Can Clausewitz’s “Center of Gravity” Survive the Digital Age?

Introduction

Of all the martial concepts that Carl von Clausewitz discussed in On War, his treatise on military strategy, perhaps the most widely adopted was his model for depicting an enemy’s primary source of strength: the center of gravity (COG). To this day, the COG model remains enshrined in the doctrine of many Western militaries, to include the United States,[1] the United Kingdom,[2] Australia,[3] France,[4] Israel,[5] and even NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization).[6] In Western planning doctrine (in accordance with Clausewitz’s concept), the enemy’s COG is essentially that element which must be defeated in order to achieve military victory.[7] COG analysis is the method of determining the enemy’s COG—the implicit next step in the planning process being to figure out how to decisively defeat it.

For decades, military planners have debated the efficacy of using COG analysis as a method of analyzing enemy strengths. Some argue that the model is impractical, while others argue that it is timeless and universally applicable. Because COG debates typically revolve around definitions and methods for applying a now-controversial model, they have achieved little in the way of influencing doctrine to adapt to present-day reality, relegating the debates to the realm of academic repartee. What is lacking in the debate is a meaningful discussion on whether the COG is a useful model given the character of war and the complexity of the operational environment in the 21st century. While academics theorize and theorists debate, practitioners are applying what many believe to be an obsolete model in the real world, and their work may well mean the difference between life and death—between martial success and failure.

To answer the question of whether the COG model remains useful to military planners in the 21st century, we should examine the reasons for the current frustration with the COG model, then compare the model to the operational environment as it evolved over time—from Clausewitz’s era of professionalized warfare, to the 20th-century era of industrialized warfare, to today’s era of digitized warfare. Should we find that the COG’s relevance has diminished over time, we can perhaps deduce a better method of analyzing an enemy’s strengths.

Current Frustration with the COG Model

Clausewitz never offered a technical definition of the COG, preferring instead to employ numerous examples to explain the COG concept. Over recent years, Western militaries have struggled to assign a useful doctrinal definition to the Center of Gravity.[8] For instance, recent U.S. planning doctrine, in trying to describe the COG, assigned twelve characteristics to the Center of Gravity. Some of the vaguer characteristics are as follows:

The Center of Gravity…

• Exists at each level of warfare
• Contains many intangible elements at a strategic level
• [Is] mostly physical at operational and tactical levels
• May be transitory in nature
• Can shift over time or between phases[9]

NATO planning doctrine provides another example of the vague definitions, stating that there could be numerous COGs—moral, physical, strategic, and operational,[10] and devoting fourteen pages to explaining how to conduct a COG analysis. The nebulous language has almost certainly been employed because a precisely defined model could not accurately represent modern militaries. The vague definitions allowed doctrinaires to salvage the model, despite its increasing disconnect from reality.

As one would expect, the vague definitions only made the model more opaque and its applicability to real-world planning more tenuous. The disconnect between the model and the operational environment leaves military planners struggling to identify enemy COGs, failing to arrive at a consensus on a specific COG, and eventually settling on a COG which they proceed to ignore in their plans. With planning doctrine built on such a precarious foundation, there should be little wonder that putting doctrine into practice is so difficult.

The practical difficulties of applying the COG model to today’s operational environment, compounded by the dissatisfaction of numerous practitioners, indicate that the model has outlived its usefulness as a universally applicable tool for analyzing an enemy’s strengths. If the model is not obvious enough to be of practical value to the average planner, it should not be enshrined in planning doctrine. Eikmeier articulated this problem by stating that the “debate [among military planners] alone is sufficient evidence that doctrine is putting planners in an unusual position of not really knowing what something is, but agreeing that it has tremendous value.”[11] Eikmeier’s solution was to craft an explicit definition of a COG, which he refined over the years. His definition from 2016, “the primary entity that inherently possesses the critical capabilities to achieve the objective,”[12] is possibly the most precise ever proposed; but even a precise definition cannot make the model adaptable to changes in the character of war or to an extraordinarily complex operational environment.

The COG in the Age of Professionalized Warfare

Clausewitz wrote his seminal work in the 1820s when the industrial revolution was gaining momentum but had not yet fully blossomed into the explosion in mechanical innovation which would characterize the Industrial Age. Clausewitz largely based his observations on European wars of the 18th and early 19th centuries—wars which, due to the range, accuracy, and maneuverability of the weaponry available to the belligerents of the day, were generally similar in character to most other wars going back to the Bronze Age.

Applied to the realm of physics, a simplified, layman’s definition of center of gravity could be “the point in an entity with the highest concentration of mass.”[13] As a model for a nation’s military strength, this definition makes sense when applied to pre-twentieth-century warfare in which the most advanced military force structures of the day were relatively simple compared to today’s advanced militaries. Professionalized militaries until Clausewitz’s time fought in two domains—land and sea. The most advanced weaponry was muskets and rudimentary cannons, while logistics moved at the pace of horse-drawn wagons. War presented a series of tactical challenges to generals but was hardly a sophisticated affair.

