The evolution of joint warfare - Joint Warfighting

Joint Force Quarterly, Summer, 2002 by Williamson Murray

The American record is much better in several respects. The nascent air service, which was a branch of the Army administratively (first as the Army Air Corps, then as the Army Air Forces), displayed much the same disregard for past experience as did the Royal Air Force in Britain; it was uninterested in cooperating with land or naval forces. In the sphere of joint amphibious doctrine, however, the United States was ahead of other nations, undoubtedly because of the peculiarities of its military organization. The Department of the Navy had its own land force, the Marine Corps, and because no unified air component had been created, both the Navy and Marines had air assets. Maritime strategists considered joint amphibious operations by the realities of distance in the Pacific. It was clear that amphibious capabilities would be needed to seize logistic bases in the region.

The Marines led the effort on amphibious warfare throughout this period. By the outbreak of World War II, the Corps developed doctrine and procedures with considerable cooperation from the Navy and some help from the Army. Although the equipment required for such operations had not been fielded, the services had established a conceptual basis for joint amphibious operations.

World War II

It is almost as difficult to extol joint warfare conducted by the Axis as combined warfare. Germany, with its ability to cooperate on the tactical level, achieved stunning results at the start of World War II. But the invasion of Norway, Operation Weserubung, was in large part the result of British bungling. The Germans lacked joint strategy or, for that matter, joint operational concepts. Planning for Operation Sealion in summer 1940--the proposed invasion of Britain--displayed no common concept of operations or even common language. Matters never improved. There was no joint high command--the Armed Forces High Command, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, was little more than an administrative staff that supported Hitler. General Walter Warlimont, one of its members, noted: "In fact the advice of the British Chiefs of Staff and the U.S. Joint Chiefs was the deciding factor in Allied strategy. At the comparable level in Germany, there was nothing but a disastrous vacuum." (4) This situation was as much due to interservice rivalry as to der Fuhrer.

The same was true for the other Axis forces. In the case of Italy, the so-called Commando Supremo exercised no real power over the services, which waged three separate efforts. The result was that the Italian military never proposed sound strategic or operational alternatives to a regime which in its ideological fog did not balance available means with attainable ends. Things were no better in Japan which had no joint high command. Without higher direction, the Imperial army and navy waged two separate wars until their misfortunes in early 1944. Thereafter, the preponderance of American strength was such that it mattered little what Japan did or did not do.

The conduct of joint warfare by the Allies was on a different plane. On the strategic level, the organizational structure for analyzing strategic and military problems that the British had created before World War II played a major role. The system was not so impressive in the early years, but that was largely due to overwhelming Axis strength. But Britain was able to set the conditions for the recovery of Western fortunes once the United States entered the war. The analytic power of the system persuaded America to embark on major operations in the Mediterranean, a commitment that was fundamentally counter to Washington's view of the war. The success of this approach by London to a joint articulation of strategy, particularly at the Casablanca Conference, led to the establishment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an organizational approach that emphasized jointness on the operational level.