The art of good generalship
Terry L. Ford
 

Sometimes we wargamers lay too little emphasis on the role of
nature in our games, and we miss some pleasure as a result. We fail
to appreciate our games as more than tabletop or mapboard realities.
When that happens, we, of all people, lack imagination, transcendental insight, and the art of generalship. If we very roughly
paraphrase Clausewitz’s definition of war as “policy carried out by
force,” then Generalship consists of achieving a defined political
end through force applied in such a way that the enemy either
prefers to concede the political point rather than prolong the conflict,
or becomes unable to prolong it. Sometimes the political end is so
obscure, as in some of the 18th-century European dynastic wars,
that no decisive resolution results.
 

In any event, the method of applying this force constitutes the art
of generalship. Whether the technology at hand is lasers, bombers,
muskets, or spears, the goal is similar, the essence of generalship
unchanged. The best generals exhibit an appreciation of Nature and
a willingness to bow to her, where lesser generals ignore or oppose
her. In this, good generals recognize a quality similar to the principles
of judo, using forces outside one’s own command by bowing to
necessity, opposing force with absence, and applying force where it
is unopposed.

In the most elementary form, we can see this principle at work
when a primitive warrior hides behind a tree to surprise an enemy
rather than await him in the open. The tree is there, so it is used for
advantage, or more accurately, the advantage is there to be used if it
is recognized. The primitive warrior meets his foe obliquely, not
head-on. Ambush works on a much larger scale as a basic principle
of warfare. Not only in the obvious areas of guerrilla fighting, supplyline raiding, and general skirmishing, but also at an army level, we
find good generals making use of the ambush technique. Hannibal
surprised the Romans by hiding men in a depression beside a river
on open territory. The Romans, used to Gallic ambushes from
woods, were taken by surprise when attacked from ambush on
“open ground” at Trebia. Caesar also used ambush en masse when
he posted troops under cover with orders to fall on Pompey’s flank at
Pharsalus.
 
 

Americans need little reminder of the advantages of
ambuscade, remembering as victims our colonial part in Braddock’s
defeat by the French and Indians, and the glamor of Morgan’s
Indian-fighting riflemen in the early days of our Revolution.
But, even used on a large scale, the major point about ambush is
the general’s ability to see the nature of the terrain and his instinct for
letting land work to his advantage. This same quality of letting the
land work for one is involved in a second technique of good generalship. Ambush requires the presence of complicated terrain. This
second technique requires the opposite: vast emptiness. In preparation for his raid on Europe, the Persian monarch Darius entered the
steppes north of the Black Sea to neutralize the Scythians to his rear.
Darius had an army that had just created the biggest empire the
world had ever known, and the nomads had scant chance of standing against it. So they didn’t stand. They ran, and they burned
everything behind them. Prairie fires were a natural answer to their
“weakness.” The Persians could never pin the Scythians to battle,
and couldn’t supply their own army in the desert the Scythians made
of the steppes, so they retired. Nature had preserved the Scythians
unconquered. Nothingness prevailed. The same technique was
used against Napoleon, who was considered almost supernaturally
undefeatable. The Russians withdrew, initiating a scorched-earth
policy, and let distance and winter do their fighting. The result was
that Napoleon met his first defeat at the hands of Nature, not at the
hands of a Russian army inadequate to face the Grand Army.
The defeat of Crassus at the hands of the Parthians in 54 B.C.
really belongs in this group of victories because Crassus insisted on
marching his infantry across desert and they were worn and thirsty
long before the Parthians skirmished them to death—again, the
Parthians declined to stand and be slaughtered when the terrain
allowed them to withdraw and weaken the enemy without close
fighting until the fight could be made on Parthian terms against
demoralized opponents.

Effective use of openness was made by Genghis Khan and
Rommel when they used vastness as a means of complicating the
enemy’s transportation and supply, while transforming it into an ally
of theirs. Mongols rode horses that used frozen rivers like freeways,
ate off the land even in winter, and were ridden by men willing to eat
raw meat in the saddle or drink horse blood. Distance and supply
were nothing to them. The Sahara, similarly, became Rommel’s best
fort, and mobility his chief buckler.

Americans solved the problem of vastness in the Pacific during
World War Two with the island-hopping strategy based on a proper
understanding of Nature. We saw that huge water as being covered
with stepping-stones we could make work for us, while the Japanese
saw it as a barrier to us.