A century after Clausewitz wrote On War, Soviet Brigade Commander Georgii Isserson contrasted Clausewitz’s observations of the Napoleonic wars to his own observations of World War I in his insightful work, The Evolution of Operational Art. Isserson observed that, in the Napoleonic era, “the range of human vision… far exceeded the range of shoulder weapons… and artillery.” The implications were that, while an army might field multiple corps or fight on multiple fronts, the limited reach of the weapons of the day and slow transportation meant that good generals were essentially master tacticians who skillfully linked tactics to strategy. These limitations forced generals to set up tactical engagements, endeavoring to maneuver their forces into an advantageous position before engaging an enemy force.[14] Such conditions would typically make one military entity (or group of mutually reinforcing units) easily identifiable as their nation’s primary source of strength.

By Clausewitz’s day, warfare had been professionalized for thousands of years, but the technological limits on maneuverability, weapons range, and munitions accuracy ensured that the character of war remained largely unchanged. The center of gravity model was accurate and applicable to most conflicts between the Bronze Age and the Napoleonic era. Shortly after Clausewitz’s death, however, a new era of industrialized warfare would emerge, World War I being the first stark example. Technological advances in weapons and their delivery platforms would make the operational environment dramatically more complex, straining the COG model’s applicability.

The COG in the Age of Industrialized Warfare

The discovery of petroleum as a new energy source fostered the development of new technologies; and the new technologies boosted the maneuverability of weapons delivery platforms, increased weapons range and accuracy, and opened a new domain of conflict—the air domain. At the beginning of the 20th century, weapons with high rates of fire forced armies to form extended battle lines, as they could now be engaged prior to assuming traditional tactical formations.[15] By the middle of the 20th century, weapons range had significantly increased, as long-range artillery, aircraft carriers, bomber aircraft, and ballistic missiles were developed. These innovations expanded war from a series of battlefields into regional “theaters” of conflict.

Nations fielded larger armies with widely dispersed units which allowed them to fight in multiple theaters and shift reserves to reinforce whichever battlefront was most beleaguered. They fielded formidable navies and air forces. Advanced logistics, facilitated by trains, automobiles, diesel-powered ships, and cargo aircraft, permitted battle lines to be stretched further than ever; and the radio made possible the command and control of widely distributed forces. These innovations substantially expanded—and complicated the operational environment.

The operational level of war emerged, in which military operations consisted of battles linked in time, space, and purpose to achieve operational objectives; and operations were linked to achieve strategic objectives. Good generals in the age of industrialized warfare expanded their scope, linking operations to strategy and devolving tactical control to lower echelons.

Advanced militaries now fielded long-range offensive capabilities and intricately layered defenses in multiple domains. No longer was there a military entity (or group of mutually reinforcing units) that could be easily identified as a primary source of strength. The COG model, as Clausewitz described it, became less intuitive. The vastly more complex militaries of the Industrial Age conceptually possessed multiple centers of gravity in various domains and at different levels of war.

Endeavoring to identify a single COG became an exercise in futility, as war planners had to devise methods to defeat the enemy in multiple domains and across many geographically dispersed battlefronts. Perhaps in the case of specific, limited objectives, the single-COG model remained useful; but as operational complexity evolved, it became less applicable to strategies and theater-wide plans.

As the Industrial Age advanced, the character of war changed at a pace that must have been unimaginable to preindustrial-era strategists. The increased range, maneuverability, and accuracy of technologically advanced weapons had markedly expanded the battlespace. To remain relevant, the COG model had to be applied to either multiple domains, various levels of war (strategic and operational), or both. Near the end of the 20th century, newer technologies would be developed which would accelerate the evolution of the character of war and again, exponentially increase the complexity of the operational environment. As complexity increased, the COG model’s applicability decreased.

The COG in the Age of Digitized Warfare

Even as the mechanical innovation of the Industrial Age continued to surge, a revolutionary technology emerged which would further complicate the operational environment. The semiconductor gave birth to the microchip, thrusting the world into the Digital Age. Like the Industrial Age before it, the Digital Age has ushered in a new era of warfare, and with it, new domains of conflict: the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS),[16] space, and cyberspace.

Warfare has expanded beyond the theater, making instantaneous global war a distinct possibility. Modern militaries possess weapons with global reach, and they combine unprecedented maneuverability with unprecedented accuracy. Perhaps just as significantly, they have built redundant reconnaissance, surveillance, and communication systems which enable rapid global power projection; and they have woven these new capabilities into intricately layered offensive and defensive architectures.

A world has unfolded before us that Clausewitz could never have envisioned—a world of satellites, of intercontinental ballistic missiles with maneuvering reentry vehicles, of hypersonic cruise missiles, of orbital bombardment systems, of drone swarms—all of which threaten to make traditional air defense systems obsolete. We live in the computer-powered, interconnected world of the internet which makes cyberspace a global domain that is interwoven through all the other domains. Artificial intelligence systems can make complex decisions faster than any human; and autonomous weapons platforms make old strategic paradigms obsolete. Today’s operational environment is characterized by new weapons capable of being employed on a multitude of attack vectors. Psychological operations seem to be ubiquitous; and virtually any piece of infrastructure, communication network, or population center could become an instant battlefield.

