National Interest

by James Holmes

    After stinging military defeats in the fall of 1776, George Washington adopted the “Fabian strategy” to defeat the British. Just as importantly, he abandoned it when the time was right.

    George Washington was a Roman strategist. Mind you, His Excellency was not the Roman captain of Hollywood lore who went for an antagonist’s jugular à la Julius Caesar. He was a strategist and field commander of a peculiar, defensive-minded sort. For a time, at any rate.

    To be sure, General Washington wanted to wrest the offensive from the British redcoats from the outset of the War of American Independence. That’s because he relished personal honor and esteem as well as victory. As a colonial officer hailing from a perceived backwater—with a checkered military past to boot—Washington had an inferiority complex vis-à-vis regular British Army officers. To banish his second-class status among the soldiery, he longed to meet and vanquish the redcoats in a traditional set-piece battle. Washington believed he could prove his mettle by administering a “fatal stab” to the British cause—and burnish his reputation as a practitioner of arms.

    Then the annus horribilis 1776 happened. Successive disasters on Long Island and Manhattan taught Washington that standing and fighting toe to toe against disciplined imperial soldiers verged on madness. Indeed, you can’t read David McCullough’s classic 1776 without getting the discomfiting sense that the Continental Army should have lost the war—and with it the cause of an independent America—during that fateful year. It took two consecutive miracles for the Continental Army to escape from New York, first from Long Island into Manhattan and then from Manhattan into New Jersey, where the Royal Navy could not make its weight felt to the extent it could amid the marine environs of New York City.

    But here’s the thing. Washington was a proud man, but not too proud to learn from defeat and privation. He was humble enough to change his methods once battle—the one true arbiter of what does and doesn’t work in strategy, operations and tactics—exposed just how ill-suited those methods were to the circumstances and the foe the Continental Army faced. Standup combat against a European army was starkly infeasible for an army like Washington’s that was still inventing itself as a fighting force. So he suppressed his thirst for renown—and did something different. Out of expediency, the American supreme commander shifted from offense to defense until ambient circumstances came to allow for offense.

• The Fabian Strategy and the American Revolution

    History abetted strategic choice. The Founding generation—including Washington and his staff—were steeped in the Greek and Roman classics and looked to them for inspiration. Among the canon were the works of the Greco-Roman historian Plutarch, who penned capsule biographies of famous, or sometimes infamous, figures from antiquity. In his Parallel Lives, he would pair a prominent Greek with a prominent Roman in hopes that juxtaposing their lives would reveal what was good, noble and worth emulating and what was low, base and unbecoming and should be avoided. In other words, classical antiquity could help generation after generation of human beings learn how to live the good life. And, when need be, how to fight.

    There is no concrete evidence that Washington ever quoted Plutarch, let alone cited him as an authority on armed conflict. But there is no doubt that takeaways from antiquity were on the minds of the Continental Army staff following the near-apocalypse of 1776. Soul-searching was a must after the patriot cause almost came to grief in the leadership’s quest for a quick triumph. For proof that the army staff undertook no small measure of introspection, look to the writings of Alexander Hamilton. While serving as His Excellency’s aide-de-camp, for instance, Hamilton paid tribute to Fabius Maximus—the Roman dictator nicknamed “the Delayer”—when describing the patriot army’s newfound, more restrained, more patient, yet no less resolute approach to combating the redcoats.

    Think in terms of probabilities. It made little strategic sense for Washington & Co. to gamble everything on the battlefield, especially for such a shallow reason as personal renown, when losing one engagement could portend losing everything. Hamilton phrased the logic plainly. In a mid-1777 letter to Robert Livingston from Continental Army headquarters in Middlebrook, New Jersey, he proclaimed that “liberties of America are an infinite stake.” If the stakes in a conflict are infinite, the decision to pursue a single decisive battle is no trifling matter.

    Accordingly, Hamilton insisted that the patriot army refuse to wager independence on “a single cast of the die.” Risk is a function of probability and consequences. If commanders or their political superiors adjudge the consequences of defeat unthinkable—even if improbable—they commonly refuse to place the bet. And rightly so. Rather than dare all, Hamilton reported that the Continental Army had resorted to “Fabian conduct” after its narrow escape from extinction in 1776.

    Fabian marks the reference to Plutarch. During Rome’s second war with the North African juggernaut of Carthage in the 3rd century BC, the Roman Senate appointed Quintus Fabius, an icon of one of Plutarch’s biographies, a dictator. The Senate superempowered Fabius with limitless but temporary power to ward off the Carthaginian menace. The warlord Hannibal embodied that menace after crossing the Mediterranean Sea, marching across the Alps and devastating a vaunted Roman army at Cannae. During the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian host made war in Italy, on Romans’ home ground, for seventeen years. Roman defenders floundered while the city strove to gather itself.

