I've now finished Claus Telp's excellent 2005 monograph on Napoleonic warfare, The Evolution of Operational Art 1740-1813: From Frederick the Great to Napoleon. The book is pricey, so use interlibrary loan or a corporate account if you can. It's also likely that a paperback version will come out eventually. So is a book about the time of Napoleon relevant to today? Extremely.
As Telp relates, what we understand as operational warfare--a blurring of strategic and tactical levels--once thought to be the product of the Industrial revolution, instead has its genesis in the transition between the respective military eras of Frederick the Great and Napoleon. He accomplishes this with detailed side-by-side cases studies of campaigns and innovation in the French and Prussian armies, as well as detailed reviews of the proto-operational theorists Guibert, Santa Cruz, and De Saxe.
Telp explodes the stereotype of 18th century warfare being timid and characterized by careful maneuver. The issue, especially in the Seven Years' War, was that limitations in coalition warfare, army organization, logistics, fortresses, and lack of all-arms formations and combined arms tactics prevented armies from realizing the ambitions of decisive battle they sought. The political and economic structures of pre-revolutionary France and Prussia were also simply not, for a variety of reasons, of generating the kind of political, economic, and social resources that would be necessary for the use of decisive operational warfare. So what changed?
There is no one single cause that this shift, and Telp's discussion can be sometimes difficult to follow. He struggles to accurately render the complexity of the political-economic-military shifts in the 70 years of change he chronicles. The short version is that both Prussia and France evolve distributed corps command and other operational instruments, supported by a quasi-"modern" state that in which the relationship between subject and sovereign has been decisively changed. The book really shines in its discussion of the 1806 Jena campaigns and the 1813 Leipzig campaigns, with helpful maps.
The book is relevant to defense readers today because of its complex discussion of military innovation. It is not a "hero" narrative with stodgy conservatives and heroic reformers. Many military intellectuals are both "innovative" and "conservative." Progress is not in a straight line, and even by 1813 there is still a good deal of problems with the Prussian warfighting style that would have to wait for correction over a long period of time.
It also demonstrates that even a loser eventually adapts. Prussia was annihilated in 1806 and forced to accept humiliating terms. It had no strategic depth due to French occupation troops. But the shock of the disaster enabled military reformers to press their case to Frederick William and his court. Radical changes were implemented that went far beyond the military realm. And in 1813 the French, whose military primacy was steadily eroding, caught the first glimpse of an future rout just as devastating as the one they inflicted in1806.
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