was an open question as to whether its functions should be The pre-industrial general staff, therefore, was a small administrative staff with only a rare and tangential, and never systematic, responsibility to support a commander in the planning and conduct of actual combat operations. One of its major features was that it was geared for administration and logistics, tasks that must be performed in peacetime as well as during a war. As a result, it tended to develop distinctive and semi-autonomous units that had little to do with actual combat operations. In the United States, these units the administrative bureaus of the War Department-were closely overseen by, and linked to, the Congress. Warfare became much more complex during the 19th Century. One major aspect of this increased complexity was armies of a much greater size than had ever been fielded, requiring more and more machine-based logistical and administrative support, and representing a much greater proportion of total national resources— both human and material.9 Armies such as these could no longer be commanded, either in the field or from a national capital, by mostly idiosyncratic and improvisational methods of a single commander, no matter what his intrinsic capabilities. High-level commanders needed staffs that could assist them in the planning and conduct of actual combat operations, as well as in providing administrative, clerical, and logistical support for their forces. 10 By the last third of the 19th Century, the amount of intelligence to be assimilated, the range of potential alternative actions, and the plethora of detailed instructions required to implement general high-level orders had all become too large to be managed on the almost purely intuitive basis that had characterized pre-industrial armies. A dramatic transformation of general staffs took place during the second half of the 19th Century. By 1900, virtually all armies of industrialized nations had institutionalized a general staff organization designed to assist military commanders in the conduct of actual military operations. Such institutions remain standard features of modern armed forces. General staffs are charged with collecting intelligence, preparing and analyzing alternative operational plans, translating the general directives of senior line command The literature on these developments exhaustive. A recent survey is Hew Strachan. European Armies and the Conduct of War. London, George Allen and Unwin; 1983. See also Larry H. Addington. The Patterns of War Since the Eighteenth Century. Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1984. A standard older work is Theodore Ropp. War in the Modern World. Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1962. 10 Irvine, "The Origins of Capital Staffs," p. 162, has the most concise delineation of the distinction. 52-314 0-85-9 ers into the specific and detailed instructions required by subordinates, and monitoring and insuring the implementation of command decisions after they are made. Modern general staffs of this type are organized by broad operational function rather than by the specific commodity or service provided by their members. For instance, modern American general staff organization, basically unchanged since World War I and applicable to any command with a general officer in charge, has had four main divisions: personnel, intelligence, operations, and supply.11 Another category-civil affairs (dealings with local civilian populations and institutions, including, but not limited to, military government of formally occupied territories)-has been added when appropriate. 12 The modern general staff is as concerned with support and logistics issues as the pre-industrial "general staff," but the modern functional general staff system makes clear that the ultimate purpose of armies is preparation for and the conduct of war, and that its support and logistical activities are directed to those ends rather than to maintenance of peacetime routine. A national army's general staff, defined in these functional terms, performs for a country's highest politico-military leadership the same function that the general staff of a separate military unit performs for that unit's commander. This highest level of national leadership, with ultimate command of the armed forces, can be civilian or military (if military, it could conceivably derive from the national general staff itself, but need not automatically do so), democratic or authoritarian. Regardless of the nature of the "national command authority"-to use a modern term-whose decision-making processes a national, functionally-organized general staff supports, it is still a general staff-the term applies because of the technical military responsibilities it has, and is not related to the philosophical or ideological orientation of the political leadership it serves. The German General Staff was not a functional general staff as described above, but a separate branch of the German Army career officer corps. It was the military-intellectual elite of the German Army from the mid-19th Century through 1945. Its members constituted a cadre of specially selected and trained officers deemed capable of meeting the demanding management and leadership tasks of modern warfare. Its members were recruited and retained through extremely selective and rigorous recruiting and retention 11 See Weigley, History of the United States Army. pp. 314-320, 322-323, 379-80, 405, and Joint Chiefs of Staff. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. JCS Pub. 1., Washington, April 1, 1984. p. 158. 