Throughout much of recorded history, the majority of military strategy has had one of two aims: capture important cities or territories, or defeat your enemy in a single climactic battle in the field. Wars were expensive, soldiers are costly to raise and train, and the longer a war dragged on the worse it was for the mainly agrarian economies of the belligerents. As war and society started to trend towards industrialization in the mid-19th Century, a new form of warfare crept its way into the minds of the newly professionalized officer corps of major (mostly European and American) Armies: Attrition Warfare. Attrition warfare was perfect for larger, stronger, and better led armies to reduce the potential variance of single climactic pitched battles, and the cost of laying siege to prepared positions. Attrition is an offensive strategy, not a defensive one. Defending in depth, or the famous Russian “bend but don’t break and then hope for the cold” can hold and the possibly retake ground, but a real war of attrition allows a stronger army to squeeze a weaker one into dust.

    The first true War of Attrition began in the summer of 1864 in northern Virginia during what became known as the Overland Campaign. Union General Ulysses S Grant had watched from the Western Theatre as Union General after Union General had allowed a weaker, but better led Army of Northern Virginia set the conditions of battle after battle, and turn back invasion after invasion in the East. By limiting the number of engagements, the South capitalized on the outsized importance of individual mistakes by Northern leadership, and until Gettysburg in 1863, had appeared one or two wins from victory.

    What Grant realized was that if he made his enemy fight more battles without reprieve and extended the drives, he could press on the Confederate Army until it broke somewhere. By taking the initiative and never giving it back, he could wear down his enemy to the point where they could no longer even defend themselves, all on ground of his choosing. Even if individual battles or drives were not successful, if you strung enough together, the side with better resources, better leaders, and more importantly the side with greater depth who could replace those resources and leaders, would eventually triumph.

    So Grant got to hammering, and despite some early setbacks, he kept hammering. Called a butcher in the press and by some of his contemporaries he kept after it. Not stupidly wasting lives on frontal attacks, but running a simple offensive campaign that reduced the potential for disaster, while simultaneously attacking in a way that forced the opponent to respond to him, he eventually pinned what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia into a nine month long siege outside of Petersburg, VA. Grant kept all his armies pressing the South on every front, and the pressure was too much for them to bear. Lee knew he was trapped and losing and tried a Hail Mary, sending Jubal Early to attack Washington DC to get Grant to send troops to defend it. Grant ignored it, and kept the pressure where it mattered. By the time the Confederates abandoned Petersburg in March of 1865 they were barely a shadow of the once proud Army that had stood on the very doorstep of victory. No single unit better symbolized the results of the two strategies better than the “Stonewall Brigade”. For the first two years of the war, the Brigade of 6,000 men had marched and fought circles around the Union Army, winning battle after battle. By the time they fled Grant and the trenches of Petersburg, there were only 219 men in its ranks.

    The American Civil War was the first truly industrial war, and as the armies of Europe stepped meter by meter closer to their first industrialized war, the Kaiser and the General Staff was taking notes. The German Empire would turn the strategy loose on the French at Verdun, nearly bleeding France out of the Great War, only to be saved by the grandsons of the veterans of both Lee and Grant’s armies from across the ocean.

 

   Michigan football, at this point for generations, fights a war of attrition. Games are the wars, and each offensive drive is a campaign. While some programs look at each drive as an individual battle, something to be won as quickly as possible, Michigan trusts to their math, and their superior resources, and grinds them out. Teams with weaker offensive lines, or Quarterbacks, or coaching need to gamble the ball downfield, and those gambles become unsustainable turnovers, and the math compounds.

     By reducing mistakes Michigan is following a formula well suited to the strong. This strategy has allowed Michigan to establish a legacy, if not one of outright Championships, one where Michigan is usually a lock to beat the teams we were expected to beat (I was in Iraq in 2008 so I deny its existence) and generally better than a toss-up against more near-peer teams. The horrifying shameful no good outliers to this have been as a result of our own failure to mitigate outlier events on drives (or on defense and special teams…Johnny Sears), which allow the “for want of a nail, the horse threw his shoe” events to upset that arithmetic.

 

Who should have won this game?        Team A                                    Team B

    The math…as all things inevitably do… is changing. The new clock rules and their skewed impact on slower, more attrition heavy pace of play teams. While Michigan is still scoring with regularity, the total number of drives available to Michigan will reduce as they face teams that can also sustain a drive. This takes Michigan from a 2-3 Touchdown lead late in a game to a 1. The new clock rules favor Michigan (if not the bettors) in games against weaker opponents, but hurt Michigan in games against stronger ones.

    One overlooked aspect of the new NFL style rules is the lack of changes to the play clock. The NFL has 25 seconds, NCAA has 40. Meaning more time in between plays, fewer plays, and a lower rate of attrition. Michigan is gambling that even with a smaller, more outlier event prone sample size they will continue to be able to exert pressure on teams until they crumble. This may be true, it may not be, but as a fan get ready for more 21-10 ends to 3rd Quarters, and a lot more nervousness against teams with comparable talent.