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).
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