Airpower Reborn: The Strategic Concepts of John Warden and John Boyd by John Olsen

Author:John Olsen [Olsen, John Andreas]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612518060
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC

TRANSITIONING FROM SUCCESS OR FAILURE (EXIT?)

So far, this chapter has considered the Where, What, and How of strategy. The fourth central strategy question concerns “Exit” and is particularly difficult to address. Nations, wars, weapons, technologies, units, and all other entities have come to an end since the dawn of human history, but planners rarely take the inevitable end into account. The failure to plan well (or at all) for inevitable end points at best leads to wasted resources and opportunities, and at worst to disaster. As counterintuitive as it might seem, end points tend to be the most dangerous and expensive aspects of strategy. Initiating an action is rarely fatal, but the failure to plan for disengagement or escape almost always leads to catastrophe.

The term “Exit” nicely captures the concept but requires a little thought to understand why. If someone makes a successful purchase in a store, the next step is to “exit” and move on to something new. Likewise, if the “someone” fails to find the sought-after item, the next step is also to “exit,” perhaps to go to another store or perhaps to give up the quest entirely. In both cases, “exit” connotes making a strategic move in response to success or to failure. What would make no sense in the first case would be to stay in the store and continue to buy things merely because of a good purchase, regardless of what had been sought. Likewise, it would be less than bright to camp out in the store in the hope that the desired item might show up at some point in the future.

As human beings, we do a poor job of “exiting.” After success, the tendency is to keep doing the same thing because it worked so well; and the tendency when we fail is to deny error and continue doing the same thing because abandoning it is too painful. Of all the things that good commanders and strategists must do, “exiting” is the most difficult, and most often botched.

A few examples from history will illustrate the need for exit scenarios from both success and failure. Hannibal and Carthage had but one objective in the Second Punic War: the complete overthrow of Rome. Their efforts progressed well through Hannibal’s spectacular success at Cannae, but shortly thereafter it should have become apparent that the chances of defeating Rome completely were small at best. If Carthage’s leaders had established end-game plans while Hannibal’s army was still superior in numbers to the Roman armies on the Italian peninsula, they almost certainly could have arranged a negotiated settlement or organized an orderly withdrawal. Instead, the situation eventually reversed itself to the point where a Roman army ventured to Africa, defeated the Carthaginian forces, and put Carthage in a perilous position from which it was never able to recover.

In 1905, General Alfred von Schlieffen designed a plan for a war with France that depended on a quick victory. When the German attack in August 1914 stalled, rather than admit that

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