Tactical Lessons and Development through history

[Centurian52]

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.

On 6/15/2023 at 7:50 PM, The_Capt said:

Gotta disagree, but not vehemently.  There is plenty of evidence of failure to translate the evidence of shifts in the wars prior to WW1 to actual changes in doctrine and structures that were not simply “missing details”.  For example the Austrian Calvary on the eastern front rode out in 1914 in parade dress complete with shiny breastplates.  The key lesson that was not taken aboard was the fact that warfare had shifted towards defensive primacy.  The evidence was hinted at in places like Gettysburg and more loudly at Petersburg.  They definitely should have gotten the memo by the Franco-Prussian War - the US commanders expressed the same reticence to digging in as a “morale issue and hindrance to the offence” in 1863, and had the massacres to prove it.  Further in places like Culps Hill where Union troops dug in, it was bloody obvious that this had a significant impact on force ratio calcs in favour of the defence on Day 2 of Gettysburg.

Your point on learning the wrong lessons is sound; however it also has to be considered in light of military culture of the day.  The militaries of the 19th century were still living under the shadow of 1812, which was a high watermark for formation manoeuvres and firepower all backed by the spirit of the offensive…in fact that was Jomini’s entire point on concentration.  Clausewitz gave it some breathing room but neither of the old masters can be considered as Defensive proponents. The militaries of Europe build an entire culture around offensive “press of the bayonet” that set them up to learn the wrong lessons as they unfolded in front of them - and we are not immune to this either.  They talked themselves into half-measures and failed to see the shift completely.  Your example of close versus extended order is simply rearranging deck chairs in a kill box.  It definitely hinted at from the slaughters of Pickets charge that the answer was “no orders of infantry…dig”.  Once machine guns and fast firing (and coordinated artillery) came into play what order ones infantry was in was an argument in relative obsolescence.  They slaughter millions on the western front learning and re-learning that one.

So, sure “wrong lessons and spotty implementation” but why that happened was built on a mountain of European military culture that had a lot of blind spots…and we have the same dynamic today.  Our culture creates lenses in seeing only what we want to see.  I have been in meeting where army officers are using observations from this war to double down on heavy formations, we are trapped in boxes of our own thinking.  I argue WW1 happened because western military culture created conditions for blind spots and learning wrong lessons.  As well as stifling any imagination on changing force structure or doctrine - and again, we see that today.

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.

[chuckdyke]

I shared and referenced this on Discord. A mandatory read in my opinion.

[The_Capt]

3 hours ago, Centurian52 said:

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.

To avoid “two guys talking on a forum” we should start with some references to frame things a bit:

https://web.stanford.edu/class/polisci211z/2.1/Glaser %26 Kaufmann IS 1988.pdf

https://web.stanford.edu/group/fearon-research/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/The-Offense-Defense-Balance-and-War-Since-1648.pdf

As can be seen this is a pretty deep topic - and a controversial one - that cannot be framed by battlefield tactics alone.  For the Civil War, I recommended this:

https://www.amazon.ca/American-Civil-Origins-Modern-Warfare/dp/0253207150

As you note these are more themes of strategies of exhaustion vs annihilation and which one plays out better in a given time in history.

Regarding the US Civil War and as to whether it signalled that a shift was afoot.  I think it is clear that the North and South we both trapped between the classic Euro-centric doctrines that had been taught to entire generations of generals on both sides and the realities of 1) The scope and scale of the war - e.g. Gettysburg had 2.5 times more troops engaged than Waterloo, 2) the size and type of terrain being fought over, and 3) The introduction of industrialization and technology onto the battlefield.

Both sides struggled with a massive mobilization challenge while also trying to build the systemic backbones of then-modern militaries.  What we becoming very apparent to the generals fighting the war - and was preached and developed before the war by Denis Mahan, an influential professor at West Point - was that war in American, in that time was different than the Napoleonic wars from 50 years before.  

The driving military theory, as reflected by theorist such as Jomini and Clausewitz was concentration, offensive action and decisive engagement.  These ideas created a cultural mindset - something tactical analyses miss.  A cultural mindset that once embedded is incredibly hard to break out of.  Militaries will keep doing things well past the point they make sense as a result of this phenomenon - the history of which is well recorded going well back before the time periods we are discussing.  One could argue that failure to adapt has lost more wars than any other factor, far exceeded “adapting ahead of reality”, which does happen but I argue nowhere near as often.

So back to “Was the writing on the wall?”  I argue “yes”.  Your examples of “close order massacres” were also seen in the battles of the US Civil War.  The evidence that lethality and range of firepower was changing the requirements to mass effects was there, yet militaries of the day clung onto “the press of the bayonets” as a central doctrinal concept.  Even though in the Age of Rifles this was already an antiquated idea.  Defensive and Offensive primacy are really about relative costs as much as they are about culture. The cost of mass on the Offensive vs the cost of equal mass on the Defensive.  “Cost” is a significant concept that goes from institutional to operational - in the end we dumb it down to ratios.  So to oversimplify, Offensive primacy appears to occur when cost/benefit projection of effective manoeuvring mass outweighs static mass.  And Defensive vice versa.

I for one cannot see how one can view the key battles of the US Civil War and not see the trend of projected manoeuvre mass failing.  The war started with Lee’s operational offensive approach dominating the Eastern Theatre.  As the War progressed it became more clear that rapid projection of mass was not working.  In fact the costs were outstripping the South’s ability to force generate replacements.  The North adopted the slow grinding war of exhaustion - it first great victory was a defensive one at Gettysburg.  Even as Grant took over the war took one a grinding attritional nature to it.  

Of course Defensive primacy does not mean “defend only”.  It does mean that offensive strategies are going to be different.  They tend to be grinding and attritional as opposed to decisive - we can see symptoms of this all through 1864 to the wars end.  I disagree that the Franco Prussian War was a counter-example of offensive action.  The war began with rapid force projection, seeking decisive battle (which the Prussians found at Sedan), but ended in long sieges - Paris the notable one.  In many ways the Franco Prussian War was a WW1 teaser - opening with rapid force projection and manoeuvre which gets bogged down in sieges as the modern realities of capacity, organization, communication and firepower set in.