12 Ibid. 13 The Prussian and German General Staff has generated much less historical literature than might be expected, and much of what exists is either polemical or hagiographical. Also, there is a tendency for histories of the German General Staff to become heavily involved in German civil-military relations, which is understandable but not helpful to the analyst trying to find out just how the institutions themselves worked. A brief historical survey is in John M. Collins. U.S. Defense Planning: A Critique. Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press, 1982. pp. 54-56. See also Walter Goerlitz. History of the German General Staff, 1607-1945. Translated by Brian Battershaw. New York, Praeger, 1953; and Trevor N. Dupuy. A Genius for War: The German Army and General Staff, 1807-1945. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1977. policies, which were based on a comprehensive mixture of militaryacademic studies and field experience. They filled not only staff billets at the German Army's national headquarters, but also command and staff positions in major subordinate field units. Those members of the General Staff who were assigned to billets in the "Great General Staff" at the German Army's national headquarters in Berlin (which continued to function under another name after the victorious Allies banned it after World War I), therefore, performed the same duties as the functional general staffs of other nations described in the preceding section of this chapter. Those members of the General Staff branch assigned to "General Staff with Troops" duty performed not only genercl staff functions in German Army field units, but also served as commanding officers of those units. The German General Staff was distinguished from all other general staffs by the extraordinarily competitive nature of professional selection to its officer corps. Junior officers (lieutenants and captains) were selected for admission to General Staff officer candidacy. Two or three years of military-academic instruction, marked by constant competition and elimination of unsatisfactory performers, was followed by one or two years of equally selective practical apprenticeship in both staff and line positions. Of 150 junior officers admitted to the Kriegsakademie (War College) for the beginning stage to General Staff officer candidate instruction at the end of the 19th century, perhaps four would eventually become full members of the General Staff branch four or five years later. 14 The same degree of selectivity and rigorously meritocratic selection prevailed in the late 1920's and early 1930's. In 1927, 270 candidates took the examination for admission to General Staff training; 37 were actually selected, and only 13 remained at the completion of the training program in mid-1930.15 Officers in the pre-1945 German General Staff branch had a "lock" on key German Army positions, policies, practices, and institutional characteristics. This domination derived from three factors: the high caliber of individual General Staff officers produced by the General Staff selection and training process; the natural success of such a system in providing its products with a common outlook and attitude toward military problems and their solutions; and the role of the General Staff branch in providing both senior staff officers for the Great General Staff in Berlin and commanders and staff officers for the German Army's major field units. This "lock" did not, however, create German militarism of the 1871-1945 era. Modern scholarship has stressed that modern German militarism resulted from the interaction of long-standing German attitudes and beliefs with new pressures and social myths arising from circumstances peculiar to the late 19th Century: 16 14 Collins, U.S. Defense Planning: A Critique. p. 55. 15 Spires, David N. Image and Reality: The Making of the German Officer, 1921-1933. Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press, 1984. pp. 33-34, 46, 181. Spires' work is one of the few which actually dissects in detail how, during one period of time, the German General Staff recruitment and selection process actually worked. 16 Bond, Brian. War and Society in Europe, 1870-1970. United Kingdom, Fontana Paperbacks, 1984. p. 63. First, the German army enjoyed unique prestige for, as Ritter concisely put it, "in western Europe the military were considered a necessary evil, whereas in Germany they were the nation's pride." He also stresses that this was a new strain not derived from the aristocratic Prussia of Frederick the Great; rather it was the bourgeoisie who were not perverted by patriotic pride and free citizens who were captivated by a sense of power. In other domestic issues they might be quite critical of government policy. Indeed, it was the educated middle classes, considerably influenced by academics, who were particularly prone to swing full circle from antimilitarism to idolatry after 1870 because they were most keenly aware of Prussia's historical achievement. For a generation after 1870, German patriotism was strongly nostalgic. Middle-class society generally continued to show tremendous respect for the officer's uniform . . . The reserve officers, who excluded a wide range of "undesirables" such as socialists, peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, and Jews, became more militaristic than the regulars, aping and exaggerating their manners and vices such as gambling, drinking, and brawling. Hence a sort of "pecking order" arose even in civil life and the very status of civilian came to be widely despised by these prigs in uniform. In such an atmosphere, it was not surprising