Notes on Jomini

Having read Clausewitz, the natural thing to do is to read Antoine-Henri Jomini.  So what does he say?

I read the 1862 translation of The Art of War (1838), which includes some later-written appendices and afterthoughts.

On the whole, Jomini concerns himself with the practical side of military operations, even delving down to the lowest tactical level.  He considers politics (and morality) only loosely connected to the question with which he concerns himself: how best to move, sustain, and employ military forces most effectively.  Despite his reputation as a highly prescriptive theorist, he is too wise to claim that following his dicta will guarantee victory even in favorable circumstances, although he writes in a very forthright and confident manner when expressing his ideas.

Jomini has two basic principles: identify and concentrate on a “decisive point”, and ensure that one’s line of communications be kept open to the “base” from which the army issues.  His major corollary: the use of interior lines allows an army to outperform its opponent in accomplishing these tasks.

Biography

I found the outlines of Jomini’s biography useful in understanding his writing.  Born in Switzerland in 1779, Jomini obtained a staff position in the Helvetic Ministry of War before moving to Paris for business and eventually joining Napoleon’s army, again as a staff officer.  Jomini made a reputation early on as a military writer and theorist, as well as a military professional, eventually becoming Marshal Ney’s chief of staff.  Divided loyalties (in classic Swiss mercenary form) led him to take a line of communications command during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, then later to recluse back to Switzerland during the Grand Coalition’s invasion of France.

After Napoleon’s abdication and final exile, he returned to the Russian service where he served in a war against Turkey, educated the future Nicholas I, and helped found the Russian staff college before retiring for good to Brussels, where with his chief intellectual rival, Clausewitz, comfortably dead he spent the next forty years composing various treatises on military matters before dying at the age of 90.

Art of War: Fundamentals

Jomini says that there are six  “parts” of war: Statesmanship, Strategy, Grand Tactics, Tactics, Logistics, and the Art of Engineers.  Statesmanship is “politics”, which Jomini considers a sort of separate sphere in marked opposition to Clausewitz.  Strategy, Grand Tactics, and Tactics roughly correspond to the strategic, operational, and tactical levels.   “Logistics” and “The Art of Engineers” are separate enabling functions.  Jomini is very concerned with the movement and sustainment of armies — his rear-area experience clearly demonstrated both the importance and activity this requires.

Jomini neatly sums up his “Fundamental Maxims on War” in the introduction to Chapter III (Strategy):

1. To throw by strategic movements the mass of an army, successively, upon the decisive points of a theater of war, and also upon the communications of the enemy as much as possible without compromising one’s own
2. To maneuver to engage fractions of the hostile army with the bulk of one’s forces.
3. On the battle-field, to throw the mass of the forces upon the decisive point, or upon that portion of the hostile line which it is of the first importance to overthrow.
4. To so arrange that these masses shall not only be thrown upon the decisive point, but that they shall engage at the proper times and with energy.

This talk of concentrating on a “decisive point” will be very familiar to anyone who has received tactical instruction from an American, and I was quite shocked to encounter this language at such an early date — officers in the Civil War would have thought in these terms!

Of course, it is good advice.  Jomini even adds:

One objection [to this] is that it is easy to recommend throwing the mass of the forces upon the decisive points, but that the difficulty lies in recognizing these points.

Which is indeed the first question a student asks when being introduced to the concept even today.  Jomini does provide guidelines, but the ultimate answer is the same as it is now: you’re right, it is difficult — git gud.

I will save comparisons with Clausewitz for another post, but I will point something out: Jomini says that decisive points must be attacked “successively” i.e., that there is more than one of them.  This solves one of two major objections to Clausewitz’s concept of a “center of gravity” (the other being that the center of gravity is defined by strength rather than effect).  The Centers of Gravity in modern strategic thought much more closely resemble Jomini’s Decisive Points than anything found in On War.

Jomini’s fondness for lists and definitions of what would now be called “operational terms”, which include many didactic refinements of similar-sounding words and phrases, are another clear influence on modern American doctrine.

Logistics and “Bases”

Wikipedia says that Jomini may have invented the term “logistics”, although reading Art of War, I don’t think so: he wouldn’t have been shy about taking credit for it if he had.  (In Article XXI, Jomini writes that “I lay not claim to the creation of these principles [of war]…but I claim to have been the first to point them out”.)  He devotes considerable energy to the discussion of logistics and what he calls the “base”.  The rapid increase in the size of armies at the end of the 18th century made logistical matters much more important than the smaller armies of pre-Revolutionary Europe — which meant an increase in the utility and importance of professional staff officers like Jomini.

Jomini equivocates somewhat between the “base” as a general geographic region and as specific discrete installations, although this isn’t too important.  What is important is that Jomini conceives strategy as an effort generated, launched, and sustained from a “base”, however defined.  Characteristically, Jomini then offers practical advice and examples (he has an encyclopedic knowledge of European campaigns, particularly since the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War).

It is this practical advice, with its greatly simplified diagrams, that looks to me to have led to so much modern criticism of Jomini.  Once such diagram below, concerning Napoleon’s 1806 campaign, from Article XXI:

This figure is accompanied by a fairly detailed explanation, but it boils down to simply this: interior lines are an advantage.  Yes, Jomini’s explication involves some possibly confusing reference letter codes and geometry, but frankly as someone who’s received a relatively technical education, these explanations simply don’t deserve their reputation as convoluted nonsense.