As to WW1, I think the latest wave of revisionist history is too kind by a half.  But to be fair, and to your point, the generals on all sides were not stupid, they simply did not have other viable options.  They were trapped in a reality no one was prepared for - Defensive dominance.  No force ratios were enough to breakthrough.  Even if they could, they could not move fast enough to exploit compared to the rail lines and their opponents ability to mass defences.  This was all a culmination of a trend going back to the US Civil War - effective manoeuvring mass was rendered inert.  Grinding exhaustion was the only card left in the deck.  First it worked on the Eastern Front, then the Western. Manoeuvre was not dead, it was still being applied in farther flung theatres but as soon as mass was created, it would bog down in places like Gallipoli.

4 hours ago, Centurian52 said:

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

I will only pull on this one quote (I hate quote by quote debates).  It is the fact that they still had a pseudo-Napoleonic system, after US Civl War, after Franco-Prussian, after the Boer War, after two Balkan Wars, after a Russo Japanese War that is the issue.  Why they still had that “pseudo-Napoleonic system” after all of those data points is not excusable in my opinion, but it is explainable - military cultural mindsets.  They invented “modern warfare” in four years because they had largely ignored, or saw only what they wanted to for previous 50.

And we stand here once more.  Evidence is starting to pile up that war is shifting again.  We will likely cling to Manoeuvre Warfare and Mission Command as tightly as pre-WW1 clung to bayonets and the cult of the offensive. Despite the evidence we are seeing suggesting warfare is evolving in other directions.  Manoeuvre is becoming Corrosive, Mission is becoming Hybrid, whether or not western militaries are able to evolve at pace remains to be seen.

 
 

[Grey_Fox]

18 hours ago, The_Capt said:

pre-WW1 clung to bayonets and the cult of the offensive.

Just a nitpick, but this is largely debunked. The main trench-clearing tools used by the British were bayonets and bombs (what we today would call hand grenades) due to the close-quarter nature of the fighting.

The "cult of the offensive" is also a myth. If you look at the RUSI archives, between 1905 and 1914 there is only 1 article about infantry maneuver warfare, written by JFC Fuller, who went on to pollute discourse on WW1 in the English language for the next 50+years.

Why was this? Because military institutions in the west very closely watched the events of the Russo-Japanese War, embedding observers on both sides, and saw what the next European war would look like. They spent the next decade trying to figure out how to fight trench warfare, to which there was no good answer until technology advanced enough and gave us aircraft, tanks, and wireless communications at low levels.

So, military planners were faced with a terrible choice: attack as hard as possible before the enemy can dig in, or eat the casualties to kick them out of their defenses and prevent them from digging in again.

There were no better options as the technology simply didn't exist.

Edited June 21, 2023 by Grey_Fox

[Artkin]

https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700610983/

Waiting on my shelf to be read by me, but shows the progression of tables of organization over the past 100 years.

This guy is the man.

 

[The_Capt]

4 hours ago, Grey_Fox said:

Just a nitpick, but this is largely debunked. The main trench-clearing tools used by the British were bayonets and bombs (what we today would call hand grenades) due to the close-quarter nature of the fighting.

The "cult of the offensive" is also a myth. If you look at the RUSI archives, between 1905 and 1914 there is only 1 article about infantry maneuver warfare, written by JFC Fuller, who went on to pollute discourse on WW1 in the English language for the next 50+years.

Why was this? Because military institutions in the west very closely watched the events of the Russo-Japanese War, embedding observers on both sides, and saw what the next European war would look like. They spent the next decade trying to figure out how to fight trench warfare, to which there was no good answer until technology advanced enough and gave us aircraft, tanks, and wireless communications at low levels.

So, military planners were faced with a terrible choice: attack as hard as possible before the enemy can dig in, or eat the casualties to kick them out of their defenses and prevent them from digging in again.

There were no better options as the technology simply didn't exist.

Debunked by who?  The decisive press of infantry attack was central to European military thinking in lead up and in the opening of WW1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_offensive#:~:text=The cult of the offensive,and therefore choose to attack.

Now do not take wikis word for it, note the refs.  Azar Gat is one of the leading historians on military theory evolution over the last 200 years.  I have his works and we use them as textbooks at war colleges.  Snyder and Taylor are now slouches either.

Your example of a single RUSI article actually supports my (and their point), militaries do not waste ink on hard doctrinal “knows”.  If European observers had seen the character of warfare shifting there would have been all sorts of articles published, because stuff like that gets attention.  They were not publishing because everyone already knew what they knew.  The same phenomenon can be seen in recent history - we get thousands of articles on cyber but no one has revisited combined arms doctrine since the 90s (recent Ukraine war generated thought excepted).

I suspect that militaries were all hoping that rapid offensives would prevent an opponent from being able to dig in and establish hard defensive positions - so double down on offensive…because that was all they were built for.  If they knew trench warfare was coming, then why did innovations like flamethrowers, creeping artillery and tunnelling/cratering take time to develop? Why were they not ready on Day 1?

 I am not sure where this WW1 revisionist history is coming from but “observed well beforehand” and “1500 dead per day” - on a normal day, does not compute.  If someone can point to actual historical research that back this up I would really like to see it.  I suspect that the senior leadership suspected that something was up, hard to miss really, but the preparations and planning do not match hard doctrinal conclusions.  “We saw it coming but had no ideas.  So we sent them over the top anyway.” actually makes things worse, not better.

 

 

Edited June 22, 2023 by The_Capt

[Hapless]

Relevant (if blatant) self-promotion, but if anyone wants 4 hours of my take on where modern warfare came from: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYvL90uFbwhO_2-ULfOsTR8EIz7VxbA27

Obviously this is a big topic and there's a lot to unpick, but it's always worth bearing in mind that the militaries of the time were big chunky organisations with plenty of variation in thought. The Cult of the Offensive was absolutely not a myth... but that doesn't mean that there were no officers or factions in the mix pushing for armies to adapt to (supposed) lessons of the Boer War, Russo-Japanese War and Balkan Wars. 'Tactical fashion' ebbed and flowed over time, with attempts to adapt waxing in the aftermath of certain conflicts and waning as naturally conservative military establishments reasserted themselves. If WW1 had kicked off in 1917 and the lessons of the Balkan Wars had had more time to bed in, the opening phase could have been very different.

