Visionaries to Emulate or Ideologues to Deride?
The French government’s
resignation of May 1887 forced Aube from office. In poor health and having made
scores of enemies in the Admiralty, Aube retired to the countryside for the
final three years of his life. As Charmes had lost his battle with tuberculosis
in 1886, the Jeune École no longer possessed clear leadership. With Aube gone,
the movement devolved into a political faction fixated on the socioeconomic travails
of arsenal workers, coal stokers, and junior officers, not to mention the implementation
of ideologically ‘pure’ (vice circumstance-derived) policies. Notwithstanding
the knowledge gained from Aube’s 1886 fleet experiments and the Royal Navy’s
evident moves to counter the Jeune École threat, the practical result of Aube’s and
Charmes’s followers’ continued agitation into the 1890s and early 1900s was
nearly fifteen more years of excessive torpedo boat procurement at the expense
of maintaining a combat-credible battlefleet.[i] It is
true that the French Navy’s administration suffered from superfluous
bureaucratic inefficiencies and ill-considered policies before the Jeune École
entered the scene, and that their overall fleet suffered accordingly.[ii] All
the same, the movement most definitely made this bad situation much worse.
Even so, it is
fair to ask whether historical criticism of the Jeune École has been excessive.
Some of their ideas, after all, were not completely imprudent for their times
or were otherwise quite predictive of future warfare. Was pursuit of change radically
and prematurely their central mistake?[iii]
Certainly, the
Jeune École foresaw large-scale oceanic commerce-raiding by independently-operating
warships. As submarines matured during the early 20th Century, their
superior ability to strike at will and then hide from pursuers allowed them to take
over the commerce-raiding role from cruisers. Germany’s submarine campaign
against British commerce during the First and Second World Wars, as well as
America’s submarine campaign against Japanese commerce during the Second World
War, represented aspects of Guerre de
Course strategy.
However, the
German and American campaigns disprove the Jeune École’s assertion that
coercive economic warfare alone would inevitably lead to the strategic defeat
of a maritime-dependent nation. While severely damaging in both World Wars to
Britain’s war economy, the two German campaigns failed in no small part due to Germany’s
inability to project other forms of maritime power into the Atlantic in support
of its submarines. As a result, the allies were eventually able to command the
surface of the Atlantic in both wars and the air above it in the Second World
War. In both cases, the allies gradually reduced the German undersea threat to
operationally acceptable levels by evolving anti-submarine doctrine and tactics
through practical experience, developing increasingly effective anti-submarine
sensors and weapons, and exploiting the German naval communications network’s vulnerabilities.
It also must be noted that Germany’s strategically tone-deaf resumption of
unrestricted submarine warfare in the First World War resulted in horizontal
escalation—America’s entry into the conflict on Britain’s and France’s
side—that ultimately led to Berlin’s defeat.
In the American
Guerre de Course example, the U.S.
Navy fast carrier task force’s advance across the Pacific arguably provided
increasing amounts of indirect combined arms support to their submariner
brethren over time by occupying the attention of Japanese naval resources that theoretically
could have been assigned to convoy defenses or submarine-hunting groups. Although
the Imperial Japanese Navy showed little interest in protecting convoys from
submarines during the war, an absence of the U.S. Navy carrier threat in the
Central Pacific after 1942 might have provided room for reallocating some Japanese
fleet assets to anti-submarine tasks as Japanese merchant vessel losses
mounted.
Nonetheless,
neither the German nor American commerce-raiding cases directly resulted in a
targeted nation’s capitulation; in the American case it was a prominent
contributing factor to Japan’s surrender but not decisive on its own. As
Clausewitz suggested, a nation’s will to fight is influenced by far more
factors than just economics or the availability of war materiel. Human passions
such as honor and fear, not to mention political leaders’ valuations of what
they believed was at stake, maintained the British and Japanese wills to resist
long after ‘rational sense’ might have suggested otherwise. Conventional sequential
campaigns aimed at destroying or neutralizing the adversary’s fielded military
forces were therefore essential to political objective attainment—something the
Germans were unable to accomplish in either World War against Britain and the
U.S. successfully achieved against Japan. The Jeune École, not to mention
scores of strategic coercion theorists who followed them, failed to grasp these
principles.
Jeune École
maritime strategy suffered from another critical point of failure: dependence
upon the adversary compliantly exposing its ships of the line to torpedo boat
attack. Per the movement’s strategic concept, commerce-raiding cruisers’
ability to break out into the open ocean depended upon the flotilla’s ability
to disrupt or destroy the adversary battlefleet’s blockade of French ports.
Yet, the flotilla could hardly be expected to achieve this if the adversary’s
blockade was distant rather than close, or if the adversary used torpedo boat
catchers and other lower campaign-value combatants to defend ships of the line
in depth against attacks. Failure to break a blockade would be especially
likely if there was little left of a functional French battlefleet to entice or
compel the adversary’s heavier forces into seeking major battle.
