Whence the Big Battalions?
Abstract
God," Napoleon is reputed to have remarked, "is on the side of the big battalions!" He was referring to the massive conventional armies he had assembled at the end of the 18th century in his bid for dominance of the European continent. To the Emperor's chagrin, the combined battalions of the allied powers were bigger and ultimately more effective. The concept of armed coalitions which effectively undid Napoleon has, in the latter half of the 20th century, played a far more complex and delicate role in the maintenance of the European balance of power. For more than 40 years now, NATO and the Warsaw Pact have faced each other in a breathless and uneasy stand-off in a Europe much changed from the one Napoleon knew in an earlier century. These huge conventional armies of tanks, guns, and men are about to experience a change of monumental implications. Valued as much for their deterrent as their warfighting capabilities, these armor-intensive big battalions have nonetheless been instrumental as guarantors of the prolonged period of peace which has characterized Europe in the postwar era. It is an era that is coming to a close in a remarkable and largely unanticipated wave of euphoria whose harbingers were an equally remarkable vocabulary of detente, glasnost, perestroika, and Gorbymania. In a world in which statesmanship, diplomacy, and economic necessity are increasingly successful in ameliorating tensions between the superpowers, have the big battalions, by their very success, rendered themselves obsolete? Or is this comforting perception simply a product of old-fashioned "linear" thinking, due to be exposed and overturned by that "paradoxical logic of strategy" advanced recently by Edward Luttwak?
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 1990
- Accession Number
- ADA516046
Entities
People
- R. J. Chiaventone
Organizations
- United States Army Command and General Staff College