A Quick March Through the Modern Military Canon Quiz

Answer: lines of operations

Born in Switzerland, Antoine Henri Jomini (1779-1869) passed up a career in banking to pursue glory in the armies of Napoleonic France. For most of his very long life, Jomini was regarded as the most authoritative interpreter of Napoleonic strategy. His works such as "Précis de l'Art de la Guerre" ("Summary of the Art of War") stress the importance of choosing the right "line of operations" from an army's base to its objective point.

For example, "The great art of directing properly one's lines of operations consists then in combining his marches in such a manner as to seize the hostile communication, without losing his own."

Answer: fog of war

Arguably one of the top two military theorists of all time (alongside Sun Tzu), Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) entered the Prussian army at the age of 12 and served throughout the Napoleonic Wars, though for a while as a Russian officer because he disagreed with his own country's policy. Clausewitz's unfinished masterpiece "On War" was published posthumously in the 1830s.

The work is filled with ideas that have shaped today's military mind, including the confusion and uncertainty associated with armed conflict (the "fog of war") and the famous dictum that "war is the continuation of politics by other means."

Answer: sea power

Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) was an American naval officer. His books, most notably "The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1793" (1890), helped to inspire not just the United States but also Wilhelmine Germany and Imperial Japan to build up their fleets, acquire overseas colonies, and engage in naval arms races.

Answer: offensive à outrance

Offensive à outrance can be translated as "offensive to the utmost," an idea inspired in part by Colonel Ardant du Picq's earlier studies stressing the importance of morale in battle and in part by the philosopher Henri Bergson's concept of élan vitale. Louis Loyzeau de Grandmaison (1861-1915) was one of the most influential among a coterie of French officers who, in the run up to World War I, trumpeted the superiority of attack over defense. Needless to say, their ideas did nothing to make the Great War any less bloody. Grandmaison himself was killed while leading an infantry attack, a sacrifice to his own ideas.

Answer: aerial bombardment of "vital centers"

The Italian General Giulio Douhet (1869-1930) was the leading airpower theorist of the interwar period. In his magnum opus, "The Command of the Air" (1921), he argued that a nation's will to resist could be broken by aerial bombing of its major population centers.

In World War II, however, the terror bombing of civilian populations failed to bring Britain, China, or Germany to their knees (and it is arguable that in the case of Japan, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945 was no less influential than the two atomic bombs).

Answer: people's war

Mao Zedong (1893-1976) led the Chinese Communist Party's rural insurgency for more than two decades against Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government, against Japanese invaders, and then against the Nationalists again, achieving nationwide victory in 1949.

In works such as "On Guerrilla Warfare" and "On Protracted War", Mao stressed the political dimension of the struggle and the need to win the active support of the peasant masses.

Answer: the indirect approach

As a junior officer in the British Army, Basil Henry Liddell Hart (1895-1970) was gassed on the Somme in 1916. He spent the rest of his career arguing against the massive, costly frontal attacks characteristic of World War I, which he blamed on the malign influence of Clausewitz, "the Mahdi of mass." Liddell Hart's solution, "the indirect approach," called for circumventing the enemy's strongpoints rather than assaulting them head-on.

Answer: oil slick

David Galula (1919-1967) was a French officer whose writings based on his experience fighting against the Algerian revolution have come to be regarded as classics of counterinsurgency (COIN) literature. The idea of the "oil slick" -- whereby the forces of order would spread their control like oil spreading over the surface of water -- was not original with Galula, having already been floated by earlier French colonial soldiers such as Hubert Lyautey and Joseph Gallieni.

Answer: escalation ladder

Born in New Jersey and trained at Cal Tech, Herman Kahn (1922-1983) spent much of his career at think tanks such as the RAND Corporation and the Hudson Institute. In his books "On Thermonuclear War" (1960), "Thinking about the Unthinkable" (1962), and "On Escalation" (1965), Kahn laid out the steps -- eventually 44 of them! -- that might lead from threats and provocations to all-out nuclear war.

Answer: OODA loop

Colonel John R. Boyd (1927-1997) was a US fighter pilot and military educator. Almost alone among the thinkers covered in this quiz, Boyd never published a book; instead, his ideas are recorded in several hundred pages of lecture notes and overhead slides.

His main claim to fame is the "OODA loop": observe, orient, decide, act -- in other words, a model of the decision making cycle. If you've ever talked about getting inside someone else's decision loop, you've probably been influenced by Boyd.