War Guide IV
Sep. 21st, 2006 09:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynHmmm...this version needs some work, but I think I should post something today...
So now that we've discussed general war aims and the fine art of getting yourself in deep crap, it's time to get down to the part that you've probably been eagerly awaiting, in which you get to blow stuff up. It's probably time to discuss battles.
Here we get into trouble, because the theory of war and strategy was formulated in an age where battles were very different than they are now. The theory of war was formulated, in the west, mostly in the nineteenth century, following the ventures of Napoleon, of Frederick the Great, and of the American Civil War. In the east, the theory of war was formulated even earlier, and hence has even more problems. The steady advance of technology has slowly, but continously, eroded the ancient setpiece battles of old.
For instance, the most celebrated engagement in the US Civil War is probably the battle of Gettysburg, which took place for three days around July 4th, 1863. For three days, the muscle-bound goliaths of the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac struggled with each other; over 160,000 men clashed on a battlefront that was less than five miles long. Then, when the battle was over, the Army of Northern Virginia broke off contact, withdrawing toward Virginia, and not fighting with the Union until July 14th. For nine days the two armies, although in close proximity, managed to avoid combat. In fact, the battle only started when the two forces blundered into each other when the Confederates went looking for shoes.
The battle of Gettysburg cost both sides, together, over 45,000 casualties. It was some of the most intense fighting in American history up to that point, a bloody affair as the two armies bashed each other to death on sunny fields in Pennsylvania.
World War II was, by all accounts, a bloodier and more intense war than even the US Civil War, but the nature of battle had changed so much that the US never faced the sheer intensity of its Civil War slaughter. Instead, it faced an entirely different type of war. The US First Infantry Division (the Big Red One) never fought a battle with the pure linear intensity of a Gettysburg. But, unlike the Army of the Potomac, who got ten days to lick their wounds between battles, the 1st was in contact with German forces essentially continuously between June 6th, 1944 and May 8th, 1945, between D-Day and the surrender of Germany. One of the largest "battles" of that war involved over 300,000 soldiers, but spread over a line more than sixty miles in length by the end, and taking over a month to come to a conclusion. And it was not precisely defined - allied and German soldiers were shooting at each other the day before the battle "started", and they fired at each other the day after it "ended". By World War II, a battle had become simply a term for an escalation in the body count, a momentary spurt of intensity in a scene that already was a continuous battle.
In the Civil War, a major problem was knowing where the enemy was. In World War II this was much easier; you simply pointed in the direction where the most people were shooting you from. In the Civil War you could cut free from your supply lines and live off the land. In World War II you could only do this if the land grew gasoline on trees.
Unfortunately, a great deal of what we know about how to conduct a war was formulated during the Civil War era, when conflict looked very different. In Napoleonic theory armies march and countermarch, sweeping around their opponents in surprise thrusts and feints, occupying strategic positions, and then making them tactically beneficial. Battles were fought in the course of a day and the level of control was very fine - Napoleon could see, in many cases, every element of his army engaged with the enemy. Weak flanks, undefended positions, and sudden opportunities were often obvious. It is in this field that the forumlas of Clauswitz and Jomini were formulated, the arrows on maps that appear so simple, columns that take the enemy in the rear by surprise, cutting of supply lines by flanking maneuvers, all of it.
Modern war is a great deal messier and harder to predict. Most of it is due to the increased lethality of weapons. The machine-gun renders the massed formation of infantry obsolete, men must now advanced scattered and undercover to keep from getting slaughtered. A single artillery shell can spell death to a hundred men in close-packed formation. The end result has been armies that are much more spread out, whereas at one point an army may have needed one man for every foot of front, it may now be one for ten or one for twenty, meaning that the same number of troops can now defend an area many times the length. This makes it easier to overpower a single section of line, but it also greatly increases the effects of friction in war. Maneuvers take longer to control, because your unit is more spread out, changes in orders are more likely to be confused. In enemy territory, the dispersed nature of your opponent means that there is always likely to be some bastard shooting at you, which slows you down. The end effect is that a great many operations move as if in treacle.
This all coalesced in the great nightmare that ruled Europe from 1914 to 1918. World War I rendered all previous military thought obsolete. Armies ran unbroken from the English Channel to the Swiss border. You could not flank your enemy, you could not get in their rear, you could not do anything except engage in the war of attrition that was as futile as it was ridiculous. In the end, thousands upon thousands died as their general struggled to deal with a war in which "battles" were continual, unnecessary, and unrewarding. Only when mobility was restored in World War II could the slaughter be lessened.
So before you go plunging off and start figuring out how to fight your battles, here's a piece of advice that has remained true throughout the centuries:
Don't Fight Battles
Seriously, just don't do it. There's no need. There's no point. There's not even any money in it, so why bother?
