Picture yourself on a battlefield. It’s cold, the snow covers the ground, yet the sun shines brightly overhead. You gaze over the landscape and at your fellow soldiers. The prospects for the future seem grim. Your enemy outnumbers you in troops and equipment by more than two to one. Options are limited, and a single wrong move could lead to the downfall of you and your comrades. The only advantage at your disposal is the determination of your outmatched troops as you strive to outmanoeuvre the enemy’s overwhelming army before you.
You might reasonably assume this image refers to Ukraine in 2022. However, the scenario mirrors what the Prussian Army and Frederick the Great encountered during the Third Silesian War (1756 to 1763). Against overwhelming odds, Frederick and his army triumphed over a coalition of continental powers, resulting in a stalemate and eventual peace treaty with the Habsburg monarchy. Frederick managed to overcome his numerical inferiority, securing victories in several battles against a significantly larger regional coalition, effectively employing a strategy of denial of the Habsburg’s objectives.
This article explores the insights gained from this case study for how the Australian Defence Force might confront a numerically superior and more powerful adversary in its near region. It argues that with sufficient strategic patience and smaller, audacious and offensively minded forces operating on interior lines of communication, the ADF can achieve local advantage. However, these small forces must have acquired a mastery of combat in the littoral terrain to Australia’s north and will need to be kept concentrated. This will then achieve a negative strategic aim (in other words, a stalemate) as a pathway to victory against a markedly more powerful foe.
Learning from Frederick: leveraging local advantage to overcome a superior adversary
Much is made these days of the concept of asymmetry. The contemporary discussion tends to focus on technological silver bullets and the inescapable asymmetries between the guerrilla and the counterinsurgent. The original and often neglected point of asymmetry in war is, as American Civil War General Nathan Bedford Forrest decreed, to ‘get there firstest with the mostest.’ An aphorism often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, ‘God is on the side of the big battalions’, expresses the great advantage that derives from the ability to bring overwhelming force to bear on a smaller portion of the enemy in battle.
Frederick the Great’s triumphs were stemmed largely from his ability to create local numerical asymmetry in battle. His tendency to bring superior numbers of Prussian troops to bear against enemy armies much larger than his own resulted from several factors. Despite his overall inferiority in numbers compared to his enemies, Frederick often acted pre-emptively and offensively, enabling him to bring larger numbers of troops to bear against only parts of the much larger enemy forces before they could concentrate against him. To this end, Frederick conditioned his army to march faster and for longer than the armies of his enemies, often catching them by surprise. Frederick drilled his troops in the difficult technique known as the oblique order, which also created local asymmetry against a larger or similarly sized foe in the confusion of battle.
In the Battles of Rossbach and Leuthan during the Third Silesian War, the Prussian Army was outmatched, facing enemy forces that were double their number and wielded superior weaponry. At Rossbach, Frederick’s troops executed a surprise assault by pretending to attack the Austrian right flank while concentrating his main force on the left. Similarly, at Leuthen, Frederick was able to concentrate the greater part of his smaller army against a smaller, yet numerically superior, section of the Austrian line. In both encounters, Frederick’s enemies suffered greater losses than the Prussians, and although Prussia ultimately found itself in a stalemate at the conclusion of the war, it retained control of Silesia and negotiated a treaty on favourable terms.
Frederick’s genius rested on his recognition of two major strategic advantages. First, he understood that the proximity of Silesia to Prussia enabled the Prussian Army to operate on interior lines of communication, meaning his troops needed to cover less ground than his enemies’ as both sides sought positional advantage over the other. Second, Frederick saw that he did not need to defeat his enemies and win the war decisively. Success required merely that he did not lose. Stalemate and negotiation on favourable terms was enough. These factors both demanded and enabled Frederick to husband his forces over a long period, and to the extent he could, seek battle only in the most favourable circumstances. It was, in essence, a strategy of denial.
The Bird Forces in 1941: A failure to use local advantage
Australia’s modest armed forces and the enormous number of locations in Australia’s north that may need defending present a challenge similar to Prussia’s in the Third Silesian War. Australia’s own experience early in the Pacific theatre of World War II offers a significant lesson in the consequences of ignoring Frederick’s example.
