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Among the basic distinctions in warfare is the difference between tactics and strategy. The term tactics refers to the operational techniques military units employ to win battles. Strategy, on the other hand, addresses the broader political objectives for which a war is fought and the ends, ways and means employed to obtain them. For strategy to succeed, there must be at least a rough connection between tactical objectives and the broader objectives for which the war is waged. Otherwise, battles become ends in themselves, often with grave strategic consequences.

Such was the case with Hannibal Barca, the Carthaginian general widely considered one of history’s most able and talented field commanders. He invaded Roman Italy in what historians still regard as a classic campaign, won every major engagement he fought and yet ultimately achieved none of Carthage’s strategic objectives.

In his view armies fought until it became clear to the political leadership of the losing side there was nothing more to be gained by further combat

Born in 247 BC, Hannibal was the son of Carthaginian general and statesman Hamilcar Barca, who rallied his North African nation-state from defeat in the First Punic War (264–241 BC) to conquer much of Iberia (present-day Spain) before his death there in battle in 228 BC. Hannibal had essentially grown up in military service, and following the 221 BC assassination of his brother-in-law Hasdrubal, who had replaced Hamilcar, Hannibal took charge of the Carthaginian army. He soon proved a brilliant field commander who applied his intellect and martial skills to the singular end of winning battles.

Again, however, battles are the means to a strategic end, not ends in themselves. Hannibal, a sworn enemy of all things Roman, lost sight of that fact when he launched the Second Punic War (218–201 BC). While the conflict would rage across the Mediterranean world, victory in Italy was Hannibal’s sole objective. To achieve it, he marched the bulk of his army in Iberia across southern Gaul (present-day France) and, famously, over the Alps into the Roman heartland.

Hannibal approached his operations in Italy not as one campaign in a larger war but as the only campaign in the only war. He seemed to believe that if he won enough battles, he would win Italy, and if he won Italy, victory would be his. Ultimately, however, his confusion of tactics with strategy caused him to commit a number of operational failures that led to his defeat in Italy. And his loss there was to have dire consequences for Carthage.

Wars evolve within the cultural contexts adversaries bring to the conflict. For Romans war was a straightforward predatory exercise employed to destroy an enemy’s regime. Battles were means to the larger political ends of conquest, occupation and economic exploitation. To accept defeat risked having an enemy impose such conditions on one’s own citizens, something Rome would pay any price in blood and treasure to prevent. Romans fought wars until decisively won. Only then did negotiations follow.

Hannibal’s perspective on war was rooted in the influence of Hellenistic culture. In his view the object was not the destruction of an enemy’s state or political regime. Instead, armies fought battles on one another’s turf until it became clear to the political leadership of the losing side there was nothing more to be gained and perhaps much to lose by further combat. The antagonists then entered into negotiations and reached a settlement of a commercial or geographic nature. Hannibal believed his battlefield victories would force Rome to the negotiating table. This Hellenistic approach restrained Hannibal from attacking Rome itself when presented two opportunities—first after his 217 BC victory at Lake Trasimene and again after Cannae just over a year later. In Hannibal’s mind an attack on Rome was unnecessary to the final outcome of the war.

When the Romans refused to discuss peace even after the disaster at Cannae, Hannibal’s plan began to unravel. It was one thing to expect the Gauls to join his campaign against Rome, but the assumption that Rome’s Latin allies or Roman colonies would join in any significant numbers was wholly unfounded, based on a lack of understanding of Roman culture and history. Had this not been clear to Hannibal before, it must surely have been after Cannae. As a fallback he sought to create a confederacy of Italian and Greek states that would become de facto protectorates of Carthage once the war was over.

For Hannibal’s plan to have any chance of success required sufficient manpower to accomplish two things: First, to hold the towns and cities while protecting agricultural resources necessary to feed the occupying troops; second, to sustain a large field army to deal with any Roman offensives. The problem was it required far more manpower than he possessed or could possibly raise and supply in Italy alone.

