SCRIPT - Sir Julian Corbett, Limited War, and a Strategy for Maritime States (21/06/2018)

Sir Julian Corbett, Limited War, and a Strategy for Maritime States

Introduction

This video will be about Sir Julian Corbett, an early 20^th Century British naval theorist, and his application of the ‘Limited War’ concept to sea power and the strategy of maritime states, which are societies closely linked with the sea. Corbett argues that maritime states should wage war in a fashion different from their continental counterparts – one based on sea control, strategic isolation, and the cost-effective application of force.

 

Corbett’s ideas, laid out in his 1911 book Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, can be seen as his answer to the following question: why was Britain able to defeat larger European rivals and rise to prominence? This was a question that needed answering as Britain on the eve of WWI once again faced larger and better-resourced states, not just Germany but also Russia and the United States.

On a theoretical level, Corbett also sought to re-introduce leaders to what he saw as a ‘British Way of War’, which he feared was being ignored in favor of a Continentalist outlook. Continentalism argued that Britain needed a large army, capable of taking on its Continental counterparts, in order to safeguard its interests. For Corbett, such an outlook threatened to drag Britain into a war of attrition that would not only be costly but also unwinnable, given its smaller population and declining relative industrial strength. Rather, Britain should re-connect with its traditional methods, where small British forces supported by naval power were able to generate effects in excess of their numbers.

In order to lay the theoretical foundations for such a method, Corbett turns to Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s idea of ‘Limited War’.

Absolute War vs Limited War

Writing in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Clausewitz is known and stereotyped for his use of ‘Absolute War’ as the ideal form of conflict. In a war of unlimited political aims where the loser stands to lose everything, the enemy will only surrender when he has been disarmed. Rather than bleeding him dry, Clausewitz argues that it is more efficient to attempt the enemy’s disarmament by pitting one’s entire force against his in decisive battle.

Later in his intellectual career, however, Clausewitz began to pay more attention to the idea of the ‘Limited War’. Limited wars are characterized by one or both sides limiting their political aims – by demanding territory, for example, rather than regime overthrow.

With limited aims, both sides operate under cost-benefit analyses which lead to points where further sacrifice ceases to be worth it. Surrender is therefore not based on whether one is able to resist, but instead on reaching that point where achieving the aim would cost more than one is willing to spend. Limited War thus offers the possibility of winning without having to mobilize one’s entire force for decisive battle, and Corbett now outlines a method where such an outcome can be achieved.

The Limited Form

What Corbett calls the ‘Limited Form’ is based on the advantages of adopting an offensive or defensive posture. By switching between the two, the Limited Form raises the enemy’s cost of winning without extra input from our side, ideally sending him over the point at which he would prefer surrender to fighting on.

Corbett sees the offensive as being the ‘more effective form of war’. Only through the offense can one actually induce changes to the strategic status quo. Operationally, the offensive side also possesses the initiative, and with that the ability to deploy and maneuver in such a way as to concentrate the largest force against the enemy’s weakest point.

Corbett characterizes the defensive, on the other hand, as the ‘stronger form of war’. Operationally, defenders have the benefit of time, force-multipliers, beneficial supply lines, and the second-mover advantage of acting after the attacker has made his move. The more an offensive progresses, the more it exhausts itself; by contrast, the defense’s advantages only get stronger the more one is pushed back. To use Corbett’s analogy, it is easier to keep money in one’s pocket than to take it from another man’s; an attacker must be stronger, faster or stealthier than the defender in order to prevail.

The following illustrates how the Limited Form can switch between offensive and defensive to produce positive and cost-effective results. Suppose two states are in a limited dispute, in this case over territory owned by the defender. The attacker begins with an operational offensive, utilizes his advantages of initiative and surprise, concentrates against the defender, breaks through and establishes himself on the territory before the defender can react. Now the attacker has shifted the status quo in his favor and is on the strategic offensive. He now switches to the operational defensive, takes advantages of local force-multipliers, and prepares to hold what he has taken.

The defender, with the goal to restore the pre-war status quo, is now on the strategic defensive. In order to do that, he now has to take the operational offensive, which means he will be going up against the ‘stronger form of war’. All else being equal, this means that the defender has to spend more, risk more and likely lose more, simply to get back to where he once was.

