10 Military Commanders Who Revolutionized Warfare

Philip II of Macedon and the Professionalization of Warfare

While Thebes and Sparta vied for the dominance of Greece in the first half of the 4th century BC, a new power was rising in the north that would soon eclipse both. In 359 BC, 23 year old Philip II (382 – 336 BC) ascended the throne of Macedon. Within two decades, he would change the face of Greece, and warfare would never be the same again.

Greeks viewed Macedon as a barely civilized kingdom that spoke a barely intelligible Greek dialect. The kingdom had a lot of potential, both in manpower and resources that far exceeded those of any Greek city state, but had yet to realize its potential. Philip unified Macedon’s fractious tribes, and transformed them into the world’s most respected and feared military machine.

Philip made soldiering a full time and highly professional, and paid, occupation. That enabled him to drill his men regularly, ensuring discipline and unit cohesion. He built upon Epaminondas’ deep phalanx innovation, and improved upon it by arming his men with a longer spear, the sarissa. He also increased mobility by reducing his men’s armor, and furnishing them with smaller and lighter shields. That gave them a marching speed that few other armies could equal.

Philip also made Macedon’s cavalry the world’s best, by recruiting the sons of the nobility into what came to be known as the Companion Cavalry. He equipped them with long lances that gave them greater reach than their opponents, and trained them in shock tactics. To break enemy lines, Philip taught the Companion Cavalry to ride in wedge formations well suited to penetrate enemy lines, in addition to being more maneuverable than riding abreast.

Another innovation was Philip’s creation of a corps of engineers to design and build new instruments of war. Philip further revolutionized warfare by perfecting the coordination of different types of troops in a battlefield synergy that enabled them to support each other – the birth of combined arms tactics. Heavy infantry, light infantry skirmishers, archers, slingers, cavalry, and engineers, all worked together. Their mutual support made their collective whole greater than the sum of their individual parts. Philip’s signature combined arms tactic came to be known as the “hammer and anvil”, with the phalanx fixing an enemy in place (anvil), and the cavalry closing in with shock tactics, acting as a hammer to shatter the foe.

Philip’s military machine was unstoppable, and by 338 BC, he had mastered Greece. He then began preparations for his life’s ambition: invading the Persian Empire. However, just before setting out to conquer Persia, Philip was assassinated at a wedding. It would be his son, Alexander the Great, who would use Philip’s military machine and tactics to become the Ancient World’s greatest conqueror.

Hannibal Barca Perfected Battlefield Tactics

Hannibal Barca (247 – ­circa 182 BC) elevated the role of strategy in warfare. He led a Carthaginian army out of Spain, through southern France, and across the Alps into Italy, thus bringing the Second Punic War (218 – 201 BC) to enemy territory. In Italy, he perfected battlefield tactics, which enabled him to consistently defeat bigger Roman armies.

Hannibal inflicted a series of humiliating defeats upon the Romans. That shook Rome’s hold on her Italian allies and client states, many of whom either joined Hannibal, or declared neutrality. His greatest victory came in 216 BC, when the Romans amass their biggest army to date, 87,000 men, and marched off to crush Hannibal. He met them with 40,000 men at Cannae, and crushed them in a military masterpiece that is still studied as an example of the near perfect battle.

Hannibal’s army was a mishmash of ethnic units of differing abilities. It functioned only because of Hannibal’s ability to deploy each group so as to maximize its strengths, while minimizing its weaknesses. A significant part of his army were Gaulish levies recruited from northern Italy. While brave, they were not as professional as Hannibal’s African infantry and Greek mercenaries.

So he placed the Gauls in the center, in a formation that bulged outwards. To either side of the Gauls, Hannibal positioned his more professional African heavy infantry. On the flanks, Hannibal positioned his cavalry. When fighting commenced, Hannibal expected that the Gauls would be forced backwards under relentless Roman pressure. Eventually, their formation which had started off bulging outwards, would bend and bulge inwards, forming a bowl shape or sack. The confident Romans, scenting victory as their foe gave ground, would push into the sack.

