The evolution of joint warfare - Joint Warfighting

Joint Force Quarterly, Summer, 2002 by Williamson Murray

Basil Liddell Hart characterized the approach by London in this period as the British way of war. But as Sir Michael Howard pointed out, Britain was only successful when its opponents in Europe fought a continental and overseas war, which demanded the commitment of substantial land forces. France failed throughout the 18th century because its leaders were unclear on which war was being fought. In attempting to fight both, they lost both. French revolutionaries in 1789 and Napoleon had clear goals, largely involving conquest on the Continent. British amphibious expeditions against French-controlled territory were dismal failures, at least until the war in Spain. Joint warfare only worked in distant places in efforts to grab French possessions or areas removed from French power. Joint, in this context, meant landing troops at some distance from an enemy and then supplying them by sea. But when Britain committed forces and a first class general to the Continent, it had a major impact on the strategic position of France. The Peninsula War against the French in Spain was one of the few instances of jointness in the Napoleonic era.

North and South

The Civil War saw the first genuine joint operations--an approach that developed because of the geographic situation, namely, the riverways of the west. At the outset, the Union dominated the maritime balance, which allowed Lincoln to impose a blockade on the Confederacy and control offshore forts. In the spring of 1862, General George McClellan launched a seaborne attack on the Yorktown Peninsula. The Navy landed troops and supported the Federal advance on Richmond. At that point a series of blows launched by General Robert E. Lee drove Union forces back down the Yorktown Peninsula. U.S. gunboats rendered signal service by stopping an enemy assault on Malvern Hill, inflicting horrendous Confederate losses. Nevertheless, there was only rudimentary jointness during these engagements.

The western theater was the scene of real jointness on the Mississippi, Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee Rivers which offered deep avenues for Union forces. The fall of Forts Donelson and Henry to General Ulysses S. Grant in winter 1862 opened Kentucky, Tennessee, and northern Mississippi to Muscle Shoals in Alabama to the projection of Army forces by the Navy. Grant secured access to the southern heartland in one brilliant move. The victories at Forts Donelson and Henry gave the North an advantage in the West from which the South never recovered. It took close cooperation between Navy officers who ran the gunboat fleet and Army commanders to use this edge to the fullest. The importance of that cooperation was underlined in April 1862 when Union vessels reinforced Grant with troops under General Don Carlos Buell at Shiloh. Joint cooperation developed in 1862 was crucial to the campaign against Vicksburg in spring 1863. Admiral David Porter dashed past the defenses at Vicksburg in April, which allowed Grant to cross the Mississippi to the south and begin the most impressive campaign of the Civil War, which resulted not only in the capture of Vicksburg but of an entire Confederate army in the field.