The same territory now demands significantly more from the defender than it did from the attacker. Should the difference be large enough, an inferior attacker can send a superior defender beyond the point where continued resistance is worthwhile. If the defender decides to go on the offensive with superior forces, he runs the risk of exhausting himself against an inferior force and tossing away any numerical advantages he once had.

The Limited Form applied in a Limited War therefore offers a way for smaller forces to win over larger forces, and for inferior nations to achieve positive results over superior nations. In this sense it is a cost-effective strategy and Corbett sees it as a pillar of the ‘British Way of War’.

Limited War: Clausewitz and Escalation

So if the Limited Form is so effective, then why isn’t it the go-to strategy for every situation?

The answer lies in the concept of escalation. Remember that Limited Wars are so-called because both sides have decided or coordinated to limit their war aims. Clausewitz sees this restraint as ultimately a political decision and nothing stops leaders from getting rid of them if they want to.

Unsurprisingly, the losing side is always tempted to escalate in a bid to turn the tables, expanding the scope of the war into new theaters where he has the initiative and can use the Limited Form against the winning side.

Clausewitz saw that this logic of escalation eventually causes all Limited Wars to become Unlimited, with aims so unrestrained that they approximate the conditions of Absolute War. Indeed, the losing side can escalate to Unlimited War immediately by ignoring the territory held by the attacker and directly striking his homeland. In either case, the side that is still fighting a Limited War when the enemy has removed all restraints is simply courting disaster, as the long record of failure against Napoleon showed.

This is not to say that escalation to Unlimited War is inevitable. But given the high stakes involved, states in Limited War have to act as if Unlimited War is a constant possibility. The only real way to solve this conundrum decisively would be to remove the enemy’s ability to resist, which means reverting back to the Clausewitzian ideal of targeting the enemy force. Escalation therefore threatens to remove the rationale for using the Limited Form in war.

Limited War: Corbett and Strategic Isolation

If ‘Limited War’ and ‘Limited Form’ are to be of practical value, Corbett must find situations where escalation effectively cannot happen. Here, he lays out two possibilities:

The first possibility is where the aim in dispute is of limited political importance: this is Clausewitz’s idea of limited aims. For Corbett, however, only colonies or other sparsely-populated overseas possessions are really that insignificant. The others are not only more materially valuable, they also tend to be infused with immaterial elements such as national pride, historical claims and so on, greatly inflating their value and promoting escalation.

The second possibility is where the aim is strategically isolated. This in itself consists of two things: firstly, the power to secure the homeland from an enemy’s unlimited strike, and secondly, the power to isolate the aim itself to deny the possibility of enemy reinforcement, Combined, this means that if the enemy wants to escalate, he is unable the enemy is unable to bring extra force to stave off defeat even if he wanted to.

Corbett claims that Continental states are connected to each other over land and therefore are never truly able to strategically isolate themselves from enemy escalation. By contrast, however, the most straightforward form of strategic isolation can be performed by a maritime state that controls the seas. Defensively, a maritime state that controls home waters is effectively defended from the threat of enemy invasion and no longer needs to mobilize to meet such a threat. It can therefore mobilize and deploy its land force in accordance with its priorities, rather than what the isolated enemy can potentially do.

Offensively, strategic isolation gives the isolator full possession of the initiative, able to redistribute and concentrate forces at will, while the isolated side is denied the chance to reinforce vulnerable fronts or to distract the isolator through the opening up of new fronts. Given the circumstances, the isolated side can only hope that his existing deployments can fend off all potential challenges, which is a tall order indeed.

Strategic isolation through sea control represents another pillar of the ‘British Way of War’. By controlling the relevant seas, Britain was spared the cost of defending itself from unlimited invasion, prevented the enemy from bringing superior force to entire theaters, and created conditions for true Limited War where local superiority and the application of the Limited Form would bring about victory. Without controlling the seas, as happened during the American Revolutionary War, Britain was deprived of the ability to strategically isolate theaters and soon found itself unable to deal with the consequent enemy escalation.

But more often than not, strategic isolation allowed Britain to win wars without the force and cost outlays of Continental rivals. The resulting cost-efficiencies allowed Britain to invest more into itself, its trade, and its Empire, fueling its rise to prominence.

