The Emperor squirmed. All at once he knew that what the people said was right. "All the same," he said to himself, "I must go on as long as the procession lasts.” So the Emperor kept on walking, his head held higher than ever. And the faithful minister kept on carrying the train that wasn't there. [McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1963] THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT A Version of the Famous Indian Legend By John Godfrey Saxe It was six men of Indostan The First approached the Elephant, The Second, feeling of the tusk, Cried, "Ho! what have we here, So very round and smooth and sharp? This wonder of an Elephant Is very like a spear!" The Third approached the animal, And happening to take The squirming trunk within his hands, Thus boldly up and spake: "I see," quoth he, "the Elephant Is very like a snake!" The Fourth reached out his eager hand, "What most this wondrous beast is like The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear, The Sixth no sooner had begun And so these men of Indostan Exceeding stiff and strong, Though each was partly in the right, And all were in the wrong! [From Introduction to Charles Babbage and his Calculating Engines, Dover Publications, New York, 1961] QUANTIFYING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE? Letter From Charles Babbage to Alfred, Lord Tennyson (c. 1850) Although Babbage never strayed very long from his calculating Engines, his tremendous scientific curiosity led him into many byways some stemming directly from the main line of his machines, and some that were far afield .. He even extended his demand for statistical accuracy to poetry; it is said that he sent the following letter to Alfred, Lord Tennyson about a couplet in "The Vision of Sin": "Every minute dies a man, / Every minute one is born": I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: "Every moment dies a man / And one and a sixteenth is born." I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre. [From the Report of the Secretary of War for 1902] THE GENERAL STAFF CONCEPT By Elihu Root The most important thing to be done now for the Regular Army is the creation of a general staff. I beg to call attention to the remarks made upon this subject under the head of 'Improvement of Army Organization' in the report for 1899 and under the head of 'General Staff' in the report for 1901. Since the report for 1899 was made many of the important measures then recommended for the greater efficiency of the Army have been accomplished or are in course of accomplishment under authority conferred by legislation. Our military system, is, however, still exceedingly defective at the top. We have a personnel unsurpassed anywhere, and a population ready to respond to calls for the increase of personnel in case of need, up to the full limit at which it is possible to transport and subsist an Army. We have wealth and a present willingness to expend it reasonably for the procurement of supplies and material of war as plentiful and as good as can be found in any country. We have the different branches of the military service well organized, each within itself, for the performance of its duties. Our administrative staff and supply departments, as a rule, have at their heads good and competent men, faithful to their duties, each attending assiduously to the business of his department. But when it comes to the coordination and direction of all these means and agencies of warfare, so that all parts of the machine shall work together, we are weak. Our system makes no adequate provision for the directing brain which every army must have, to work successfully. Common experience has shown that this cannot be furnished by any single man without assistants, and that it requires a body of officers working together under the direction of a chief and entirely separate from and independent of the administrative staff of an army (such as the adjutants, quartermasters, commissaries, etc., each of whom is engrossed in the duties of his own special department). This body of officers, in distinction from the administrative staff, has come to be called a general staff. There has been much misunderstanding as to the nature and duties of a general staff. Brigadier General Theodore Schwan, in his work on the organization of the German army, describes it as follows: In Prussia, at least, the term has been used exclusively and distinctively applied, since about 1789, to a body of officers to whom, as assistants to the commander in chief and of his subordinate generals, is confided such work as is directly connected with the designing and the execution of military operations. That in Germany, as elsewhere, chiefs of special arms, heads of supply departments, judge-advocates, etc., form an important branch of the higher commands goes without saying, but they are not included in the term general staff. Clausewitz's dictum that the general staff is intended to convert the ideas of the commanding general into orders, not only by communicating the former to the troops but rather by working out all matters of detail, and thus relieving the general from a vast amount of unnecessary labor, is not a sufficient definition of general staff duties, according to Von Schellendorf (upon this question certainly the better authority). as it fails to notice the important obligation of the general staff officer of constantly watching over the effectiveness of the troops which would be impaired by a lack of attention to their material welfare. Out of this obligation grows, he says, the further duty of furnishing to the heads of the supply departments and other officers attached to the headquarters such explanations touching the general military situation, or the effect of a sudden change therein, as will enable them to carry out intelligently