An Audit of Warfare

Major Agha H Amin (Retired)

October 2001

About the AuthorAbout the Author Agha H. Amin , Retired Tank corps major who served in five tank regiments and commanded an independent tank squadron and served in various staff , instructional and research assignments. In his Pakistan Army tenure he wrote three original tactical papers on Reconnaissance Troops Tactical handling, Reconnaissance support group , and RFS Concept. His writings were published in Pakistan Armys prime journals , Pakistan Army Journal and Citadel Journal of Command and Staff College Quetta. His recommendations regarding bifurcation of officer corps into command and staff cadre advanced in 1998 were later accepted. In addition his recommendation of grouping various corps into army commands advanced in an article published in Citadel Journal in 1998 were accepted in 2005 or so. Wrote The Essential Clausewitz in 1993, Sepoy Rebellion of 1857-59 in 1998 , Pakistan Army till 1965 in 1999 ,Development of Taliban Factions in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2010) ,Taliban War in Afghanistan (2009). Served as Assistant Editor of Defence Journal ,Executive Editor of globe and Founder Editor of Journal of Afghanistan Studies . An associate of the think tanks ORBAT and Alexandrian Defense group. Carried out various oil and gas and power transmission line surveys in West Asia. Editor in Chief of monthly Intelligence Review and monthly Military and Security Review. Heads the think tank Centre for study of Intelligence Operations established in early 2010.

While valour, operational strategic insight receive great attention, financial aspects, drab albeit extremely significant, are mostly ignored by students of military history. This article aims at highlighting the financial aspect of war with a view to show that there is a great deal of truth in Napoleons saying why bigger battalions, other factors being relatively similar, are more likely to emerge as victorious!

In ancient and medieval history size of armies was relatively small, munitions and armaments were rudimentary and armies lived off the land! As the size of armies increased and warfare

became more civilised financial aspects of war became far more complicated.

The period  1550-1650 was a watershed in military history. During this period size of armies radically increased. Around 1631 Gustavus Adolphus commanded armies which were in excess of 100,000. It became difficult to sustain such large armies. The total strength of the Mughal Army of Emperor Akbar was estimated  around  38,77,557 matchlockmen and infantry (including militia and zamindars retainers) while the cavalry was estimated to be around 384,758 men.1 In Aurangzeb’s time the strength varied from 240,000 to 300,000 cavalry and around 600,000 infantry.2 In Aurangzeb’s reign Aurangzeb’s Maratha War laid the foundation of financial decline of Mughal Empire. The magnitude of the expenses may be imagined from the fact that Aurangzeb’s military budget was double of Shahjahan’s military budget!3 This expense had serious maritime implications. Because of pre-occupation with the Maratha guerrillas Aurangzeb failed to capture the strategic ports of Bombay and Madras.4 Thus by late 1690s and 1700 Bombay was a prosperous and strongly fortified port and had surpassed Mughal Surat as a port! During this period Mughal land revenue declined due to revolts and civil wars and foreign trade which could have compensated for the shortfall was almost zero, which may be gauged from the fact that custom revenue “yielded less than one percent of the total revenue of the state”.5

This trend was not confined to India alone! War was no longer a question of few charges, a brilliant stratagem but a very costly affair. In 1552 a single campaign at Metz cost the Hapsburg

Emperor Charles the Fifth ten times his normal income from the American colonies alone!

The British victory at Plassey was decisive because it gave the English East India Company enormous additional revenue with which it was able to massively expand its army. Thus within four years of  Plassey the English East India Company had effectively neutralised its rival French Company once it had captured the most important French base Pondicherry in 1761. The English East India Company became the best paymaster in India after Plassey and no native power could challenge it.

Even on a personal level the British officers made huge personal fortunes out of war! Thus Clive as a relatively junior officer in Madras made something like 40,000 Pounds Sterling between 1744 and 1753! In Bengal he manoeuvred Mir Jafar into gifting him something like 234,000 Pounds Sterling in the period 1757-66 ! Even more honest British generals like Wellington earned prize money around the figures of  43,000 Pounds Sterling in the period 1798-1805!7 The other side of the coin is the fact that these men exposed themselves to fire unlike our silent soldiers and many more “GT Road soldiers” (a term coined by one of our leading military writers) who may have spent 1965 and 1971 war going up and down the GT Road, for no fault of theirs, but the resultant guilt complex makes them fond of wearing martial dresses, a clear violation of  “Army Dress Regulations” with a macho outlook without having been through the baptism of fire!

