Fighting Power

The German army van Creveld describes was organized, above almost everything else, around the fighting group as a living thing. Its doctrine, running back through the nineteenth-century General Staff, treated combat as inherently chaotic — a domain where plans dissolve on contact and no order from the rear can anticipate what a junior officer will face. The response was to push decision-making down. A lieutenant, sometimes a sergeant, was expected to grasp his commander's intent and then improvise toward it without waiting for permission. This is the famous Auftragstaktik, mission-type orders: you're told what to achieve, not how, and you're trusted to figure out the rest.

Trust of that kind has to be manufactured. Van Creveld shows how the Germans engineered it through cohesion. Where possible, men were recruited, trained, and sent to the front in units drawn from the same region, and — crucially — the wounded were returned to their original units rather than reshuffled into whichever formation was short of bodies. A soldier fought alongside men he had trained with, whose faces he knew, under officers who had come up with him. The unit was a home you returned to, not a slot you were plugged into.

The United States Army built its soldiers on a different philosophy, and van Creveld traces it to a different picture of what an army fundamentally is. Where the Germans saw a fighting organism, the Americans of 1939–45 tended to see a vast production system — a problem of moving men, materiel, and expertise efficiently toward an output. The dominant metaphor was managerial, drawn from the industrial and corporate culture that had made the country rich. The army was, in a sense, run like a giant firm, and it was extraordinarily good at the things firms are good at.

The trouble was that some of the practices that make a firm efficient corrode a fighting unit. The most damaging, in van Creveld's account, was the individual replacement system. American casualties were made good not by rebuilding whole units but by feeding in replacements one at a time — anonymous men shipped forward alone to formations of strangers, often arriving at night, sometimes killed before anyone learned their names. Statistically it kept divisions at strength. Humanly it dissolved the very cohesion that the Germans had gone to such lengths to protect.

Step back from the two armies and Fighting Power reads as an argument about where combat effectiveness actually comes from — and the answer van Creveld keeps arriving at is unfashionably human. Not weapons, not numbers, not doctrine on paper, but the social bonds inside a unit: whether a soldier fights beside people he knows and won't abandon, whether he trusts the man giving orders, whether the group he belongs to feels worth dying for. Men in combat, the evidence suggests, endure terror less for country or cause than for the few others in the hole with them. Fighting power is, at bottom, the organized production of that willingness.

That reframes what a military institution is for. Everything upstream — recruitment, training, how the wounded are returned, how officers are chosen, how replacements are handled — is really a set of levers that either build or dissolve small-group cohesion. The Germans, van Creveld argues, had for reasons of history and design gotten better at pulling those levers, and it showed everywhere the fifty percent showed. The Americans had built a machine optimized for a different and, in the largest sense, more decisive kind of excellence.

Van Creveld set out to explain a number that embarrasses the winners: unit for unit, the beaten German army fought harder than the American one that beat it. His answer was that fighting power isn't in the equipment or the order of battle but in how an institution raises, wires, and holds its men together — and that the Germans, for reasons older than the regime they served, had simply built the better machine for producing men who kept fighting. The Americans built a different machine, superb at everything except the thing he was measuring, and it won the war anyway.