Margin of Victory: Five Battles that
Changed the Face of Modern War
Douglas Macgregor. Naval Institute
Press, 2016. 268 pages. $34.95.
By Allen Boyer
This book is hammered together from
two sermons and five cautionary tales, and it holds up marvelously. Author
Douglas Macgregor, an Army tank officer who fought in Operation Desert Storm,
touched off a fierce debate with his first book, Breaking the Phalanx (1997).
Breaking the Phalanx was controversial because it called for
slaughtering some of the Pentagon’s most sacred cows: closing regional military
commands, scrapping the Navy’s carrier program, and buying attack helicopters
rather than Air Force support planes. Margin of Victory is less
controversial, but it can be just as provocative.
Following Clausewitz, Macgregor
focuses on “wars of decision,” conflicts that change the shape of the political
and economic world: “wars the United States cannot afford to lose.” He argues
that we cannot predict against whom the United States will fight, or where, or
when; we can bear in mind only that the next war of decision will inevitably
occur; and we must concentrate on winning the first fight. Nor can we afford to
wait, he warns: “Wars are decided in the decades before they begin, not by the
sudden appearance of a new, technological ‘silver bullet’ or the presence of a
few strong personalities in the senior ranks during a single battle.”
The first battle that Macgregor
discusses, the British Expeditionary Force’s defense of Mons in 1914, is a
study in flashback. Mons was a fighting retreat – very nearly a disaster. But
the point of Mons, Macgregor finds, is that the British had a force that could
stand up against German infantry and artillery. The British Army of Queen
Victoria’s day fought tribal warriors and Boer militia. Its proud regiments
were unprepared to fight a well-trained, well-equipped modern army. From 1905
to 1912, Sir Richard Haldane had struggled to build the B.E.F., an elite force
of seven divisions (six infantry, one cavalry) that could deploy quickly
against any foe in the world. At Mons, Haldane’s vision was vindicated; the
B.E.F. held the French flank, preventing German victory.
The Battle of Shanghai, which raged
for four months in the fall of 1937, was reckless and thoughtless – a bloody
opening to a war for which neither side was ready. To gain control of Shanghai,
Chiang Kai-shek put at risk his army. Even when surprise was lost, the Chinese
futilely threw division after division into the attack, wasting units trained
for years by German officers. The Japanese landed an army starved by years of
financial cutbacks. They had tanks, artillery, and aircraft – but too few. The
Japanese had “failed to change enough to achieve a true margin of victory,”
Macgregor writes. Neither side could overwhelm the other. The Japanese pressed
on into China, while the war grew increasingly bitter. The battle to control
Shanghai ended with the destruction of Nanking.
The third battle, the Byelorussian
campaign of 1944, features two armies that pursued different paths of reform.
The Wehrmacht had developed the tactics of the blitzkrieg – calling down
artillery and dive-bombers on enemy strongpoints, punching open the way for
tanks and fast-moving infantry. However, German success with these new tactics
concealed the weakness of German logistics; supplies for panzer divisions were
pulled by draft horses. The Russians looked further ahead, to a concept of
“deep battle” – broad strikes far into enemy territory, backed by up strategic
reserves and immense supply chains. Russian resources, deployed by a unitary
command (“a Soviet marshal could [order] in minutes what took General
Dwight D. Eisenhower months of negotiations with US and British air force
commanders to do: unleash 700 long-range bombers”) won the day.
The shortest battle described in
this book, between the United States Army and the Iraqi Republican Guard, is
one in which Macgregor fought. On the afternoon of February 26, 1991, at a map
gridline called 73 Easting, Cougar Squadron of the Second Armored Cavalry
Regiment swept the desert clear of Iraqi forces, wrecking more than 70 tanks,
70 armored vehicles, 44 trucks, and 32 bunkers. This was the swift, devastating
tank battle of which the Army had dreamed for fifty years – and yet it was not
decisive. War planners called a halt to Operation Desert Storm, leaving Saddam
Hussein in power.
Macgregor’s chapter on the Yom
Kippur War of 1973 tells how two different armies each played to its own
peculiar strength. Anwar Sadat, like Viscount Montgomery before Alamein,
trained his soldiers exhaustively and massed artillery to support and protect
them. He learned from Russian wartime experience in crossing rivers under fire.
He sneaked five Egyptian divisions into trenches on the west bank of the Suez
Canal, which was defended by only five Israeli battalions. When the Egyptians
stormed across the canal, the defenders panicked – but when the Israelis
regained their nerve, their daring brought the chance for a brilliant
counterstrike, their own attack across the canal. The Israeli drive into Egypt
could hardly be stopped, but the Egyptian beachhead in Sinai could not be
dislodged. The two armies fought each other to a standstill, from which
statesmen eventually forged a peace.
Margin of Victory is a meditation on military history. After his best
divisions were ruined, Chiang Kai-shek, who had gambled on capturing Shanghai,
became the wary, evasive, do-nothing despot whom General Stillwell despised.
The fact that Chiang could shift strategy so radically underlines the
unpredictability of war. Hitler’s generals and Stalin’s marshals both planned
to fight sweeping tank battles, and they ultimately fought sweeping tank
battles – ignoring casualties, since they answered to dictators, not voters.
Because armies will fight the kind of wars they prepare for, this history
suggests, the Army must choose carefully the kind of war it prepares for.
However, Margin of Victory is also a soldier’s pamphlet. Captain H.R.
McMaster, the young officer who commanded Eagle Troop of Cougar Squadron, the
spearhead of the attack at 73 Easting, is now Lieutenant-General McMaster, the
president’s National Security Adviser. A generation of soldiers have heard
Macgregor’s preaching, and may share his faith.
Allen Boyer (ΦBK, Vanderbilt University, 1977) is a lawyer and writer in New York City. His fifth book, “Rocky Boyer’s War: An Unvarnished History of the Air Blitz that Won the War in the Southwest Pacific,” will be published in May. Vanderbilt University is home to the Alpha of Tennessee Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
Allen Boyer (ΦBK, Vanderbilt University, 1977) is a lawyer and writer in New York City. His fifth book, “Rocky Boyer’s War: An Unvarnished History of the Air Blitz that Won the War in the Southwest Pacific,” will be published in May. Vanderbilt University is home to the Alpha of Tennessee Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
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