Paralysis in Peer Conflict? The Material Versus the Mental in 100 Years of Military Thinking
Heather Venable
December 1, 2020
Military history rarely offers simple, straightforward lessons, much to the frustration of those seeking to apply takeaways to today. The lesson that retains the strongest hold on U.S. military thinking may be how German blitzkrieg enabled the lightning defeat of France in the summer of 1940. Theorists like John Boyd subsequently suggested that these breakthroughs stunningly “soften[ed] and shatter[ed] the moral fiber of the political, economic and social structure†of the opponent, building on the promise of paralysis proposed by J.F.C. Fuller during and after World War I. Fuller had advocated incapacitating the army’s “brain,†or a military’s ability to command subordinate units. According to one of the foremost scholars writing about Boyd, Fuller “exerted an obvious influence on Boyd through his study of strategic theory.†In turn, Boyd and other U.S. military reformers after the Vietnam War reimagined how the nation should wage warfare.
But most campaigns held up as paragons of “paralysis†through maneuver often have depended on the attacker’s ability to inflict high levels of human and material attrition on the opposition as a means of attaining its goals. This is a far cry from Boyd’s idea of “shattering†the enemy’s nerve. Never validated through rigorous historical study, these untested ideas have been removed from context and sprinkled ahistorically throughout U.S. doctrine. Today, they continue to shape emerging multi-domain or joint all-domain operations doctrine, especially in those doctrines’ aim to inflict multiple dilemmas on an opponent. In short, U.S. military thinking is founded on unrealistic hopes and ahistorical examples that the enemy can be outsmarted and, ultimately, paralyzed as maneuver warfare morphs into joint all-domain operations.
https://warontherocks.com/2020/12/paralysis-in-peer-conflict-the-material-versus-the-mental-in-100-years-of-military-thinking/