    But they persevered. Fabius became known as “the Delayer,” and it was a nickname well earned. His painstaking mode of strategy prolonged warfare against Carthage, at that time a stronger foe. Delay denied Carthage victory until Rome—at last—mustered sufficient resources to go on offense and triumph. Fabian’s strategy bore resemblance to the “clinch” in boxing. His army would cling to the enemy, remaining nearby to deny Hannibal freedom of action, while at the same time refusing to fight a pitched battle that might cost Rome everything.

    Only once, after the Senate foolishly divided the army between Fabius and his political rival Lucius Minucius, did the Delayer hazard major battle. Taking the field seemed necessary, lest Hannibal wipe out Minucius’ contingent, which represented a sizable fraction of Rome’s combat power, while victory seemed probable. And Rome won. Big. Afterward Hannibal likened the engagement to a cloudburst that was long in coming.

    The dilemmas raised when fighting a stronger foe are perennial. That was true in ancient Rome; it was true in colonial America; it is true today. The lesser combatant covets the keys to victory when squaring off against the strong. The stronger combatant wants to withhold those keys, preserving the mismatch of forces in its favor. Generalship, then, depends on understanding how the weak win, for both the inferior and the superior pugilist. The Delayer excelled at deploying strategically defensive yet tactically offensive methods to forestall a decisive battle, all while marshaling resources to right the military imbalance in Rome’s favor.

• The Fabian Strategy Doesn’t Always Work—but It Did for Washington

    Skillfully prosecuted, a Fabian strategy proffers an opportunity to best a superior opponent in a trial of arms. Fabius’ circumspect feats of arms earned him the nickname “Maximus” among Romans—signifying rock-star status. And indeed, historians of classical antiquity ranging from Plutarch to Polybius to the Renaissance Florentine philosopher-statesman Niccolò Machiavelli regarded him as an emblem of patient, guileful martial statecraft.

    Yet there are at least two drawbacks to Fabius’ approach to affairs of the battleground. First and foremost, it depends on whether Father Time is on the defender’s side. If not, stalling for time is a losing strategy. Stretching things out solves little. Second, as Hamilton confessed with regard to Washington’s “Fabian conduct,” it is commonplace for strangers to the battlefield to attribute reticent strategy to “cowardice or weakness” rather than shrewd gamesmanship. His Excellency’s aide-de-camp observed that Great Britain confronted daunting geopolitical challenges during the War of American Independence. Owing to past defeats, all of Britain’s European rivals pined to see British arms humbled in America. France, Spain and the Netherlands ultimately took up arms in the colonial cause. Furthermore, contended Hamilton, Britain had little capacity to send reinforcements to North America. Britain was an empire with abundant commitments and sparse resources to police them.

    In other words, British commanders lacked manpower adequate to conquer and garrison the American colonies while discharging responsibilities elsewhere in the British Empire. That being the case, British resource constraints augured well for a self-denying, slow-moving Fabian strategy on the Americans’ part. Hamilton told Livington that the Continental Army’s proper business was “to avoid a General engagement and waste the enemy away by constantly goading their sides, in a desultory teasing way.”

    Hence his invocation of Fabius.

• Washington Knew When to Go Back on the Attack

    Now, George Washington was no Fabius Maximus, strictly speaking. He was better. In one crucial and flattering respect, Washington defied the parable of Fabius. In his Discourses on the Roman histories of Titus Livy, Machiavelli comes close to insisting that individuals cannot change. Change poses too much of an ordeal for us once set in our ways. And he invokes the example of Fabius to state his case. Machiavelli saw the ability to change with the times as a pivotal advantage of open societies over authoritarian ones. A closed society changes only at the behest of one authoritarian ruler. Stasis prevails if Machiavelli is correct to insist that individuals resist change.

    Individuals in an open society are likewise captive to human nature. They too resist change. But if people cannot change, an open society can change people to keep abreast of times in flux.

    That’s precisely what happened in Rome. Machiavelli echoes Plutarch, who records how Fabius refused to go on offense, even after, at length, the military balance swung in the city’s favor vis-à-vis Hannibal. In fact, Fabius did everything he could to sabotage efforts to shift from defense to offense. He persisted even after the Senate appointed the offensive-minded Scipio—subsequently dubbed “Africanus” in honor of his feats of arms—to head the army. Rather than continue dueling the Carthaginians in Italy, Scipio carried the fight across the Mediterranean and crushed Hannibal in North Africa, at the Battle of Zama. He shifted the center of gravity of the Second Punic War in Rome’s favor.

    Unlike Fabius, Washington proved able to change. He thirsted for offense at the get-go, then he went on defense when it became necessary, then he went back on offense when circumstances permitted. The American colonies built up their strength and attracted allies, most notably France in 1778. Over time the allies seized the offensive—and they won. His Excellency blended the best of the two eminent Roman captains, Fabius and Scipio, while proving that sometimes individuals can buck Machiavelli’s acid wisdom.

    Are there Fabian situations around us in today’s war-wracked world  You be the judge.