It's also worth noting that the historical record is not exactly crystal clear: the British might have struggled at first in 1899, but once they deployed a more 'continental' level of force they crushed the Boers. Grant beat Lee because he was the first Union General to go up against him and just keep coming, no matter how many casualties he suffered from battle to battle. The French lost the Franco-Prussian War because the Prussians went faster and harder. And there are, of course, massive game changing technological developments in firepower over the same period that may- or may not- be changing the dynamics... but the victors in all those wars arguably won because they were able to sustain heavy losses.

Not to mention the obvious fact that no-one ever won a war without attacking.

RE: Close order massacres/ the offensive-defensive balance... Bussaco and Waterloo anyone? Column vs Line? If we really want to pull the thread we could maybe argue for Crecy and Agincourt, all the way back to the Thebans getting pelted with roof tiles in the streets of Plataea. I think the issue isn't simply one of firepower vs mass, but the ease with which one side can create the tactical conditions necessary for the other's failure.

Wellington was famously a master of exploiting reverse slopes- using the terrain to mask his force, manoeuvre to block incoming French columns and then break them with the shock action of massed firepower at close range. Fast forward a century and while those factors are still important, all it takes is one machinegun team in the right place at the right time to achieve the same thing.

Another century later and... we're looking at WW1 pumped up on steroids stood around wondering whether it's still relevant while a 100km deep, satellite, EW and drone enabled corrosive warfare campaign rages on overhead.

[The_Capt]

15 minutes ago, Hapless said:

Relevant (if blatant) self-promotion, but if anyone wants 4 hours of my take on where modern warfare came from: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYvL90uFbwhO_2-ULfOsTR8EIz7VxbA27

Obviously this is a big topic and there's a lot to unpick, but it's always worth bearing in mind that the militaries of the time were big chunky organisations with plenty of variation in thought. The Cult of the Offensive was absolutely not a myth... but that doesn't mean that there were no officers or factions in the mix pushing for armies to adapt to (supposed) lessons of the Boer War, Russo-Japanese War and Balkan Wars. 'Tactical fashion' ebbed and flowed over time, with attempts to adapt waxing in the aftermath of certain conflicts and waning as naturally conservative military establishments reasserted themselves. If WW1 had kicked off in 1917 and the lessons of the Balkan Wars had had more time to bed in, the opening phase could have been very different.

It's also worth noting that the historical record is not exactly crystal clear: the British might have struggled at first in 1899, but once they deployed a more 'continental' level of force they crushed the Boers. Grant beat Lee because he was the first Union General to go up against him and just keep coming, no matter how many casualties he suffered from battle to battle. The French lost the Franco-Prussian War because the Prussians went faster and harder. And there are, of course, massive game changing technological developments in firepower over the same period that may- or may not- be changing the dynamics... but the victors in all those wars arguably won because they were able to sustain heavy losses.

Not to mention the obvious fact that no-one ever won a war without attacking.

RE: Close order massacres/ the offensive-defensive balance... Bussaco and Waterloo anyone? Column vs Line? If we really want to pull the thread we could maybe argue for Crecy and Agincourt, all the way back to the Thebans getting pelted with roof tiles in the streets of Plataea. I think the issue isn't simply one of firepower vs mass, but the ease with which one side can create the tactical conditions necessary for the other's failure.

Wellington was famously a master of exploiting reverse slopes- using the terrain to mask his force, manoeuvre to block incoming French columns and then break them with the shock action of massed firepower at close range. Fast forward a century and while those factors are still important, all it takes is one machinegun team in the right place at the right time to achieve the same thing.

Another century later and... we're looking at WW1 pumped up on steroids stood around wondering whether it's still relevant while a 100km deep, satellite, EW and drone enabled corrosive warfare campaign rages on overhead.

I do believed there was a spectrum of thinking - always is - as warfare evolved. However the issue of where the center of that bellcurve of military thought laid (or currently lies) is found in how the force generation money was spent before the major milestones that we pin as defining moments.  So how were European troops training before WW1?  Was there a lot of trench warfare/siege training going on?  Was there a lot of artillery/infantry integration training?  Were they experimenting on trench warfare before WW1?  Now how about before WW2? 

You can apply this to any major conflict going pretty much as far back as you like.  “Creating tactical conditions for the other teams failure” is a very broad topic.  Firepower and mass are very simplistic but fundamentals elements.  So are C2, logistics, ISR, force protection.  Deeper stuff like culture, leadership and psychology.  And finally theory and doctrine.  One can argue that actual warfare is the collision of all these factors with reality.  That reality creates a unique but artificial environment - there common elements across collisions, however, each collision is also unique.  How well a military and the system that supports it can adapt to the environment is critical to success.  Adaptation is directly linked to sustaining and creating options, and options matter.

The easiest way to tell that militaries have gone into a conflict upside down is to assess just how far and fast they needed to adapt.  Victory and defeat lay in how well they adapted relative to an opponent.  This makes warfare as much an exercise in competitive collective learning as anything else. Collective learning with very high stakes.

So What?  Well mindset and culture are critical to how well we can learn.  A closed conservative mindset is going to learn very differently than an open exploration one.  I will let everyone make up their own minds on the military mindsets of the 19th century - the reality appears that they varied more than we thought but also less than realities demanded.  This is not what is important right now though.  What is important is our own modern military mindsets in the face of a changing military reality.  Where do we stand on the spectrum?  How well set up are we for rapid and effective adaptation as compared to our likely opponents?  Looking back to the cautionary tales of the previous centuries informs the one in front of us.

[The_Capt]

And a quick follow up:

https://archive.org/details/1914-uk-infantry-training/page/53/mode/2up

A whole lot of “marching up and down the square” at the front end.

A quick read of Chapter 10 tells me that the “press of the bayonet” was alive and well in 1914.

“5. The main essential to success in battle is to close with the enemy, cost what it may. A determined and steady advance lowers the fighting spirit of the enemy and lessens the accuracy of his fire. Hesitation and delay in the attack have the opposite effect. The object of infantry in attack is therefore to get to close quarters as quickly as possible, and the leading lines must not delay the advance by halting to fire until compelled by the enemy to do so.
The object of fire in the attack, whether of artillery, machine guns, or infantry, is to bring such a superiority of fire to bear on the enemy as to make the advance to close quarters possible.”