Once the Romans were in the sack, the African infantry positioned to the Gauls’ sides would wheel inwards and attack the Roman flanks. By then, the Carthaginian cavalry would have defeated the Roman cavalry. It would then turn around, and attack the enemy infantry’s rear, thus completely encircling the Romans. Things worked out exactly as Hannibal had planned, and in a battle viewed as the gold standard for tactical generalship, the Romans were nearly wiped out. Only 10,000 out of 87,000 Roman escaped, with the remainder either slaughtered or captured.

The Romans learned their lesson, and avoided taking Hannibal head on. They kept Hannibal bottled up in southern Italy for years, while they attacked Carthage on other fronts, seizing its empire in Spain, and defeating its allies in Sicily. Eventually, Roman general Scipio Africanus led a counter-invasion against Carthage itself, and Hannibal was recalled to defend the homeland. There, Hannibal lost the climactic battle of the war at Zama, in 202 BC. He was eventually forced into exile, and took his own life circa 182 BC in Bithynia, in today’s Turkey, to avoid capture by the Romans.

Gonzalo de Cordoba, “El Gran Capitan”, Revolutionized Warfare With Firearms

Gunpowder revolutionized warfare, but not overnight. It took centuries before gunpowder weapons, first used in battle in the 14th century, came to dominate warfare in the 16th century. Canons were the first to leave their mark in the late 15th century, when Charles VIII of France invaded Italy and used mobile artillery to breach castle walls up and down the Italian Peninsula. Firearms, held back by their slow rate of fire, took slightly longer. Enter Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba (1453 – 1515), a Spanish general known as “El Gran Capitan” (Great Captain). He revolutionized warfare by innovating tactics that enabled firearms to dominate battlefields forever after.

Firearms had been in use for centuries before Cordoba appeared on the scene, but infantry armed with such weapons were handicapped by the length of time they took to reload. After discharging, firearms took so long to reload that cavalry, or even swift footed infantry, could close in and chop up firearms users before they managed to get off another shot.

Cordoba fixed that weakness at the Battle of Cerignola in 1503 by his liberal use of the arquebus and arquebusiers. In that engagement, El Gran Capitan led an army of 6300 men, including 1000 arquebusiers and 20 canon. They faced a French army of 9000 men, mostly heavy cavalry and elite Swiss pikemen, supported by 40 canon. Cordoba deployed his arquebusiers behind a ditch and field fortifications, and from that shelter, they won an upset victory by shooting the attackers to pieces. Battlefields were dominated by firearms-bearing infantry from then on.

Cordoba furthered that revolution by inventing formations to allow infantry equipped with firearms to operate without the benefit of fortifications. The result was the Tercio, a formation combining pikemen with arquebusiers, allowing the latter to shelter behind the pikes of the former while reloading. Spanish infantry in the Tercio formation would go on to dominate European battlefields for the next century.

Maurice of Nassau Kicked Off “The Military Revolution”

Maurice, Count of Nassau (1567 – 1625), became Prince of Orange and stadtholder of the Dutch Republic from 1585 onwards. During his years in office, he led his Protestant countrymen’s fight for freedom from Catholic Spain, and secured the Dutch Republic’s de facto independence. He changed warfare by implementing radical innovations in military strategy and tactics, laying the foundations for what came to be known as The Military Revolution.

Since childhood, Maurice had been fascinated by all things military, such as ballistics, engineering, and mathematics. A bookworm and history buff, he developed military theories that he was eager to put in practice. As soon as he was confirmed as Prince of Orange in 1585, at age eighteen, he proceeded to energetically implement his innovations.

He began by reorganizing the Dutch army, then led it in what came to be known as the Ten Glory Years in capturing vital fortresses and towns from the Spanish, to round out the borders of the Dutch Republic and make it more defensible. That solidified the Dutch cause, and established Maurice as his era’s greatest general. Many commanders who rose to prominence during the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, learned their trade while serving under Maurice.

At the heart of Maurice’s reforms was an emphasis on drill, streamlining logistics, and simplifying battlefield tactics. Maurice was an avid student of Roman and Byzantine military history. He read about the role of rigorous training in the success of Rome’s legions, and drew lessons from classical authors such as Vegetius, Aelian, Frontinus, and Emperor Leo VI of Byzantium.