Much the same
can be said of the Jeune École’s general theories on fleet structure and
doctrine. With respect to cruiser Guerre
de Course, the Jeune École’s embrace of the torpedo as a wonder-weapon
blinded them to fact that France’s lack of overseas coaling stations rendered
the entire commerce-raiding concept operationally unexecutable unless cruisers’
onboard coal storage capacity was drastically expanded. The Jeune École’s
failure to perform even rudimentary campaign-level analysis by examining the
oceanic distances involved in interdicting British trade routes (and their apparent
devaluing of the traditionalists’ arguments along these lines) contributed to
the production of underarmed cruisers that lacked the requisite endurance.
As for torpedo
boat operations, Aube’s belated fleet experiments revealed battleships’ superior
strategic mobility and torpedo boats’ vastly inferior seakeeping made flotilla
operations far more difficult than the Jeune École originally thought (with the
same even more true for the bateau-cannon
gunboat). Their fixation on ship size, obsession with a single weapon system,
and distraction by ideology led them to discount combined arms applications of
large and small combatants that could strengthen—or parry—torpedo boat attacks.
The Jeune École likewise overrated torpedo performance, completely neglected
other naval technology developments that could disrupt or destroy torpedo boat
attacks, and ignored the possibility that torpedo evasion tactics for ships of
the line might be developed.
Their cardinal lapse
in this regard, of course, was their implicit assumption that adversaries were
incapable of adaptation and innovation. It followed that although torpedoes and
torpedo boats remained fearsome weapons in coastal operations, France’s
competitors discovered the risks they posed could be managed through doctrinal,
tactical, and technological evolution.
Nevertheless,
the fact that this evolution took some time did have some strategic consequences.
19th Century British international deterrence and compellence
strategies depended on the Royal Navy’s ability to blockade an enemy coast or otherwise
project power ashore from the sea. The Jeune École’s ideas severely threatened
these strategies’ credibility for roughly a decade until the Royal Navy improved
its anti-torpedo boat defenses and torpedo boat performance limitations became
more widely understood.
This closely
parallels the situation today, in which the U.S. Navy and its allies
continually strive to find ways to counter potential adversaries’ employment of
torpedo boats’ descendants. Anti-ship cruise missiles and torpedoes carried by
fast attack craft, aircraft, and submarines are analogous to the Whitehead.
Autonomous mines also can be traced in part to the early torpedo. One might
even extend this logic to apply to land-based anti-ship missile forces, whether
cruise or ballistic. All these weapon systems can credibly threaten a superior maritime
power.
However,
credibility varies based upon demonstrated capability over time—it is not a
constant. The Jeune École’s technological determinism led them to believe
torpedoes were a permanently decisive weapon against large warships, and they
used their political influence to alter French Navy procurement efforts and
force structure accordingly. They should have known better. Military history is
defined by the never-ending struggles between offense and defense that are
bounded by the laws of physics as well as combat’s fog and friction. No new
combat measure exists long before a vulnerability is discovered and at least
one if not more countermeasures (whether technological, tactical, or doctrinal)
are devised, which is exactly what the Royal Navy eventually did. This is why constant
military innovation is so critical to sustaining a nation’s warfighting edge.
Innovation,
though, must be disciplined. Radically changing force-level doctrine and
committing to dramatic procurement policy shifts in the absence of rigorous precursor
analysis and experimentation, not to mention without first demonstrating the
relative maturities and real-world performances of the new technologies these
changes rely upon, invites strategic, operational, and budgetary disasters. It
is one thing to introduce new technologies and methods in an incremental
fashion to provide even a low level of additional
capability options to a force, as this promotes iterative improvement of the
technologies, phased and orderly retirement of older technologies as they reach
actual obsolescence, and doctrinal and tactical experimentation. It is another
thing to rapidly gut an existing force by wholesale replacement of technologies and methods that are not yet
obsolescent with immature technologies and methods. The Jeune École took the
latter path. Its dogmatic agitation for rapid revolutionary change—a ‘shoot
then aim’ approach, if you will—contradicted their professed adherence to
‘scientific’ thinking. France’s naval clout paid the price.
Yet, the Jeune
École’s oversights and failures did not originate
from their pursuing change prematurely and radically. These were mere symptoms
of the underlying source of the movement’s failures: undisciplined, hubristic
reasoning. Our review of the Jeune École’s story indicates Aube was just as
guilty of arrogantly simplistic thinking as Charmes and the movement’s other
voices. Indeed, the famous statement by a Jeune École supporter that “Let us be
better, if that be possible, but in any case we must be different, in the
adaptation to rejuvenated methods of war, of new engines, judiciously conceived
and rapidly executed” beautifully captures the movement’s intellectual
overconfidence, technological determinism, and zeal for seeking ‘change for
change’s sake.’[iv] As the great
Irish-British philosopher and politician Edmund Burke would likely have argued,
the Jeune École enthusiast’s preceding statement is based around the fundamentally
flawed idea that the ‘new’ is always
superior to the ‘old,’ and as such the ‘old’ should be replaced by the ‘new’
wherever ‘reason’ dictates. To make such an assertion without dispassionate due
diligence in examining why something ‘old’ was originally developed, exploring whether
the functions it serves or wisdom it imparts remain valid, weighing the expansive
potential second and third-order effects of a change, and considering the prospects
for evolving the ‘old’ by integrating it with experimentally-validated elements
of the ‘new’ (as opposed to tearing the ‘old’ down indiscriminately), is the
apex of folly. Disciplined analysis and experimentation might very well reveal
legitimate reasons to discard the ‘old’ in favor of the ‘new,’ but one’s
process for arriving at such a conclusion—including the judicious application
of humility to moderate that conclusion—represents the primary safeguard
against prematurity and overreach.
