I took the opportunity at last week’s Current Strategy Forum at the Navy War College to address an issue that had been bothering me for some time. I concluded my lecture with the suggestion that military planners should stop asking, “What is the enemy center of gravity?” but instead ask, “What is the position we wish to achieve?” Am I right? Is it time to move on from the Center of Gravity? Does my suggestion for an alternative add anything?
Clausewitz’s concept of a Center of Gravity (COG) was taken from the physics of his day and became one of his most unsatisfactory contributions to strategic thought. In physics, the COG represents the point at which the forces of gravity could be said to converge within an object, where its weight was balanced in all directions. If struck there it would lose balance and fall. One obvious problem was that whereas it might be easy to identify the COG of a solid and static object, it was much harder to do so with a complicated shape made up of moving parts.
For Clausewitz, the COG represented the source of the opponent’s power and strength and was therefore “the point against which all our energies should be directed.” Here the application of force should most likely result in the enemy’s defeat. Unfortunately, however, he was never wholly clear on the spot to look for. It could be a major concentration of physical strength, and therefore a challenging place for an attack, or the point where the enemy forces came together and were given direction, which might make more sense. Perhaps it was something more political—say a capital city or a particular member of an alliance that once defeated would cause the whole to crumble.
Over the past few decades, this has turned into a search for the knockout blow, the limited but well-directed, and brilliantly executed, thrust that might take down the enemy’s forces without the bother of a prolonged and bloody campaign of attrition. This reflected changing views about both receiving and inflicting casualties, and fitted in with a natural preference for strategy to be smart and sophisticated, avoiding the crude application of brute force.
There are three basic problems with the notion:
First, countries, or indeed any political entities, or their armed forces, do not have COGs. As a metaphor, it encourages a search for some vital core that holds the enemy system together. If this core can be identified and successfully attacked, it is supposed that the enemy system will unravel. This assumes an interconnected and interdependent system, incapable of adaption and regeneration. Yet once some key element is removed, social organizations do not necessarily collapse. There may be a transformation, but this could be into something more robust and durable. Taking out the enemy regime, for example, may not result in something pliable and cooperative, but instead a new entity that is as unfriendly and less manageable.
Second, it reflects the classical assumption that the most important task of armed forces must be to defeat those of the enemy. This follows from the conviction that the key to unlocking the enemy state is the elimination of the enemy army. Yet taking enemy forces out of the fight is not invariably necessary in order to achieve desired political effects, especially in a campaign for limited objectives short of all-out war. There are also roles for armed forces in protecting civilians from danger, intimidating and coercing, comforting friends and reassuring allies, prodding disputants to negotiations and strengthening bargaining. Force can have an instrumental value, even when it is not decisive in itself. There is always a need to understand enemy objectives and capabilities, but that does not always require working out how to impose a total collapse. Their forces might be deterred, denied, deflected, and displaced without being threatened with a terminal defeat.
Third, the concept of the COG has had little practical value. Many variations on the COG theme have been explored by Britain’s and America’s armed forces over the past few decades. I am prepared to be corrected, but I have seen no evidence that the effort has improved the conduct of military operations. There has been no consensus about what commanders should be looking for or the methodology required to find it. Is the aim to seek out or avoid enemy strengths or to find the enemy’s weakest points, although only if they represent a critical vulnerability and not just some marginal asset? Reviewing the literature for my book, Strategy: A History, I came up with a compound definition for a center of gravity that accounted for all the versions I had seen. It could refer to
a target, or a number of targets. which might constitute a source of enemy strength and/or a critical vulnerability, found in the physical, psychological or political spheres which might, if attacked, have by itself, or alternatively in combination with other events, a decisive effect or else possibly result in consequences with potentially decisive effects.
Could it be that there has been a tendency among some military planners to begin with what could be attacked most effectively and then work backwards and proclaim that these targets did indeed constitute the enemy’s COG? At times, it has been used to dignify an available target set with greater strategic significance than it could possibly deserve. A ruling party may depend on its Ministry of Interior and a repressive police force but precision strikes against their HQs and branch offices are not going to weaken their influence, especially if the buildings have been vacated in advance. In addition, targets have to be chosen by additional criteria to what hurts the enemy most. A COG analysis which showed that a regime is most vulnerable to random attacks on urban areas where the elite tend to live is going to be of little value because such targeting would be deemed unacceptable. Depriving a country of energy, transport and water might make a country ungovernable. This would, however, affect not just the current regime, but anyone subsequently trying to put the country together again.