Maurice pioneered the decentralization of units. He made his infantry more maneuverable and flexible by splitting large Spanish style tercio regiments, of about 3000 men each, into smaller battalions of 580 men. He also simplified logistics by reducing his artillery to just 4 basic calibers. In 1599, Maurice went a step further and had the entire army of the Dutch Republic reequipped with muskets of the same caliber and size, greatly easing the lives of quartermasters.

The bedrock of Maurice’s reforms, however, was drill and discipline. He trained his men constantly, and introduced drills to reduce tasks, such as loading and discharging canons or firearms, to rote. The routine motions became operations that were, literally, done by the numbers. That enabled soldiers to function in the heat and chaos of battle, and perform their jobs by falling back on muscle memory from repetitive drilling. Maurice’s system of discipline and drill became the model for European armies for centuries to come.

Maurice’s Military Revolution had knock-on effects that went beyond the military. The new way of fighting relied on high levels of training, expertise, discipline, and organization. That could only be provided by professional, fulltime soldiers, who had to be maintained even in peacetime. It made them far more expensive than earlier armies, cobbled together from hastily recruited and hastily trained conscripts, who were discharged soon as the war was over.

Paying for the new standing armies required higher taxes, which in turn required an expansion in the authority and administrative machinery of governments. Gone were the days when fractious aristocrats could challenge the crown by raising armies from their retainers and peasants. Such ad hoc forces stood no chance against the central government’s professional armies. Only other governments could afford to raise, equip, and pay standing armies of similar quality.

Gustavus Adolphus Created a Warfare Template That Endured For Centuries

Gustavus Adolphus II (1594 – 1632) was king of Sweden from 1611 to 1632, during which time he transformed Sweden into a great power. He reformed the Swedish army and introduced military innovations that emphasized linear tactics, and the efficient use of combined arms. That made Sweden the premier military force during the Thirty Years War (1618 – 1648), and revolutionized warfare by creating a model that would be emulated by military commanders for hundreds of years.

Gustavus Adolphus built upon the innovations of Maurice of Nassau, and simplified logistics by standardizing his army’s artillery and muskets. He also paid attention to drill and discipline, until Swedish soldiers became Europe’s most professional men at arms. Adolphus went Maurice of Nassau one better, by cross training his men, such as training Swedish infantry and cavalry to service artillery pieces. That enabled them to serve as gunners at a pinch if their own artillerists fell in battle, and if they captured enemy guns, they could immediately turn them on their foes. Similarly, if the need arose, a killed cavalryman could be replaced by an infantryman, and vice versa.

While Maurice had reformed the Dutch army, dense Spanish style tercio formations remained the norm throughout the rest of Europe. Adolphus adopted Maurcie’s smaller infantry battalions, and reduced their density to only five or six lines. That allowed most of the soldiers to participate in combat. By contrast, only about half of a tercio’s soldiers could directly engage in their opponents, unless and until those in front of them were killed or wounded.

The Swedish king also introduced artillery to the lower levels of command. Before Adolphus, artillery was centralized and controlled by the army commander. Adolphus equipped his regiments with light field pieces, which could keep up with attacking infantry. That gave lower level commanders greater firepower in both defense and offense. Between reducing the density of his formations and equipping regiments with artillery, a Swedish brigade of about 1300 men could pour out more firepower than a tercio of 3000 men.

Adolphus also trained his infantry to fire in volleys. He was innovative with cavalry as well, and reintroduced shock tactics by training his horsemen to charge opposing lines. As artillery softened up enemy lines, the infantry would advance, halt a short distance from the enemy, fire a devastating volley from close range, then charge their reeling foes before they recovered. When the enemy broke or was about to break, the cavalry would be unleashed to finish him off. That combined arms model, with artillery, infantry, and cavalry acting in conjunction, would become the standard emulated by western armies for centuries. The broad outline is still followed to this day.

Frederick the Great Revolutionized the Role of Skilled Battlefield Maneuvers

Frederick II (1712 – 1786) ascended the Prussian throne in 1740. He earned the sobriquet “The Great” by fighting a series of wars that greatly expanded Prussia’s territory, and transformed it from a second rate power into a great one. Frederick reformed the Prussian army and introduced military innovations, particularly skilled battlefield tactics, that revolutionized 18th century European warfare. Emphasizing tactical training, he transformed Prussia’s army into a well oiled machine capable of executing intricate battlefield maneuvers on the fly. That multiplied his forces’ effectiveness, and allowed them to frequently attack and defeat bigger opponents.

