 |
| The French bateau-cannon fast gunboat Gabriel Charmes (Courtesy of Hazegrey.org) |
For previous installments, see Parts I and II
Strategic Theories of the Jeune École
Aube’s
motivations, as previously noted, were not solely ideological. Building upon
his embrace of Guerre de Course and
coastal warfare, Aube argued French maritime strategy should be aimed at triggering
the adversary’s socio-political collapse vice seeking conventional battle with
the adversary’s fleet. In a war with Italy, he asserted, coercive naval
bombardment of coastal towns and cities should be France’s objective. Against
Britain, a commerce-raiding offensive backed by coastal defense of the French homeland
should shape campaign plans. Aube’s ideas were reinforced by his observations
of the social effects of the European economic depression of the early 1880s,
particularly the labor strikes and anarchist terrorism in Britain. He became
convinced that a series of sudden blows directed against an enemy’s economy at
the start of a war, whether by shelling coastal commercial infrastructure or
disrupting maritime trade, could shock the enemy population and incite economic
paralysis. As jobs disappeared in the enemy’s economy, popular discontent
against the adversary’s government might compel war settlement on terms
favorable to France.[i]
Needless to
say, Aube did not subscribe to (and might very well have not been aware of)
Clausewitz’s political theory of war. In his 1882 book “La Guerre Maritime et les ports Francais,” Aube argued:
The highest objective of war [is] to do the most
possible harm to the enemy… [since] wealth is the sinew of war, everything that
strikes the enemy’s wealth…becomes not only legitimate but obligatory. We can
expect to see the…masters of the sea turn their powers of attack and
destruction…against all the cities of the coast, fortified or not, pacific or
warlike; burn them, ruin them, or at least ransom them mercilessly.[ii]
For Aube,
future wars would—and should—automatically trend towards “totality” regardless
of the political objectives at stake and without any concern for the possibilities
of reciprocal escalation.
Aube’s theories
on war and economic coercion led him to the deterministic conclusion that only
a few British merchant vessels needed to be sunk before insurance rates would
soar, shipowners would hold their ships in port or sell them to neutrals, the
British economy would stall, and the British government would sue for peace. Charmes
endorsed Aube’s ideas as heralding a brighter future for mankind: “others may
protest; for ourselves, we accept in these new methods of destruction the
development of a new law of progress in which we have a firm faith and the
final result will be to put an end to war altogether.”[iii]
Aube and
Charmes’ strategic theories accurately assessed the dangers commerce-raiding
posed to a nation dependent on maritime trade. They also recognized, albeit
narrowly, the possibility of combining commerce-raiding with traditional
force-on-force operations to complicate an adversary’s strategic situation.
However, their belief that the effects of one’s combat actions on an adversary
could be accurately predicted—and therefore ‘surgically’ tailored to achieve
specific outcomes—hubristically foreshadowed the worst excesses of 20th
Century compellence theories centered on conventional strategic bombardment,
not to mention early 21st Century effects-based operations theories.
Nor did Aube and Charmes account for the possibility an adversary might successfully
adapt its war plans and marshal its national resources despite absorbing severe
blows.
More damningly,
Aube and Charmes saw the connection between French military means employed and
an adversary country’s civilian morale as a one-way street; they did not
recognize that the adversary’s citizens might demand escalation rather than
conciliation from their political leaders. Their thinking reflects the general
ignorance of Clausewitz’s Trinitarian theory and gross misinterpretations of the
Prussian Master’s dialectical contrasting of theoretical ‘maximum’ war with
actual war that were prevalent in European militaries prior to the First World
War.[iv]
Nevertheless, this does not absolve Aube and Charmes of their ill-disciplined
reasoning and falsifiable conclusions.
Most
importantly, Aube and Charmes ignored the possibility that the rapidly evolving
technologies that provided France with revolutionary tools of naval war could
also be adopted by an adversary in ways that eviscerated the Jeune École’s
strategic concepts. Their foundational assumption that the adversary was a
static rather than intelligently-adaptive system was one of the key factors
that ultimately brought down their movement.
Doctrinal Theories of the Jeune École
Aube, Charmes,
and their followers noted the Royal Navy’s long history of dominance over the
French Navy, which they considered particularly relevant in the aftermath of
British hostility to France’s Tunisian colonization in 1881 and Britain’s
unilateral occupation of Egypt in 1882. Additionally, while the Jeune École
downplayed naval warfare against Germany as they evaluated the German naval
threat as insignificant, they did note Italy’s opposition to the French
presence in Tunisia as well as the expanding Italian fleet. Fleet doctrinal
concepts advocated by the Jeune École accordingly centered on using small
surface combatants to negate the Royal Navy’s conventional superiority and the
Italian Navy’s peer-level capabilities.[v]
In 1882’s “La Guerre Maritime et les ports Francais,”
Aube argued torpedo boats could defend the French coast by threatening the
enemy ships of the line performing a close blockade. Once torpedo boats
disrupted the enemy’s blockade, the French Navy’s heavier forces could sortie
from port and engage the enemy line at locations and times of its choosing.
Similarly, torpedo boat disruptions of the blockade could enable cruiser breakouts
into the open ocean for their Guerre de
Course campaign. The French battleship fleet, Aube asserted, should be
concentrated in the Mediterranean in order to maintain local sea control over
France’s lines of communication with its North African colonies, while the
torpedo boat flotilla should be primarily distributed throughout France’s ports
along the Bay of Biscay and English Channel for coastal defense. Aube
additionally noted that France’s telegraph network could be used by higher
echelon commanders to rapidly sortie torpedo boat squadrons from their
homeports against enemy fleet concentrations offshore.[vi] The
more ports hosting torpedo boat squadrons, felt Aube, the greater the threat these
‘maritime sharpshooters’ could pose against an enemy’s blockade.[vii]
There were
several problems with this approach. Aube’s doctrinal concepts ignored Grivel’s
arguments in favor of a balanced fleet, particularly the need for small
warships to be closely supported by heavier ones and vice versa in battle.
