Limit Breaks #7: Combined Arms

WEATHERING THE FRENCH ASSAULTS

Wikipedia: Duke of Wellington: Waterloo Campaign  –
 
“The French cavalry attacked the British infantry squares many times, each at heavy cost to the French but with few British casualties. [French General] Ney himself was displaced from his horse four times. Eventually it became obvious, even to Ney, that cavalry alone were achieving little. Belatedly, he organised a combined-arms attack, using Bachelu's division and Tissot's regiment of Foy's division from Reille's II Corps plus those French cavalry that remained in a fit state to fight. This assault was directed along much the same route as the previous heavy cavalry attacks.
 
Meanwhile, at approximately the same time as Ney's combined-arms assault on the centre-right of Wellesley's line, Napoleon ordered Ney to capture La Haye Sainte at whatever the cost. Ney accomplished this with what was left of D'Erlon's corps soon after 18:00. Ney then moved horse artillery up towards Wellesley's centre and began to destroy the infantry squares at short-range with canister.
 
This all but destroyed the 27th (Inniskilling) Regiment, and the 30th and 73rd Regiments suffered such heavy losses that they had to combine to form a viable square. Wellesley's centre was now on the verge of collapse and wide open to an attack from the French.
 
Luckily for Wellesley, Pirch I's and Zieten's corps of the Prussian Army were now at hand. Zieten's corps permitted the two fresh cavalry brigades of Vivian and Vandeleur on Wellesley's extreme left to be moved and posted behind the depleted centre. Pirch I Corps then proceeded to support Bülow and together they regained possession of Plancenoit, and once more the Charleroi road was swept by Prussian round shot. The value of this reinforcement at this particular moment can hardly be overestimated.”
 
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HELD LINES AND BROKEN LINES
 
We will discuss Combined Arms  momentarily, but first some context is in order. It’s necessary for understanding the Napoleonic battlefield, but also useful for building your understanding of the world at large.
 
One of the strangest realizations about large-scale combat that most military historians know, and that most civilians do not know, is that the vast majority of casualties and fatalities on a battlefield do not happen during the most fierce fighting.
 
Instead, most casualties happen when ranks break  and one side retreats.
 
This has been described thoroughly in Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman’s books  On Killing  and  On Combat , which look at the psychology of a human on the battlefield – the stresses and pressures people face under combat, and how they act.
 
In general, when intact military formations are facing each other in battle, the casualties are very low. Something like 75% to 95% of the casualties of a battle would typically only happen after one side “broke ranks” and either began to flee or started acting in a confused and disorganized way.
 
This is why you’ll see a battle where one side took 4,000 casualties and the other side took 40,000 casualties – both sides might have had casualties in the low thousands until the ranks broke, and then in the pursuit and aftermath, the fleeing side would be ridden down and destroyed by the winning side’s cavalry.
 
This explains why Napoleon Bonaparte marched only 73,000 French troops against 118,000 Allied troops at the Battle of Waterloo. On a quick glance, he was outnumbered – but Napoleon’s intent was to march against the British to break their ranks and destroy them before their German (Prussian) allies could join the battle. Napoleon’s hope was to turn the British into disarray and drive them off the battlefield before the Germans arrived, and then fight the Germans could join the battle.
 
When you read, “[The Duke of Wellington, Arthur] Wellesley's centre was now on the verge of collapse and wide open to an attack from the French ” – this means that Napoleon had almost caused the British troops to break their formations and start to act in a disorganized and retreating way, which would mean the battle was lost.
 
Napoleon had marched rapidly on an army that outnumbered him, but which was divided between two different camps, looking to wipe out the British camp before facing the Germans.
 
It almost worked.
 
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A BRUTAL GAME OF ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS

On the Napoleonic-era battlefield, the three primary types of military units were cavalry, infantry, and artillery.
 
Artillery was expensive, slow-moving, and rare – artillery troops were the most complicated to train, and required a mix of different skills and roles to operate: engineers, technicians, transport, and soldiers skilled in mathematics and calculus to be able to aim and deploy the artillery.
 
Artillery devastated infantry that was formed up a tight group, but undefended artillery could easily be ridden down by fast-moving cavalry on horseback and destroyed.
 
Cavalry likewise was very effective at facing infantry that was disorganized and spread out, but horses were unwilling and unable to ride into a tightly formed group – a “square” is what the main anti-cavalry formation was called.
 
