Germany and the Next War

by Friedrich von Bernhardi

The transport service has advanced to a place of extraordinary importance in the general system of modern warfare. It should be appreciated accordingly. Every active transport service officer ought, after some years' service, to attend a scientific course; all the senior officers on the furlough establishment intended for transport service ought, as their first duty, to be summoned to attend such a course. If these educational courses were held in the autumn in the training camps of the troops, they would entail little extra cost, and an inestimable advantage would be gained with a very trifling outlay.

The results of such a measure can only be fully realized in war, when the superior officers also thoroughly grasp these matters and do not make demands contrary to the nature of the case, and therefore impossible to be met. They should therefore be obliged to undergo a thorough education in the practical duties of the General Staff, and not merely in leading troops in action.

This reflection leads to the discussion of the momentous question how, generally, the training of the superior officers for the great war should be managed, and how the manoeuvres ought to be reorganized with a view to the training. The essential contradiction between our obsolete method of training and the completely altered demands of a new era appears here with peculiar distinctness.

A large part of our superior commanders pass through the General Staff, while part have attended at least the military academy; but when these men reach the higher positions what they learnt in their youth has long become out of date. The continuation school is missing. It can be replaced only by personal study; but there is generally insufficient time for this, and often a lack of interest. The daily duties of training troops claim all the officer's energy, and he needs great determination and love of hard work to continue vigorously his own scientific education. The result is, that comparatively few of our superior officers have a fairly thorough knowledge, much less an independently thought out view, of the conditions of war on the great scale. This would cost dearly in real war. Experience shows that it is not enough that the officers of the General Staff attached to the leader are competent to fill up this gap. The leader, if he cannot himself grasp the conditions, becomes the tool of his subordinates; he believes he is directing and is himself being directed. This is a far from healthy condition. Our present manoeuvres are, as already mentioned, only occasionally a school for officers in a strategical sense, and from the tactical point of view they do not meet modern requirements. The minor manoeuvres especially do not represent what is the most important feature in present-day warfare—i.e., the sudden concentration of larger forces on the one side and the impossibility, from space considerations, of timely counter-movements on the other. The minor manoeuvres are certainly useful in many respects. The commanders learn to form decisions and to give orders, and these are two important matters; but the same result would follow from manoeuvres on the grand scale, which would also to some extent reproduce the modern conditions of warfare.

Brigade manoeuvres especially belong to a past generation, and merely encourage wrong ideas. All that the soldiers learn from them—that is, fighting in the country—can be taught on the army drill-grounds. Divisional manoeuvres are still of some value even to the commanders. The principles of tactical leadership in detail can be exemplified in them; but the first instructive manoeuvres in the modern sense are those of the army corps; still more valuable are the manoeuvres on a larger scale, in which several army corps are combined, especially when the operating divisions are considered part of one whole, and are compelled to act in connection with one grand general scheme of operation. The great art in organizing manoeuvres is to reproduce such conditions, for only in this way can the strain of the general situation and the collective mass of individual responsibility, such as exist in actual warfare, be distinctly brought home. This is a most weighty consideration. The superior officers must have clearly brought before their eyes the limits of the possible and the impossible in modern warfare, in order to be trained to deal with great situations.

The requirements which these reflections suggest are the restriction of small-scale manoeuvres in favour of the large and predominantly strategical manoeuvres, and next the abolition of some less important military exercises in order to apply the money thus saved in this direction. We must subject all our resources to a single test—that they conduce to the perfecting of a modern army. We must subject all our resources to a single test—that they conduce to the perfecting of a modern army. If the military drill-grounds are suitably enlarged (a rather difficult but necessary process, since, in view of the range of the artillery and the mass tactics, they have generally become too small) a considerable part of the work which is done in the divisional manoeuvres could be carried out on them. The money saved by this change could be devoted to the large army manoeuvres. One thing is certain: a great impulse must be given to the development of our manoeuvre system if it is to fulfil its purpose as formerly; in organization and execution these manoeuvres must be modern in the best sense of the word.

It seems, however, quite impossible to carry out this sort of training on so comprehensive a scale that it will by itself be sufficient to educate serviceable commanders for the great war. The manoeuvres can only show their full value if the officers of every rank who take part in them have already had a competent training in theory.

To encourage this preliminary training of the superior officers is thus one of the most serious tasks of an efficient preparation for war. These must not regard their duty as lying exclusively in the training of the troops, but must also be ever striving further to educate themselves and their subordinates for leadership in the great war. Strategic war games on a large scale, which in the army corps can be conducted by the commanding Generals, and in the army-inspections by the Inspectors, seem to me to be the only means by which this end can be attained. All superior officers must be criticized by the standard of their efficiency in superior commands. The threads of all this training will meet in the hands of the Chief of the General Army Staff as the strategically responsible authority.

It seems undesirable in any case to leave it more or less to chance to decide whether those who hold high commands will be competent or not for their posts. The circumstances that a man is an energetic commander of a division, or as General in command maintains discipline in his army corps, affords no conclusive proof that he is fitted to be the leader of an army. Military history supplies many instances of this.

No proof is required to show that under the conditions of modern warfare the reconnoitring and screening units require special training. The possibility and the success of all operations are in the highest degree dependent on their activity. I have for years pointed out the absolute necessity of preparing our cavalry officers scientifically for their profession, and I can only repeat the demand that our cavalry riding-schools should be organized also as places of scientific education. I will also once more declare that it is wrong that the bulk of the training of the army cavalry should consist in the divisional cavalry exercises on the military drill-grounds. These exercises do not correspond at all to actual conditions, and inculcate quite wrong notions in the officers, as every cavalry officer in high command finds out who, having been taught on the drill-ground, has to lead a cavalry division on manoeuvres.