Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville: The Principles of War and the Horns of a Dilemma at the Burton Farm

Abstract

Abstract : One of the great debates about the military art has centered around whether great leaders are made or, as the great Marshall Saxe believed, they are born. While unable to positively determine one way or the other, given the present state of knowledge of the human mind, evidence and intuition indicates that certain factors contribute to the effective leading of men in stressful situations such as intense combat. The Marine Corps, like the other services, has demonstrated a clear preference for the analytical method of decision making, which in many ways reflects the American Way of War--the search for a more prescriptive method of arriving at decisions. The challenge of transforming the citizen into the soldier, is the primary cause for the American tendency to conduct war by the numbers. The prescriptive method of war then, is an attempt to reduce the time it requires to turn the inexperienced volunteer or recruit into a veteran, the aim of which is fewer casualties and speedier conflict resolution. This desire to formalize war, through the search for certain fundamental principles on which to build combat insight, goes a long way to explaining the tendency of warriors to fight the next war, at least initially, the same way they fought the last one. Only when the old lessons proved too costly were they rejected, and the whole process began again, using the old war as the base line for the new. As unfortunate as this cycle is, history, and the insight it provides, is one of the most important guide posts for the future. Invariably, history offers some insights, which military institutions distill into principles of war, so general that their utility is often called into question. However, these principles do have worth when contemplated over case studies in order to examine the decision-making processes in the context of the times those decisions were made.