Leadership constraints throughout history

Can you provide some added info? Are you looking for personality constraints? Legal constraints? Physical constraints?

I am look for personality constraints. Like high self confidence, low self control, attention to detail, disorganized, low self confidence (hesitant to move forward), low drive.

You display a very shallow understanding of the circumstances which lead to the invasion of Russia. You have also confused the sequential circumstances of the campaign.

The entire force of the assembled Grande Armée in Poland on the eve of the invasion was roughly 450,000 men. When Napoleon arrived three months later before the village of Borodino, he had approximately 120,000 effectives to oppose to a similar, perhaps slightly smaller force, commanded by Mikhail Kutusov. This doesn't mean that 330,000 men were lost in the approach march to Moscow. When Napoleon assembled his armies in Poland, the Russians were massed on the frontier. The commander then, Barclay de Tolly, was no better prepared to deal with the speed and coordination of the French advance than was any other commander in Europe at the time. The French military doctrine, developed and implemented before Napoleon ever held a responsible command, is the ancestor of the staff systems and combined arms doctrines which armies use to this day--they were literally generations ahead of their time, and no one in Europe approached understanding what it was about the French command and control structure, and their operational and tactical doctrine, which hopelessly outclassed almost everyone they faced. This did not mean that they could not be defeated, but it did mean that no single defeat could bring them to their knees, and no nation in Europe was organized to recover as quickly as were the French.

In any such operation as vast and as complicated as was the invasion of Russia, the key to success, if there were to be any success, would lie in the logistics by which the army was supported. Barclay de Tolly was forced by the rapid French advance to continually fall back from one defensive position to another, only to find himself outflanked almost as soon as he arrived at his new position. Additionally, the senior Russian commander (de Tolly was descended from Scots, and had been born in Lithuania), Pyotr Bagration (who was, in fact, a Georgian) avoided a conjunction of the forces under his command with those of de Tolly, as de Tolly's seniority would have put him in overall command--so the Russian effort was marred by a lack of coordination.

But the logistical imperatives ate away at the French forces as they marched more deeply into Russia. As the French supply line grew longer, more and more detachments were necessary to guard the supply line without which the army could not survive and fight. Additionally, ad hoc guerrilla operations were conducted by aristocrats such as Denis Davydov which necessitated heavier detachments to protect the lines of supply of the main army. It is, however, historical myth that the Russians were implementing a traditional scorched earth policy--in most cases, military commanders were following standard military doctrine in burning supplies which they could not carry off in the face of the rapid French advance. Napoleon had divided his army into five sections--two to the southeast (his right) were tolled off to protect that flank of the advance and to hold Minsk and the region north of Belarus--the first was a relatively small force numbering no more than 30,000 troops but not opposed by any significant forces. Further to the south and east more than 60,000 troops had been sent to screen substantial Russian forces (eventually reaching perhaps 70,000 men) in southern Lithuania--and this force eventually failed in its mission, allowing the Russians to push past them and place themselves across Napoleon's line of march during the retreat, the major factor in turning the retreat into such a debacle. To the north, on the left of the main advance, two forces were sent to hold the Dvina River and clear the basin of the Nieman River to facilitate the rapid forwarding of supplies for the main army--and those forces numbered upwards of 100,000 troops. Therefore, before the campaign was even well underway, Napoleon had already sent nearly half of the army to his left and right to protect the flanks of the advance, and to paralyze the Russian forces protecting St. Petersburg and the important Russian supply areas south of Moscow--both missions failed, in that the Russians correctly judged that MacDonald before Riga was no threat, and were able to brush aside the more than 50,000 men guarding the right flank to put themselves on Napoleon's line of march at Borisov during the retreat.

None of that constitutes a criticism of Napoleon's plan. He had planned carefully, and his subordinates did what they were ordered to do, so far as they were able to do it. If one were to fault the plan overall, one has to ask what the Hell Napoleon thought he would accomplish in taking Moscow, and why he did not advance in force on St. Petersburg with the main army. That would have guarded his left by placing the Baltic on that flank, and would have necessitated far less detachment to guard the line of march. It would also have struck directly at the heart of the Imperial government, which was located at St. Petersburg, not Moscow.