what is expected of them. The general staff thus becomes a directing and explaining body, and its chief, therefor, is in some respects the head of the whole staff. It follows, that of the two terms, staff and general staff, the Germans regard the former as the more comprehensive one and as embracing the latter." Neither our political nor our military system makes it suitable that we should have a general staff organized like the German general staff or like the French general staff; but the common experience of mankind is that the things which those general staffs do have to be done in every well managed and well directed army, and they have to be done by a body of men especially assigned to do them. We should have such a body of men selected and organized in our own way and in accordance with our own system to do those essential things. The most intelligible way to describe such a body of men, however selected and organized, is by calling it a general staff, because its duties are staff duties and are general in their character. The duties of such a body of officers can be illustrated by taking for example an invasion of Cuba, such as we were all thinking about a few years ago. It is easy for a President or a general acting under his direction, to order that 50,000 or 100,000 men proceed to Cuba and capture Havana. To make an order which has any reasonable chance of being executed he must do a great deal more than that. He must determine how many men shall be sent and how they shall be divided among the different arms of the service, and how they shall be armed and equipped, and to do that he must get all the information possible about the defenses of the place to be captured and the strength and character and armament of the forces to be met. He must determine at what points and by what routes the place shall be approached, and at what points his troops shall land in Cuba; and for this purpose he must be informed about the various harbors of the island and the depth of their channels: what classes of vessels can enter them; what the facilities for landing are; how they can be defended; the character of the roads leading from them to the place to be attacked; the character of the intervening country; how far it is healthful or unhealthful; what the climate is liable to be at the season of the proposed movement; the temper and sympathy of the inhabitants; the quantity and kind of supplies that can be obtained, and a great variety of other things which will go to determine whether it is better to make the approach from one point or from an other, and to determine what it will be necessary for the Army to carry with it in order to succeed in moving and living and fighting. All this information it is the business of a general staff to procure and present. It is probable that there would be in such case a number of alternative plans, each having advantages and disadvantages, and these should be worked out each by itself, with the reasons for and against it, and presented to the President or general for his determination. This the general staff should do. This cannot be done in an hour. It requires that the general staff shall have been at work for a long time collecting the information and arranging it and getting it in form to present. Then at home, where the preparation for the expedition is to be made, the order must be based upon a knowledge of the men and material available for its execution; how many men there are who can be devoted to that purpose, from what points they are to be drawn, what bodies of troops ought to be left or sent elsewhere, and what bodies may be included in the proposed expedition; whether there are enough ships to transport them; where they are to be obtained; whether they are properly fitted up; what more should be done to them; what are the available stocks of clothing, arms and ammunition, and engineers' material, and horses and wagons, and all the immediate supplies and munitions necessary for a large expedition; how are the things to be supplied which are not ready, but which are necessary, and how long a time will be required to supply them. All this and much more necessary information it is the business of a general staff to supply. When that has been done the order is made with all available knowledge of all the circumstances upon which the movement depends for its success. It is then the business of the General Staff to see that every separate officer upon whose action the success of the movement depends understands his share in it and does not lag behind in the performance of that share; to see that troops and ships and animals and supplies of arms and ammunition and clothing and food, etc., from hundreds of sources come together at the right times and places. It is a laborious, complicated, and difficult work, which requires a considerable number of men whose special business it is and who are charged with no other duties. It was the lack of such a body of men doing that kind of work which led to the confusion attending the Santiago expedition in the summer of 1898. The confusion at Tampa and elsewhere was the necessary result of having a large number of men, each of them doing his own special work the best he could, but without any adequate force of officers engaged in seeing that they pulled together according to plans made beforehand. Such a body of men doing general staff duty is just as necessary in time of peace as it is in time of war. It is not an executive body; it is not an administrative body; it acts only through the authority of others. It makes intelligent command possible by procuring and arranging information and working out plans in detail, and it makes intelligent and effective execution of commands possible by keeping all separate agents advised of the parts they are to play in the general scheme. |