Carroll Quigley - The Evolution of Civilizations

A third example of institutionalized thinking in military tactics in this period might be called the doctrine of the "straight front." According to the book, the worst error a commander could make would be to allow his unit to be cut off from his line of supplies and to be caught in a "crossfire." To avoid these errors, it was "imperative" to advance with a straight front against the enemy, even if this required holding back the advance at defensively weak spots and throwing reserves at the enemy's strong points. Simply by reversing this rule in March 1918 (by advancing as rapidly as possible and by throwing reserves at the defensive weak points, thus bypassing and isolating his strong points), Erich von Ludendorff made the most spectacular advances of the war, bursting over Chemin des Dames and being stopped finally, ten weeks later, thirty-four miles from Paris —stopped because he could not bring himself to use his unorthodox methods with full conviction and resources.

As a consequence of the institutionalization of military tactics by devotion to the bayonet, the saber, and the straight front, the early years of World War I saw the largest casualties in history, suffered, in most cases, to advance over a few miles of devastated terrain. In the early months of 1916 almost a million casualties were suffered by both sides in a single battle (Verdun), while later in the same year another battle (Somme) cost 1,200,000 casualties, mostly by bayonet charges against machine-gun fire. When civilians in England tried to force the professional soldiers to use the tank, or civilians in Germany tried to make the professionals use poison gas against machine guns, both were resisted bitterly. When the civilians succeeded in ordering the military to use these innovations, their use was sabotaged by the soldiers. The refusal of the British Command, in 1915, to yield to civilian requests to shift their munition orders from ineffective shrapnel to high-explosive shells for barrages against trench defenses led to an acute intragovernmental crisis that gave impetus to the rise of David Lloyd George. In the American army of 1918 a major part of training time was devoted to bayonet practice. As late as 1940 this was still true, although in the interval the casualty statistics of World War I had shown that the casualty figures from bayonet wounds were microscopic. Noncommissioned officers, skilled in bayonet tactics, were reluctant to abandon something that they knew and could teach, and justified their inertia, in spite of the statistics, on the grounds of the presumed morale-raising attributes of cold steel. From experiences such as these, the French premier, Georges Clemenceau, drew the conclusion that "war is far too important to ever be entrusted to soldiers."

Clemenceau might well have broadened his remark to say that everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve. As a consequence, old established armies and navies have frequently been defeated by new forces that have not yet become institutionalized. Thus the Greeks defeated the Persians; the new Roman navy defeated the Carthaginian fleet; the English defeated the French chivalry in the Hundred Years' War; the English navy, barely seventy-five years old, defeated the Spanish Armada; Braddock was defeated; the Colonists won the American Revolution; the new French armies of Napoleon defeated the old, bedecorated forces of Austria and Prussia; the new Prussian army of Emil von Roon and Helmuth von Moltke defeated Austria and France in 1866 and 1870; the Boers held off the English for years; and Japan defeated Russia in 1905. Such defeats can be avoided only by constant reform that seeks to reorganize an institutionalized force so that its aim—to defeat the enemy —remains always paramount.

This situation appears in every social organization. Workers join together to get better pay and working conditions. The organizations they form, labor unions, soon take on a life of their own, and the workers begin to wonder if they are not now as much the slaves of the union as formerly they were slaves of the management. The kings of England, long ago, created a representative assembly to consent to taxation. Soon that assembly (Parliament) took on life of its own and ended by decapitating, removing, and ruling kings. A political party was organized in 1854 to protect freedom in the United States and to prevent the extension of slavery. By 1868 it was an organized machine of vested interests, a functioning spoils system, whose chief aim was to perpetuate itself in office and whose chief method for achieving that aim was to end the freedom of the whites in the South. A church is organized to bring men psychological security by linking them with the Deity. A century later it has become a vested institution with wealth and power, and its chief aim is to preserve and expand these valuable prerogatives. A college is organized to train youth in practical and humane achievements; later it has become a whole tissue of vested interests in which standards are lowered and admission qualifications relaxed in order to secure a flow of tuitions that go to meet the institution's expenses. Within its hallowed walls, professors intrigue for promotions and appointments for themselves and their disciples, while a condition of undeclared war goes on between departments and schools to get larger student enrollments in their courses and thus justify bigger slices from the annual university budget. Even in earlier days, professors of the classics resisted efforts to reduce required Latin from four years to two, or to make Greek completely elective, or to abolish compulsory chapel, or to establish a first (elective) course in chemistry without any efforts at any objective analysis of the purposes of these activities or of their role in training youth for later life; that these changes would reduce the established system's control of the college was, in most cases, a sufficient argument to oppose change.

We see fraternities, established to promote fellowship among students, with the passage of time become vested institutions serving to destroy fellowship by dividing the students into uncordial and competitive cliques to the jeopardy of real academic goals. A game called football was invented about 1870 to provide healthful physical exercise for the undergraduates on bright autumn afternoons. Seventy years later the undergraduates who needed exercise most were seated in the stands of a city baseball park on Friday night, with their flasks and their coeds, while on the grass (or mud) below, the undergraduates who needed exercise least pushed each other about under the floodlights.

The process by which football was, almost imperceptibly, transformed from an instrument for providing physical exercise to an institution acting as an obstacle to exercise for many students who loved the game and needed the exercise is as instructive an example of social development as changes in military tactics. The informal games of the 1860s and early 1870s between groups from the same campus led, little by little, to challenges for games with other institutions. This led to travel expenses, more formalized rules, nonpartisan officials, and uniforms. The increase in interest led to larger groups of spectators. What could be more natural than to pass a hat among these spectators to raise money for the players' expenses? Defeats led to desire for revenge, and thus to stricter rules of team membership, practice, and training. All of this led gradually to more formalized coaching. This task rested at first with the captain and more experienced players, but, as established intercollegiate rivalries began to grow, an experienced player of previous years, usually the last victorious captain, was asked to return from the outside world to coach intensively during the week before the "big game." As other colleges adopted this pattern and several "big games" a year emerged, the demands on graduates to return to the campus for coaching duty became more than could be fulfilled. The obvious solution, a full-time paid coach, made it essential to have an established team income. "Passing the hat" among the spectators was replaced by sales of tickets at a fixed price. But sold tickets entitled spectators to a seat, which led very quickly to the building of the first modern stadium (1903). In time stadiums were being built with borrowed funds, with the result that their mortgage charges, along with coaches' salaries and other expenses, made it essential that the stadium's seats, no matter how numerous, must be filled, or nearly filled, on the eight or so Saturdays a year it was used. Gradually the interests of the spectators and the need for football income became dominant over the interests of any undergraduate who liked football or needed exercise. The team had to win, at least most of the time, and the game had to be spectacular to watch. Scouts looked for able players outside and, in one way or another, persuaded them to come to the scout's college to play football. Financial rewards proved, in many cases, to be powerful persuaders. Thus the game shifted from undergraduates who needed exercise to those who had already had too much exercise. At some institutions, where football incomes were earmarked for educational uses such as for building funds, almost all games were played in baseball parks of large cities remote from the campus, with the result that the team could rarely be seen by its own students. Teams that played on the East Coast, the West Coast, and the Gulf Coast on successive weekends spent much of the autumn traveling and might be away from their college halls for weeks.