, at the mouth of the Mississippi. To New Orleans could be added Galveston (Texas), Mobile (Alabama), Savannah (Georgia), Charleston (South Carolina), and Wilmington (North Carolina). If the Union Navy could blockade these ports, which sat at vital southern railheads, it would be enough to largely choke off the southern states, and imports at smaller ancillary ports would never be able to meaningfully offset the loss of these major hubs. Meanwhile, Virginia’s sea access was cut off with relative ease thanks to built-in Union dominance of the Chesapeake.

Late in the summer of 1861, the Army-Navy Blockade Board convened to sketch out how all of this could be accomplished. They clearly understood that a blockade could be achieved by isolating the Confederacy’s major ports, but even this task required identifying a series of coastal installations which would have to be captured. Above all, the navy would require coaling stations - a new wrinkle in war planning. By this time, the US Navy - like its European counterparts - had transitioned to steam power, but the steamships of the day were woefully inefficient coal-guzzling monstrosities which required regular restocking. Maintaining a blockade around major Confederate ports would require not only an adequate force of warships, but also nearby coaling bases under Union control.

The blockade board eventually identified a series of locations that were to be captured and used as coaling stations and bases of support for blockading fleets - these included Fernandina, Florida, Bull’s Bay and Port Royal, South Carolina, and Ship Island, Mississippi. The latter was to prove particularly important - located between Mobile and New Orleans, Ship Island would serve as a base for blockading forces in the Gulf and allowed Union Ships to patrol both the mouth of the Mississippi and the entrance to Mobile Bay.

The naval theater offered the Union a chance to win a decisive victory relatively early in the war, but this opportunity was wasted due to a variety of institutional neuroses. These began with the retirement of Scott and his replacement by McLellan, who had less appreciation for joint operations and viewed the pivotal axis of the war to be the land front along the Virginia border, with naval operations playing a subordinate, supportive role. Furthermore, there was no systematic or institutional mechanism for coordinating Army and Navy operations (particularly when the blockade board disbanded after issuing its recommendations in 1861), and Lincoln - still shaky as commander in chief - generally failed to adjudicate disputes between the services, of which there were many.

The Union’s 1861 capture of Port Royal, South Carolina offers an instructive example. The Union foothold at Port Royal had essentially driven a wedge in the lower Confederate seaboard, giving Union forces a powerful position between Savannah and Charleston. The threat was severe enough that Confederate high command dispatched Robert E Lee to sort out defenses along the southern coast. Many Union officers saw Port Royal not merely as a naval base to support the blockade, but as a place where they could land and supply an army deep in the enemy’s rear. Such a vision, however, would require close coordination and strategic synchronization between army and navy - but the army’s commander, McLellan, was preoccupied with his campaign into Virginia, and the Navy was much more concerned with the blockade and hardly wanted to subordinate itself to a support arm of the army. Admiral Gustavus Fox, who commanded the naval detachment at Port Royal, encapsulated the views of many naval officers when he said “my duties are twofold; first, to beat our southern friends; second, to beat the Army.”

In the end, then, the Union simply lacked the institutional mechanisms to systematically coordinate joint operations and establish what we would call unity of command. Tactically, Union forces proved capable of assaulting and capturing sometimes formidable Confederate coastal forts, but a lack of strategic perspective prevented the North from fully capitalizing on these footholds. Rather than landing forces for operations in the Confederate rear, the Union’s chain of coastal positions were largely used as bases of support for blockading ships.

There was, however, one theater where commanders managed to develop a working practice of joint operations. Fortuitously for the Union, this was the single most strategic theater of the war, and it was here that Ulysses Grant found himself in the driver’s seat.

Grant and the Turtles

Today, Cairo, Illinois is a dilapidated and depopulated little ghost town, full of boarded up buildings and poverty and social rot. In the early 1860’s, however, it occupied the single most strategic position of the American Civil War. Cairo lies at the place where the four great rivers of the American Midwest - the Missouri, the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Cumberland - converge and meet both each other and the almighty Mississippi. It is thus the place where vast flows of riverine traffic converge, and the place where Union forces had the opportunity to use those rivers to penetrate deep into the Confederate space.

The potential for penetration via the Mississippi and its tributaries was astonishing. The state of Tennessee can be almost entirely subjugated through the access provided by the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers - these waterways offer direct access to Nashville and Chattanooga, and would provide Union forces both efficient logistical connectivity via boat and the ability to easily move men and artillery. The importance of the Mississippi, of course, needs no real elaboration - it was the artery of the South, both dividing the Confederacy in two and providing unimpeded access to Louisiana and Mississippi. A Union army operating from Cairo, lying directly on the confluence of the region’s five great rivers, was like a blood clot threatening to descend into the Aorta of the Confederacy. And since this Civil War was the conflict which guaranteed America’s immanent status as the world’s most powerful nation, we can say with only a little exaggeration that, for a moment at least, Cairo was the pivot of world affairs.