So the wrong question to ask at the start of a campaign is “What is the enemy’s center of gravity?” The term should henceforth be banned. What should be put in its place? My suggestion may appear anticlimactic and banal. I would pose a simpler, more straightforward question: “What is the position you wish to reach?”
The term itself has a history. In pre-Napoleonic positional war, the aim was to establish defendable points. This led to a later association of positional war as premodern, reflecting an age of tentative confrontations, limited objectives, slow tempo and cautious method, and associated with weak and indecisive leaders. By contrast, the Napoleonic wars demonstrated the potential of much bolder wars of manoeuvre in the modern era,. At the same time the word “position” was also used in a basic, literal sense — the actual space occupied by an army in preparation for a battle, during its course and at its end. Brian Anderson has pointed out to me that Alfred Thayer Mahan spoke of war as the “business of positions”. Mahan claimed to be quoting Napoleon, although he was using the term more broadly. Napoleon’s maxims are full of references to positions as physical locations. Mahan was thinking about more than battle, but how to retain control over vital sea lanes and also how to influence negotiations on trading matters. He also believed, as a Jominian, that positions taken should be strategically decisive.
After the First World War, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci distinguished between a “War of Manoeuvre,” essentially a working-class insurrection to seize power directly, and a “War of Positions,” which was slower, more subterranean, involving a gradual attempt to gain influence in society, including by shaping the way that the masses thought about their condition. It accepted that an improved position might be achieved using culture rather than physical strength. Another use of the terms comes in business strategy. There is a whole school, associated with Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School, often known as the positioning school, concerned with how firms relate to their competitive environment. A position sought by a business would depend on an analysis of the environment, including its bargaining power with both suppliers and customers.
By itself the term “position” means little, but that is an advantage. It requires the hard work to be done by those who must explain what they are doing and why. It encourages the objectives of any use of armed force to be evaluated in terms of the wider environment, which should encourage careful exploration of risks. By focusing on the political as much as the military effects to be obtained, options can be assessed against more than hypotheses about critical enemy vulnerabilities. Although it is always natural for the military to aim for a particular spot, the position need not be a physical location, but an extra advantage when negotiating (bargaining position) or sustaining a stake in a developing power struggle. The question of position can be asked at any level of command, and can be relevant to port visits and joint exercises as much as peacekeeping, humanitarian intervention and regular warfare. Thus, asking about position presumes nothing about tasks and allows for the integration of the political and military strands of strategy. It recognises that conflicts develop through stages, so that the first move rarely turns into a knockout blow that later moves will depend on how the first moves affected the situation, including unintended consequences and the unanticipated responses of others.
Similarly, I expect my thoughts here might have some unintended consequences and I can only begin to imagine the responses of others in response to my challenge to this confused orthodoxy. In any case, I welcome comments and debate.
Lawrence Freedman has been Professor of War Studies at King’s College London since 1982. His most recent book is Strategy: A History (OUP, 2013). He is a Contributing Editor at War on the Rocks.
Photo credit: The U.S. Army
Wilford Garvin 
Sam 
Michael S. 
Ken Szmed 
Dale in Atlana 
Ellen Haring 
Robert Brooks 
Ruben Stewart 
Keil Gentry 
Great follow-up on one of my favorite CSF presentations.
Set a foundation for the rest of the conference.
Professor Freedman, I’m an undergrad at the University of Southern California who’s been studying strategy and grand strategy for some time, and I must say your thoughts here do a lot to explain some of the strategic problems American forces have run into in the past.
Moreover, the classic debate of Sun Tzu vs. Clausewitz- attack his weakness vs. attack his strength- comes into play here, and I think your argument greatly strengthens Sun Tzu’s position.