that German military institutions generally, and the German General Staff in particular as the dominant agency within the German Army, came to possess great prestige. The German General Staff, therefore, rarely had to truly threaten civilian control of the military to get what it wanted-the civilians were in general only too glad to give it to them, often through what observers from nations with a stronger liberal-democratic tradition would call the voluntary abrogation of civilian responsibilities.17 In Imperial Germany, it is true that "between the 1860's and 1900 the Reichstag [the national legislature] lost the right even to discuss the military budget for as long as five or seven years; that the war minister became a figurehead with no real authority over the army; and that actual authority steadily accrued to the kaiser [emperor] who looked for advice mainly to his own military cabinet and to a lesser extent to the general staff." 18 These things could not have happened, however, without the assent of the civilian institutions involved, including the ultimate civilian, the kaiser. The same pattern of deference to the Army, which by definition entailed deference to the Army's controlling organ, the General Staff, took place during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Even liberal or socialist governmental leaders may have disliked the Army 17 There is a plethora of literature on German civil-military relations, and the role of the German Armed Forces in German society, from 1871 to 1945. These include Goerlitz, History of the German General Staff Gordon A. Craig. The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640-1945, Oxford, United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 1955, and Karl Demeter. The German Officer Corps in Society and State, 1650-1945. New York, Praeger, 1965. See also John Gooch. Armies in Europe Boston, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. pp. 114-117, 136-138, 147, 154-155, 162-163, 165 166, 170-172, 177-178, 195-200, 205-210. and the General Staff, but it appears that in practice they did little to control what the Army actually did, to the extent that was normal for parliamentary bodies in countries such as France, Great Britain, or the United States. German Army evasions of Treaty of Versailles disarmament provisions, secret military cooperation with the Soviet Union, and mobilization planning took place with either the tacit or explicit acquiescence of the Weimar Republic civilian leadership, or else civilian oversight of the Army was so intentionally superficial as not to reveal their existence. 19 Finally, under the Nazi regime (1933-1945), Adolf Hitler may indeed have had an intense "populist" disdain for the old-line aristocratic members and characteristics of the traditional German General Staff, but he shared its generally authoritarian outlook, belief in the efficacy of force in international relations, social-Darwinist concepts about war determining the "survival of the fittest" among nations, and character-building aspects of compulsory military service. Hitler-a civilian, a former wartime corporal in the Imperial German Army during World War I-reduced the General Staff as an institution to absolute impotence in terms of major strategic decisions. These he reserved for himself, as absolute dictator.20 But although the power for ultimate military decisions remained in civilian, if authoritarian, hands under the Third Reich, the attitudes and beliefs of both the popular civilian dictator and the professional General Staff toward "the military virtues" of discipline, authority, and obedience were quite similar, and both were only reflecting underlying values of German society of the time: 21 The majority of senior officers readily accepted [Hitler's] policies-though some failed to grasp their dangerous implications and many of those who did protest or drag their feet were only really alarmed at the tempo of the build-up for war, not at the prospect of war itself. SINGLE-SERVICE AND JOINT GENERAL STAFFS Neither type of general staff-the functional type found in all modern armed forces or the military-elite type unique to pre-1945 Germany-has been anything but a single-service institution at the national level. Because the army is the dominant military service in most countries, a national army general staff has frequently dominated national strategy as a whole, but there has never been a truly joint, fully-integrated interservice national general staff.22 In 19 As well as the general discussions cited above in note 17, for civil-military relations in Germany during the Weimar era see John W. Wheeler-Bennett. The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918-1945. London, Macmillan Co., Ltd., 1954, and F. L. Carsten. The Reichswehr and Politics, 1918-1933. Oxford, United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 1966. 20 See the sources cited in notes 17 and 19, as well as R. J. O'Neill. The German Army and the Nazi Party, 1933-1939. London, Cassell, 1966; and Albert Seaton, The German Army, 1933-1945. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982. 21 Bond, War and Society in Europe, 1870-1970. p. 158. For a discussion of German Army-as distinct from Gestapo or SS-involvement in Nazi wartime atrocities, see Daniel Goldhagen. "A Bitburg Footnote: The German Army and the Holocaust." The New Republic, May 13, 1985. pp. 16-17. 22 The Soviet General Staff may be the closest approximation. See William Scott and Harriet Fast Scott. The Armed Forces of the USSR. Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press, 1979. pp. 108113. |
