Disunited Fronts: Military Strategy and Multifront Conflict

Abstract

How do states fight multifront wars? Across history, the prospect of multifront war has plagued the minds of statesmen and generals. Numerous wars have grown from a fear of fighting on multiple fronts or the opportunistic exploitation of an adversary’s entanglements. Today, with crises or outright wars in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, major powers like the United States, Russia, China, and India are all increasingly at risk of having to fight on multiple fronts. Fighting in multiple geographic locations forces a state to divide its military, making it more difficult to achieve victory and increasing the risks of military defeat. It also forces state leaders to make tradeoffs in which front they will prioritize, and how they will allocate their scarce military resources. This paper seeks to understand how and why state leaders prioritize amongst the different theaters of a multifront conflict. I argue that front prioritization decisions within multifront conflicts are driven by state efforts to thread the "victory-vulnerability balance," in which they seek to maximize efforts in fronts where they expect to win, while minimizing the risks from fronts where they are vulnerable. Specifically, I posit that state leaders will look for battlefield windows of vulnerability and for favorable offensive prospects in determining which front to focus military efforts on. I test this theory in decision-making with an in-depth examination of German decision-making from 1914-1918.

Keywords: War, military strategy, military operations, wartime decision-making, two-front war, window of vulnerability