That said, however, I’m not convinced that a Center of Gravity truly does not exist. It may well be that it does not HAVE TO exist, and that it does not exist as the vital organ of any force the way Clausewitz argues, but it still seems that destroying the command and control of any force (ie taking out the institutions in DC, or eliminating the al-Qaeda core bases in Pakistan) would at the very least drive the enemy force to a far less centralized and coordinated position, which we have actually seen with the post-9/11 evolution of al-Qaeda.
As long as there is a central authority for any of the fonts of power of a particular political entity- be that the commander of the army, or the capital of a nation, or the industrial heartland of an empire- its capture or destruction would clearly result in chaos and disarray for the force, which would then have to reorganize along different lines according to its new situation. To discount the Center of Gravity entirely would be foolish; to better understand its dynamics, though, would be prudent, and it seems that that would require a dialectic with your new conception of multiple, shifting centers of gravity.
So, in my view, a conglomeration of all tried and tested techniques- the identifying of various centers of gravity around which to base your strategy (know your enemy) the understanding of which position you need to get to in order to oppose those centers of gravity while protecting your own (know yourself) and a cunning and unpredictable use of force at his weakest points (be unknown by your enemy) may be a reasonable and effective new trinity for effective strategy.
I think Sir Lawrence has a point, well, at least his point jives well with my own examination of the topic in Addressing the _Fog of COG_ located here:
usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/download/csipubs/COG.pdf
(In the anthology’s shortest chapter.)
Bottom lines:
-COG as both an anlytical tool prior to war and a tool for use during war has been both misappropriated and misused because of a casual approach to how it was used in On War by Clausewitz. I doubt he ever intended such a result.
-The idea of starting with “position” has great merit, as long as it does not become jargon (which is what happened to COG). As Carl himself said:
”
Again, unfortunately, we are dealing with jargon, which, as usual , bears only a faint resemblance to well defined, specific concepts.”
Carl von Clausewitz, 1827, from “Two Letters on Strategy,” ed. and trans. by Peter Paret and Daniel Moran, 32 and 37.
vr, John T. Kuehn, Stofft Professor, Fort Leavenworth
Sir, fine article. I would submit that Centers of Gravity, much like decisive points, are merely tools that commanders can use to assist in planning how they orient combat power.
You address the fundamental problem up front, however. Commanders and staffs forget that the planning processes that we use are structured to keep you from putting the cart before the horse. Centers of Gravity, as with decisive points, help us answer HOW to accomplish the mission. That implies, however, that we already understand WHAT the mission is.
Until commanders and staffs understand the METT-TC conditions, you cannot plan for BLUFOR. This means understanding their mission and commander’s intent, which includes the desired endstate for both the intent and their role in the higher concept. Additionally, it means understanding the terrain and enemy to the best of our ability through the IPB process.
At endstate, our planning output should give us plans that might work rather than ones that will fail. However, when you start looking to draft your friendly plan without first understanding what you want to do and why, and what they want to do and why, it doesn’t matter whether you’re using decisive points, COGs, critical events, or any other tool to orient combat power. You still don’t truly know what you’re doing.
This is like listening to a bunch of people comment on the NFL that have never played football. COG is a valuable term, but has never been the end-all/be-all of army planning. The enemy will ALWAYS have a COG, but it may not be easy to find. The example of bombing regime buildings after they’ve been vacated proves the very point the author is trying to deconstruct: The BUILDINGS aren’t the COG – the leadership is. The COG does not have to be a concrete thing. For both Vietnam and Iraq, our COG was public support – something the enemy understood and attacked with vigor. As for the replacement of “What is the position you wish to reach”, that’s precisely what the army does. It’s called mission orders, and is encapsulated in the most important statement of the operations order: The commander’s intent. Every mission statement will include “In order to…” And THAT is the position you wish to reach. We already do that, and it leaves me scratching my head about the entire discussion, as if the US Army is using the COG in every order. At the strategic level the intent could be vague, as in “In order to allow a free and fair election of parliament”. At the tactical level, it could be concrete, as in “In order to allow second platoon to penetrate the eastern edge of the city.” or “In order to prevent the massing of fires on first battalion’s advance across the beach.” COG may be in need of refinement, but that’s because of a misunderstanding of its utility. The Army hasn’t fallen in love with it, but it does have distinct value. Skip all the Clauswitz/Sun Tzu references. They’re just words on the page, like a sports editorial for the NFL.