To this an entire appendix on “Bayonet Fighting”.

Chapter 11 kinda suggests that Offensive primacy was still in the mindset:

“1. The term defence is used here in its broadest sense, and includes :—
i Active defence, in which the ultimate object in view is to create and seize a favourable opportunity for a decisive offensive.
ii. Passive defence, in which the object may be to beat off an attack without hope of being able to turn the tables on the enemy by assuming the offensive at some stage of the fight, as, for example, in the defence of a fortified post weakly garrisoned.
iii. The delaying action by means of manoeuvre, in which efforts are directed to gaining time without risking defeat, as in the conduct of rearguards, or when awaiting the arrival of reinforcements.”

And then this nugget:

”13. Infantry in attack must not delay the advance or diminish the volume of fire by entrenching. Entrenchments in the attack are only used when, owing to further advance being impossible, the efforts of the attacking force must temporarily be limited to holding the ground already won. Th advance must be resumed at the first possible moment.”

A quick scan of the Training Syllabus in Apx 2 shows that out of a “ten fortnight” (gotta love the Brits) training regime, troops had about 8 hours programmed for “Entrenching”.  The details of Entrenching has been relegated to engineering field manuals.

This one is very interesting as it is a source document from the time period.  I personally think it supports the idea that the UK military was prepared for a very different war than the one they got.  Nor does it demonstrate a whole lotta realization that the battlefield was becoming defensive primacy driven in nature, despite the evidence presented by observers of the smaller wars in the previous 50 years.  I suspect the plan was to win quickly in the offensive as to not get bogged down in a static defensive battle (sound familiar?).  How that was going to happen looked a lot like early 19th century doctrine but “now with machine guns.”  Would be interesting to see what the other manuals had to say.

 

[Centurian52]

Note: I started typing out this reply over 24 hours ago, so some of the replies that have rolled in in the meantime may have already covered some of this ground.

10 hours ago, The_Capt said:

1) The scope and scale of the war - e.g. Gettysburg had 2.5 times more troops engaged than Waterloo

Gettysburg and Waterloo were about the same size. Waterloo had about 120,000 soldiers on the Coalition side (about 70,000 in Wellington's army, and about 50,000 in Blucher's army), and about 70,000 on the French side. Gettysburg had around 90,000 to 100,000 on the US side and about 70,000 to 75,000 on the CS side. They were also both about as bloody, with about 55,000 casualties at Waterloo and about 45,000 to 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg. And there were battles in the Napoleonic Wars that were much larger than Waterloo (Waterloo gets its place in history because it was the last battle and because English speakers participated in it, not because it was the largest or bloodiest battle of the Napoleonic Wars). Borodino had about 100,000 to 130,000 French and 125,000 to 160,000 Russians. Leipzig had about 200,000 French and 365,000 Coalition soldiers (this may have been the bloodiest battle in human history prior to WW1, with somewhere from 130,000-160,000 casualties). The scope and scale of the Napoleonic Wars was much greater than the US Civil War. There were more battles, more of them were large battles, the largest battles were larger, and the average casualty rates were (slightly) higher*. I think people forget just how much of a bloodbath the Napoleonic Wars were. Don't be fooled by the flashy uniforms and the wartime propaganda. It was the largest and bloodiest war in human history prior to WW1 (assuming you count each of the Coalitions as part of the same war (presumably someone counted them as separate wars at some point, which is presumably why "Napoleonic Wars" is pluralized)). Somewhere between 3.2 and 6.5 million people died between 1803 and 1815 in the Napoleonic Wars.

10 hours ago, The_Capt said:

So back to “Was the writing on the wall?”  I argue “yes”.  Your examples of “close order massacres” were also seen in the battles of the US Civil War.  The evidence that lethality and range of firepower was changing the requirements to mass effects was there, yet militaries of the day clung onto “the press of the bayonets” as a central doctrinal concept.  Even though in the Age of Rifles this was already an antiquated idea.

I know this is a controversial opinion, but I think Napoleonic tactics were correct for the US Civil War. Rifle-muskets were not the game changer that so many documentaries have claimed. They did increase engagement ranges (more than double the effective range, from 200 meters for smoothbores to 500 meters for rifles, if the target is an infantry battalion in close order (if the target is an individual soldier then the effective ranges are about 70 meters for smoothbores and 200 meters for rifles)). But they were still slow, and they still needed to be massed in order to provide enough firepower to stop a charge. Dispersed infantry with rifle-muskets could still be easily driven off of a position by massed infantry, and they would still be easily cut down by cavalry. It's only when you get breechloaders that dispersed infantry have enough firepower to fend off massed infantry and cavalry. They did represent a significant increase in capability**, but I don't think that rifle-muskets made a significant difference in what sort of tactics were appropriate (although it would be nice if there was a CM-style sim for the 19th century that I could test that out in (it's all speculation until I can actually test it!)).

Yes, units in close order were massacred from time to time. But some units are massacred from time to time in any war (the French infantry columns at Waterloo were torn to shreds). The difference was that in the US Civil War close order tactics generally worked, while in the Boer War close order tactics resulted in massacres every single time. It's easy to find examples of close order attacks failing in the US Civil War, but it's also easy to find examples of close order attacks succeeding in the US Civil War. It is impossible to find examples of close order attacks succeeding in the Boer War (as far as I know). Every last one of them was a massacre, while in the US Civil War only some of them were massacres.

Overall I think the importance of the US Civil War has been oversold somewhat. Still, it did herald a number of significant changes. Railroads and telegraphs were both game changers. And while I don't believe that rifles had significant implications for tactics, breechloaders definitely did have significant implications. While breechloaders remained relatively rare right up to the end of the war, there were enough engagements with units armed with breechloaders to provide enough data points to force me to agree that they should have seen some writing on the wall. But people did notice, and there were active discussions about what the implications were and what to do about them. Even if they didn't quite figure out how to reform doctrine, they did at least figure out that breechloaders were so overwhelmingly superior to muzzle-loaders that they needed to completely rearm the army with breechloaders***. Anyone who didn't get that message from the US Civil War certainly got it in the 1866 Austro-Prussian war, when the Prussians (armed with breechloaders) completely massacred the Austrians (armed with muzzle-loaders). I have no idea why no one got the message from the 2nd Schleswig War in 1864, in which the Prussians achieved the same lopsided victories against the Danes that they would achieve against the Austrians 2 years later for the same reasons. Perhaps they assumed that Denmark didn't count? That might be an example of your point about military culture inhibiting learning.