On the other hand wars, most of which were initiated by the highly ambitious Viceroy Marquis Wellesley brought losses for the English East India Company!  Thus by 1815 three quarters of the budget of the English East India Company was gobbled

by its 150,000 strong standing army alone! In 1815 the total debt of the East India Company stood at 40 Million Pounds Sterling!8 Wellesley was thus forced to extort money from States like Oudh whose more than half territory he annexed in 1801 citing political compulsions! This was not enough. In 1814-16 the English Company once again forced the Nawab of Oudh to give it a loan  to finance part of the bill of the Anglo Nepal War! 9

Few people understand how the First World War bled Britain white in financial terms. This in turn weakened British resolve to hold on to the colonies and accelerated the process of grant of self-rule to the British colonies after the First World  War. The British never realised how the First World War would affect them and financially destroy them! They were a victim of self-hypnosis about the sun never setting on the British Empire! Their historians had distorted the fact that Napoleon was not defeated by Nelson at Trafalgar alone but by Russian Spanish Austrian and Prussian blood in many wars fought between 1805 and 1815! Table No 1 illustrates the financial potential of Europe’s leading powers as it stood in 1914:—10

This was not all. As a matter of fact USA advanced huge loans to all allied countries which made their economy far more weaker than it was in 1914. The following table illustrates the war loans advanced by USA to various allied countries:—

The British financial position was made worse by the fact that it had also advanced loans of a total amount of 8,695,000,000/- USD to its allies.13 Thus Britain with a total pre- war annual income of 11 Billion USD had spent something like  44,000,000,000/- USD as  direct cost of the war (excluding indirect costs) as compared with US  whose pre-war income was

some 37 Billion USD and which had spent only something like 31,000,000,000/- USD as direct cost of war!

Such was the British war weariness that it concluded a treaty with Afghanistan which had attacked India without fighting anything more than a few minor border actions! Thus British losses in the First Great War resulted in Afghanistan’s diplomatic independence, which it got by signing the Treaty of Rawalpindi in the aftermath of the Third Afghan War! Britain had won the war but its victory was a Pyhrric one !

The Japanese fought heroically against the USA in the Second World War. However, certain financial indicators show why the USA emerged victorious in the Second World War.

Table No 4 shows the armament spendings of various countries in the period 1935-45 in Billions of USD at the rate as it stood in the year 1994:—14

As a matter of fact Table No 4 explains how the allies won the war against Japan and Germany! US money combined with Russian blood won the war since the Red Army sustained some 90%15 of the total casualties sustained by all allies!

Japan was industrially too outmoded to fight USA. The fact that despite all these shortcomings the Japanese did well is no compliment to the US military role in WW Two! The Japanese industry took much longer to build aircraft carriers,16  the most important weapon of the war as compared to US industry. Thus Japanese cause was doomed after they lost  four carriers at Midway. Industrially they could never recover from this loss.

The industrial potential of the US armaments industry may be gauged from the fact that during Second World War US industry alone produced some 52% of world wide (including both allies and the axis powers)  aircraft production, 36% of all artillery, 48% of all vehicles and 61% of all ship building!17

Recently in an article Lieutenant General Hameed Gul (Retired) called the US soldiers chocolate cream soldiers! Some pedants in order to indulge in the exercise of “Hazoor ka Iqbal Buland Karna” (Endless Sycophancy) criticised Hameed Gul for saying so! Logistically Hameed Gul’s point is valid. Even in WW Two the US soldier was a thoroughly spoilt soldier. This may be gauged from the following statistics. In WW II on the average each US fighting division consumed something like 720 tons of supply per day as compared with barely 200 tons of supplies per day of its German counterpart division. This included a scale of one ounce of sweets, two ounces of biscuits, and one packet of chewing gum for every man per day totalling something like 6,250 pounds of sweets, 12,500 pounds of biscuits and 100,000 packets of gum!18

The 1965 War certainly played a major role in derailing Pakistan’s economy and the 1971 War certainly proved too costly for Indira Gandhi and she was booted out within four years of a victorious war. The human mind works strangely! Increased expectations lead to bitterness and  sometimes ungrateful behaviour and defeat results in increased resolve to vindicate one’s honour!