Professor Freedman – well done analysis and supporting argument. One of the benefits for military planners using a COG analysis are the accompanying tools and methodology we developed to support planning and strategy development. It’s not the perfect solution but in most cases it gets the job done and makes it easy to turn it into deliverable and actionable solutions.
I will also offer a counter argument/theory – ISIS/ISIL is latest version of an “Open Source” enemy. No centralized planning or execution but an established guidelines/framework/”codebase” for strategy. ISIS/L is not the only example, we have seen similar organizations like AQAP, Al Shebaab, etc..
My question for you is – What methodology and framework do we use to analyize, target and eliminate an “open-source”/unconventional foe? A foe that has no real COG and a counter “position” is difficult to describe, let alone develop into military strategy.
Interested to get your thoughts.
I greatly appreciate that Prof Freedman has offered his opinion to the COG debate in this forum. It is my sincere hope that the gravitas of his position and reputation lend weight to this dissident perspective.
I agree with Prof Freedman… I believe the COG construct is of little utility, excepting perhaps as an artificial vehicle with which to begin to understand ecology. The degree the COG construct is still advantaged – indeed venerated, over other concepts and ideas; over other theories of action (e.g. neuralgic concepts), is troubling. Indeed, from my perspective it is fixed at the center of Western warfare orthodoxy.
In my opinion, the assumptions inherent in applying the COG construct remain dangerously unexamined by practitioners. The most fundamental being that an opponent’s “system” does indeed possess the characteristics and qualities, the coherency; the order and the logic prescribed by our COG construct.
I too agree that it’s time to stop trying to stretch and caveat the COG paradigm to fit current reality… I believe it’s time for our understanding to transcend classical Clausewitzian mechanics in warfare.
The COG concept is a valid concept, and I’ve proven it many times during my own Military career. The real problem, which the author should’ve addressed instead of trying to prove that the whole concept is invalid, is to point out that if you don’t understand what COG really means, and you are incapable of determining what the enemies real COG is, then you will not be able to exploit it correctly. That is the problem. I dealt with many senior officers, at the 0-6 Level and above, who not only didn’t really understand what a COG was, but who also completely misunderstood the concept of “maneuver warfare”; which to them meant, basically, we have to move around fast!
Sometimes an enemies COG is not related to their actual military might; it might be an economic factor, a social factor, a religious factor, a logistics factor, a political factor, or a combination of all of the above, and maybe even including a military factor. Or, then again, it could be just a military factor alone. But for the author to suggest that it has no value, and then to discard it, is short-sighted, wrong-headed, and wrong. Just as a prime example General Sherman’s march to the sea was a classic case of identifying the enemy’s weak spot, and exploiting it to the maximum; it crushed the Confederacy! Just because some less than stellar senior Officers in the past 12 years have failed to understand/implement the concept correctly and to the fullest, does not make it invalid!
PS: “What is the position we wish to achieve?”
This question should be asked, and answered, by what is known as the “Commander’s Intent”!
That comes first, and only then, once the Commander’s Intent is correctly analyzed, vis a vis the enemies capabilities, can the correct COG be determined.
Again, from my own military experience, I’ve seen many 0-6’s & above, who were not able to formulate a correct Commander’s Intent; nor did they ask for clarification or even questions, in order to flesh one out, when they received incomplete, vague, and even contradictory CI’s from higher up in the COC, especially when coming from the Elected Political Leadership! As a result, poor, confusing, contradictory Commander’s Intent’s, lead to poorly understood, misdiagnosed COG’s, and thus poorly fleshed out, implemented OpPlans. The whole thing fits together, and is valid, IF it’s done correctly from the Top on Down!
Thank you! The sooner “COG” is eliminated from doctrine and purged from our lexicon the better. This limited concept has long plagued and sucked the creativity out of military thinking and planning. For three years I taught COG analysis to smart Army majors at CGSC. It was a painful process. Not only did I not buy into it, despite extensive personal study, the students always pointed to faulty, inconsistent outcomes in their final products. The problem with clinging to a faulty concept is that it limits our ability to consider or develop other, possibly better concepts or models.