For further reading I recommend Bull Run to Boer War: How the American Civil War Changed the British Army, by Michael Somerville (part of the Wolverhampton Military Studies series). As a follow up I'd also recommend From Boer War to World War: Tactical Reform of the British Army, 1902–1914, by Spencer Jones. I think Spencer Jones in particular is someone you need to read if you want to understand modern WW1 scholarship. He's probably not quite what David Glantz is to WW2, but I think he's still pretty important. He's also given some good talks which were recorded by The Western Front Association and put on youtube. Come to that, The Western Front Association youtube channel has a quite number of good talks on it from a number of other individuals (these are not made for youtube, but recordings of presentations given at various conferences over the years, so they can be a bit dry if you are used to pretty graphics).

14 hours ago, The_Capt said:

The driving military theory, as reflected by theorist such as Jomini and Clausewitz was concentration, offensive action and decisive engagement. These ideas created a cultural mindset - something tactical analyses miss.  A cultural mindset that once embedded is incredibly hard to break out of.

I haven't read Jomini. But I have read Clausewitz. I can't say I recommend it, unless you are really committed to being able to brag that you've read Clausewitz (it is not a page turner). His views are actually pretty nuanced, though he is working with a completely different set of concepts (no notion of offensive or defensive primacy). He defines the defense as the stronger form of war with a negative object (don't lose something), and the attack as the weaker form of war with a positive object (gain something). He predicts several trends, from the increasing dominance of firepower over shock (bayonet power), to the diminishing importance of cavalry. Perhaps the cultural impact of Clausewitz would have been better if more people had actually read him, rather than just repeating the cliff notes, but I can certainly understand why more people didn't take on the challenge.

12 hours ago, The_Capt said:

I disagree that the Franco Prussian War was a counter-example of offensive action.  The war began with rapid force projection, seeking decisive battle (which the Prussians found at Sedan), but ended in long sieges - Paris the notable one.  In many ways the Franco Prussian War was a WW1 teaser - opening with rapid force projection and manoeuvre which gets bogged down in sieges as the modern realities of capacity, organization, communication and firepower set in.

I believe I addressed that already. Sieges were nothing new in warfare. Was the Siege of Toulon (1793) a WW1 teaser? The fact is that sieges going at least as far back as the 17th century (which is as far back as I have any confidence in my military history) look an awful lot like previews of WW1. I believe the correct interpretation is not that all sieges going back for hundreds of years were WW1 teasers, but that something about WW1 made the entire war look like one giant siege.

I think you are right that there was something different going on in the Franco-Prussian War. But I think it was a political dynamic that had shifted. I don't think it had anything to do with the technology of the time. The French field army was defeated, and the outcome of the war was decided. At that point the French Second Empire should have surrendered, as any other government would have. Instead it was overthrown and replaced by the French Third Republic, which refused to surrender, forcing the Prussians to physically subdue each city instead. At the time any observer would have had every reason to assume that was an anomaly. But in retrospect it may have been an early sign of the total war ideologies that would cause so much trouble in the next century.

15 hours ago, The_Capt said:

It is the fact that they still had a pseudo-Napoleonic system, after US Civl War, after Franco-Prussian, after the Boer War, after two Balkan Wars, after a Russo Japanese War that is the issue.  Why they still had that “pseudo-Napoleonic system” after all of those data points is not excusable in my opinion, but it is explainable - military cultural mindsets.  They invented “modern warfare” in four years because they had largely ignored, or saw only what they wanted to for previous 50.

The system they had was pseudo-Napoleonic, instead of fully Napoleonic, precisely because they had not ignored the lessons of the previous century of warfare. They had stretched and contorted the Napoleonic system in every way imaginable in order to try to adapt it to the trends that were visible to them in warfare (what they ended up with looks to me to be about halfway between a true Napoleonic system and the modern system (the degree of dispersion was about halfway between Napoleonic and modern, the size of the basic tactical units was about halfway between Napoleonic and modern))****.

But inventing an entirely new system is far more difficult than merely modifying an existing system. Inventing the modern system required thinking of things that no one had ever thought of before. I think it is important to keep in mind that it is very easy to think of things that someone has already thought of before, but very difficult to think of things that no one has ever thought of before. The solution is always obvious after you've found it. We know what the correct answers are to the problems of 20th century warfare because other people already found those answers over a hundred years ago. But at the dawn of the 20th century the modern system still had to be invented from scratch. 

I think inventing a new system is a bit like the nine dot problem. You arrange nine dots in a three by three grid, so they look like a box, and then tell the subjects to draw four straight lines through all nine dots without ever lifting their pencil from the page. This is impossible if you keep the lines inside the box formed by the dots, and the correct solution requires drawing the lines outside of the box (this is apparently where the phrase "think outside the box" comes from). If you're familiar with the nine dot problem then you'll know that no one ever thinks to draw the line outside of the box until they have explored and rejected the full possibility space inside the box. In all the wars that came before observers could gather evidence about what the trends were and form theories about the best ways to adapt. But by the time any lessons could be derived and reforms implemented the wars were usually over. There wasn't an opportunity to really explore what worked and what didn't, to fully explore and reject the full tactical possibility space inside the Napoleonic box, until WW1.

 

*A few years ago I averaged the casualty rates of a bunch of battles from the US Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars (I didn't have a procedure for randomly selecting the battles, so this was hardly a scientifically rigorous exercise, but the sample size included dozens of battles from each war), and the Napoleonic Wars came out slightly higher. Just a couple of percentage points. It's all on a text file buried somewhere in my computer, but it was something like a 12% or 13% average casualty rate for the US Civil War and 14% or 15% for the Napoleonic Wars.