Frederick II’s father, Frederick Wilhelm I, was a martinet who devoted his life to the Prussian army, and became known as “The Soldier King”. However, he lavished resources to create an army that looked great on the parade ground, not in the field of battle. An example was his Potsdam Regiment, composed of giants standing 7 feet tall or more. Frederick Wilhelm sent agents to comb Europe in search of extra tall recruits, and they were not above kidnapping them if they did not willingly enlist. The Soldier King liked nothing more than spending hours drilling his giants on the parade ground.

Upon ascending the throne, Frederick II immediately disbanded the expensive Potsdam Giants, and redirected their budget to raise 7 new regiments and 10,000 troops. He modernized the army, emphasizing not only drill and discipline, but also the training of officers. That well trained officer corps allowed Frederick to grant commanders in the field greater autonomy to use their own initiative to further his overall plan. It would become a German military hallmark. Frederick also introduced annual maneuvers, in which the Prussian army tested out new formations and tactics.

The Prussian army was relatively weak in cavalry, and relied instead on infantry. Frederick’s favorite unit was his 1st Guards Battalion, of about 1000 men, which he used it to test out new theories. He also used it as a military academy to train new officers, and as a refresher for officers he thought could use more training. His next favorite were grenadier units, comprised of select soldiers with at least two years’ experience in regular infantry battalions. The bulk of Frederick’s army were musketeers in standard infantry regiments. His men carried about 55 pounds of equipment, and they routinely marched about 15 miles per day.

Frederick was a tactical genius who owed much of his success to the quick and skillful movement of his troops. The Battle of Leuthen, 1757, illustrates the effectiveness of his innovations. In that engagement, Frederick led 36,000 Prussians against an Austrian army of over 80,000 men. Despite the odds, he went on the offensive and won a stunning victory.

Frederick opened the battle by attacking the Austrian right, luring the enemy into shifting forces to meet that threat. Frederick then took advantage of hills in front of the Austrian position that masked his movements, and marched the bulk of his army to fall upon the Austrian left. In an oblique order attack – a version of Epaminondas’ tactics at Leuctra of focusing forces on a single flank – Frederick wrong footed the Austrians and shattered their left. The Austrians suffered a crushing defeat, losing 22,000 men to the Prussians’ 6000. At the time, only Frederick’s army was capable of such skilled battlefield maneuvers.

Prussia’s army became a model for other European powers. Unfortunately for Prussia, Frederick’s successors rested on Frederick’s laurels, and failed to keep pace with military innovations. As a result, the Prussian army ossified, and was easily crushed by Napoleon in 1806 – 1807. After his victory, the French Emperor stopped by Frederick’s tomb, and paid him a great compliment by informing a group of his officers: “Gentlemen, if this man was alive, I would not be here“.

Napoleon Bonaparte Became the Model for Generations of Subsequent Commanders

The career of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 – 1821), one of history’s greatest military geniuses, spanned nearly three decades, during which he fought over 60 battles, losing only 8 times. He revolutionized warfare with tactical, strategic, and organizational innovations, and for generations after his death, he was the model whom all aspiring commanders sought to emulate.

Napoleon was an artillery officer with an instinctive grasp for its full potential. Until the late 18th century, commanders tended to view field artillery more as a defensive than an offensive weapon. In the years preceding the French Revolution, military theorists had begun to challenge that conception. Napoleon took their ideas, and ran with them.

Napoleon did not see artillery as an adjunct, but as a central part of his battle plans. Instead of using artillery to simply break up attacking infantry or cavalry, Napoleon realized its offensive potential by concentrating it in grand batteries to devastate key enemy positions. He also studied the relationship between the placement of his own guns and the potential movements of his troops and those of the enemy. Napoleon then positioned his artillery accordingly, anticipating the flow of battle and having his guns already in place or ready to move to where they could do the most good.

