Moltke the Elder Created an Army Command Structure Used Around the World to This Day
The military philosophy of Helmuth von Moltke (1800 – 1891), also known as Moltke the Elder, was to distill Napoleon’s innovations and precepts, and adapt them to contemporary conditions. An example was his realization that the defensive power of modern firearms had rendered the frontal attacks of Napoleon’s days impractical. So he focused instead on developing tactics to secure victory via enveloping attacks instead of head on assaults.
He viewed strategy through the pragmatic lens of adapting means to ends, and avoiding the pursuit of ends when the means to secure them were unavailable. He also realized that things almost never go as planned in war, and his most famous statement summarizing his thinking is “no plan survives contact with the enemy“. So he emphasized extensive preparations for all possible scenarios.
In 1857, Moltke was promoted to Chief of the Prussian General Staff – a position he would hold for the next three decades. He revolutionized warfare with his innovations to that institution, renamed the Great General Staff after the establishment of the German Empire. Moltke made the commander’s staff a professional and permanent body, and created an infrastructure to handle basic matters such as logistics and supply, transport, intelligence, and coordination. Relieved of those chores, the commander was freed to concentrate on strategy and tactics. Moltke’s Great General Staff was emulated by armies the world over, all of which eventually established their own general staffs.
Moltke was one of the first to realize that the days when a commander could exercise complete control over an army, such as occurred during the Napoleonic Wars, were over. By the second half of the 19th century, armies had gotten too big, and their fields of battle and theaters of operations had grown too massive, for an army commander to see all his forces from a command post atop a hill. In this new environment, senior commanders had to explain their intent to subordinates, then grant them autonomy and trust them to use their own initiative to realize the commander’s intent.
Instead of detailed orders, Moltke gave subordinates clearly defined goals, the forces needed to execute them, and a time frame in which the goal must be achieved. How to accomplish the goal was largely left to the subordinate’s discretion and initiative. That required a revamping of officer training to encourage initiative and independent thinking. German soldiers are often thought of as robotic automatons, but since Moltke’s day, few if any armies have allowed their soldiers as much discretion, or trusted them to use their own initiative, as much as the German army.
Moltke’s innovations made the Prussian army the world’s most efficient, as it demonstrated in a series of swift and successful wars en route to unifying Germany. After defeating the Danes in 1864, then crushing the Austrians in 1866, in accordance was plans drawn by Moltke, Prussia took on France, whose army was reputedly the world’s best. Moltke drew the plans for the Franco-Prussian War, 1870 – 1871, and led the Prussian army in executing his design. The result was a stunning Prussian victory, capped by the creation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirror in Versailles.