**Just how significant of an increase in capability is an active area of interest for me. When I get time, I think the Crimean War is the appropriate conflict to study to answer that question. The Crimean war is almost the ideal laboratory for testing the relative effectiveness of smoothbores vs rifles, since one side (the Russians) was largely armed with smoothbores (IIRC only around 10% of Russian soldiers were armed with rifles), while the other side (the French and British) was largely armed with rifles (IIRC only around 25% of British soldiers were still armed with smoothbores). On a cursory glance I would guess that rifles represented a significant advantage for the French and British, since they were able to consistently beat the Russians in battle after battle (though there are confounding factors). On the other hand it seems that smoothbores, while inferior, were still very dangerous, since it seems that the Russians were consistently able to put up a tough fight and inflict significant French and British casualties.

***They only figured that out after the war though. There was some foot-dragging about switching to breechloaders during the war (apparently on the grounds that they would expend ammunition too rapidly) which I personally think was inexcusable and which probably led to needless additional US casualties.

****I should talk a bit about what the tactics of 1914 actually were. I call them pseudo-Napoleonic because they are basically Napoleonic skirmisher tactics that have been pressed into service as primary battle tactics. The basic tactical unit was usually the company of around 250 men, give or take (227 in a British company, 270 in a German company). A typical attack by a European army would see companies deployed in skirmish line, with a spacing of one or two meters between each man (I believe two meters was more common). Companies might then advance by short rushes while under effective enemy fire, sprinting forward a few tens of meters and then dropping down to return fire. An attack consisting of a full battalion or multiple battalions would probably deploy into multiple waves (by default I imagine a battalion attacking in two waves, with two companies up and two companies back), with successive waves reinforcing and adding momentum to forward waves that have become pinned down. The separation between waves might be around 100 meters or more.

Of course European armies of the time seemed to be allergic to universal training in uniform doctrines. So there was a considerable amount of variation and the example above was at the high end of tactical proficiency. On the extreme low end of tactical proficiency your unit might be led by one of the remaining close order advocates, in which case you will attack in the classic Napoleonic block and get slaughtered within minutes. As far as I know, in 1914, no unit attacked in close order twice.

[The_Capt]

My bad on Gettysburg v Waterloo, totally mis-remembered that one.  You are correct on relative sizes.  As the Napoleonic Wars being the "largest and bloodiest in human history prior to WW1"...well it must be your turn to mis-remember: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasions_and_conquests.

I am inclined to lean towards Haggerman on the use of Napoleonic tactics in the US Civil War.  I think that while they were not totally obsolete by 1863, the writing was starting to be seen on the wall.  At places like Antietam Cornfield, and Peach Orchad/Devils Den at Gettysburg, it was clear that close order troops were entering into a dilemma.  One did not need to mass for firepower in the same manner as they had in the past.  A doubling of effective range of rifles has major effects on the battlefield, from fire control to formation.  The equation of density-to-firepower changes, as does vulnerability.

Read Azar Gat A History of Military Thought.  He does an outstanding job of tracing the evolutions of military theory.  The theories of the day drove mindsets and culture, which drove doctrine and organization, which drove application of strategy and tactics.  One cannot get into a serious discussion of evolution of tactics without reaching back through all that into underlying theoretical thinking and the cultural frames they create.  I think the cultural dynamic is a core concept in this and it is the one that many either miss, or misread. 

Yes, sieges were teasers of WW1...all of them.  They are definitive examples of Defensive primacy and have been since the dawn of civilization.  They require long grinding attritional offensives to exhaust the defenders or become exhausted oneself.  The difference between US Civil War and Franco-Prussian War, was how those sieges were conducted.  In the US Civil War great walled cities did not exist so sieges became trench-based.  At Paris the battle of annihilation early on did not work in creating victory, and offensive options quickly ran out rendering the war a more drawn out affair.  We are seeing a massive War of Sieges in front of us right now - yet I am still hearing all about combined arms manoeuvre and "yay tanks!".  The character of modern day siege warfare is not the same as WWI, why that is and what it means is a central question we will have to solve.

2 hours ago, Centurian52 said:

The system they had was pseudo-Napoleonic, instead of fully Napoleonic, precisely because they had not ignored the lessons of the previous century of warfare. They had stretched and contorted the Napoleonic system in every way imaginable in order to try to adapt it to the trends that were visible to them in warfare (what they ended up with looks to me to be about halfway between a true Napoleonic system and the modern system (the degree of dispersion was about halfway between Napoleonic and modern, the size of the basic tactical units was about halfway between Napoleonic and modern))****.

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/leavenworth-papers-4-the-dynamics-of-doctrine.pdf

This plus a the UK 1914 infantry manual (I will keep digging), spell out that European militaries 1) did not totally ignore all the lessons of the previous wars, 2) did not evolve anywhere near as far as they had to by the beginning of WW1.  Meeting a century old system "half way" and leaving it embedded into military culture is how the Somme happened. 

So why did they not evolve far enough?  This is a major question that had enormous consequences.  Military theory and doctrine drive force development, which drives money.  That money pays for innovation and sparks further innovation.  Technology does not spontaneously happen in a vacuum.  If European militaries were still interested in firepower thinking it was for offensive uses, then industry is going to privilege this...why?  Because that is where the money is. By failing to push far forward enough, European militaries simply created a self-reinforcing box.  

2 hours ago, Centurian52 said:

But by the time any lessons could be derived and reforms implemented the wars were usually over. There wasn't an opportunity to really explore what worked and what didn't, to fully explore and reject the full tactical possibility space inside the Napoleonic box, until WW1.

Or one could really pay attention to the smaller wars that proceeded them.  Here I disagree.  There was plenty of opportunity and evidence to rethink the box. War of colonization offered a myriad of different ways of fighting...but none were European (read: civilized) enough.  The trend lines were all pointing in a direction that led out of the Age of Rifles directly to the Age of Firepower.  Much in the same way the current trends point to moving from an Age of Steel to one of Information/Unmanned. 