This lead to a brutal game of tradeoffs – tightly-formed-up infantry would defeat cavalry, artillery would destroy tightly-formed-up infantry, and cavalry would destroy undefended artillery.
 
“The French cavalry attacked the British infantry squares many times, each at heavy cost to the French but with few British casualties. [French General] Ney himself was displaced from his horse four times. Eventually it became obvious, even to Ney, that cavalry alone were achieving little. Belatedly, he organised a combined-arms attack… Ney then moved horse artillery up towards Wellesley's centre and began to destroy the infantry squares at short-range with canister.”
 
Those paragraphs we opened with, which seem technical and mystifying without the historical context, begin to make sense.
 
General Ney had started by (foolishly) attacking infantry in formation with cavalry, and the cavalry took heavy losses. Seeing this, he brought up his artillery to fire upon the formed-up British infantry, and the infantry started taking heavy losses and was on the verge of breaking – which is when Ney would send his cavalry and infantry back in to finish the British off.
 
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LIMIT BREAKS #7: COMBINED ARMS
 
We are in the midst of our series on Limit Breaks  – identifying and surpassing the limits to greater performance and thriving.
 
Napoleon Bonaparte’s name is, to this day, synonymous with military genius. With less resources than his opponents, and often outnumbered, he won stunning and incredible victories on the battlefield.
 
There’s many reasons for his success, but one of the largest was he understood how technology had changed in the late 1700’s, and he used Combined Arms  better than his adversaries. It was only after many decades of fighting that the best of his adversaries also learned these methods well, most famously Arthur Wellsley, the Duke of Wellington, who would lead the final defeat of Napoleon on the battlefield at Waterloo.
 
While the era of Napoleonic Warfare is long past, the general doctrines and principles of Combined Arms  are employed to this day in modern militaries, and the general mental models of Combined Arms can be incredibly useful in one’s life.
 
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THE TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES AT THE ADVENT OF THE NAPLEONIC ERA
 
Wikipedia: Napoleonic weaponry and warfare  –
 
“The French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars revolutionized military strategy. The impact of this period was still to be felt in the American Civil War and the early phases of World War I. With the advent of cheap small arms and the rise of the drafted citizen soldier, army sizes increased rapidly to become mass forces. This necessitated dividing the army first into divisions and later into corps. Along with divisions came divisional artillery; light-weight, mobile cannons with great range and firepower. […]
 
“While not the originator of the methods he used, Napoleon very effectively combined the relatively superior maneuver and battle stages into one event. Before this, General Officers had considered this approach to battle as separate events. However, Napoleon used the maneuver to battle to dictate how and where the battle would progress. The Battle of Austerlitz was a perfect example of this maneuver. Napoleon withdrew from a strong position to draw his opponent forward and tempt him into a flank attack, weakening his center. This allowed the French army to split the allied army and gain victory. […]
 
One of the major components in Napoleon's arsenal of weaponry was his artillery. With the development and improvement of combat weapons throughout the Seven Years' War prior to Napoleon, artillery had expanded to almost every European country, including France with 12-lb, and 8-lb cannons. "The Gribeauval guns, developed between 1765 and 1774, were 12-, 8-, 6- and 4-pounders with 6- and 8-inch howitzers."
 
This style of gun was the artillery of choice for Napoleon, considering they were lighter by one third than the cannons of any other country. For example, the barrel of the British 12-pounder weighed 3,150 pounds, and the gun with carriage and limber about 6,500 pounds. The Gribeauval 12-lb barrels weighed 2,174 pounds and the gun with carriage and limber 4,367 pounds. Since Napoleon insisted on speed and mobility in conducting his maneuvers, this lighter cannon provided the flexibility he desired. Along with the artillery, the army had vast quantities of mortars, furnace bombs, grape and canister shots, all of which provided substantial support fire.”
 
This is, unfortunately, somewhat technical stuff. It can be hard to get at what’s important and what’s not.
 
But let’s try to untangle it.
 
“With the advent of cheap small arms and the rise of the drafted citizen soldier, army sizes increased rapidly to become mass forces”  – prior to the rise of cheaply mass-produced small arms weapons (rifles and handguns), it was very expensive and time-consuming to train soldiers; to be a soldier was a highly specialized role.
 
In particular, early gunpowder was not much better than archery – but a master archer might take 3-5 years to train, whereas a conscript with modern gunpowder light arms could be trained in a few weeks to a few months. This meant that many more people would take the battlefield, and battles grew much larger than before.
 
