Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface to the First Edition
- Introduction: Military Effectiveness Twenty Years After
- Maps
- 1 The Effectiveness of Military Organization
- 2 Britain in the First World War
- 3 The Dynamics of Necessity: German Military Policy during the First World War
- 4 American Military Effectiveness in the First World War
- 5 Italy during the First World War
- 6 The French Army in the First World War
- 7 Japan, 1914–18
- 8 Imperial Russia's Forces at War
- 9 Military Effectiveness in the First World War
- Index
8 - Imperial Russia's Forces at War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface to the First Edition
- Introduction: Military Effectiveness Twenty Years After
- Maps
- 1 The Effectiveness of Military Organization
- 2 Britain in the First World War
- 3 The Dynamics of Necessity: German Military Policy during the First World War
- 4 American Military Effectiveness in the First World War
- 5 Italy during the First World War
- 6 The French Army in the First World War
- 7 Japan, 1914–18
- 8 Imperial Russia's Forces at War
- 9 Military Effectiveness in the First World War
- Index
Summary
Introduction
For the professionals of any nation's armed forces, the challenge of battle traditionally has been the only true test of their troops' effectiveness. Yet some crude equation of effectiveness with victory tells us very little. An army may wage war skillfully and even successfully, but victory may elude its grasp thanks to any number of diplomatic, political, social, or other factors. The true ‘combat effectiveness’ of any military establishment thus must be judged in a broad political-diplomatic-strategic context. Only then can one examine how soldiers deal with concrete situations, often unforeseen, within a network of constraints over which they have often little or no control. Of course, one may argue that the professionals should have foreseen both the situations and the constraints. Even so, history shows that wars have a nasty habit of taking unexpected turns that few would have predicted beforehand.
For a political leadership, on the other hand, the real test of their forces' effectiveness may be the extent to which they deter wars. Therefore the peacetime relations between the military and their political masters may be fraught with tensions about the armed forces' ultimate purpose, tensions that do much to shape the army that eventually enters a conflict. Similarly, the virtues demanded of commanders in peace may be very different from those needed on the battlefield.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Military Effectiveness , pp. 249 - 328Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
- 2
- Cited by