Napoleon had also spent time in the Bureau of Topography, and he had an instinct for the ground and terrain. One of the secrets behind his success, routine now but often overlooked before Napoleon, was studying the terrain in advance to select the best battlefield. His maxim “know your enemy and know your battlefield better than your enemy“, is as valid today as it was in Napoleon’s day.

One of Napoleon’s greatest organizational innovations was the development of the corps system. He organized divisions into corps of 20,000 to 40,000 men, that were essentially mini armies containing infantry, cavalry, engineers, and artillery. During campaigns, the corps, each headed by a marshal, would march on a broad front, likened to the outstretched fingers of a hand. When one corps made contact with the enemy, it would give battle and attempt to fix the opposition in place, while the other corps closed in on the enemy, turning the outstretched fingers into a closed fist.

On the battlefield, Napoleon overthrew the linear warfare that had dominated battlefields since the days of Gustavus Adolphus – a process begun early in the French Revolutionary Wars, and perfected by Napoleon. When the Revolutionary government enacted the levee en masse and conscripted the entire French population into the war effort, French armies were suddenly swollen by hundreds of thousands of new recruits. France was invaded on multiple fronts by her neighbors’ professional armies, and it lacked both the time and resources to train up the new citizen armies to professional levels.

Making a virtue out of necessity, French military doctrine, as perfected by Napoleon, was changed to deemphasize the linear tactics of lining up against enemy forces and exchanging volleys of musket fire. Such exchanges were usually won by the more professional army. Instead, the French emphasized attacks by massed troops in dense columns, which required relatively little training. The dense formations were psychologically comforting to poorly trained troops under fire. They were also psychologically exhilarating, enabling them to feed off each others’ enthusiasm and elan during an attack. Napoleon mastered the art of using terrain and good timing to throw such columns at vulnerable points in enemy battle lines, to overwhelm and break them with sheer mass.

Napoleon also went out of his way to make his soldiers not only respect him, but love him. He shared his men’s hardships, and spoke their language. A master propagandist, he issued bombastic army bulletins to boost his soldiers’ morale, praising their prowess, and his own brilliance in order to solidify their confidence in him. It was effective back then, when such propaganda was something new.

Napoleon’s armies were also a meritocracy in which commendable behavior was rewarded with decorations and promotions. It was often said of Napoleon’s soldiers that “inside every private’s knapsack is a marshal’s baton“, to describe the potential for rapid promotion and advancement. And indeed, more than one of Napoleon’s marshals had started off as a lowly private.

Moltke the Elder Created an Army Command Structure Used Around the World to This Day

The military philosophy of Helmuth von Moltke (1800 – 1891), also known as Moltke the Elder, was to distill Napoleon’s innovations and precepts, and adapt them to contemporary conditions. An example was his realization that the defensive power of modern firearms had rendered the frontal attacks of Napoleon’s days impractical. So he focused instead on developing tactics to secure victory via enveloping attacks instead of head on assaults.

He viewed strategy through the pragmatic lens of adapting means to ends, and avoiding the pursuit of ends when the means to secure them were unavailable. He also realized that things almost never go as planned in war, and his most famous statement summarizing his thinking is “no plan survives contact with the enemy“. So he emphasized extensive preparations for all possible scenarios.

In 1857, Moltke was promoted to Chief of the Prussian General Staff – a position he would hold for the next three decades. He revolutionized warfare with his innovations to that institution, renamed the Great General Staff after the establishment of the German Empire. Moltke made the commander’s staff a professional and permanent body, and created an infrastructure to handle basic matters such as logistics and supply, transport, intelligence, and coordination. Relieved of those chores, the commander was freed to concentrate on strategy and tactics. Moltke’s Great General Staff was emulated by armies the world over, all of which eventually established their own general staffs.

Moltke was one of the first to realize that the days when a commander could exercise complete control over an army, such as occurred during the Napoleonic Wars, were over. By the second half of the 19th century, armies had gotten too big, and their fields of battle and theaters of operations had grown too massive, for an army commander to see all his forces from a command post atop a hill. In this new environment, senior commanders had to explain their intent to subordinates, then grant them autonomy and trust them to use their own initiative to realize the commander’s intent.

