I didn't have a chance to respond to one of @The_Capt's post in the How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get thread this weekend (too busy sleeping, visiting family, and playing video games). Since it took me so long to get around to it I figured my response didn't belong in that thread anymore, hence the new thread. But military history and tactical development are hobby subjects for me, so I did want to get around to responding. Though my opening post is on tactical lessons and development leading up to and during WW1, I'm going to make the topic of this thread generic to tactical development in any era. I think a discussion of tactical lessons learned, missed, or miss-learned in the past could be helpful for grounding our understanding of tactical trends in the present. Understanding that the tacticians of the past may have had good reason, based on the evidence and analytical tools available to them, for reaching conclusions that we now know were wrong may help us have humility in our own conclusions about tactical trends in modern warfare. And understanding that they actually got more right than they get credit for may prevent us from too hastily rejecting the received view on a subject, merely because it is the received view.
I think it's arguable just how obvious a shift to defensive primacy should have been. The Franco-Prussian war certainly wouldn't have signaled a shift to defensive primacy for any casual observer of the time. The Prussians overran French defenses with hasty (bordering on reckless) attacks in battle after battle. If anything the war repeatedly demonstrated offensive primacy until the French field army was defeated at Sedan and the Prussians settled in for the Siege of Paris. While the Prussians weren't able to storm Paris's defenses, that alone didn't prove defensive primacy since it couldn't set it apart from any other siege that had been conducted over the last several thousand years of warfare. For all of recorded history up to that point there were field battles and there were sieges. Field battles lasted from a few hours to a few days, while sieges were attritional slogs that lasted for weeks or months. In fact even the Siege of Petersburg would have looked just like any other siege. It and other months-long sieges in the American Civil War would not have alerted anyone to any sort of shift towards defensive primacy. In fact, far from the participants of the Siege of Petersburg noting some new form of warfare, reports and letters from 1915 refer to WW1 as if the entire war had become one giant siege.
It's fair to criticize the French, who went into the Franco-Prussian war believing in defensive primacy, for overcorrecting and assuming absolute offensive primacy. But it's clear that the overcorrection didn't come out of nowhere. I'll note that the French seem to have a habit of overcorrecting too hard, assuming defensive primacy in the Franco-Prussian War, overcorrecting to total offensive primacy in WW1, and overcorrecting to total defensive primacy in WW2. Another tragic downside of Prussia's reckless attacks during the Franco-Prussian War being met with repeated success is that it led the Germans in WW1 to think that reckless attacks were a good idea. I think the Franco-Prussian war may have a number of cautionary tales for how we derive lessons from wars.
Defensive or offensive primacy are useful as broad concepts. But each is brought about by specific factors, and soldiers in the field still need to adapt to them with specific tactics. The difference between close order and extended order formations is not trivial. Close order means fighting in a multi-rank formation (normally two or three ranks deep) with each file brushing shoulders with the files next to it. Extended order means fighting in a single rank (technically Napoleonic skirmish lines were multi-rank formations, with filemates forming small teams, but I'm focusing on the late 19th/early 20th century here), with several meters between each soldier (as few as one or two meters in the early 20th century, but 5 to 10 meters is more common today). A close order formation is the classic Napoleonic block of infantry. The dispersed formations of modern infantry are examples of extended order formations (even if no one thinks to call them "extended order" anymore).
With the invention of smokeless powder bullets had enough penetration to tear through multiple people, so no only is a close order formation a much easier target to hit, but each hit is sure to inflict multiple casualties. Add in artillery firing high explosive shells and a single shell could inflict dozens of casualties on a close order formation, where it may have only inflicted a handful of casualties on an extended order formation. For a worst case scenario, at the Battle of Magersfontein the 3rd Highland Brigade was caught in quarter column, the densest formation possible for British troops, by Boar riflemen and was virtually annihilated. The British suffered nearly a thousand casualties at Magersfontein, 700 of them were suffered by the 3rd Highland Brigade in the first few minutes of the battle. Over the course of the 2nd Boar War British infantry in extended order were frequently able to overcome Boar defenses, albeit with heavy casualties. But every single British unit that attacked in close order was massacred. Even the Japanese, at the Battle of the Yalu (1904) took such heavy casualties while crossing the river in close order that they stopped in the middle of the battle to extend their order.