Far more frequently than open spaces, natural obstacles play a
role in generalship. Mountain passes or the space between mountains and ocean can often be corked by troops as the Spartans
attempted to do at Thermopylae and Marathon. At a strategic level,
rivers and mountain ranges used to be considered ideal frontiers for
a nation or empire. Italy and the Alps, Spain and the Pyrenees come
immediately to mind. Just by being there, they impose difficulties on
an enemy. Control of the Mississippi River was eventually recognized as a crucial strategic goal of the North in our Civil War because
it cut off Confederate supplies from the West and because it provided quick transportation of Union troops. It was both a barrier and a
highway, depending on the point of view.

This appreciation of the military value inherent in nature includes such varied things as hiding behind a bush in savage warfare
and appreciating the strategic advantages of being an island nation
such as Great Britain (the sea is a highway) or Japan (for long, the
sea was a barrier). How do grand strategy and one-on-one scuffles
all boil down to good generalship on the wargame table or mapboard? How does it apply?
First, the wholeness or unity of the game situation must be
appreciated. A particular battle is part of a campaign, part of a war,
aimed at securing or preventing certain political ends. This realization alone adds zest. The issue of slavery or states rights lies behind
your Civil War battle. Not only are you fighting for a cause, but you

are paying a price— the tiny soldiers or paper counters represent
goals and ends in the hearts of individuals. Is it worth the lives to be
lost to hold the table, or should you slip away like the Scyths?
For example, I recently fought a table battle with a Celtic army
against Greeks in a campaign situation representing the Galatian
assault on Greece in the fourth century B.C. After having looted
several towns, my force was laden with baggage and plunder. It had
been mauled by Macedonians, and was hoping only to survive battle
with the loot intact as it plodded back north. My tactics were dictated
by that strategy. I chose rough, wooded terrain with many hills to
make my stand. I sent out skirmishers, but ordered the main bands to
hold until the enemy entered charge distance. Woods sheltered the
most vulnerable targets while good dice rolls, and the campaign
rules, produced a short battle of only seven turns. The result was that
my army survived with plunder intact, and casualties were “acceptable.” The greatest losses were among the charioteers, who could
not fight a good defensive battle and so faced Greeks on the open
portion of the battlefield. The light-medium infantry who skulked in
the woods fared better.

Though the Greeks won the battle, they gained nothing for their
fighting. This was especially true because Gallic losses could be
replaced in the next campaign turn, and the Greeks had to await
reinforcements from a long distance. Both the strategic and the
tactical help that nature provided made it possible for the Gauls to
survive. Too often we unquestioningly settle for a battleground like a
football field and battles with no more relationship to natural help
and hindrance than that most abstract of wargame fields, the
chessboard.

The examples cited so far involve primarily the negative side of
effective terrain use. It hinders the enemy to pass through woods and
uphill and across creeks, rivers or ditches to reach you. It hinders his
missiles if you are obscured by trees, bushes, banks or terraces. But
nature supplies direct help to the perceptive wargamer as well. Much
of the success of a wargame army depends upon getting the right
forces to the right place to do the right job at the right time. Some
map games and miniatures rules allow speed increases for using
roads. Sometimes interior lines are available to you behind the
shelter of hills so you can safely shuttle troops to the portion of the
front that needs them most. Archers on a hillside get additional view,
and sometimes range is increased, overhead support fire for friends
possible, and they may fight melees with additional strength. Caesar
describes the advantages of high ground to ancient troops very well
in his Gallic Wars, and Quatre Bras and Gettysburg show that his
evaluation has stood for centuries.

Openness can be to your advantage, as often as rougher terrain
can be. Hannibal made perfect use of his cavalry superiority by
meeting Romans on a plain, denuding them of their own cavalry and
hitting them in the rear with his returning Numidian victors. Polybius
claims Hannibal could do this because he had clear-cut numerical
and qualitative cavalry superiority and was only outnumbered in
infantry at Cannae. In this case open terrain, where cavalry could
maneuver, worked to his advantage. The same was true for the
Parthians who killed Crassus.

