SECTION A

‘TORCH’:

THE LANDINGS IN NORTH AFRICA JULY 1942–MAY 1943

Operation ‘Torch’, a series of Anglo-American landings in North Africa in November 1942 designed to clear the southern shore of the Mediterranean of Axis forces, was a great success, but its origins were marked by deep division between American and British military leaders. The source of their dispute lay in their nations’ differing strategic traditions. The Americans plunged straight for the enemy's heart but the British preferred an indirect approach, wearing down their opponent in a series of marginal campaigns, which used the superiority of British sea power. In 1942 the Americans, already distracted by a desire to seek vengeance in the Pacific for the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, also sought an early end to the European war. Through operation ‘Bolero’ they proposed to build up forces in Britain with which to invade northern Europe, either in ‘Sledgehammer’, a diversionary invasion of western France in 1942 designed to relieve pressure on a collapsing Soviet Union, or in ‘Roundup’, a full-scale landing across the Channel in 1943, which intended a rapid march on Berlin. The British thought that the German army and air force were too strong for any invasion the western alliance could mount in 1942 or 1943; ministers, military leaders and public opinion feared a repeat of the Western Front's bloody stalemate of 1914–18. They pressed for an attritional campaign which would weaken German military and aerial power, leading to a return to the continent in 1944, when German strength in the air and on the ground would be more manageable. They had invested heavily, in prestige as well as military resources, in the Mediterranean, where their position in the first half of 1942 was parlous; a successful campaign in that region would restore British morale, prestige, control – and her economic and diplomatic position in the post-war Middle East and Balkans. Almost every British minister and service chief supported the idea of an early Mediterranean expedition, Cunningham included [21, 25]. It was President Franklin Roosevelt, interested in securing control of Morocco to aid the Battle of the Atlantic and realising that the British were unalterably opposed to a landing in France in 1942, who tipped the strategic balance in favour of ‘Torch’ in July 1942.

Through textually grounded "reverse engineering" of Sun Tzu’s ideas, this study challenges widely held assumptions. Sun Tzu is more straightforward, less "crafty," than often imagined. The concepts are more structural, less aphoristic. The fourteen themes approach provides a way of addressing Sun Tzu’s tendency to speak to multiple, often shifting, audiences at once ("multivocality"). It also sheds light on Sun Tzu’s limitations, including a pervasive zero-sum mentality; focus mostly on conventional warfare; a narrow view of human nature. Sun Tzu’s enduring value is best sought in the text’s extensive attention to warfare’s information aspects, where Sun Tzu made timeless contributions having implications for modern information warfare and especially its human aspects (e.g., algorithm sabotage by subverted insiders). The text points opportunities for small, agile twenty-first-century strategic actors to exploit cover provided by modern equivalents to Sun Tzu’s "complex terrain" (digital systems, social networks, complex organizations, and complex statutes) to run circles around large, sluggish, established institutional actors, reaping great profit from applying Sun Tzu’s insights.

Often regarded as the oldest surviving work on strategy, the Sun Tzu text has influence in many quarters today. This study organizes Sun Tzu’s ideas under fourteen thematic headings. It also clarifies Sun Tzu’s limitations and blind spots. Building on Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, USMC (Ret.)’s translation, this study analyzes Sun Tzu from three standpoints: Sun Tzu (1), Sun Tzu’s ideas in their original Warring States Chinese context; Sun Tzu (2), Sun Tzu’s ideas applied to warfare in a military sense in other times and places; Sun Tzu (3), generalizations of those ideas, including to cyber warfare and other twenty-first-century strategic competitions. Whereas Sun Tzu (1) analysis addresses ways in which the text is a product of its times, intertwined with traditional Chinese cultural milieux, Sun Tzu (2) and (3) analyses, often building on analogical thinking, map universalistic aspects of Sun Tzu’s insights into war and conflict, strategy, logistics, information, intelligence, and espionage. Those analyses also identify ways in which Sun Tzu’s thinking has relevance to gaining strategic advantage in twenty-first-century conflicts.

Starting off substantive engagement with Sun Tzu with a focus on calculation serves a positive purpose. It is a way of emphasizing to contemporary audiences that there is more to Sun Tzu than being tricky or unorthodox – the strands of his way of war that readers, at least Western ones, widely note and often lionize. In present usage, the umbrella term “calculation” is intended to serve as a flexible rubric capable of covering intendedly rational judgments of more than one kind, many intuitive, others more formally structured.

This chapter has two parts. Adopting an accretionist perspective on the Sun Tzu text – regarding it as developing over an extended period with no single author – the first part provides basic background on the Warring States era in which the text took shape. It analyzes an early Chinese battle illustrating Sun Tzu principles, then ends with discussion of logistics aspects of Warring States warfare. Shifting from battlefields to texts, the second part provides comparative overview of different extant copies of the Sun Tzu text, some traditionally transmitted, one archaeologically recovered. Some textual issues aside, the Sun Tzu text is in relatively good shape for a text of its antiquity. The second part ends with overview of a set of eleven traditional commentators on the text; perspective on the sprawling modern Sun Tzu literature; and brief orientation to the Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), one of China’s great pre-modern vernacular novels. Although this novel of Ming dynasty vintage is not properly part of the Sun Tzu tradition, in modern times many Chinese have been exposed to Sun-Tzu-esque thinking through the Sanguo’s vivid, albeit fictionalized, stories.