While 1861 and 1862 saw few decisive developments in the eastern theater of the war (the theater of Lee, which draws most of the attention in historiography), Ulysses Grant would blow the western theater wide open with series of riverine campaigns which made ruthlessly effective use of combined operations. Grant’s life prior to the Civil War was one of hardship and instability, but when he was given command of Union forces in the Cairo district, luck was finally and firmly on his side: his operational possibilities were second to none, and he had powerful new technological means to exploit them.

Grant’s riverine campaigns in the western theater would make use of one of the Civil War’s novel weapons systems: the Eads Gunboat, formally the City Class Gunboat and otherwise affectionately known simply as the turtle. Designed by wealthy and renowned inventor and industrialist James Buchanan Eads of St. Louis, the steam powered turtles were remarkable and quirky little vessels that packed a tremendous punch and represented the cutting edge of naval combat systems in the day. Some 175 feet long and 50 feet at the beam, the steam powered turtles boasted thick armored plating arrayed at a sharp angle to deflect shot, and were armed with a whopping 13 cannon of various calibers. Most importantly, they had a draught of only six feet despite their tremendous weight - providing, in essence, a highly mobile and well armored ship capable of traversing the rivers with ease. Their combination of mobility, protection, and firepower made them an essentially novel weapons system and a harbinger of the industrial era of war. While the Eads boats were perhaps the most powerful and innovative vessels at Grant’s disposal, they were not alone - Union forces also constructed a flotilla of flat-bottomed boats which carried siege mortars for reducing Confederate fortifications, and a host of barges for transport.

The Eads Gunboats were not only the perfect weapons system for a campaign which would be centered on the great rivers, but also a potent demonstration of Union superiority in manufacturing and engineering. Eads and his men were able to deliver a fleet of eight working gunboats just four months after receiving the contract, with more vessels in the works. In contrast, the Confederacy - which lacked an equivalent base of engineering and innovating industrialists - had nothing even remotely comparable to contest the rivers. Although the south would scramble mightily throughout the war to deploy ironclad warships, they were always too late and too few to match Union assets. Furthermore, although the North was not nearly as urban as the South liked to believe (Confederates frequently derided northerners as soft city boys who had never held a rifle), the more industrialized quality of northern society now proved to be an asset. Grant’s forces contained no shortage of railroad workers and mechanics who were more than capable of operating and repairing the steam engines on the gunboats - thus, although custody of the ships nominally belonged to the Navy, much of the crew and in particular the mechanics were soldiers from Grant’s army formations. In the modern parlance, we would say that Northern industrialization gave Grant organic engineering capabilities.

The ensuing campaign would provide an iconic demonstration of riverine operations, and more generally revealed the immense value of rivers are arteries for movement, supply, and the delivery of combat power.

The Confederates made the opening move late in 1861 and got the jump on Grant, with General Leonidas Polk seizing the city of Columbus, Kentucky, allowing him to block the Mississippi just a few miles downstream of Grant’s base in Cairo. The move made some sense, as far as Confederate operational presumptions went: commanders on both sides continued to view the Mississippi as the vital waterway of the war, and not without some justification. What Polk failed to grasp, however, was that the uniquely dense waterways of the region would give Grant ample opportunities to bypass Columbus. The real operational prize in the region was not the course of the Mississippi itself, but the area farther upstream where all the great rivers - the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee - converged on the Mississippi. Polk could block the Mississippi, but Grant’s position around Cairo allowed him to access any of the region’s rivers at his pleasure.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the single most important position for the Confederacy to defend at the outset of the war (perhaps with the exception of New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi) was the narrow corridor where both the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers cross from Kentucky into Tennessee. A Union army at liberty to use the rivers here would be able to freely penetrate into Central Tennessee, threatening to not only overrun the heartland of the state (and advance directly to Nashville) but also outflank defensive positions to the east along the Mississippi - positions like Polk’s base of operations at Columbus. While Polk was setting up shop in Columbus, Grant moved east from Cairo to the little town of Paducah - a seemingly trivial little settlement, except that it sat at the confluence of the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee rivers, and thus gave Grant the ability to run his gunboats in any direction he pleased.

Read more