By Michael F. Duggan
In the summer of 1864, the Union war effort was grinding to a halt. The Confederates had been defeated at Gettysburg and Vicksburg the previous July, but finishing the job was proving to be difficult for the Union. Sherman’s Military Division of the Mississippi and Grant’s Army of the Potomac were both stalled face to face with Confederate forces in a war of position outside of Atlanta and at Petersburg, south of Richmond.
In the 18th century—having learned their lessons from the total wars of the 17th century—European generals and princes sought to fight limited “cabinet wars.” Warfare was thus reduced to a chess-like game reflected in the doctrine of Swiss soldier and military theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini. From the second half of the American Civil War onward, Western great powers wars tended toward total warfare and the more comprehensive view of conflict espoused by Clausewitz. In the atomic age, following hard upon the most destructive war in history, the overarching question facing strategists and war planners was how to keep the game alive without it turning nuclear. After the nuclear-heavy “New Look” grand strategy of the Eisenhower years, the Kennedy administration opted for “Flexible Response,” which certainly kept the game alive, but also made smaller, limited, wars more likely.1
But in the later stages of the Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman realized that in order to defeat the Confederacy, he would have to defeat the South as a whole and not just Southern armies, which had often defeated Union forces on the battlefield. From 1863 to 1864, the nature of the war changed from piecemeal “Napoleonic” battles to something more like modern campaigns punctuate by major clashes: Grant would fight Lee in an existential struggle in Virginia via a war of continuous campaign, and Sherman would bring the war home to Southern civilians in something conceptually akin to modern total warfare in Georgia and the Carolinas.2
Civilians support war through agriculture and food production, communications, industry and other economic activity, and transportation. After taking Atlanta, Sherman’s plan was to cut a 60 mile-wide swath “to the sea,” to Savannah, wrecking bridges, factories, railroads, and telegraph lines with soldiers and “bummers” foraging off of the land, burning plantations, and freeing slaves and Union prisoners of war along the way. Sherman called it a “hard war.” But unlike later total war campaigns—like Nazi Germany’s Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in 1941—the object was not the extermination of civilians, but rather to bring the CSA to its knees by wrecking its infrastructure and making civilians no longer want to fight by making life miserable. “I can make this march,” Sherman said, “and make Georgia howl.” And he did.
The situation in eastern Ukraine in some ways also resembles the scene at Petersburg in late 1864 and early 1865, when the Army of the Potomac under Grant (technically under George Meade, but Grant, in charge of all Union forces, was headquartered with him) squared off against the Army of Northern Virginia under Lee. After the brutal Virginia Campaign of May and June 1864, the exhausted armies settled into a war of position that foreshadowed the “trenchlock” on the Western Front 50 years later. It was a war of attrition in which the side with the greater numbers and resources eventually won.
This appears to be what is happening in Ukraine: the stronger side has a mixed record on the battlefield, the weaker side has fought extremely well, and the war has settled into deadlock. Although a winter offensive is still possible, perhaps inevitable, Russia seems to also be opting for a Shermanesque hard war by reducing Ukraine’s infrastructure and making life dangerous and miserable for civilians. Although there have been atrocities on both sides, Russia appears to be pursuing the systematic destruction of Ukraine as a functioning nation and the grinding down of its army on the battlefield rather than a strategy based on the of annihilation of civilians. A strategy based on breaking the will of a nation’s home front is always dicey, but on the other hand, it is also less risky for the attacker than outright combat. It would also be a means for prosecuting the war while waiting-out the other side.
The relevant questions at this point are: 1). will the more limited offensive strategy work, and 2). is it merely a prelude for a more robust offensive in February and March?
Notes
1. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (Oxford University Press, 1985). See also Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010).
2. See James M. McPhereson, “From Limited War to Total War in America,” in On the Road to Modern War (Cambridge University Press, 1999) 297-309. See also Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press), 1985. For a general background of the grand strategies during the Civil War, see T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His General (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York: Charles L Webster and Company, 1885), and William T. Sherman, Memoirs (New York: Library of America, 1990 [1875]).