How to Lose a War by Bill Fawcett

Author:Bill Fawcett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

The military power must be destroyed, that is, reduced to such a state as to not be able to prosecute the war…. The country must be conquered. But even when both these things are done, still the war…cannot be considered at an end as long as the will of the enemy is not subdued also, that is, its government and its allies must be forced into signing a peace, or the people forced into submission….

It is obvious that Napoleon’s heart wasn’t in the war—he stayed in the rear, he didn’t mingle with his men, except to hold endless, pointless parade reviews—and therefore did not act like the commander of an invading army, whose point was to conquer the target country in the most efficient way possible.

Napoleon’s Grande Armée could be considered the largest military bluff in history—he hoped his massive force would make his enemy roll over and surrender rather than risk battling such an overwhelming force. But when that didn’t happen, and he was forced to fight, he seemed hesitant and unsure of himself and his forces. He wanted to give Alexander every chance for peace, and by doing so undermined his position of strength from the moment he entered the country in June. Once there, he let the defenders set the nature of the conflict, chasing them around the country instead of identifying the key strategic targets in the country, whether that would have been Moscow or St. Petersburg, and making for them. Instead of plodding along in fits and starts, letting exhaustion and disease whittle away his mighty force to nothing, a decisive thrust into Russia to capture either capital might have gained him the results he had to achieve, but didn’t really want to do.

The second crucial mistake Napoleon made, quite simply, is that he didn’t lead his men. Again, as Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War about a leader commanding his troops:

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