While the term “campaign” has been a part of the military lexicon for centuries, campaigning is emerging as a distinct level of war. Multiple campaigns, linked in time, space, and purpose, will almost certainly be needed to achieve strategic objectives. Today’s generals will need to broaden their scope even further and become experts at integrating multi-domain campaigns and operations.

Belligerents in the age of digitized warfare must contend with enemy forces in all domains and on numerous battlefields around the globe. The multiple centers of gravity, for which Industrial-Age planners had to account, have multiplied exponentially as domains and levels of war have increased and the battlespace has gone global. For militaries that have kept pace with technology, a center of gravity, as Clausewitz conceptualized it, has become nearly impossible to discern.

A Better Method of Analyzing an Enemy’s Strengths

The point of a doctrinal COG analysis is to identify an enemy’s primary source of strength—that which must be defeated in order to obtain victory. Because the COG seems to no longer be an accurate model for today’s operational environment, attempting to identify enemy strengths and weaknesses through the lens of a single COG (or even multiple COGs) has become so cumbersome as to be ineffectual. Today’s militaries need a model of the operational environment that better represents present reality. They need updated planning doctrine that prescribes an accurate and intuitive method for analyzing an enemy’s strengths (and weaknesses). Failing to do so will continue to entrench planners in an archaic way of thinking that produces flawed enemy capability analyses and, consequently, flawed plans. Multiple methods are available which could be easily integrated into Western military doctrine, two potential methods being offered as examples.

The first potential method is the business-oriented SWOT Analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats). A SWOT analysis could be performed at each echelon of planning (strategic, campaign, operational, tactical) for each domain. The resulting list of enemy strengths and weaknesses would intuitively lead planners to consider the linkages between the strengths and to exploit the identified vulnerabilities. Of course, the SWOT analysis could also be applied to friendly forces. Planners could easily base their plans on the SWOT analyses to capitalize on friendly strengths and target enemy weaknesses.

The second potential method would be to retain Western planning doctrine’s familiar Critical Factors Analysis—a component of COG analysis. The purpose of the critical factors analysis is to identify critical capabilities—things the COG does to accomplish the mission, critical requirements—things upon which the COG depends in order to function, and critical vulnerabilities—things which can be exploited to degrade critical capabilities. Ultimately, sufficient attacks on critical vulnerabilities should reduce the COG’s strength to such an extent that the enemy capitulates.[17], [18] Conducting a Critical Factors Analysis, without requiring planners to identify a single COG (or a single COG per level of war), intuitively guides planners towards identifying all critical strengths and weaknesses. Like the SWOT analysis, the Critical Factors Analysis could be performed at each echelon and for every domain. For each critical capability, planners could continue to identify critical requirements and critical vulnerabilities, and design plans to exploit those vulnerabilities.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of the two suggested methods is that they would make planners consider the enemy’s capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses in all domains rather than try to identify a single COG. As planners explore linkages among the capabilities in each domain, they will naturally identify dependencies, choke points, and vulnerabilities to exploit. Because the proposed methods provide frameworks for more accurately modeling the operational environment, the resulting strategies and plans would be more executable, being built upon a logical, intuitive foundation.

Updating planning doctrine as suggested would not prohibit planners from employing the COG model if they thought it appropriate. In response to those who remain wedded to the COG concept and who believe that it is improperly applied by poorly trained planners, the proposed analytic methods would still result in plans that would logically lead to the collapse of the COG (if one exists)—even if it is not explicitly identified. Either of the proposed methods enables military commanders to affect layered enemy capabilities as appropriate and does not subconsciously limit their thinking by imposing the outdated COG paradigm on them.

Conclusion

The efficacy of the COG model has been the subject of vigorous academic debate for several decades, with little meaningful discussion on whether it provides today’s planners with an accurate map of the operational environment, given the extent to which the character of war has evolved. Modern technology has given us weapons with global reach, opened new domains of conflict, and created a virtually unlimited battlespace—all of which adds up to an operational environment that is vastly more complex than that which existed in Clausewitz’s day. The analogy of the center of gravity simply does not accurately model advanced, 21st-century militaries.

The age of digitized warfare is upon us. As conflicts among technologically advanced militaries proliferate, the need for a more intuitive, accurate, and easily applicable method of analyzing enemy strengths and weaknesses becomes more apparent. By updating planning doctrine with analytic methods that more effectively model the operational environment, military leaders have an opportunity to disabuse their planners of the obsolete COG concept before the next war occurs. While the debate would undoubtedly be fierce, updating doctrine would be worth the effort so that planners can base their plans on a more logical and intuitive foundation that is better suited to this new age of warfare.