The French military innovator Gribeauval brought the manufacturing technologies of standardization and replaceable parts to artillery – a little before Napoleon’s time, he standardized the French armory on just a few types of standard heavy canons, howitzers, and mortars.
 
The heavy artillery got lighter and smaller… not to a huge degree, but just enough that it was more mobile. Suddenly, smaller teams of horses and men could pull artillery up a hill quickly. Whereas canon had been used for a long time in defending castle walls and in slow sieges, during Napoleon’s time it was possible to move artillery around the battlefield reasonably quickly, and use it to breach opponents’ lines and central positions.
 
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMBINED ARMS DOCTRINES
 
That’s the technological background.
 
So what? The Napoleonic era is over, and the majority of us will never serve in the military or as soldiers in any sort of way. Why should we care?
 
Well, I contend that the general mental models and practices of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington can be studied and learned from, in order to make us more effective in our own professions and non-military affairs.
 
Resources are always limited, and to achieve things in the world, we have to deploy our resources well. Napoleon, and later Wellington, were among the best in history in seeing how the technological, social, and economic landscapes had changed – and how to use limited reasons much more effectively. Combined Arms  was a large piece of this puzzle.
 
Notably, I think Combined Arms  requires the four basic steps that can be learned and applied outside of the military context –
 
1. Experimentation, theorizing, tradeoffs
2. Codification, doctrine, training
3. Building of repertoire
4. Leverage, deploying strength on opportunity/weakness
 
***
 
POINT #1: EXPERIMENTATION
 
Outside of our basic human instincts, everything we do has to be learned.
 
We often forget this.
 
When you observe any modern institution – a hospital, a railroad, a military base – it seems to be running well. It seems like “things are the way are.”
 
We often forget that these institutions were once completely unknown, and they had to be discovered through experimentation and built from scratch.

This is most true in an era with new and changing technologies; that is, an era like the one we now live in.
 
In May 1779, at the age of 20 years old, Napoleon entered into the French military academy at Brienne-le-Chateau; upon graduation, he trained for a year at the elite French Ecole Militaire academy in Paris.
 
The French seem to have grasped the significance of artillery sooner than most other European military traditions, and one of the largest debates at the military academies was on whether artillery should be dispersed  or concentrated .
 
Meaning, if you have 10,000 soldiers broken into 10 groups of 1,000 soldiers, and you have 60 artillery guns, would it be better to assign 6 pieces of artillery to each group, or would you be better placing all 60 pieces of artillery with a single group with immense firepower?
 
A common view, before Napoleon, was that dispersed  artillery was the way. Each group could use some artillery to weaken and soften their opposition before combat.
 
It was only through a mix of experimentation that the better could be found. Eventually, Napoleon settled on concentrating artillery heavily in a few small groups, and using those heavily-armed groups to cause breakthroughs in the opponent’s lines.
 
But again – as logical as this sounds, now , it was not obvious before experimentation and trying different ways of doing things. Each method had tradeoffs, and you had to develop strategies and maneuvers that would take advantage of the way you chose.
 
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POINT #2: CODIFICATION, DOCTRINE, AND TRAINING
 
One of the largest impediments to Combined Arms  is that every different type of military service has its own terms of language and its own subtly different way of doing things. Cavalry officers would have a very different culture than artillery officers, and would use different language, different standards of timing, different tactics and preferred ways of doing things.
 
In Limit Breaks #4: Automation , we already discussed the need to be standardize  in order to be able to automate procedures.
 
In military terms, they needed to codify doctrine  – Napoleon needed his different branches of military service to work together, and to train and standardize his way of doing things.
 
From “ The Success of Napoleon ”  –
 
“Napoleon essentially borrowed the divisional formation […] He stressed the need for greater mobility and advocated the use of divisional formations. It was through the use of divisional formations that Napoleon revolutionized strategy. Armies would now be composed of detachable parts that could engage the enemy alone until the rest of the army came up in support, which consisted of both infantry and artillery […] As a result of implementing divisional formations, generalship was made more complicated and staff work became more important, as well as the need for highly detailed maps that would need to show terrain features and road networks. […]
 
Even though Napoleon had implemented the use of divisional formations, armies during this time period would drastically increase in size due to conscription. These conscription based armed forces in France would number over a half a million men. In order to effectively command these large numbers of troops, Napoleon would implement permanent army corps within the French army. This organizational unit became essential for administration and command and controlling these large numbers of troops. The corps formation would be utilized similarly as the division, which it would be a combined arms organization composed of infantry, artillery and cavalry.”
 
