Stardate 20020805.1219

(Captain's log): Cecil, a retired Marine officer, writes about my use of the technical term "defeat in detail":

It is refreshing to see someone still knows what the phrase means. You'd be astonished how few even among military professionals use it correctly. (And I'm disgusted to admit when most young officers say: "we're going to defeat him in detail," they actually mean "we're going to smash his combat force so completely even the pieces will be broken.")

I notice from your bio the avid wargaming, which helps explain the expertise. I always believed I learned more about tactics from Squad Leader than the Basic School; and more about operations and strategy from SSI than Command and Staff. There was an initiative to promote wargaming among officers, but it devolved into "staff rides" and analyses of famous battles instead of letting guys make some mistakes with counters, and has since been abandoned. A pity.

I would never hope to claim that my experience with wargaming actually qualified me to lead men into battle. I would never be so presumptuous. But I think it gives me a much better understanding of the real problem associated with military operations, and the real limits imposed by practical reality, and how to use those limits to win. You can do that because those limits also apply to your opponent; if you can capitalize on his limits, you can defeat him.

The influence of the hobby of wargaming has been pointed out before. Glenn Reynolds co-wrote an article about it which was published in NRO last year, and that inspired me to write about my own experience with it.

During the time that I was wargaming heavily (about fifteen years, starting in about 1978) I played many different kinds of games in many different formats, placed in many different eras, some historical and some synthetic, some highly abstract and some very realistic, some even set in the future. I was an avid computer wargamer for a long time.

When you play a single era intensively (like my experience with Napoleonics) you grow to learn the details of that era very well. But when you play a lot of different games, you begin to see certain underlying factors which apply everywhere, under all circumstances.

Logistics is everything. You can't fight with what you don't have, and you can't fight with what you do have if it's in the wrong place. Logistics is the foundation on which everything else is built; strategy and tactics can only work with what logistics has delivered. While I was never much of a fan of Command and Conquer, one thing about it I heartily endorse: its emphasis on production as the key to victory. C&C is about logistics, not about maneuver and tactics. You win by building factories, not by building tanks. You defeat your enemy by destroying his factories, not by destroying his field army. His field army is simply a barrier between you and his factories, your real target. And you can't do any of this without money.

Interdiction is the most important tactic in war. Using your military capability to interfere with your enemy's ability to produce or acquire war matériel, or to move it where he needs it to threaten you, is easier and more effective than defeating it once it reaches its destination. Many wars have been won through interdiction. It's generally accepted that this was a key element in the defeat of Japan in WWII, and Germany very nearly defeated the UK this way. (Twice! in two World Wars.) The most important battle of World War II was the Battle of the Atlantic.

The more you know, the better off you are. "Fog of war" is a very real problem, and it can be the difference between defeat and victory. Computer games in general are better than any other kind of wargaming at handling this, and you soon learn in computer wargames that you have to scout; you have to keep track of what your potential opponents are doing.

Traditional military forces invested vast amounts of money on troop formations which were often nearly useless on the battlefield. The most notable example of this is the Confederate cavalry in the American Civil War. The Union cavalry was useful on the battlefield because of their high-tech weapons, but the only advantage that the Confederate cavalry brought to a battlefield was the ability to move more rapidly than infantry, and since it wasn't able to fight alone that turned out to be pretty minimal. Nonetheless, the Confederate cavalry was immensely valuable, though not on the battlefield. Its job was strategic, not tactical; it was Lee's primary intelligence arm. Its job was to find out what the Union was doing, and to prevent the Union from finding out what Lee was doing. (These are respectively referred to as "scouting" and "screening".)

As you study the progress of war over the centuries, you find progressively larger and larger investments in intelligence gathering and analysis in the nations which won. The United States today spends more on intelligence gathering than most nations spend on their entire militaries; the ways it is collected are fantastically diverse and include satellites, radio interception, UAVs, and many, many other means most of which they'd rather we didn't know about.

There's a difference between capabilities and intentions, and you need to know them both. Capabilities are what