Military Review English Edition July-August 2016 | Page 81

VERDUN

(Graphic courtesy of Wikipedia)

At a minimum, a theory of warfare has four
essential components: strategic givens, a generated
military, military effects, and a political outcome.
The strategic givens describe the background conditions in which force will be generated; of particular
importance is the resource context from which the
military emerges and the adversaries for which it is
designed. The generated military describes the “stuff ”
that is controlled by the military, how it is organized
for use, and the uses to which it is put. These friendly
efforts yield some military effect on the adversary
that, according to the theory, will change the military situation in some important way. As a result of
the new military situation that friendly forces have
imposed, the a dversary will be forced to accept a
new political reality and a desired strategic outcome
will occur. The four elements of a theory of warfare
connect to one another, as in the following proposition: “Given a set of conditions, we will employ our
formations in order to achieve some military effect
on our adversaries, leading to their capitulation and a
desired political end state.”
MILITARY REVIEW  July-August 2016

Falkenhayn and the Evolution
of German Theories of Warfare
1914–1916
In 1914, the German theory of warfare was designed to address a difficult set of givens: How does
one fight a set of adversaries with greater aggregate resources on two fronts simultaneously? The Germans
devised an answer that was rooted in their decisive
defeat of Napoleon III’s armies in 1870 during the
Franco-Prussian War. In that conflict, they used audacity and decisive maneuver to trap Napoleon’s forces in two large fortresses: Metz and Sedan. Napoleon,
cut off in Sedan and forced to surrender after failing
at his breakout attempt, sat helplessly in Berlin as his
empire fell and was replaced by the Third Republic.
Applying that historical lesson to the challenges of
the early twentieth century, German planners determined that they would need to defeat the French army
in a single stroke, before the Russian army could mobilize and before the comparative population and industrial advantages of the Entente could be brought to bear.1 It
would require rapid mobilization, the reduction of key
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