There are at
least five basic ways the Jeune École’s hubris resulted in easily-triggered
failure conditions being incorporated within their theories. First, Aube,
Charmes, and their associates viewed incredibly complex human interactions such
as war and economics through a deterministic lens; they did not allow for the
human certainty of misinterpreting or incompletely understanding the sublime.
Second, they refused to account for mankind’s passions and adaptivity. Third,
they attempted to take things that were true under specific circumstances, such
as torpedo boats’ effectiveness against larger warships in certain coastal
warfare scenarios, and extend them as universal laws. Fourth, as they made no
effort to address the traditionalists’ valid criticisms, the Jeune École’s intellectual
haughtiness and ideological fervor deprived them of opportunities to recognize and
correct the major gaps in their logic. Lastly, they pursued ‘blind’ change—that
is, revisions to the existing order without the benefit of testing their ideas
in advance. Granted, it was impossible for them to test much of their Guerre de Course concept outside the
cauldron of war, but it was completely within their reasoning ability to admit it
was at least possible their economic coercion concept might not work and that
other forms of naval force—and force structure—would be needed as a hedge. Furthermore,
it was definitely within their ability to test their torpedo boat concepts in
fleet experiments before wielding their political influence to upend French
naval procurement. Aube did direct such experiments after he became Minister of
the Marine, did deemphasize the bateau-cannon
after its failures during testing, and did not personally advocate that torpedo
boats were suitable for independent operations on the high seas.[v] Nevertheless,
that does not excuse him from his original move to freeze battleship
construction and begin massive purchases of torpedo boats despite the absence
of experimentally-obtained supporting evidence. Nor does it excuse him from his
tacit failures to rein in or at least add public caveats to Charmes’s torpedo
boat advocacy.
It follows that
the Jeune École predicted several major aspects of future maritime warfare in
spite of their analytical methodology, not because of it. Their foresight may
be a triumph of imagination, but we must remember that their movement neither
sought to predict what might be possible in the future, nor sought to develop
and advocate a policy path towards making their visions practicable over time.
Instead, the Jeune École sought to implement their ideas in their own era at
any cost regardless of the extant strategic, economic, and technological
circumstances. The early 21st Century’s most radical advocates for
discarding ‘traditional’ combined arms force structure elements wholesale in
favor of emerging technology-based wonder-systems, as opposed to incremental
evolution of the ‘old’ through disciplined and complementary introduction of
the ‘new,’ echo the Jeune École. The same is true of those who argue that networked
sensors can and will provide a nearly-omniscient picture of a battlespace that
an opponent cannot hope to counter. Needless to say, there is also a straight
line from the Jeune École to contemporary advocates of ‘effects-based’ coercive
strategies rooted in determinism.
The Jeune École
did get one major thing right, though, as their rise to power demonstrates to
us the importance of a military communicating effectively with the public it
serves. The political and economic environment in 1880s France certainly made
it difficult for the Admiralty to gain or retain popular support. All the same,
it does not appear the Admiralty even tried to widely publicize their arguments
in favor of a strong and balanced fleet using terms that were comprehensible by—and
resonated within—their needed audience. In contrast, the Jeune École succeeded in
large part because they were more able and willing than the Admiralty to engage
French policy elites, opinion elites, and the general public. Although Jeune École
egalitarianism and scientism were greatly attractive within French society of
that era, had the Admiralty conducted fleet experiments focusing on torpedo
boat operations earlier it might have gained enough concrete evidence to moderate
Aube and discredit Charmes before too much damage was done. In ceding the
narrative battle to the Jeune École, the Admiralty demonstrated the old maxim
that ‘silence is concurrence.’
There’s a lesson to be learned from the French Admiralty’s public
outreach failures. Debate over a military service’s missions, strategic
concept, doctrine, and force structure is healthy and necessary in a democracy.
There will always be influential voices, whether reasoned or polemical,
criticizing a service’s path. A service’s leaders and their allies must be
willing to clearly, credibly, publicly, and routinely explain the logic of the
service’s plans and policies. They must not let hollow arguments levied against
the service’s positions go unanswered. If
they do not do these things, and cannot adequately defend their requests for a
share of the nation’s resources, then they risk losing the tacit support of
their service’s most powerful advocates: the voting public. We are wise to
remember this in our own difficult political and economic times.
[i] Ropp, 178-180, 257-259.
[ii] Halpern, 37.
[iii] Erik J. Dahl.
“Net-Centric Before its Time: The Jeune École and Its Lessons for Today.” Naval War College Review 58, No. 4
(Autumn 2005), 123-125.
[iv] Ropp, 165-166.
[v] See 1. Dahl, 122-123; 2. Røksund, 79.
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.