Conflict scholars never seek such a simplistic process for understanding the multi-layered nature of violent conflict. A better, although still imperfect method for analyzing and understanding conflict was developed by an interagency group of scholars called the Conflict Assessment Framework and can be accessed here http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/187786.pdf
This model has only been used on a limited basis. It is complicated and it requires education and training to understand but that is what is required. Assuming that we can teach people how to point their fingers at a single point of strength or weakness within complicated social systems is just faulty logic.
Start an “Abandon COG Now!” petition for its elimination from our thinking and planning processes.
The author has things mixed up. Identifying COGs is part of the “how” of military planning. His proposition deals with the “what” part (what are we trying to achieve). It’s comparing apples and oranges. Identifying adversary COGs is very much still a valid process, in order to apply the minimum amount of finite resources against those objectives which are most likely to achieve the campaign’s goals. And these COGs would be in support of the “what” part of the campaign, which is what the author is trying to say.
While raising some interesting challenges to the idea, the key issue seems to be with the reason why we identify a centre of gravity, rather than the idea of centre of gravity itself. He infers and indeed the alternative he proposes suggests a weakness with our analysis of the situation and that the planning process is too rigidly applied. As a proscribed element of all military decision making, identifying a military centre of gravity is a weakness however as a tool that can be used, when applicable, it still has utility.
Read more broadly his piece implies that the essential identification of a centre of gravity in the planning process is distracting at best and at worse could mislead the entire process. The identification of a centre of gravity for the sake of fulfilling doctrinal procedure is a pointless exercise. Not knowing when and where to apply the idea of a centre of gravity is the gravest charge in this piece. By inferring that the identification of a centre of gravity is done poorly is in fact to take aim at the entire decision making process.
This points to a decision making process where we are more interested in the end product and fulfilling the doctrinal checklist. Maybe we have forgotten that the benefit of planning is not the plan itself but what we learn along the way. Has the process and science part of military decision making overtaken our ability to creatively use what were originally meant as a series of guidelines?
So this piece is absolutely correct in that we need to evaluate more thoroughly our desired endstate and the wider environment, including especially the human domain and let that analysis flow naturally into a series of integrated tasks. But let’s not abandon centre of gravity just yet.
Professor Freedman’s question “What is the position we wish to achieve?” should replace the the question “What is our desired end state?” rather than “What is the enemy center of gravity?” I believe the problem most theorists and some practitioners have with the concept of a center of gravity (COG) is that they take the metaphor literally. As such, the first part of Professor Freedman’s argument is spot on and most experienced strategists realize complex, adaptive systems don’t have a single center of gravity.
The second part of his argument, however, strays off course. He writes, “the classical assumption that the most important task of armed forces must be to defeat those of the enemy. This follows from the conviction that the key to unlocking the enemy state is the elimination of the enemy army.” This argument presupposes that strategists will conclude that the enemy’s army is the COG. That is often not the case; experienced strategists understand that COGs are not limited to military forces.
The third part of his argument misses the point that the usefulness of the COG concept is that COG analysis helps the commander and staff determine and focus on what is most important amongst all of the variables and factors that can influence the conduct of operations.
All of this brings me back to my first point that strategists would be better served by replacing the concept of end state with position. The term end state implies a static set of conditions whereas position better captures the result of the clash of opposing wills.
General Sir Rupert Smith, in ‘The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World’ states that ‘[War is] the product of both a ‘trial of strength’ and a ‘clash of wills’… [I]n our current circumstances it is actually the will of the people that is often the objective being sought – yet there is still a tendency to use overwhelming military force in the belief that winning the trial of strength will deliver the will of the opponent.’
Is COG relevant only to the ‘trial of strength’ element of the equation? These days, if armies are fighting ‘wars among the people’ and not inter-state wars, the real question is surely if achieving a military victory is going to help you attain your political goal. Otherwise, no matter how many battles you win you won’t win the war.