Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/May 2024/Op-ed


 * By Hawkeye7

On 2 December 2023, the US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd J. Austin III, gave a speech in which he said: "You know, I learned a thing or two about urban warfare from my time fighting in Iraq and leading the campaign to defeat ISIS.

Like Hamas, ISIS was deeply embedded in urban areas. And the international coalition against ISIS worked hard to protect civilians and create humanitarian corridors, even during the toughest battles.

So the lesson is not that you can win in urban warfare by protecting civilians. The lesson is that you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians.

You see, in this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population. And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat."

The speech contains a great deal of nonsense, but what I would like to home in on is the concept of "the centre of gravity". Some of you are no doubt familiar with senior people using buzzwords without understanding them, but this one pertains to a more widespread misconception. This arose from the curious reverence that the US military paid to the German military thinker Carl von Clausewitz in the wake of the disastrous Vietnam War. Clausewitz invoked the term, appropriated from the physics of the day, to describe the focal point of military effort. The word he used was "schwerpunkt", which in physics does indeed translate as "centre of gravity". In Clausewitz's mind, the object of a military force was the destruction of the armed forces of the enemy. If he were in charge in Gaza, he would go after the Gazan forces.

The Germans subsequently refined the concept somewhat. Our article on it says:"Schwerpunkt has been translated as center of gravity, crucial, focal point and point of main effort. None of those forms is sufficient to describe the universal importance of the term and the concept of Schwerpunktprinzip. Every unit in the army, from the company to the supreme command, decided on a schwerpunkt by schwerpunktbildung, as did the support services, which meant that commanders always knew what was the most important and why. The German army was trained to support the schwerpunkt even when risks had to be taken elsewhere to support the point of main effort and to attack with overwhelming firepower."

Whether through mistranslation or misconception, the US military came up with a different take on it, which you can read about in our center of gravity (military) article. The key points to take away are that: (a) each of the US services has a different definition, none of which actually correspond to what Clausewitz wrote; and (b) despite it becoming integrated into the decision making process there has been debate over whether the concept, as framed by the US military, is a valid one or just another management fad. Lawrence Freedman articulated some problematic aspects of the concept:
 * It is a purely theoretical concept, and may not actually exist in a complex military system.
 * It reflects the 19th-century assumption that the object of a military force was the destruction of the armed forces of the enemy, which may not be necessary, desirable or even possible.
 * It may not be the best way to frame the situation and formulate a strategy.

Regardless, the people are not the centre of gravity in an insurgency. That makes no sense at all. "The people" are invariably too diverse and disparate to constitute a point of decision.

What lessons are there for us in this? For a start, we need to be careful when we deal with translated terms. Although we are nominally only adhering to what our sources say, we must avoid misrepresenting them. That means we have to understand them in order to present them correctly. But what if the sources themselves misrepresent them? Do we hold the line and insist on the correct use of terminology? This is a variation of the Lexicographer's Dilemma: at what point does the misuse, misunderstanding or misspelling of a word become so widespread that the meaning or spelling can be considered to have changed?