The importance of extended order was not the only lesson drawn from the wars leading up to WW1. Mostly what I have are lessons learned by the British army (it seems that most English speaking historians have a preference for writing about the British (which is very annoying for me, since I'm interested in everyone)). The importance of snap-shooting, and the ineffectiveness of volley fire, was taken to heart by the British after the 2nd Boar war. Post-Boar War British marksmanship training is some of the earliest that I'm aware of to feature pop-up targets. The need for the cavalry to be armed with the same rifle as the infantry was learned through the frustrating experience of cavalry armed with carbines being repeatedly outranged by Boars armed with rifles. This was a lesson that was apparently only learned by the British, with the other cavalry forces in 1914 going to war with carbines. The need to conceal the artillery, rather than firing from the open, was a lesson that was theoretically learned, but not taken to heart by every artillery officer. In 1914 it seems that even trying to keep the guns in concealed positions wasn't good enough, and they needed to be pushed back to the rear where they could only provide indirect fire support. And of course that introduced the problem of infantry-artillery coordination which would plague armies for much of WW1 (it's a lot easier for the artillery to know what to shoot at when they can see what they are shooting at).
And unfortunately, defensive primacy doesn't mean you can get away with just defending. You can't win a war by sitting in your trenches forever. Sooner or later you need to figure out how to push the enemy out of theirs. You have to find ways to attack successfully despite the primacy of the defense. This means finding specific countermeasures for specific causes of defensive primacy. The most frequently cited cause of defensive primacy in WW1 was the firepower imbalance between the attacker and the defender. The machinegun, being relatively immobile at first, provided more firepower to the defender than to the attacker. It was easier for the defender to use artillery effectively, since they only needed to put up a screening blanket of artillery in front of their positions, while the attacker had to figure out how to get the artillery firing on the right targets at the right time as the infantry advanced, all at a time before man-portable radios had been invented. The solution that was found for the firepower imbalance essentially came in three parts. The first was to get better at creating an artillery fire plan to support the infantry as well as possible (WW1 artillery tactics could, and probably do, fill entire books). The second was to invent tanks, which could provide more flexible direct fire support, engage targets which had been missed by the artillery, and continue providing heavy fire support to the infantry after the artillery fire plan inevitably broke down. The third was to increase the organic firepower of the infantry by introducing light machine guns and rifle grenades. All of those were important, but that third point in particular is not to be underestimated. Imagine playing as Commonwealth forces in CMBN, but your infantry have no Bren guns, only SMLEs. Attacking with rifle-only infantry, with no automatic weapons of any kind, is unthinkable on any post-1917 battlefield.
Another cause of defensive primacy was that armies had gotten so much larger. That, plus the increased dispersion of troops necessary to survive modern firepower, meant that armies could hold an unbroken frontline along an entire border. So you can't attack the flank of an army the way you might in the Napoleonic wars, because there are no flanks. It's frontal attacks or nothing. The obvious solution is to create some flanks by breaking through the frontlines. Unfortunately railroads make it easy for the defender to bring up reserves to plug a breakthrough, or to prevent a break-in from becoming a breakthrough. And the lack of mechanization, and the difficulty of trying to bring a field telephone up to recently captured positions, makes it difficult for the attacker to push reserves through a breakthrough to exploit, or into a break-in to turn it into a breakthrough in the first place. Another difficulty is that the dispersed battlefield makes command and control far more difficult. The obvious adaptation to the difficulty (near-impossibility, prior to man-portable radios) of issuing new orders to a unit in the middle of a battle is to script out every step of the attack in advance. This makes the battleplan rigid. When things went according to plan, the initial stage of a battle could go very well (the first day of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle). But even if things went to plan, the script would inevitably run out, with the result that any attempt to exploit initial success would fail miserably (second day of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle). And of course, things didn't always go to plan (first day of the Battle of the Somme).