Torpedo boats also lacked the height of eye possessed by larger warships, so
combat coordination between torpedo boat squadrons demanded either preplanned tactics
or closing to extremely short range for direct communications. Torpedo boats’
small sizes additionally rendered them more vulnerable to having their
operations hamstrung by weather; strong winds and higher sea states could delay
or prevent boats from getting underway, drastically reduce their speed of
advance towards their destinations or their less-affected prey, and drain their
crews during longer transits. Most significantly, the telegraph could support
some degree of torpedo boat distribution between multiple ports, but a
time-sensitive rendezvous location needed to be within the boats’ speed
capabilities. If sea or weather conditions were poor, the telegraph could not
compensate for the boats’ decreased speed of advance—or their inability to get
underway in the first place. Nor could it support communications with underway
boat squadrons, so the final orders or enemy location information transmitted
prior to a sortie would be all a given boat had to work with. Information
timeliness, accuracy, and detail telegraphed to a squadron before sortie would
be critical determinants of that squadron’s mission success.
Charmes’s
beliefs further departed from Grivel’s concept of operations. Lacking any naval
experience of his own, Charmes argued that the multi-mission battleship was a
jack of all trades and a master of none. As a result, he asserted, a French
battleship should be decomposed into specialized small boats. The first type of
boat he advocated, the torpilleurs d’
attaque, was equivalent to existing Whitehead-armed torpedo boats. In order
to defend these boats during their attack runs from enemy small boats, a second
type armed with rapid-fire guns and spar-torpedoes called torpilleurs de défence would be needed. A third type armed with a
5.5” gun, the bateau-cannon, could
replace large surface combatants in performing the shore bombardment mission.
Charmes called for the torpilleurs de
défence and bateau-cannon to
distract the enemy while the torpilleurs
d’ attaque conducted their anti-ship raiding runs. Boat squadrons as
envisioned by Charmes would consist of two bateau-cannon
and four each of the other two torpedo boat types. This flotilla’s logistical support would be provided by Ravitailleur tenders, which could supply
up to four gunboats and sixteen torpedo boats with coal, weapons, and stores.[viii]
Charmes believed
torpedo boats’ low profiles and high relative speeds rendered ships of the line
obsolete. Based upon his knowledge of 1870s-vintage British gunnery technology,
Charmes believed that battleships’ slow-firing heavy guns posed little risk to
maneuvering torpedo boats. Even if a large combatant managed to hit a torpedo
boat, the loss of the inexpensive boat would impact France far less than the
loss of a capital ship at the hands of the surviving boats would impact
France’s adversary.[ix] Charmes’s recollection of
how the two torpedo boats participating in the 1883 Mediterranean exercises
endured heavy seas fed his assertions regarding torpedo boats’ suitability for
open ocean operations. He wrote passionately of French torpedo boats stalking
and sinking unescorted British oceanic commerce at night in a foreshadowing of
the German First and Second World War submarine campaigns.[x]
Charmes’s extreme
assertions reflected his technical ignorance and operational inexperience. His faith
in the torpedo’s ‘revolutionary nature’ was so dogmatic that he declared its
incontrovertible supremacy over all possible defenses. Frenchmen must “bring to
bear immediately all of our genius for invention and all of our budgetary
resources on the side whose future is certain and inevitable,” Charmes
pronounced.[xi] Although statements like
this had the effect of clouding and distorting Aube’s actual views, the Vice
Admiral continued to make no evident efforts to walk back his politically influential
partner.[xii]
Tactics
proposed by the Jeune École were little more complicated than surrounding a
solitary target with torpedo boats and using the chaos and gunsmoke of battle
as cover for opportunistic attack runs.[xiii]
Jeune École writers simply assumed that an enemy would sit still and adapt
neither its plans nor its armaments to exploit French operational, doctrinal,
or technological weaknesses.
Most glaringly,
the movement’s activists allowed themselves to fall into scientism’s intellectual
trap. They believed logic derived from the era’s scientific discoveries, such
as a large organism’s susceptibility to bacterial infection, was universally
applicable to humanity’s endeavors as opposed to being descriptive only within
the narrow contexts of specific actors and circumstances in nature. In this
view, they deterministically reasoned, torpedo boat ‘microbes’ would
unquestionably be fatal to ‘giant’ warships.[xiv]
Tomorrow, the French Admiralty's counterarguments, plus the Jeune École's effects on French Navy acquisition in the 1880s.
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not reflect the official positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, and to the author’s knowledge do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense, any U.S. armed service, or any other U.S. Government agency.
[i] See 1. Ropp, 162-163; 2.
Arne Røksund. The Jeune École: The Strategy of the Weak. (Boston: Brill,
2007), 8-12.
[ii] Ropp, 158.
[iii] Ibid, 13.
[iv] Michael Howard. “The
Influence of Clausewitz” in Carl Von Clausewitz. On War, Edited and Translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret.
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 32-33.
[v] Ropp, 12.
[vi] See 1. Ropp, 157; 2.
Halpern, 38.
[vii] Ropp, 160.
[viii] Halpern, 39.
[ix] Walser, 11-12.
[x] Halpern, 39.
[xi] Ropp, 165.
[xii] Ibid, 167.
[xiii] Ibid, 136.
[xiv] Walser, 17.
No comments:
Post a Comment