How much actual experimentation or force development on trench warfare was done prior to WWI?  We can see from the UK training manual that "Entrenchment" was a known thing; however, appears to have been treated as an inconvenience.  Trench warfare was known and demonstrated back in the US Civil War.  There is "unknowable" and then there is "failing to look, because we do not want to."  The European militaries were absolutely trapped in a box, my argument is that they could see the walls of that box if they looked harder - the evidence of failure to do so is fairly well established.

I do not believe that European militaries blindly marched into slaughter.  I believe that the professionals all had a sense that something was changing and made stuttering steps to try and stay abreast of it.  I also believed their failure is a cautionary tale for modern military thinkers.  I think historical revision can be healthy and add nuance to what was no doubt a highly complex and uncertain time.  However, I think broad scale forgiveness and apologist narratives let both them and us off the hook, which is extremely dangerous.  I mean if the evolution of war is so undecipherable, then our doctrine should be to stick with what worked...until is doesn't?  That to my mind is as dangerous now as it was then.

[Centurian52]

I also realize that I've been spelling Boer as Boar. So just to keep it all straight in my head:

Boer: A Dutch settler in South Africa

Boar: A very angry pig

BAOR: British Army On the Rhine

[The_Capt]

2 hours ago, Centurian52 said:

I also realize that I've been spelling Boer as Boar. So just to keep it all straight in my head:

Boer: A Dutch settler in South Africa

Boar: A very angry pig

BAOR: British Army On the Rhine

Bear: Furry omnivore that it is best to stay on good terms with

[Centurian52]

9 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

"...well it must be your turn to mis-remember: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasions_and_conquests.

Fair point. I forgot about that one.

9 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

This plus a the UK 1914 infantry manual (I will keep digging), spell out that European militaries 1) did not totally ignore all the lessons of the previous wars, 2) did not evolve anywhere near as far as they had to by the beginning of WW1. 

We certainly agree on both of those points. I think at this point our only major point of disagreement is on what is reasonable to expect of human beings. I'm fascinated to see what other people have to say on what European armies could or should have learned in the lead up to WW1, but I doubt I have anything further to add (about what they should have learned, I'll still be adding points about what late 19th/early 20th century doctrines actually looked like if I can dig up more details).

[Centurian52]

Does anyone know how I can gain access to an article of Military Affairs? Specifically one on French Tactical Doctrine 1870-1914 by Joseph C. Arnold (Vol. 42, No. 2). I keep finding references to it, but I can't find a version of it that I can either view for free or buy (I don't have a university). I was able to find a first page preview, which referenced the French Service Regulations of 1875, but that's about it.

Alternatively, where I can find the French Service Regulations of 1875?

[The_Capt]

3 hours ago, Centurian52 said:

Fair point. I forgot about that one.

We certainly agree on both of those points. I think at this point our only major point of disagreement is on what is reasonable to expect of human beings. I'm fascinated to see what other people have to say on what European armies could or should have learned in the lead up to WW1, but I doubt I have anything further to add (about what they should have learned, I'll still be adding points about what late 19th/early 20th century doctrines actually looked like if I can dig up more details).

The major problem being hindsight is 20/20 and a full picture of events that unfolded 200 years ago is never going to be complete.  One also has to keep in mind (and here I point to myself) that all of these militaries largely lacked centralized bureaucracies for force development.  Things like lessons learned and doctrine were largely decentralized or buried deep in largely powerless structures.  Military doctrines were largely left to generals who tended to groom from their own internal cliques and clubs.  Unlike the open information spheres of today, these military institutions largely lacked challenge functions or deliberate experimentation institutions.  So your point on “reasonable” is heavily caveated by reasonable for the time, place and context.  In reality given the context, without some highly visionary and powerful Alexander type it was very hard to break out of those boxes.

I too continue to search.  The conversation has me wondering about the naval forces in the same era.  Unlike land forces, navies of the world appear to have evolved apace with the times.  What functions allowed them to do this?  In fact one could argue that naval power development and evolution allowed the Entente to ultimately win the war.  Nor does naval power appear to have the same offence/defence dynamics over time despite also having vast increases to range and lethal in the same time periods.  In many ways land warfare was a poor cousin to the efforts in naval power and I am curious if the priority may have also made a difference.

Edited June 22, 2023 by The_Capt

[Flibby]

I just wanted to weigh in to strongly support the viewing of Spencer Jones's talks from the western front association.

Secondly, was there any difference tactically between an attack in 1917 and the Second battle of El Alamein?

My reading suggests that the tactics were almost identical to post 1916 ww1 attacks, creeping barrage included.

 

 

Edited June 22, 2023 by Flibby

[chuckdyke]

33 minutes ago, Flibby said:

Secondly, was there any difference tactically between an attack in 1917 and the Second battle of El Alamein?

Engineers IMHO who cleared the minefields and marked the passage. 

[Flibby]

8 hours ago, chuckdyke said:

Engineers IMHO who cleared the minefields and marked the passage. 

Isn't that the same as blokes cutting the wire?

[chuckdyke]

2 minutes ago, Flibby said:

Isn't that the same as blokes cutting the wire?

Not exactly they didn't have mine-detectors in the First World War that was a Polish invention. I understand it was a night operation before the battle. Cutting the wire is only the start. By the Geneva Convention minefields need to be marked so I imagine they have wire around it. Minefields slow you much more down.

[Hapless]

One problem to bear in mind looking up British doctrine/manuals etc from the time is that the British army was out doing Empire things most of the time. So the concept of peer-to-peer industrial scale war on the continent had to take a seat alongside colonial policing, punitive expeditions and general engagements against sub-peer opponents (comparisons to the recent emphasis on COIN anyone?). A year before running into magazine-rifle equipped Boers firing from trenches, the Brits were standing shoulder-to-shoulder repelling massed infantry charges at Omdurman, a year after they were sending raiding columns out into the mountains of the North-West Frontier.

For the Germans though, Balck's Manual from 1911 is pretty comprehensive: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64927/64927-h/64927-h.htm (the WW2 Balck's dad). I don't know whether it's in the original or this translation, but this version also includes notes on how other armies do things, which is very helpful.
Include gems like this:

Quote

"Battalion drill is, however, necessary, since, as shown by the advance of the IInd Army on the morning of August 18th, 1870, simultaneous movements of large masses across country will be unavoidable in future wars on account of the great size of modern armies."