Napoleon codified  the different mix of tactics and strategy that his commanders and soldiers would operate within, created new types of permanent army structures, and found and promoted excellent officers to lead these new types of military units, trained in the new methods of war.
 
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POINT #3: BUILDING OF REPERTOIRE
 
From the Apple dictionary –
 
repertoire
noun
• a stock of plays, dances, or pieces that a company or a performer knows or is prepared to perform.
• the whole body of items that are regularly performed: the mainstream concert repertoire.
• a stock of skills or types of behavior that a person habitually uses: his repertoire of threats, stares, and denigratory gestures.
 
The concept of repertoire  is one that’s endlessly fascinated me – it’s a set of common moves and maneuvers that you can competently do.

Early in his military career, Napoleon faced weak opposition, and thus his errors – and he made plenty of errors early – did not lead to fatal consequences.
 
Instead, these unpunished errors taught him new ways of doing things.

“Napoleon would once again borrow these ideas from one of his teachers. Pierre de Bourcet, a chief of staff of the royal armies in both the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War, as well as the director of the school for staff officers at Grenoble. He taught that an enemy could be misled by moves of various units which appeared to be disconnected, but which were actually part of a unified plan. The overall aim of this strategy was to compel the enemy to divide their forces and then to attack them while separated before it could be reinforced. It was through this philosophy that would form the basis of Napoleonic strategy.  Napoleon would later refine this strategy by accident at the Battle of Marengo in 1800, where the battle was won for Napoleon by the opportune appearance of a division that had failed to concentrate prior to battle.  Thereafter, Napoleon would often hold reserves back until the enemy forces were worn out, which was when he would send in his reserves.”
 
-- “The Success of Napleon”, emphasis added
 
There is a large difference between knowing something in theory, and being able to do it consistently.
 
By being constantly at war, the French Napoleonic armies became battle-hardened and able to quickly execute complicated maneuvers. If not for the dual disasters of the overreaching coup in Spain and invasion of Russia, the French armies might have remained nearly invulnerable against their opposition.
 
Napoleon’s repertoire, and his troops’ repertoire, was developed through combat. By being constantly at war, they mastered how to apply the codified doctrines of combined arms and how to best deploy the new technologies of the day.
 
Most historians credit the invasion of Russia with bringing Napoleon’s downfall, but Napoleon himself pointed to the long-term guerilla war in Spain as his biggest problem.
 
This is true – aside from tying down his best troops, it did something else: it gave a theater of the battle for the British to fight the lesser commanders trained in the Napoleonic style of war for years.
 
The Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, also made many large mistakes in his first campaigns against the French in Spain and Portugal – but Napoleon was not there himself to rout and destroy the British; Wellington was facing lesser French commanders.
 
During the war in Spain, Wellington’s troops learned and built their repertoire and learned how to face down French artillery, cavalry charges, and battlefield maneuvers designed to surround and destroy them.
 
Note well – facing lesser opposition and easier challenges at the beginning of their military careers led both Napoleon and Wellington build repertoire  that they would later build their successes upon.
 
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POINT #4: STRENGTH ON WEAKNESS/OPPORTUNITY
 
Finally, the doctrine of Combined Arms  comes together by deploying your relative strengths against an adversary’s weakness. (In non-conflict situations, this is deploying your strength against the best opportunities.)
 
For most of his career until the blunderous invasion of Russia, when Napoleon outnumbered adversaries he would look to surround them; when he was outnumbered, he would pick a weak spot in their line and drive very hard at it.

Early in the Napoleonic Wars, it was always surprising and confusing when an outnumbered Napoleon would take the offensive and drive hard at an army that outnumbered him – by doing so, and deploying most of his artillery at a weak point, he would cause a breakthrough and cause the enemy’s battle formations to disintegrate, followed by rapidly having his cavalry and infantry pursue the disintegrated and fleeing adversary.
 
This is often described as taking a maneuver warfare  approach, as opposed to an attrition warfare  approach. Attrition warfare might be likened to two boxers who are just punchers, slugging it out and trading blows until one of them falls over.
 
Maneuver warfare is dancing around the ring, deflecting heavy blows, and looking for an opportunity to land a devastating attack when the opponent is caught on the wrong foot.
 