The solution to these problems came in two parts. The first was to stop the battle before the script runs out. Give up on trying to achieve a breakthrough, or indeed on achieving any single decisive battle, and instead focus on wearing down the enemy with a series limited objective attacks at different points along the line. The hundred-days offensives which broke the German army in 1918 were a relentless series of limited objective attacks up and down the line, never letting up the pressure on the German line, while being careful to never press any one battle past its culmination point. The second was to accept that complete, centralized control of a battle was no longer possible. A single commander could not issue timely orders to react to developments in every corner of a dispersed battlefield. The solution was to invent the modern concept of mission command. Delegate greater authority down to lower and lower levels. The basic tactical units got smaller (from company at the beginning of the war, to squad at the end), with leaders at each level empowered to make decisions based on their local situation without being expected to wait for orders from above.
The trend in WW1 scholarship over the last couple of decades has been to reject the "Lions led by Donkeys" narrative (see Blackadder's portrayal of British high command (great comedy, terrible history)). The emerging view is that the leadership of the major combatants of WW1 (with the possible exceptions of the Russians and the Austrians) were generally competent and did about as well as could reasonably be expected (they certainly made no shortage of mistakes, but I've played too many wargames to judge them too harshly for that). In any case, they invented modern warfare in the space of just four years, with a pseudo-Napoleonic system as their starting point, so they must have been doing something right.
PS: I definitely have to grant that you have a point about the Austrian cavalry. But I think it's worth pointing out that the Austro-Hungarian army was a train wreck even by the standards of the time. Even the Russian army was less dysfunctional than the Austro-Hungarian army. And the only respects in which the early 20th century Russian army was better than the modern Russian army were that it could raise more troops and produce more stuff.
The question facing military professionals everywhere out of this war are:
- "What is unique to this war?"
- "What is universal to all future wars?"
We had a whole thread going on the General Forum on development of warfare over the 19th century and I believe modern militaries are facing a similar conundrum.
"How would NATO do in this war?" Well it depends which side we are going to be. As Ukraine against Russia we would likely have seen a shorter sharper war but the costs would have been a serious shock to the western world. [note: let's not get dragged into another nuclear equation discussion, we can just put that one to the side] We are talking likely tens of thousands of casualties and a lot of expensive kit lost. Why?
- Air superiority. I do not know what this means in a modern context. A2AD capability is rapidly becoming distributed and highly portable. We may have been able to gain air superiority over 20,000 feet but below that we would have been taking serious losses as there is not such thing as SEAD for MANPADs basically everywhere. Modern MANPADs and IADs can operate independently all over the battlefield. Further they can deny airspaces at much higher altitudes and higher ranges. Why? Because while we were stonking Iraq, Libya, Serbia and a bunch of dirt farmers in Afghanistan competing states were taking notes and investing heavily in the tech. Take away our air supremacy and the western way of warfare is immediately in trouble. And, shocker, places like Iran really don't like us and do not want to be invaded.
Below 20,000 feet it is the freakin wild west right now. I do not care how many lasers we strap on every tank, IFV or truck. I do not care how much EM is pumped into space - birds f#ucked up for the next 20 years. Unmanned systems are 1) cheap, 2) highly effective and 3) everywhere. Whether they are doing ISR or strike they have changed the fabric of warfare between about 3 to 20,000 feet...and they are just getting started. Air superiority below 20,000 feet does not exist as a concept right now. Hell we lost it below 2000 feet in Iraq to freakin ISIL, who were basically the lowest bar one can get with respect to conventional warfare. If we were fighting the RA the UAS problem would be extremely costly...as in freakin nations pulling out after losing too many people, costly. Can anyone imagine if the Taliban got their hands on this tech and started dropping old cluster munitions right on our heads back in the COPs and FOBs? I slept for weeks about 200m from a 50,000 gallon fuel bladder that was resting under an open sky ...let that sink in.
So what? Well "wither goest Air Superiority" is one of the biggest questions of this war, and as you can see it is a multi-dimensional one.
- C4ISR. Russia does not have a world class C4ISR architecture. But even with what they do have the principle of "making them go dark" to establish C4ISR superiority - far more important in this day and age then any domain superiority - is also in question. With everything being a sensor hooked into crazy comms and networks - hell with hotspotting everything can be a node in a comms network. So I am not even sure how to make an opponent go dark anymore (see unmanned). I am sure we got people working on it but the fact that an even poorly armed opponent can see me tens of kms out makes me nervous. Worse, they can see my logistics train as well. The fact they can record all this and stream it all over the planet in real time turns really concerns me. A half decent opponent would be broadcasting every screw up and horror show, which makes sustainment of national will a big problem.
