Allied Force: Coalition Warfare in the Mediterranean and the Allied Template for Victory, 1942–43

Dissertation Project

In the West today, the team reigns supreme. At any given moment, and on any given day, coalitions, alliances, and international organizations collaborate in the interest of collective security: They conduct multinational military exercises, exchange intelligence, and safeguard global trade routes; they assist and enable foreign partners, promote integration and interoperability, and standardize operating procedures; they devise long-term strategies, anticipate new threats, and deter common adversaries.

In many ways, military multilateralism has become emblematic of the West’s preferred approach to a spate of contemporary security challenges. Reliance on cooperative security mechanisms has grown more pronounced in recent decades: Three-fourths of all U.S. military interventions since the end of the Cold War were conducted alongside allies and partners. Indeed, the 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy referred to ‘partners’ and ‘partnerships’ no less than 168 times. According to a recent RAND study, “the trend toward greater reliance on coalitions is likely to continue.”¹

This has not always been the case. Historically, coalitions—with all their attendant cultural, linguistic, and technical challenges—were viewed as perhaps the most inefficient way to wage war. Thus would Winston Churchill dismiss the history of “all coalitions at war” as “a tale of the reciprocal complaints of allies.”² “Coalitions,” writes Wayne Silkett with reason, “mean friction…and the whole amounting to less than the sum of the parts.”³ General Dwight D. Eisenhower argued how “history testifie[d] to the ineptitude of coalitions waging war.” “Allied failures have been so numerous and their inexcusable blunders so common,” he wrote, “that professional soldiers had long discounted the possibility of effective allied action unless available resources were so great as to assure victory by inundation.”⁴

What happened? How did Western statesmen and military practitioners, once almost universally pessimistic toward the prospect of fighting alongside allies and partners, come to see military multilateralism as not only a preferred—but, as Winston Churchill later told a group of American officers in 1946—a “precious” tool of Western statecraft?⁵ My research attempts to answer this question.

Most scholars agree that the “special” teamwork exhibited by the Anglo-American allies during World War II not only hastened ultimate victory over the Axis but also reconditioned Western attitudes toward the concept of collective security. At the same time, it is often easy to take the process by which they developed the practical machinery to manage, coordinate, and sustain vast multinational undertakings on the theater level for granted. This was arguably the Allies’ greatest, if not most underrated strength—a uniquely collaborative way of war that stood in direct contrast to that employed by their enemies.

This machinery did not emerge in a vacuum, nor did it, as many popularly assume, “spring from the sea fully-formed like Aphrodite” at Normandy in June 1944.⁶ Rather, it was developed over a crucial twelve-month span in the Mediterranean between 1942 and 1943 as unfamiliar allies “merge[d] the soldiers and resources of two sovereign powers into one unified army” for the first time in history.⁷ The remarkable rapidity with which they did so not only facilitated a seismic shift in Western attitudes toward the practice of coalition warfare, it ushered multinational military operations themselves into the modern age.

The origins of modern coalition warfare are thus rooted in the often overlooked Mediterranean theater of World War II. It was there where Anglo-American personnel learned to harmonize their fighting efforts under an experimental theater command organization known as Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ).

Sorely tried on the battlefields of North Africa and Sicily, Allied personnel at AFHQ pioneered a host of collaborative processes that amplified the coalition’s combat effectiveness: These included the integration of unified and collocated military staffs; the reconciliation of discordant bureaucratic, doctrinal, and technical procedures; the equipping, training, and assimilation of foreign partners and one-time enemies; the coordination of complex supply chains, liaison channels, and administrative systems; and the execution of a dizzying array of joint and combined operations. These synergistic elements have since become lodestars of today’s multinational military efforts.

Since 1945, the United States has regularly chosen to fight its wars alongside allies and partners—though not always harmoniously. Understanding the pitfalls and practicalities of multinational military operations thus remains as important as ever. Aside from its historical value, a serious study of the operational dynamics of coalitions at war may help policymakers, leaders, and military practitioners alike grapple with the complexities of today’s multinational efforts—and learn to better design and execute those of the future.