Hannibal’s revised plan, therefore, depended on Carthage to provide manpower and logistical requirements from outside Italy, something it refused to do for sound strategic reasons. Moreover, the plan gave no consideration to the ability of the Roman navy to blockade southern Italian ports and disrupt supply convoys from Carthage. Most important, Hannibal’s southern Italian confederacy was essentially a defensive strategy that left intact and unchallenged the Roman manpower and resource base north of the Volturnus (Volturno) River, thus enabling Rome to rebuild its armies until ready to resume the offensive. Even if it coalesced, Hannibal’s league of rebel towns in southern Italy could not impede Rome’s war effort sufficiently to induce it to seek peace.

Hannibal’s failure to attack Rome was his greatest tactical mistake. The Roman historian Livy tells us that when Carthage recalled Hannibal in 203 BC, he called down “curses on his own head for not having led his armies straight to Rome when they were still bloody from the victorious field of Cannae.” But history must regard Hannibal’s failure to attack Rome within the context of his greater failure to understand the strategy that guided the conduct of the war.

Both Carthage and Rome viewed the war in a far broader strategic context than did Hannibal. Rome sought to preserve gains it had obtained during the First Punic War and perhaps seize Iberia, while Carthage aimed to retain Iberia and recover territory in Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily it had lost in the previous war. Rome clearly perceived Carthage’s strategic intent: Of the 11 legions deployed after Hannibal arrived in Italy, two were sent to Iberia, two to Sardinia, two to Sicily and one to the port of Tarentum (present-day Taranto) to block any invasion by Philip V of Macedonia, though he had yet to ally with Hannibal. Only four legions deployed within Italy to meet Hannibal’s invasion.

Had Hannibal also taken the broader perspective, he would have understood that an attack on Rome would have made sound tactical and strategic sense. A march on the capital after his victory at Trasimene would have forced the Romans to come to its aid, drawing off their forces from outside Italy. By then only one intact legion, at Tarentum, remained to defend Rome. At Trasimene, Hannibal had destroyed Gaius Flaminius’ army, while his subordinate Maharbal had destroyed Gnaeus Servilius Geminus’ cavalry. The two nearest Roman legions were on Sardinia, but 70 Carthaginian warships patrolled its waters to prevent Roman troop transports from reaching the mainland.

Had Hannibal immediately marched on the capital, even as a feint, Rome would have been forced to recall some of its legions, exposing Sicily, Sardinia or Iberia to Carthaginian attack and invasion. His failure to act represented a lost opportunity even he, in hindsight, realized might have turned the tide of the war.

At the outbreak of war Carthage had initially given Hannibal a free hand, having had little choice but to support their field commander in his Italo-centric strategy. But after Cannae, when it became clear Rome could not be forced to the negotiating table, Carthage favored a more direct approach to regaining its lost possessions.

What Carthage wanted most from the war was to retain possession of Iberia, with its lucrative silver mines, commercial bases and monopoly on the inland trade. It also wanted to recoup its bases in Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and some of the offshore islands and thus control the sea-lanes in the eastern Mediterranean. After Cannae, Carthage moved to secure these possessions by reinforcing them, as in Iberia, or attempting to seize them militarily—as in Sardinia, Sicily and Corsica. If Carthage could establish a significant military presence in its former possessions, it would be in a strong position to retain them once the war ended and negotiations ensued.

Hannibal’s superiors viewed his operations in Italy as little more than a localized campaign designed to tie down as many Roman legions as possible while they brought military pressure to bear at more important strategic locales. It had wisely revised its strategic approach and objectives—a direct consequence of Hannibal’s failure to realize his myopic goals in Italy.

Hannibal felt betrayed by Carthage after Cannae. When in 203 BC his superiors ordered their commander to abandon his Italian campaign and return to Africa, Livy records that Hannibal “gnashed his teeth, groaned and almost shed tears.” He openly blamed Carthage for its failure to support his campaign with troops, supplies and money. “The men who tried to drag me back by cutting off my supplies of men and money are now recalling me,” he is said to have complained, adding that his defeat came not at the hands of Romans “but the Carthaginian Senate by their detraction and envy.”

As with many of history’s great field commanders, Hannibal had succumbed, at least in part, to his enemy’s superior logistics.

