Fabian strategy
While avoiding decisive battles, the side employing this strategy harasses its enemy through skirmishes to cause attrition, disrupt supply and affect morale.
[1] This strategy derives its name from Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus,[2] the dictator of the Roman Republic given the task of defeating the great Carthaginian general Hannibal in southern Italy during the Second Punic War (218–201 BC).
Fabius initiated a war of attrition, fought through constant skirmishes, limiting the ability of the Carthaginians to forage for food and denying them significant victories.
[7][8] Hannibal was handicapped by being a commander of an invading foreign army (on Italian soil), and was effectively cut off from his home country in North Africa due to the difficulty of seaborne resupply over the Mediterranean Sea.
He determined that Hannibal's largely extended supply lines (as well as the cost of maintaining the Carthaginian army in the field) meant that Rome had time on its side.
[11] He sent out small military units to attack Hannibal's foraging parties[12] while keeping the Roman army in hilly terrain to nullify Carthaginian cavalry superiority.
[13] Residents of small villages in the path of the Carthaginians were ordered by Fabius to burn their crops creating scorched earth and take refuge in fortified towns.
This, Fabius had concluded, would wear down the invaders' endurance and discourage Rome's allies from switching sides, without challenging the Carthaginians to major battles.
The magister equitum, Marcus Minucius Rufus, a political enemy of Fabius, famously exclaiming: Are we come here to see our allies butchered, and their property burned, as a spectacle to be enjoyed?
[15] As the memory of the shock of Hannibal's victories grew dimmer, the Roman populace gradually started to question the wisdom of the Fabian strategy, the very thing which had given them time to recover.
[citation needed] The strategy was used by the medieval French general Bertrand du Guesclin during the Hundred Years' War against the English following a series of disastrous defeats in pitched battles against Edward, the Black Prince.
[citation needed] During the Italian Wars, after a first defeat in pitched battle in Seminara, Spanish general Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba used Fabian tactics to retake southern Italy from Charles VIII of France's army, compelling the French to withdraw after the Siege of Atella.
Used against Napoleon's Grande Armée in combination with scorched earth and guerrilla war, it proved decisive in defeating the French invasion of Russia.
During the First World War in German East Africa, Generals Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and Jan Smuts both used the Fabian strategy in their campaigns.