The Limited Form in an Unlimited War

Through strategic isolation and the Limited Form, the ‘British Way of War’ proposes a method for inferior states to win Limited Wars. Corbett now seeks to apply this method to Unlimited Wars, where the war aims demand the destruction of the enemy’s ability to resist. According to Clausewitzian Absolute War theory, such an achievement would require the annihilation of the enemy force under a strategy of decisive battle.

In the broadest sense, Corbett does not dispute this. He does, however, propose that one can use Strategic Isolation and the Limited Form to overthrow the enemy’s ability to resist without having to mobilize and match his force strength.

There are two ways that Corbett’s strategy can be used to win Unlimited Wars. The first way involves finding a prestige objective so symbolic that its capture would generate significant pressures for surrender. Strategy then becomes a matter of isolating the objective and then using the Limited Form to force the enemy into unfavorable match-ups. Corbett takes the Crimean War as an example, where the entire contest over Near Eastern hegemony crystallized into a fight over Sevastopol, the eventual fall of which compelled the Russians to admit defeat despite retaining potent forces.

Corbett characterizes the other way as ‘Wars Limited by Contingent’, where an expeditionary force uses the Limited Form to overstretch the enemy and advantage allies in coalition warfare. First, a selected theater is strategically isolated via sea power, limiting the enemy’s ability to bring his full force to bear and effectively turning it into a Limited War. An expeditionary force lands and applies the Limited Form, forcing the enemy to attack defensive positions in order to recover the strategic status quo. Then, once the opponent has been sufficiently exhausted, the expeditionary force goes back on the operational offensive, routs that portion of enemy strength, and repeats the whole process again. This, Corbett claims, was what happened in the Peninsular War against Napoleon.

Even at a suboptimal level, coastal descents using the Limited Method represent a disruption that the enemy has to spend outsize resources containing. In fact, the mere threat of such action may be enough to force the enemy to divert scarce resources into passive garrison work. Napoleon implied as much when he grumbled that 50,000 English in Kent could paralyze 300,000 of his army.

Usage of the Limited Form not only weakens the enemy, it also strengthens the inferior state’s hand against coalition allies. A state which furnishes an inferior contingent to participate in decisive battles has little say over coalition strategy or at the negotiating table. The Limited Form offers a way for said contingent to make an independent and outsize contribution without the corresponding cost that other allies pay.

All in all, in the absence of a symbolic target, the enemy will still have to be brought low through decisive battle. However, even when the aims demand the enemy’s overthrow, the ‘British Way of War’ shows that inferior forces or states can still contribute in a significant and cost-effective way towards victory.

Conclusion

Corbett’s ‘British Way of War’, encompassing the concepts of sea control, strategic isolation, and the Limited Form, sees maritime states utilizing their geographic advantage to wage Limited Wars in a cost-effective fashion. Doing so not only allows them to hold off larger forces with smaller ones, it spares them the cost of raising and risking large armies in the first place.

Corbett’s focus was on explaining British success, but his precepts also apply to other maritime states such as Japan and the United States. Further theoretical developments on Corbettian theory have continued as the dangers of unrestrained escalation and the emergence of compartmentalized wars within broader superpower rivalry have spurred research into Limited War.  

Unfortunately for Corbett, his strategy came too late for WWI. Influenced by the Continentalist outlook, Britain raised a mass-conscript army that ground down the Germans after 4 years, but at the cost of 800,000 lives and significant debt. Corbett bemoaned the adoption of such an inefficient strategy instead of one where the French and Russians soaked up the bulk of the casualties while the British eroded German strength by threatening the Baltic and picking off the Central Powers.

That is not to say that Corbett’s theory is without criticism. His interpretation of Clausewitz assumes states will dispassionately weigh costs and benefits in war rather than being swung to extremes through chance and passion. It is unclear if strategic isolation of the homeland is even possible nowadays with airpower and missiles, and of course, Corbett’s theories are tailored towards conventional state-to-state, army-versus-army wars rather than the asymmetric variants more commonly seen today.

In the end, Corbett’s insights remain useful as a guide for maritime states, represent a valuable development on Clausewitz’s theories and also serve as a link between Clausewitzian-era Unlimited War and post-Clausewizian Limited War.

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