Disunited Fronts: Military Strategy and Multifront Conflict

• In Event: Military Power and Strategy

Abstract

How do states fight multifront wars? Across history, the prospect of multifront war has plagued the minds of statesmen and generals. Numerous wars have grown from a fear of fighting on multiple fronts or the opportunistic exploitation of an adversary’s entanglements. Today, with crises or outright wars in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, major powers like the United States, Russia, China, and India are all increasingly at risk of having to fight on multiple fronts. Fighting in multiple geographic locations forces a state to divide its military, making it more difficult to achieve victory and increasing the risks of military defeat. It also forces state leaders to make tradeoffs in which front they will prioritize, and how they will allocate their scarce military resources. This dissertation seeks to understand how and why state leaders prioritize amongst the different theaters of a multifront conflict. I argue that front prioritization decisions within multifront conflicts are driven by an interaction between military realities and domestic political pressure. I theorize that military realities, in the form of the existence of clear and major vulnerabilities or opportunities for the state, will first dictate prioritization in circumstances in which there is only one front where either the state or its opponent are seriously vulnerable to attack. In these situations, the optimal strategy for the state is to concentrate their resources against that vulnerable front so that they can either defend their greatest vulnerabilities or exploit the vulnerabilities of an opponent. However, often there will be multiple fronts in which the state is vulnerable, or in which it can try to exploit weaknesses of its opponents. In these circumstances, military strategy does not dictate a single optimal prioritization, and domestic politics comes to the fore as the most important factor. When military realities are strategically indeterminate, then the existence of domestic political pressure to concentrate on one front or another will determine front prioritization. If there is strong domestic pressure to concentrate on only one front, state leaders will prioritization that theater; if there are multiple competing domestic pressures to focus on different fronts, then state leaders will risk of dividing their forces for simultaneous offensives on both fronts in order to satisfy domestic pressure. I test this theory in decision-making in four conflicts across the 20th Century: Germany from 1914-1918; India from 1947-1949; and Israel from 1967-1973.

Author

• Wright Smith, Massachusetts Institute of Technology