Instead of detailed orders, Moltke gave subordinates clearly defined goals, the forces needed to execute them, and a time frame in which the goal must be achieved. How to accomplish the goal was largely left to the subordinate’s discretion and initiative. That required a revamping of officer training to encourage initiative and independent thinking. German soldiers are often thought of as robotic automatons, but since Moltke’s day, few if any armies have allowed their soldiers as much discretion, or trusted them to use their own initiative, as much as the German army.

Moltke’s innovations made the Prussian army the world’s most efficient, as it demonstrated in a series of swift and successful wars en route to unifying Germany. After defeating the Danes in 1864, then crushing the Austrians in 1866, in accordance was plans drawn by Moltke, Prussia took on France, whose army was reputedly the world’s best. Moltke drew the plans for the Franco-Prussian War, 1870 – 1871, and led the Prussian army in executing his design. The result was a stunning Prussian victory, capped by the creation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirror in Versailles.

Mao Zedong, the Father of Modern Guerrilla Warfare Theory

One of the most original military thinkers of the twentieth century was Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976), the communist revolutionary who became the founding father of the People’s Republic of China. He literally wrote the book on the modern theory of insurgency: On Guerrilla Warfare. In it, he described a revolutionary methodology to defeat Japanese invaders, based on strategies and tactics honed during Mao’s struggle against China’s Nationalist government.

Mao developed a Theory of People’s War that divided popular insurgencies into three stages. Stage One is about winning popular support by distributing propaganda and attacking the organs of an unpopular government. Stage Two sees an escalation, with attacks directed against the government’s military forces and vital institutions. Stage Three further ratchets things up by turning to conventional warfare, and making a bid to seize the cities, overthrow the government, and seize control of the country. It was a flexible doctrine, and shifting between stages can go in either direction, depending on circumstances. And the stages need not be uniform throughout the entire country, but could vary depending on local conditions.

Mao’s insurgents fought both the Japanese and the Nationalist Chinese, and ultimately prevailed. Using small groups of combatants in raids and ambushes to defeat bigger and less mobile armies discomfited the Japanese, and eventually secured the communists victory in China. Mao summarized his revolutionary guerilla methodology as: “When the enemy advances, we retreat. When the enemy rests, we harass. When the enemy tires, we attack. When the enemy retreats we advance“. His methods became a model followed by numerous insurgencies around the world, as they fought against colonialism and oppressive native regimes.

Maosit insurgency seeks to win hearts and minds by treating the peasants with a respect that stands in stark contrast with the contempt meted them by their rulers, be they Japanese invaders or Chinese landed gentry and government officials. Revolutionaries also tied the peasants’ economic interests to the success of the revolution, via a redistribution of land, and a lifting of feudal-type dues.

As Maoists and their emulators discovered, at a visceral level, the peasants and the disadvantaged craved simple respect, even more than they craved the economic benefits promised by the revolution. They also harbored significant resentment against the upper classes who had been exploiting and contemptuously looking down upon them for so long. Such stored resentments are a powerful resource that revolutionaries should seek to tap.

After Japan’s defeat in WW2, the communists went on to win control of China in 1949, and Mao’s insurgency model and example were later utilized to great effect throughout the Developing World. The Viet Minh in particular successfully adapted Maoist methods to local conditions, and used them to defeat Vietnam’s French colonial masters. They then waged a protracted war to unify a divided Vietnam, and succeeded despite massive American support for the government of South Vietnam.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources & Further Reading

Ancient History Encyclopedia – Epaminondas

Biography – Philip of Macedon

Encyclopedia Britannica – Gonzalo de Cordoba, Spanish Military Commander

Encyclopedia Britannica – Maurice, Stadholder of the Netherlands

History of Macedonia – Philip II of Macedonia

History Net – Frederick the Great: The First Modern Military Celebrity

Forster, Stig, Journal of Strategic Studies, Volume 10, 1987, Issue 2 – Facing “People’s War”: Moltke the Elder and Germany’s Military Options After 1871

Livius – Hannibal Barca

Marxists Internet Archive – On Guerrilla Warfare

Nimwegen, Olaf van – The Dutch Army and the Military Revolutions (1588 – 1688)

Searching in History – Military Innovation: Gustavus Adolphus

Strategy by Design – Von Moltke on Strategy

Wikipedia – Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba

Wikipedia – Maurice, Prince of Orange