- PGM. Artillery, ATGM...insert whatever nightmare comes next. No one is ready to face this. I cannot begin to imagine trying to do an obstacle crossing when my opponent can hit me at 3-4kms with an 80% success rate with ATGM. "Oh that is ok, we have APS"...fantastic, right up until someone comes up with workarounds like sub-munitions or EFP. And even if we do magically put bubble wrap around ourselves, nothing on earth can stop artillery round that can land directly on my head. Oh and this is while I am still trying to deal with old stuff like mines, and new stuff like UAS.
All of that adds up to some very disconcerting calculus. As in "is combined arms dead as we know it?" type of calculus (someone is going to try and answer this, someone always does...just don't bother. I do not post my mil quals for some very good reasons but trust me when I say no one has this figured out yet).
Now here is the punchline: this is all if we were fighting Russia. I, frankly, am far less concerned about fighting Russia - now more than ever. I am very worried about fighting Ukraine. If we get stuck on the wrong side of a proxy war and our opponent is armed with C4ISR, PGM and A2AD like Ukraine is right now, we are in very serious trouble.
"Well we just won't fight those wars." Ya, that is not how it works. We don't get to choose the wars we decide to fight, gawd that is a post-Cold War perception that needs to die, and fast. This is the nightmare scenario and I do not know if you guys have been paying attention but we kinda been doing a lot of expeditionary operations in all sort of places to push the brand. What happens when Chinese space based ISR start lighting us up? We wind up in a hybrid fight with the other side armed with HJ-12s?
I do not know. This is a big reason when [insert talking head] says "Ukraine needs to do this" "We need to give them that"...and the war will be over in a week. My advice is to stop listening. No one in the west has been in a war like this since Korea and the freakin needle has moved miles since Korea. I say this without hyperbole, we are going to be spending the rest of this century trying to figure this all out as things like UGVs start coming online. Tell your (grand) kids to get into the sciences of killing because it is a major growth industry. For now, the best we can do is watch and learn. Both the UA and RA are feeling their way through a war unlike any we have seen before.
AMX-10 at the east. Soldiers really like the gun. Wheels are not protected and get flat under the shelling easily so manoeuvrability become problematic.
PS: I would assume Leo 1 will be also warm welcomed in the troops
Comments from General Milley at today's Ramstein press conference on how well Ukraine's counter-offensive is going: https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3462659/secretary-of-defense-lloyd-j-austin-iii-and-joint-chiefs-of-staff-chairman-gene/
Claimed to be from this morning. All over twitter, probably originally from a telegram channel.
One road span collapsed. The oyher road span exists but it looks a wee bit twisted, angled slightly down towards the collapsed part by maybe half a foot at the lowest point. As if it is sagging a bit.
Haven seen anything about the railway part yet.
Either Ghirkin really wants to walk out that window, or his faction is about to make a second coup attempt. I can't square the circle of what he is saying any other way. Says the Russian line in the south could fail anytime, and their are no reserves to speak of. and then he gets really depressed.
Take it with a grain of salt. Anyways, state of affairs in Orc army seems to go down the drain in some units.
https://twitter.com/PStyle0ne1/status/1680309371106983939?s=20
The Russian VDV troops threaten Shoigu and Gerasimov
"Servicemen of the 7th Airborne Division recorded an audio message to the Ministry of Defense. In particular, they spoke in defense of their commander of the Airborne Forces, Colonel-General Mikhail Teplinsky. The catalyst for this appeal was the removal of the commander of the 106th Airborne Division of the Airborne Forces, General Seliverstov . In addition, in early July, General Kornev was removed from command of the 7th Airborne Assault Division. “We, the paratroopers, warn that we will not tolerate such actions in relation to General Teplinsky. And in the event of the slightest threat to his life and freedom, we will stand as a wall to protect the honor and dignity of our commander. We are very determined. Up to the point that we will withdraw from our positions and go to the rescue of our Bata. You, those who sit in the offices! The landing party does not abandon its own! Do not make fatal mistakes"
https://twitter.com/PStyle0ne1/status/1680309371106983939?s=20
Taranis reacted to Centurian52 in Tactical Lessons and Development through history