Mongols even managed to preserve “ambush” in totally open
areas by detaching a portion of their force to arrive late on the
battlefield, on the rear or flank (generally the left) of the by-then-engaged enemy. This was done so often that the concept became
known as the “standard sweep.” What happened was an example of
using time rather than trees or hills as a cover for ambush.
Confederates at Bull Run used the railroad in a similar manner to
get very distant troops into combat, a more technological application
of the same principle.

The obvious tabletop application of this technique is to reserve
troops off the table and roll dice to bring them on a later turn. In map
games the scale is often large enough that a strategic rather than
tactical “standard sweep” is an option. Some of the 20th-century
and hypothetical-future wargames allow for paratroopers, marine
invasion, or gravity sleds, the perfect modern tools for the sweep.
If your troops consist of much heavy cavalry or tanks or hovercraft (wargaming now includes a lot of futuristic stuff), you may

benefit from that open space by maneuvering or by gaining speed
for an uninhibited fast closing with the enemy if he can be overrun!
Most rules already allow you to use the terrain fairly realistically,
and the ones that don’t can be easily modified by agreement of the
players. Our problem as wargamers is that we too seldom take more
than uninspired advantage of the options open to us.
One of the most enjoyable battles I have ever fought was an
experiment with Legion miniatures rules on a ping-pong-sized table
covered with remarkably varied terrain. A fort was established at
each end and troops were not revealed until they would be in line of
sight of each other. My Gauls inhabited a forested region and
Romans marched to reach the Gallic hillfort. (The Romans had a
camp on the far—lengthwise- edge of the table.) Naturally, Gauls
waited in ambush in woods along the road. Equally naturally, the
Romans didn’t march on the road—not being fools. Scouting became important, as did issuing new orders and trying to crest the
right hill at the right time to get a shot or melee advantage. Eventually
fighting occurred over walls (both the Gallic fort and Roman camp at
one time or another were attacked), to the discomfort of the attackers. The game had a good sense of flowing with the nature of the land
and the uncertainty of the manner in which the opponent would use
the terrain was refreshingly challenging.

Having invested heavily in time and money in 25mm armies, I
am not eager to shift to 15’s, but the scope they offer for grand
strategic use of terrain on a limited-size table appeals, and the
opportunities for good generalship would seem to be even greater.
Having spoken throughout this article of “Nature” in terms of
terrain, one more caution is required. Human nature is nature also,
and an army has its own nature as well. Operating in violation of
these natures is as reprehensible and prone to draw down misfortune as misuse of terrain. The obvious example is the use of “barbarian” miniatures armies. They often go into uncontrolled advance
toward the enemy, so rather than try to avoid it, one is often better off
to make those Gauls or Goths close with the enemy as quickly as
they can. Use fairly large units and trade whacks with gusto. You
know you will not be more maneuverable than the opposing regulars, but you can (if the dice rolls go well) hit with the force of a
whirlwind. If that happens in an unexpected place on the enemy’s
front (or flank or rear) you have done all a good general could hope
to do with the troops available.

Playing Metagaming’s Ogre with one super-tank of the future
against powered armor infantry, gravity sleds, and various armored
units, I at first made the mistake of avoiding combat and running
toward the enemy command post, without taking into account “cybertank psychology.” I am more often successful by letting the
unspeakably powerful machine gleefully assault the nearest enemy,
detouring whenever it can run over infantry, smash lesser armor or
launch a missile at a pursuer. It works better than singleminded
beelining because it is more appropriate to the “army” of one
supertank. Good generalship for this game involves spirited aggression.

In both miniatures and board games you may find your French
Napoleonics most successful if you trust their elan. Your British fare
better standing coolly in line firing. These qualities are often built
right into the game in National Characteristics rules. Even where
they exist, you would do well to imitate Wellington and place your
thin red lines behind the crest of a hill out of artillery’s way, and your
French will fight better charging downhill; or if the terrain is rough,
thick swarms of skirmishers may be more to the French taste than
columns up front.

The thing to be gained from all this is a greater zest for your
wargame. Troops acting in harmony with the terrain, and their own
special qualities, will necessarily be more successful than troops that
ignore their surroundings and “inner natures.”
You will find your battles becoming more individual, more compelling, displaying greater variety and at the same time proceeding
more “realistically.” The truism that “no battle plan survives contact
with the enemy” still stands, but taking account of nature will allow
you more often to achieve the apotheosis of United States Civil War
generalship and “hit ’em where they ain’t.”