Military Review English Edition July-August 2016 | Page 89

VERDUN Biography Maj. Robert P. Chamberlain, U.S. Army, is an operations research/systems analysis officer at the Future Warfare Division of the Army Capabilities Integration Center at Fort Eustis, Virginia. He holds a BA from the University of Kansas, an MSc from Oxford University, and a PhD from Columbia University. His assignments include deployments to Iraq, command in the 1st Infantry Division, and teaching at the United States Military Academy. Notes 1. This is connected to a larger trend in German strategic thought, the belief in Vernichtungsschlacht, or “The Battle of Annihilation.” For the role of this concept in pre-World War I planning, see Jehuda L. Wallach, The Dogma of the Battle of Annihilation: The Theories of Clausewitz and Schlieffen and Their Impact on the German Conduct of the Two World Wars (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 1986). 2. This concept of operations, known as the Schlieffen Plan, is well documented and widely discussed. A particularly readable text about the opening phase of the war is Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Presidio, 1962). The authoritative text on the military aspects of the campaign was first published in 1935 and has been rereleased under a new imprint: Sewell Tyng, The Campaign of the Marne (1935; repr., Yardley: Westholme Publishing, 2007). 3. Tyng, Marne, 25–33. Chapter 3 offers comparisons of the French and German armies and an excellent overview of their organization, equipment, and operations. 4. While this essay limits itself to the German side of the conflict, for an excellent account of French strategic evolution, see Robert A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 5. Robert T. Foley, German Strategy and the Path to Verdun (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The roots of this “exhaustion strategy,” or ermattungsstrategie, is the subject of chapter 2 of Foley’s excellent account of Falkenhayn and his place in the larger debates among prewar German strategists. 6. Ibid., 140. 7. Ibid., 153. 8. Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71 (1965; repr., London: Penguin, 2007). 9. Foley, German Strategy, 146. 10. Erich von Falkenhayn, The German General Staff and Its Decisions, 1914–1916 (1920; repr., London: Forgotten Books, 2012), 240. 11. Ibid., 249. While his memoirs are authentic, the preceding two passages are drawn from a letter he says he delivered to the Kaiser around Christmas 1915. No other evidence of this document has emerged, and while his memoirs likely reflect his thinking at the time, historians now believe the Christmas Memorandum to be a literary device. See Foley, German Strategy, 188. MILITARY REVIEW  July-August 2016 12. Paul Jankowski, Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 14–15. Jankowski, a revisionist historian, offers an alternative view, arguing that Verdun only became especially important symbolically after the battle and was not particularly important beforehand. 13. Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (1962; repr., London: Penguin, 1993); Jankowski, Verdun, 41. While his account of Falkenhayn has been superseded by later scholarship based on the release of German records captured by the Soviets, Horne’s account of French preparations and behavior around Verdun remains eminently readable. 14. Foley, German Strategy, 10. 15. Jankowski, Verdun, 41.There remains scholarly debate about what, precisely, Falkenhayn intended to happen, and there is certainty that there was debate among his subordinates. 16. Foley, German Strategy, 235-36. 17. U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff ( JCOS), The National Military Strategy of the United States of America 2015 ( June 2015), 6, accessed 12 April 2016, http://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/ Publications/National_Military_Strategy_2015.pdf. 18. JCOS, 7 and 12. This language also appears on page 11. 19. JCOS, Capstone Concept for Joint Operations: Joint Force 2020 (10 September 2012), 4, accessed 12 April 2016, http:// www.dtic.mil/doctrine/concepts/ccjo_jointforce2020.pdf. 20. U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Pamphlet 525-3-1, The U.S. Army Operating Concept: Win¬ in a Complex World, 2020–2040 (Fort Eustis, VA: TRADOC, 31 October 2014), iii and 18, accessed 12 April 2016, http://www.tradoc. army.mil/tpubs/pams/tp525-3-1.pdf. 21. Ibid. 22. U.S. Navy, Navy Operating Concept for Joint Operations (May 2003), 13–14, accessed 20 April 2016, http://www.dtic.mil/ docs/citations/ADA524820. 23. U.S. Air Force, Air Force Future Operating Concept: A View of the Air Force in 2035 (September 2015), 7, accessed 12 April 2016, http://www.af.mil/Portals/1/images/airpower/AFFOC.pdf. 24. Ibid., 31. 25. Dianne Chamberlain, Cheap Threats: Why the United States Struggles to Coerce Weak States (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016). 87