In the present situation with a long low intensity war impending some readers may draw wrong conclusions and think that material might cannot be defeated with anything. This  is

incorrect provided the guerrilla or unconventional forces receive some kind of aid like the Viet Cong got in Vietnam War from USSR and the Afghan Mujahideen from USA! Fortunately guerrilla war turned out to be something totally different from conventional war. Thus in Vietnam despite spending something like direct cost of  515 Billion USD and a total cost of something like 900 Billion US Dollars19 the USA failed in its self-professed object of detainment of communism! This is despite the fact that over 13 Million Tonnes of bombs equivalent to 450 times the energy of the atomic bombs used on Hiroshima were dropped on Vietnam! This comes down to an average of 265 KG for every man, woman and child in Indo- China! Indeed one optimist has estimated that had the Americans showered the Indo-China residents with the money spent on making all these bombs they might have won the war of hearts and minds!20 But then men, at least the vast majority of them are highly irrational creatures!

Conclusion

War whether conventional or unconventional, high or low intensity is a combination of moral and material factors! In the first strike, audacity wins but long-term wars cannot be fought on audacity alone! Nations, especially those based on democratic institutions are not one man shows! Their decision making and executing processes are highly deliberate and well organised affairs! On the other hand every empire has gone through a process of rise, decline and fall and the same applies to USA! On the other hand, sentimental people which we are, we must not forget that US aid apart from Islamic fervour played a major role in the Afghan War  or  Jihad, which has

been  described as “the largest covert action programme since Second World War”!21 Some 2 Billion US Dollars were pumped in Afghanistan by the USA, a far cheaper business than Vietnam! No one knows how much of the Vietnam War was financed by exports of high-grade narcotics from the Golden Triangle or how much of the Afghan War was financed from exports of Heroin and Dope from the Golden Crescent!

The danger in today’s war is that it has no rules! It has too many shades, variation in which it is not easy to make out! Too many notes, too many flavours! It is far more complicated than any conventional or unconventional war which has been fought to date! The danger lies in the fact that hatred will become as intense as it was in the 30 Years War or in the Crusades! The power of state would increase at the expense of individual liberty and citizens of all countries, big and small will suffer! Indeed the foundations were laid once civilians were indiscriminately killed in Vietnam and when Operation Phoenix had authorised killing by assassination!

Just last year this scribe had stated in one of the articles published in the Defence Journal,

“Similarly the Americans must remember that the Muslim Jehadi Count Dracula that they resurrected many centuries after the crusades with CIA Dollars and modern US military hardware in Ningrahar and Paktia is definitely far more dangerous than the older original Transylvanian version of Bram Stoker which was only confined to the London journal in which it was serialised! This new Muslim Dracula may one-day travel in the hidden vaults of a merchant ship across the Atlantic or Pacific to USA! The reader may note that as per one respectable

authority only five out of 100 containers arriving at US ports are checked thoroughly! Ironically the result would be the re-creation of a medieval or pre-medieval religious rivalry, for vampires can only be destroyed by recourse to religion! As in Indo-Pak religious extremism in India was intensified once religious extremism intensified in Pakistan from the post-1977 period. The case in Europe and USA may be almost similar. Fears of Islamic resurgence may give rise to another similarly absurd reaction in shape of Christian military resurgence!”

One lesson in finance for unconventional forces fighting larger forces in today’s world is that they must have allies! One cannot gamble on any single card, may it be ideological fervour or martial races theory or sheer material superiority! A lesson for both the US and its present and potential enemies in the war against terrorism! There was a time when  a man named Nixon had bragged  “The bastards have never been bombed like they are going to be bombed this time”!22 The bastards were bombed but their resolve was not erased and USA had to finally withdraw from Vietnam! But USSR supported them to a great extent and China to a much lesser extent and the Cold War had not ended! May be the recent situation dating from 11th September restarts the Cold War or a hotter War!

The worst war and the most costly  war  is one in which the enemy does not wear a uniform ! We saw one in 1971! It makes all including non-combatants vulnerable to attack and atrocities ! The war which began on 11th September 2001 is one without precedent in the history of mankind! This war will be the worse civil war cum crusade cum jihad fought on a global scale! The other day we heard someone

saying “USA will never be the same again”. I am afraid that I disagree with this a bit myopic view! I assert with all my strength that after 11th September 2001 this world will never be the same again! God help us! To rephrase Lord Greys phrase made on the outbreak of First World War one may say that “lights around us are going out! Who knows whether the future generations will ever see them lit up again”!