This is critical for breaking through limits – if you sit and “slug it out” with an adversary or a poor opportunity, it drains resources and is very expensive. By looking for the weakest spot – or the easiest opportunity – your resources can be utilized to much greater extent.
 
Before Russia, at least, Napoleon recognized that he didn’t have to defeat the entire enemy army in full combat – he needed to find one critical spot and break it apart, and then the enemy would disintegrate.
 
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PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
 
Any time that technology is changing very quickly, there are many opportunities.

We live in just such an era.
 
I contend the basic understanding of Combined Arms  can be applied to one’s personal life, career, and projects –
 
1. Experimentation, theorizing, tradeoffs
2. Codification, doctrine, training
3. Building of repertoire
4. Leverage, deploying strength on opportunity/weakness
 
The first step is probably the hardest, or rather, the one that’s hardest to define and explain well. By definition, there are no formulas here; as soon as there are formulas, they get codified, trained, developed into repertoire, and deployed – at which point in time, they aren’t major unknown opportunities any more.
 
It’s worth remembering that 1997 was only 20 years ago. This is before the dot-com mania and dot-com crash, and much has happened since then.
 
There’s dozens if not hundreds of small and large technologies that have emerged and refined over the past 20 years – broadband internet, wireless internet (WiFi), smartphones, App Stores, syncing technologies like Dropbox, better databases like Firebase and RestDB, coding frameworks like Ruby on Rails, easily-deployed web software packages like Wordpress. Streaming audio and video, social media, search engines and pay-per-click advertising, marketing and sales automation software, customer-relationship management software like Salesforce, online banking, reliable GPS in smartphones, high-quality maps like Google Maps, user-generated review sites like Yelp and Goodreads, more elegant project management and communications software like Basecamp, Trello, and Slack… the list goes on and on.
 
Any single one of these technologies might be something a career or company is built upon. It might be something brand new like a new type of media company built around podcasting and streaming video, or it might be a better form of distributed team built around Slack, Skype, and Trello.
 
This is without even looking forwards at emerging technologies like wearable devices, augmented reality and better virtual reality, cheaper and more innovative uses of genetics for medical prediction, blockchain and cryptocurrencies…
 
… a lot of things are happening. It’s hard to say which of them will be important; some of them may be more hype than substance, but there’s no doubt that many of them will change the fundamental ways we do things.
 
We live in an era where experimentation for the sake of experimentation will pay huge gains. If you’re not a technologist at all in 2017, why aren’t you? This is one of the eras in which technology is changing and evolving faster than ever before, and from it will come many opportunities. Building a curiosity and experimentation around emerging technologies is very valuable.

To be less fancy about it, “playing around with new tech” is very valuable right now.
 
But a lot of people play around with tech, and do not get much gains from it – once you discover something that seems to work very well and is very promising, you’ll want to then start codifying and standardizing how you and your colleagues use it going forwards, and training it into doctrine.
 
From there, taking on a set of small projects using new technologies and methods is the way to develop repertoire  – so that you can quickly and consistently deploy new methods for getting large gains.
 
The strongest repertoire is one that combines the use of new technologies and new ways of doing things in a way that’s stronger than any individual pieces.
 
Once that all that starts coming together, it then makes sense to look for the areas where you’ll get the largest gains from your new advantages with the least effort and lowest costs. This is placing strength on opportunity.
 
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CONCLUDING
 
I won’t make remarks about hubris and Napoleon’s overreaching and arrogance – I would simply point you back at the old series Vantages , now in Machina , about Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s inability to stop overreaching and consolidate his gains; his disastrous invasions of Korea and China, and the Toyotomi dynasty being overthrown as a result.

We have covered why people act foolishly and cannot stop; it is beyond this piece. Read the Vantages series for that perspective.
 
But it is worth noting that, though Wellington did not have perhaps quite as much innovative genius as Napoleon, he was still able to master Combined Arms through experimentation, codification, developing repertoire, and then placing strength on weakness at that critical Battle of Waterloo.
 
You don’t have to be the first in a field to develop a repertoire in that field – simply identifying the technological trends that are developing, experimenting to find the highest yield and best methods, codifying it, building it into repertoire, and then placing your strengths against relative weaknesses and opportunities – this is ever and always a way to greatly outperform limited resources that are at hand, and to break through various limits to more performance and more achievement.