Hannibal’s accusation that the Carthaginian Senate had failed to send him critical supplies and troops when most needed was dead on. Throughout the course of the Second Punic War, Carthage sent Hannibal only one resupply expedition—a marginal force of 4,000 Numidian horse, 40 elephants and some money in 215 BC. After that he received nothing, as Carthage had redirected its resources to a strategy in which victory in Italy no longer occupied a central place.

Carthage’s failure to properly resupply Hannibal cannot be blamed on a lack of available resources. Indeed, the manpower and resource base of the Carthaginian empire was greater than Rome’s. The troop and resupply expeditions Carthage sent out in support of military operations during the Second Punic War were substantial, in some cases larger than Hannibal’s entire army in Italy. In 215 BC, for example, Carthage sent to Iberia 12,000 infantry, 1,500 cavalry, 20 elephants and a quantity of silver with which to hire mercenaries. Later that year it sent an even larger force to Sardinia. In 213 BC.

Carthage dispatched to Sicily 25,000 infantry, 3,000 cavalry and 12 elephants. In 207 BC it sent to Iberia 10,000 additional troops to replace losses from the Battle of Baecula. Finally, in 205 BC Hannibal’s brother Mago and a force of 12,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry and a number of elephants invaded Liguria in northern Italy.

Carthage was able to resupply and reinforce its armies in the various theaters of operations thanks to its ready supply of transport ships—not surprising for a commercial and shipbuilding nation-state that could construct or hire from traders as many transports as needed for any contingency. Moreover, the Roman naval presence off southern Italy was never sufficient to cover all bases at once, so there was no good reason why supply transports could not have gotten through to Hannibal.

Right up to war’s end Carthage had more than enough men, materiel and transports to support Hannibal in Italy. It simply chose not to send them.

Ironically, Carthage’s strategic shift away from Italy after Cannae came at a time when Hannibal’s momentum was at its zenith. Paradoxically, it was his very successes in the field that led Carthage to reconsider its strategy. When Mago returned to Carthage in 215 BC to request troops and supplies for Hannibal, he addressed the Senate. At that meeting Hanno, head of the faction that had opposed the war from its outset, asked Mago the following questions: “First, in spite of the fact that the Roman power was utterly destroyed at Cannae, and the knowledge that the whole of Italy is in revolt, has any single member of the Latin confederacy come over to us? Secondly, has any man belonging to the five and 30 tribes of Rome deserted to Hannibal?” Mago had to answer they had not.

“Have the Romans sent Hannibal any envoys to treat for peace?” Hanno continued. “Indeed, so far as your information goes, has the word ‘peace’ ever been breathed in Rome at all?” Mago again replied in the negative. “Very well then,” Hanno concluded. “In the conduct of the war we have not advanced one inch: The situation is precisely the same as when Hannibal first crossed into Italy.” Hanno’s point was that Hannibal’s strategy to bring Rome to the negotiating table by defeating its armies in the field had already failed. If none of the Latin allies or Roman tribes had deserted by that point, it was highly unlikely any further defections in the south of Italy or additional victories Hannibal might win there would prompt Rome to seek peace.

The strategic ground shifted beneath his feet, reducing a commander who had once ruled the battlefield to little more than a sacrificial pawn

If Hannibal could not destroy Rome on its own soil, as Carthage believed, then what was the point of the war? In true Hellenistic fashion the Carthaginian statesmen decided their priorities lay in maintaining control of Iberia and perhaps regaining Sardinia, Corsica and other areas lost earlier. If that was the strategic objective of the war, then how did Hannibal’s continued presence in Italy contribute to that end? The answer was to tie down as many legions as possible in Italy while Carthage concentrated its efforts in the other theaters of operations. Italy became a sideshow, and Hannibal was left to his fate so that when the war ended, Carthage might be able to hold on to what it had won elsewhere.

In the end Hannibal failed in Italy not because he was defeated on the battlefield but because his tactical victories had not contributed to Carthage’s overall strategic objectives. After Cannae the strategic ground shifted beneath Hannibal’s feet, reducing a commander who had once ruled the battlefield to little more than a sacrificial pawn in a much larger game he never really understood. MH

Richard A. Gabriel is a retired U.S. Army officer and the author of more than 50 books. For further reading he suggests his own Hannibal: The Military Biography of Rome’s Greatest Enemy.