Table No 1

CountryNational

Income in billion USD

Population in millions

Per Capital Income in

USDUnited States of America 37 Billion 98 377

Britain 11 Billion 45 244France 6 Billion 39 153Japan 2 Billion 55 36Germany 12 Billion 65 184Italy 4 Billion 37 108Russia 7 Billion 171 41Austria-Hungary 3 Billion 52 57

Table No 2 shows the financial meaning of First World War11:—

Country/Dominion/Colony Direct Cost of War in USDUnited States of America 22,625,253,000/-Great Britain 35,334,012,000/-Canada 1,665,576,000/-Australia 1,423,208,000/-New Zealand 378,750,000/-India 601,279,000/-Union of South Africa 300,000,000/-British Colonies 125,000,000/-France 24,265,583,000/-Russia 22,593,950,000/-Italy 12,413,998,000/-Belgium 1,154,468,000/-Romania 1,600,000,000/-Japan 40,000,000/-Serbia 399,400,000/-Greece 270,000,000/-Other Allied Countries 500,000,000/-Grand Total 125,690,477,000/-

Table No 3 showing advances made in The First World War by the USA to its Allies12

Country Loan advanced in USD

Great Britain 4,316,000,000/-France 2,852,000,000/-Italy 1,591,000,000/-Russia 187,000,000/-Belgium 341,000,000/-Serbia 27,000,000/-Czechoslovakia 50,000,000/-Greece 43,000,000/-Rumania 30,000,000/-Cuba 10,000,000/-Liberia 5,000,000/-

Table No 4 Showing Spending on Armaments in Billions in US Dollars

COUNTRY 1935-38 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944

USA 13.5 5.4 13.5 40.5 180.0 342.0 378.0Canada ? ? ? 4.5 9.0 13.5 13.5Britain 22.5 9.0 31.5 58.5 81.0 99.0 100.0USSR 72.0 30.0 45.0 76.0 104.0 125.0 144.0Germany 108.0 31.0 54.0 54.0 77.0 124.0 153.0Japan 18.0 4.5 9.0 18.0 27.0 42.0 54.0

End Notes1Page-61-The Army of the Indian Mughals-Its Organisation and Administration-William Irvine-1898. Reprinted by Eurasia Publishing House-Ramnagar-New Delhi-1987.2 Ibid.3Page-316-Cambridge History of India-The Mughal Period-Lieut Col Sir Wolseley Haig and Sir Richard Burn-Reprinted by S.Chand and Company-New Delhi-1987.4Page-242-The New Cambridge History of India-The Mughal Empire-John.F.Richards-Cambridge University Press-1993.5 Page-317-Haig and Burn-Op Cit.6Page-59-The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers--Paul Kennedy-Fontana Press-London-1988.7Pages-129 & 130-The Rise and Fall of the British Empire-Lawrence James-Abacus Books-UK-1995.8Page-133 & 134-Ibid.9Page-239-A Popular History of British India-W.Cooke Taylor-1855-Reprinted by Mittal Publications-New Delhi-1987.10 Page-314-Paul Kennedy-Op Cit.

11Page-364-A Concise History of the First World War-Edited by Brigadier Vincent.J.Esposito-Pall  Mall Press-London-1964.12 Page-369-Ibid.13Ibid.14Page-515-The Pacific War Encyclopedia-Volume Two-James.F.Dunnigan and Albert.A .Nofi-Facts on File Inc-New York-1998.15Page-987-Hitler and Stalin-Parallel Lives-Alan Bullock-Alfred. A. Knopf-New York-1992.16Page-421-Pacific War Encyclopedia-Op Cit.17Page-423-Ibid.18Pages-33 & 34-Overlord-Max Hastings-New York-1984.19Page-109-The Economic Consequences of the Vietnam War-Anthony.S.Campagna-Praeger-New York-1991.20 Page-35-Vietnam-A Travel Survival Kit-Robert Storey and Daniel Robinson-Lonely Planet Publications-Australia-1995.21Page-186-Superpowers Defeated-Douglas. A. Borer-Frank Cass Publishers-London-1999.22 Reported in New York Times-