In 1941, the Australian Army stationed troops along the northern approaches to the continent to defend what was known as the Malaya Barrier. The Australian Imperial Force (AIF) 8th Division, one of four divisions, along with other AIF and militia units (known as the Bird Forces) covered a vast area, forming a 7,500 km arc from Malaya, Singapore, Timor (Sparrow Force), Ambon (Gull Force), Port Moresby (50th Brigade) and New Britain and New Ireland (Lark Force) to Nauru (Wren Force) and Ocean Island (Heron Force). The Bird Forces were each based around an AIF infantry battalion but did not operate as a combined arms team.
While the Australian government would withdraw Wren and Heron forces, ceding Nauru and Ocean Island to Imperial Japanese occupation, it refused to abandon the other harbours and airfields across the northern approaches. Australia thought their importance for the defence of Singapore and a potential counteroffensive into the North Pacific was too great. Due to insufficiency of naval and air support for defending or withdrawing the ground forces, the Bird Forces were easily isolated and destroyed. Imperial Japanese attacks on the Bird Forces resulted in more than 2,000 soldiers dying in battle or falling into captivity.
Australia learned valuable lessons from this experience and eventually secured local advantages. This learning was evident when Australian and US forces systematically dismantled isolated Imperial Japanese positions in the Pacific between 1943 and 1945. For Australia, this experience was most apparent in the fighting along the north coast of New Guinea.
Overcoming the odds in the Indo-Pacific
Frederick’s campaigns in Silesia offer some salient lessons for an Australian Defence Force preparing to fight against a major power close to Australia. The circumstances of such a war would likely mean Australia could take advantage of a negative strategic aim, seeking merely not to lose, and accepting that stalemate would be enough for strategic success. Australian forces would have the advantage of operating on interior lines of communication against a foe operating on extended exterior lines. Tactical and operational excellence in tropical and jungle littorals, including the right kinds of specialised materiel, particularly a combination that enabled speed of movement of sufficient forces to establish fortified forward defences or to attack before the enemy was thoroughly prepared and fortified, would give great advantage.
Frederick’s example also offers a couple of important cautions. His success depended on Prussia’s capacity to endure a long war of several years’ duration, which included logistical preparations and a national capacity to endure the harsh social consequences and privations of war. It required strategic patience in equal measure to audacity and offensive mindedness.
Perhaps most importantly, the essence of Frederick’s success was concentration of force. He simply did not divide his relatively modest force too broadly, seeking to use speed of movement to his advantage rather than waiting passively for his foe. The tactical defence is usually the superior tactical form, whereas the strategic offence is normally the superior strategic form. Frederick could not defend everywhere without decisively weakening his forces and creating opportunities for his concentrated enemies to gain local numerical superiority against them. So Frederick kept his army mobile and capable of concentration when and where the opportunities presented themselves.
It is easy to acknowledge that warfare in Frederick’s era was different to warfare today. Yet while the character of war has changed, its fundamental nature remains the same, and history remains our greatest teacher. The Prussian philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz observes, ‘war is a nothing but a duel on a larger scale.’ It is dynamic and interactive in the same way a wrestling match is. Tactics is the material of strategy. Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu cautions that ‘strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory.’
There is an ever-present risk in peacetime of losing touch with the practical essence of strategy. Frederick reminds us that strategy is an active thing, not a theory or a plan. Whereas the failure of the Bird Forces is a caution against this tendency, Australia’s successful offensives against the Imperial Japanese along the north coast of New Guinea affords an important insight into the way to fight a powerful foe close to home.
Frederick’s campaigns in Silesia suggest Australia could take advantage of a negative strategic aim and seek stalemate as a pathway to victory. Interior lines of communication offer another important advantage, and mastery of the littoral terrain to Australia’s north another. Patience, audacity and offensive mindedness in equal measure seems to be essential too. Frederick’s example also cautions against expectations of a short war and the folly of dispersing one’s forces too broadly. Concentration of force, after all, was the essence of Frederick’s genius. As Frederick himself said, ‘He, who defends everything, defends nothing.’