For whatever one may argue about the soundness of the plan, the strongest criticisms of Napoleon arise from his behavior at Borodino and afterward at Moscow. He may have believed that he could knock out the main Russian army with a heavy and swift coup de main, and thereby end the war before winter. Whether or not that was his plan, his execution was to throw his forces headlong in a frontal assault on prepared Russian positions which made that battle the most costly of his career. In so doing, he threw away every advantage of the superiority of French operational and tactical doctrine, because in so doing, he fought the battle on Russian terms. The Russians were not sophisticated and subtle commanders, and they relied upon the fatalism of their troops, who by then had a well-established reputation of standing stoically in their lines even as they were slaughtered in their thousands. That is what Napoleon did, but at great cost to his own army. Wagram in 1809 had already cost him the cream of the great army created in the Wars of the Revolution before he had ever risen to power, and it had been conducted on the same brutal principle of simply throwing his troops at the enemy after he had gotten himself in a seemingly untenable position. Napoleon was one of history's truly great organizational geniuses--on the battlefield most company grade officers in the French army handled their troops with more care and subtlety than Napoleon did at Wagram and later at Borodino. By 1812, the finest officers upon whom Napoleon had relied since 1797 were gone. This is not to say that he did not have capable commanders, but the thousands and thousands of company grade and field grade officers and non commissioned officers who had made the Grande Armée invincible in 1805 were in their graves or invalided out of the army permanently--Wagram in particular resulted in an appalling slaughter of competent lower ranking officers and of non commissioned officers, one light infantry regiment came out of the line triumphant, but having suffered more that 50% casualties, and in the command of its senior corporal. All over the field at Wagram such slaughter and destruction of the men upon whom the army relied for command and control had taken place, and Borodino sealed the fate of most of the competent veterans who remained. By the time of the Battle of the Nations at Leipsic in 1813, the French army was a mob of raw levies with little to rely on in the way of hierarchical leadership.

Once arrived in Moscow, Napoleon did not take even ordinary precautions in organizing the occupation of a city which had formerly held a million inhabitants, and was built of wood. Small wonder the city eventually caught fire and burned. What discipline there was in the army after Borodino had completely evaporated before the retreat even began.

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Napoleon and the invasion of Russia in 1812 is, however, an example of a crisis in leadership. This not because Napoleon made a foolish decision--he had no choice. One might argue that he handled the situation badly, and therefore doomed himself--but that is to indulge in the sort of historical "what ifs" which can never be resolved, and represent the wool-gathering variety of idle speculation. Napoleon had no choice but to invade Russia and bring the Emperor Alexander to terms, if he was able.

Although the invasion of Spain in 1808 seemed to have been a success, when Napoleon was present, his decision to put his brother on the throne, arguably a decision based on the narrow and provincial ethos of his Corsican origins, resulted in the implacable determination of the Spanish to resist the French. They may well, and likely would have, accepted French domination if Napoleon had left a Spanish Bourbon on the throne, but they wanted no part of Joseph Bonapart. Although 1809 was not a year of stellar victories for Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington), it was the beginning of the steady bleeding wound which Spain represented for the French Empire. Although Wellesley failed to defeat the French at Talavera, Joseph equally failed to capitalize on the defection of the Spanish to destroy the English, and although years of hard fighting lay ahead, the fate of the French in Spain was sealed.

In that same year of 1809, Napoleon definitively defeated the Austrians in the Wagram campaign. Although it had started auspiciously, the actual battle of Wagram was a slaughterhouse in which the brightest and the best of the French army's officers and non commissioned officers gave their lives in a ham-handed, although successful effort to drive off the Archduke Karl's army and expose Vienna. Although this lead the Emperor of Austria to seek terms, the Archduke had been prepared to fight on--and therefore, four years later after the retreat from Russia, the French faced an Austrian army which was untouched since 1809, and which was the best organized and equipped of his foes.

Since the failure of the Peace of Amiens (1802), England had attempted to strangle Napoleon's Europe with a blockade. To the extent that this ruined merchants throughout Europe, it was successful, but it did not touch France's ability to make war. Napoleon had responded with his continental plan, which prohibited the import of British goods, or goods carried in British ships, to the continent. This too was largely successful, despite widespread smuggling, in that the sustained commercial growth which England had enjoyed for more than a century was slowly strangled, and by 1808, had ended. The English merchant class continued to make profits, but the steady growth of the 18th century was over. Modern historical research shows that mercantile revenues declined in 1808, 1809, 1810 and 1811, despite the fact that the English now had access to South American markets. This meant a concomitant decline in government revenues in England--but basically, the people of England were unaffected by the wars on the continent.

Where the continental system was successful was in denying to England the important naval stores which had been an object of their trade in the Baltic for more than a century. This meant a drastic reduction in the revenues of the Russian nobility who had enriched themselves since the foundation of St. Petersburg in 1703 by selling timber and flax (used for making the canvas which was most highly valued for sailcloth) to the West, primarily to the English and the Dutch. The vast forests of tall, straight pines which the English wanted for masts and spars, and the flax of the swampy Baltic littoral could not legally be sold to the English, and the Russians were feeling the pinch severely by 1811. Alexander I, the Russian Emperor, had at one time actually admired Napoleon, and had gotten along well enough with him. Although he had attempted to revive the third coalition against Napoleon, and had declared a "holy war" on the French in 1806, after he was definitively defeated by Napoleon in 1807, and met him personally, he was totally won over by Napoleon's blandishments, and conceived of Europe ruled by two Empires--the French and the Russian.