As a matter of fact, on this matter I think Jomini’s meditations on lines of communication may in fact have overemphasized their importance at the time, but then became more relevant later.  As Grant and Sherman discovered in the American Civil War, horse-and-musket armies didn’t necessarily need to maintain communications with a base area, and could simply live off the land.  Industrialized militaries, however, generally do not have such a luxury — a mechanized unit will quite deterministically putter to a halt without its LOCs open.  At any rate, Jomini probably underestimates the extent to which communication with the base was a matter of organization and psychology.  This underestimation probably both reflected and reinforced something about the European conception of warfare; Asian armies in the 20th century (I’m not too familiar with their earlier history) have never attached the same significance to LOCs and rear areas as Europeans.

Still, the basic insight that interior lines are an advantage is sound.  This is far from the only example of an intuitively simple concept being difficult to describe in quantitative terms (electric motors come to mind).

War and the State

Jomini gives a brief overview of “Statesmanship” and its relation to warfare and strategy in the first chapter of The Art of War.   He gives an overview of the different reasons for waging wars, and clearly considers strategy a morally neutral tool that can be used for good or ill.  For instance in Article VI:

A war of invasion without good reason—like that of Genghis Khan—is a crime against humanity; but it may be excused, if not approved, when induced by great interests or when conducted with good motives

In typical Continental fashion, Jomini was scarred by the historical memory of the Thirty Years’ War and the actual memory of the French Revolution.  Jomini frankly confesses a skepticism of republicanism and democracy, associating it with wanton murder and concluding:

As a soldier, preferring loyal and chivalrous warfare to organized assassination, if it be necessary to make a choice, I acknowledge that my prejudices are in favor of the good old times when the French and English Guards courteously invited each other to fire first,—as at Fontenoy,—preferring them to the frightful epoch when priests, women, and children throughout Spain plotted the murder of isolated soldiers.

That being said, Jomini separates his preferences from his observations.  Which leads to the next point.

Low-Intensity Warfare

Although he doesn’t spent too much time on it, Jomini has quite a bit to say on what would now be called low-intensity warfare.  There are two reasons for this.  The first is Jomini’s experience and concern with rear areas and lines of communications.  In these types of conflict, any sort of “front” becomes less important or downright irrelevant and the pickets, outposts, convoys and the like become the main event.

The other factor is that Jomini paid a lot of attention to the Peninsular War, even though he did not serve in that theater.  As a relatively highly-positioned staff officer in Napoleon’s machine, he presumably had a fair amount of access to both formal and informal news of the campaign in Spain.  He also had the perceptiveness to connect the conduct of the war in Spain with other “national” struggles and insurrections, including the Vendée revolt.

Jomini examines the conduct of these conflicts in some detail without making them major foci of his book, and concludes that they are difficult but not impossible to win with the right “combinations” of military and political efforts, though he remarks that victory will not come quickly, if at all.

He also approves of national militia systems for their effectiveness both practically and as deterrents, while noting that these require not only armament but training and organization.  These irregular or less-regular forces should be backed by professional soldiers, and Jomini comments — wistfully — that the Austrian forces invading France to suppress the Revolution ought to have spent more of their efforts on aiding the Vendée.

Practical Tactics

Nearly a quarter of The Art of War is devoted to the “minor” or unit-level tactics.  I won’t regurgitate everything Jomini says.  These chapters are mostly interesting to a student of military history, but there they do present clear precedents for modern tactical concepts (the echelon, vee, wedge, line, and column are all explained and illustrated).

The inclusion of this material would have made The Art of War a useful field manual in a way that Clausewitz’s book absolutely was not.  I am reminded of the criminally neglected Strategikon of Maurice, which presented a similarly comprehensive small-unit-to-field-army accounting of contemporary thought.

Relatedly, Jomini’s concept of the “decisive point” is equally as useful at the level of unit tactics as at the strategic level.

Style

I’ll write a follow-up post comparing Jomini and Clausewitz, but I want to close by pointing out a few things that aren’t necessarily related to Jomini’s ideas.

Even when qualifying his statements — as he always does given history, common sense, and his own experience — Jomini has a very forthright and confident tone.  He can’t guarantee victory, he might say — fate, fortune, circumstance, and the enemy all have a vote on that — but he can give the reader the tools to put in a solid, professional performance.

Jomini’s style is also more conversational: not in the sense of informality, but literally in the fact that his writing is part of a conversation between various writers and with certain other systems and ways of thinking.  Jomini addresses critics, flatters patrons (particularly the Russians but also the Austrian Archduke Charles), and comments on pressing matters and historical points of interest.

He also likes to drop anecdotes, particularly about his personal interactions with Napoleon.  While these of course demonstrate Jomini’s status and professional authority, they aren’t totally without theoretical merit either: while Jomini states that Napoleon’s staff was always mindful of the possibility of retreat, he recounts that Napoleon himself believed that a general should never even consider the possibility of defeat and retreat (this was from before Russia).  I would like to note, which is even of contemporary interest, that Jomini also states that Napoleon preferred enemy- to terrain-based objectives.

Conclusion

On the whole, I think The Art of War is more valuable for historical and historiographic study than for strategic insight: Jomini did not achieve the same level of timelessness as did his competitor.  However, there’s still something there, and there is some value for Americans in reading what is their ur-Field Manual in order to see the roots of their own thinking.