Excerpt Of The Day

The following is from Barbara Tuchman's excellent and well-known book on the causes and the outbreak of World War I called The Guns of August. The background to this excerpt is that two senior military men, one from France and one from England, are having an informal chat in January 1910, more than four years before the war began. France at this point conceives of war with Germany as fairly inevitable. The dominant feeling in Britain, however, is that they should stay clear of continental conflicts; what business is it of theirs that France and Germany (and Russia) habitually decide to fight each other? France, however, knows that it needs Britain on its side, and would do whatever it takes to get a commitment from them to fight on their side in the event of a war.

A question that Wilson asked of Foch during his second visit in January 1910, evoked an answer which expressed in one sentence the problem of the alliance with England, as the French saw it.
"What is the smallest British military force that would be of any practical assistance to you?" Wilson asked.
Like a rapier flash came Foch's reply, "A single British soldier -- and we will see to it that he is killed."

This exchange beautifully illustrates the concept of a trip-wire. One may wonder, after all, why the French general wants a soldier from Britain to die? They're supposed to be allies, aren't they? The answer is that the death of one solider from Britain would draw in many, many more soldiers into the conflict, almost as a matter of course. Given British reticence on the question of being heavily involved in a conflict that is not theirs, the only way to guarantee their participation is to make it theirs. And what better way to do that than have a soldier killed? Thus the French military commander's reply of needing just one soldier -- the rest, by logic, will follow.

By the way, the concept of a trip-wire is an old one, but no one explained it better than the grandaddy of war (and peacetime) strategy, a certain Thomas Schelling. The following is from his classic work, Arms and Influence, though his treatment of the concept entails its use as a commitment device. The basic point is that you can huff and puff and promise to do something to your rival if he oversteps his mark, but you have to do something to make him believe what you say, else the threat is useless. How can you make him believe it? A trip-wire.

To have told the Soviets in the late 1940s that, if they attacked, we were obliged to defend Europe might not have been wholly convincing. When the Administration asked Congress for authority to station Army divisions in Europe in peacetime, the argument was explicitly made that these troops were there not to defend against a superior Soviet army but to leave the Soviet Union in no doubt that the United States would be automatically involved in the event of any attack on Europe. The implicit argument was not that since we obviously would defend Europe we should demonstrate the fact by putting troops there. The reasoning was probably that, whether we wished to be or not, we could not fail to be involved if we had more troops being run over by the Soviet Army than we could afford to see defeated. Notions like "trip wire" or "plate glass window," though oversimplified, were attempts to express this role. And while "trip wire" is a belittling term to describe an army, the role is not a demeaning one. The garrison in Berlin is as fine a collection of soldiers as has ever been assembled, but excruciatingly small. What can 7,000 American troops do, or 12,000 Allied troops? Bluntly, they can die. They can die heroically, dramatically, and in a manner that guarantees that the action cannot stop there.