But the continental system ruined all of that. Napoleon had treated Alexander generously in 1807, and had not imposed upon him onerous terms. He had seduced him with his visions of the two Empires eventually uniting to drive the Turks from Europe and to march across Asia to India. But Napoleon's only aim was to gain a willing partner in his continental system, and to help to strangle English trade, and to deny them the naval stores upon which their Royal Navy relied. At the end of 1810, Napoleon annexed the Duchy of Oldenberg to France, which was mortally offensive to Alexander, as his uncle was the Duke of Oldenberg. Since Alexander had come to the Imperial Throne in 1801, he had alienated a good deal of the old-line aristocracy with his reforms--now the economic losses the nobility suffered under the continental system gradually bled away those who had supported Alexander's reforms, and an opposition formed which the Emperor could not ignore. Some historians, even among the Russians, suggest that Alexander feared assassination (he had come to the throne when his father, Pavel, had been assassinated), and so caved in against his better judgment. I think that unlikely, and it is also the sort of gross simplification which doesn't do justice to the complexity of historical events. Pavel had been murdered because the nobility took offense to the reforms he was attempting to implement. Although Alexander had been among those who opposed the reforms, there is no good reason to assume that he colluded in the murder of his father, and there is documentary evidence that he at least on one occasion refused to involve himself in a plan to murder his father, simply to gain the throne. When he became Emperor, Alexander quickly came to the conclusion that reform was necessary, and he implemented far more comprehensive reforms than his father had intended, which suggests that he was no coward who feared assassination.

Alexander's was a complex and mercurial temperament which makes him a far more interesting study in leadership than Napoleon would ever be, in fact. But that was not the burden of your remarks.

Napoleon could not hold his tenuous European Empire together in the face of Russian defiance. Alexander could not longer keep his nobility in line in the face of the ruinous economic consequences of the continental system. Alexander could not maintain the French alliance, and could not help but bid defiance to Napoleon's continental system. Napoleon, therefore, could not help but attempt to destroy the Russian army, and force on Alexander the terms which he had seduced him into accepting in 1807. This was a crisis of leadership, but neither man was a free agent in the situation. Alexander had to defy Napoleon and Napoleon therefore had to invade Russia.

You are absolutely right, I have very little knowledge about history. That is why I am asking for help. I was trying to come up with an example of what I was looking for in a leadership story, however my example was incorrect. Thank you for pointing that out, although I am still looking for examples of leadershp constraints.

Thank you again for any help.

I can heartily second Setanta's comments above. Just how imperative it was to invade Russian in 1812 is debatable, but I tend to agree that from Napoleon's perspective it had to be done. That Napoleon felt "betrayed" by Alexander probably underscored the "need" to invade. Napoleon's personality, character and modus operandi were important elements in his decision-making. Napoleon was the darling of European intellectuals until he decided to make himself Emperor and reform the Republic into a personal fief. He was certainly personally ambitious, and jealous of anyone who became too popular or powerful. Napoleon's military reputation was built upon surprise, rapid movement and mastery of tactical doctrine. As he came to control larger and larger formations he tended to revert to depending upon the shock of ponderous frontal assaults. The result was slower movement, less surprise and increased numbers of casualties. As revolutionary as Napoleon's tactics are thought to be, he still believed that victory consisted of breaking the opposing army and capturing the enemy's capital city. Many believe that he lingered in Moscow hoping that Alexander would smarten up and either surrender, or propose terms that recognized French superiority.

Even so, a case can be made that Napoleon's defeat was linked to his personal deficiencies. Whenever a system/group is highly centralized and dependent upon limited leadership with vast power, there is a danger that foolish decision-making will be go unchecked. It shouldn't be too difficult to find a number of cases that support the idea of disaster resulting from the personal failings of a leader. Hitler is frequently used as an example for almost every political/military decision he dictated.

You should be very careful of making snap judgments based on limited knowledge. Often decisions that later seem crazy to outsiders, would have made perfect sense to the decision-maker at the time. Information is never complete, nor entirely trustworthy, so decisions MUST be made without full understanding of the risks or the outcome. Sometimes what later appears to have been a brilliant and insightful decision was little more than a lucky guess.

I was raised to think of R.E. Lee as almost a god. "When you don't know what the right thing is to do, just ask yourself what would Lee have done."

Actually, Lee had many faults and some of those faults had pretty bad results. He hated to offend subordinates, and so he over looked and tolerated conditions that might have been corrected with a firm hand. Lee's orders are elegant, but the far too often left a subordinate commander to decide for himself what was intended and needful. Lee had a hell of a temper though it seldom showed. When his "blood got up" he was impetuous to the point of reckless fault. At Malvern Hill and later at Gettysburg, Lee ordered mass frontal assaults on prepared positions ... absolute murder and wastage of irreplaceable troops.

Though Lee wasn't this nation's finest commander, his faults probably had little to do with the defeat of Southern arms. Nor was Jefferson Davis, with his own baggage of faults, ultimately the cause of defeat. The web of historical events is far too complex usually to fix any single element as either cause for success or failure. The whole Great Man (or his antithesis Evil Man) hypothesis is mostly a mine field waiting to blow-up the unwary student.

Swedish king Charles XII is a good example of a potentially great leader whose personality led to disaster.