Benjamin Jensen and Jake S. Kwon
Mass has long been a cornerstone of military strategy. Traditionally defined as the concentration of combat power at a decisive point to overwhelm the adversary, this principle remains as relevant to contemporary joint force planning as it was during the Napoleonic Wars. However, advancements in artificial intelligence are fundamentally reshaping how mass is generated, applied, and countered in modern warfare.
Mass now derives from converging effects across domains and aligning them against objectives. This process relies on synthesizing large volumes of information to support mission command and generating tempo in modern military operations.
What is Mass?
In war the principle of mass describes, as US Army doctrine puts it, the imperative to “concentrate the effects of combat power at the most advantageous place and time to produce decisive results.” The modern foundation for thinking about mass emerged from analysis of Napoleonic warfare in the early nineteenth century. In On War—particularly the book’s chapter on the “concentration of forces in space”—Carl von Clausewitz sees the concentration of force as an almost law-like principle governing how to win decisive battles. Antoine-Henri Jomini asserts that most fundamental principle of war is applying “strategic combinations [of] mass” on the “decisive points of a theatre of war.” These concepts became the principle of mass in modern war through J. F. C. Fuller’s attempts to formulate a science of war in the early twentieth century.
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