And a good quick overview of the then open vs close order debate:

Quote

 

"In close order the men are placed so close together that they can be led by word of command and directly influenced by their officers. The position of the individual soldier is fixed; the men on either side of him interfere with his utilizing cover or his weapon. On terrain devoid of cover, close order formations present such large targets to infantry fire, that their employment, when exposed to the unsubdued fire of the enemy, is impossible and must lead to annihilation. Thus the hostile fire compels the most extended deployment..."
"...In extended order the soldier’s position is not definitely fixed; he is not required to keep his body in a prescribed position, nor is he expected to handle his rifle by the numbers as in the manual. Instead, judgment, agility, courage, confidence in himself, skill in handling his weapon and in taking full advantage of the accidents of the ground, as well as unremitting attention to his leader, are demanded of the skirmisher.

The difficulties of troop leading are, moreover, increased by the noise and other disorganizing influences of the fight, especially in broken or wooded country. Whether an organization is thoroughly trained and disciplined is best shown in extended order fighting, for, as the direct control of the leader on his command decreases, the demands made on the initiative of the individual soldier increase out of all proportion. It is at any rate more practical to develop this initiative than to try to prevent the disorganizing effect of combat by restricting the personal freedom of the individual soldier.

In order to keep troops well in hand and to deploy them quickly in any direction, it is requisite that close order formations be retained as long as the terrain and the hostile fire permit. After an action, in order to make a renewed employment of the troops possible, they must be assembled[104] in close order without regard to the previously existing organization."

 

11 hours ago, The_Capt said:

The conversation has me wondering about the naval forces in the same era

The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command by Andrew Gordon is a good deep look at Jutland and how the Royal Navy in the preceding 50-60 years, with a significant emphasis on signalling and how unwieldy it was having to rely on increasing combinations of signal flags. Hand-in-hand with that is the thread of naval command and control as some elements of the RN tried to adapt to either simplifying the signalling system or giving individual captains more freedom to act (including the tragi-farce of the HMS Victoria sinking- potentially an example of "Here's a stupid order, let's see if you're smart enough to not do it").

In general though, there was probably more continuity in tactics at sea than on land. The ranges are greater, but there was no 'devolution' of command in the same way as there was in No Man's Land: where a platoon commander in WW1 goes from being an unthinking cog in a battalion-sized machine to being an independent actor, the captain of a ship at Jutland is still the captain of a ship the way he was at Trafalgar. Battles were still fought in lines of ships trying to destroy one another with fire, just at much greater range.

[Lieutenant Ash]

It may be worth pointing out that in the British army, up to 1871, officer commissions could be bought and sold, up to the rank of colonel.

Also, officer training at places like Sandhurst appeared to have been an optional extra rather than a requirement.

Doe's make you wonder how much military theory was considered back then, at least in the army - the Royal Navy was professionalised for much of its history.

[The_Capt]

4 hours ago, Hapless said:

One problem to bear in mind looking up British doctrine/manuals etc from the time is that the British army was out doing Empire things most of the time. So the concept of peer-to-peer industrial scale war on the continent had to take a seat alongside colonial policing, punitive expeditions and general engagements against sub-peer opponents (comparisons to the recent emphasis on COIN anyone?). A year before running into magazine-rifle equipped Boers firing from trenches, the Brits were standing shoulder-to-shoulder repelling massed infantry charges at Omdurman, a year after they were sending raiding columns out into the mountains of the North-West Frontier.

For the Germans though, Balck's Manual from 1911 is pretty comprehensive: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64927/64927-h/64927-h.htm (the WW2 Balck's dad). I don't know whether it's in the original or this translation, but this version also includes notes on how other armies do things, which is very helpful.
Include gems like this:

And a good quick overview of the then open vs close order debate:

The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command by Andrew Gordon is a good deep look at Jutland and how the Royal Navy in the preceding 50-60 years, with a significant emphasis on signalling and how unwieldy it was having to rely on increasing combinations of signal flags. Hand-in-hand with that is the thread of naval command and control as some elements of the RN tried to adapt to either simplifying the signalling system or giving individual captains more freedom to act (including the tragi-farce of the HMS Victoria sinking- potentially an example of "Here's a stupid order, let's see if you're smart enough to not do it").

In general though, there was probably more continuity in tactics at sea than on land. The ranges are greater, but there was no 'devolution' of command in the same way as there was in No Man's Land: where a platoon commander in WW1 goes from being an unthinking cog in a battalion-sized machine to being an independent actor, the captain of a ship at Jutland is still the captain of a ship the way he was at Trafalgar. Battles were still fought in lines of ships trying to destroy one another with fire, just at much greater range.

Excellent finds. Good lord, they were still talking about close order in 1911?!  I can see right away how their C2 requirements were colliding with 20th century firepower - that is another key consideration.  You can see the beginnings of Mission Command here as well.  There are several thesis opportunities here for anyone interested.

Thank you very much for the Jutland ref, I can feel another journey of exploration ahead of me.

[Centurian52]

5 hours ago, Hapless said:

For the Germans though, Balck's Manual from 1911 is pretty comprehensive: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64927/64927-h/64927-h.htm (the WW2 Balck's dad)

Well I  (mostly) have my assigned reading for the foreseeable future. I'm still in the middle of FM 100-2-1 (reading it all the way through for the first time, rather than just skipping to chapter 5 (Offensive tactics: Division and lower) like I always used to), but this is definitely next. I still need something for French tactics before WW1. And then I'll need to find time to reread some of my WW2 FMs in anticipation of switching back to the WW2 CM games once I'm done with my current CMA/CMCW playthrough.

[The_Capt]

4 hours ago, Centurian52 said:

Well I  (mostly) have my assigned reading for the foreseeable future. I'm still in the middle of FM 100-2-1 (reading it all the way through for the first time, rather than just skipping to chapter 5 (Offensive tactics: Division and lower) like I always used to), but this is definitely next. I still need something for French tactics before WW1. And then I'll need to find time to reread some of my WW2 FMs in anticipation of switching back to the WW2 CM games once I'm done with my current CMA/CMCW playthrough.

Well I for one fully support CMCW reading and playthroughs.  FM 100-2-1 was a key reference for when we built the game.