The Army claims to train its officers to destroy the enemy by Fire, Maneuver, and Shock Effect. Of the three, Fire, the actual act of killing the enemy in battle, has always been the least effective measure, even if it is essential to the other two. Maneuver is the preferred method of the generals of old. Occupying key supply points in the enemy's rear may force them to retreat without engaging you, cutting off their lines of retreat (as the Russians did to Paulus's Sixth Army at Stalingrad) can force a surrender. A bloodless victory, by either encouraging an enemy withdraw or forcing a surrender, is preferable to any manner of conflict. Even if this is not possible, it may also be the key to forcing an advantageous battle. The ultimate general, even when deep in enemy territory, decides when and where he will fight, and whether he is to be the attacker or the defender. He does this by threatening decisive points taht the enemy cannot give up, for political or military reasons, resulting in a forced combat. The key to this is maneuver, a general should always be able to maneuver cleanly, and be prepared to seize opportunities for bloodless, or relatively bloodless, victories.
The second method, shock effect, depends on human psychology. If maneuver is the key to winning without fighting, shock effect allows you to make the most of the fighting you do. Laugh all you want at the concept of "shock and awe", but it works. In the recent invasion of Iraq, 375,000 Iraqis were sent flying by an outnumbered Coalition force. The key here was not direct battle, which would have required killing or wounding a great many of those soldiers, but rather shock effect. Modern war is terrifying, it is loud, disorienting, difficult to understand, and hard to face even at the best of time. Facing the enemy is hard to do, even for veterans. You have to be assured that there is some chance of survival, that you are not about to be surrounded, that you are not about to die without hope of salvation. When one unit suffers enough in battle, it can break and start fleeing. Panic is contagious; a united army can fight off its attackers, a shattered one cannot, and once part of it gets shattered, the rest of it figures this out. The true measure of discipline is not whether you can win a battle, but whether you can lose it, retreat, and still be active.
Unfortunately, none of us are perfect, and for the most part we still have to fight battles. We can minimize the number we have to fight, and maximize their effect, but in the end we still have to fight them. So you might as well learn how.
There are only two lessons when it comes to fighting a battle; outnumber your enemy and attack them where they are weakest. Numbers are decided before the battle even starts, but can be easily manipulated. Even if you are heavily outnumbered you can gain temporary numerical superiority by attacking them with concentrated forces while theirs are dispersed. It doesn't matter how many men your opponent has elsewhere, all that matters is how many he can bring to the battle. If he has a hundred thousand men, but only a hundred in this particular town, then your small army of a thousand has managed numerical superiority.
Attacking them when they are weakest is somewhat harder because you have to figure out where that is first. The most common way to do this is to "turn their flank". In a conventional battle this means that, instead of attacking them in part of their line, to move your enemy around one end of their position and attack them from the direction they are not prepared for. This is the simplest maneuver in all battles and, strangely, the most important. Generals who can pull it off are considered to be geniuses, and the names of those who do not understand how to use the flanking maneuver could fill the heaviest book. It is both extremely simple, and extremely tricky. Other means may include finding gaps in your enemy's line, in their terrain, or in some other trick that you can pull from a hundred campaigns.
So, use maneuver to avoid as many battles as possible. When it becomes necessary to fight, pick an advantageous position. Concentrate the greatest part of your strength on the least of your enemy's. Hit them where they are not expecting it. And, when all else fails, push right through their center and hope that you have the better force.
Now as to what to attack them with - well, we can discuss that later.
So now that we've discussed general war aims and the fine art of getting yourself in deep crap, it's time to get down to the part that you've probably been eagerly awaiting, in which you get to blow stuff up. It's probably time to discuss battles.
Here we get into trouble, because the theory of war and strategy was formulated in an age where battles were very different than they are now. The theory of war was formulated, in the west, mostly in the nineteenth century, following the ventures of Napoleon, of Frederick the Great, and of the American Civil War. In the east, the theory of war was formulated even earlier, and hence has even more problems. The steady advance of technology has slowly, but continously, eroded the ancient setpiece battles of old.
For instance, the most celebrated engagement in the US Civil War is probably the battle of Gettysburg, which took place for three days around July 4th, 1863. For three days, the muscle-bound goliaths of the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac struggled with each other; over 160,000 men clashed on a battlefront that was less than five miles long. Then, when the battle was over, the Army of Northern Virginia broke off contact, withdrawing toward Virginia, and not fighting with the Union until July 14th. For nine days the two armies, although in close proximity, managed to avoid combat. In fact, the battle only started when the two forces blundered into each other when the Confederates went looking for shoes.
The battle of Gettysburg cost both sides, together, over 45,000 casualties. It was some of the most intense fighting in American history up to that point, a bloody affair as the two armies bashed each other to death on sunny fields in Pennsylvania.
World War II was, by all accounts, a bloodier and more intense war than even the US Civil War, but the nature of battle had changed so much that the US never faced the sheer intensity of its Civil War slaughter. Instead, it faced an entirely different type of war. The US First Infantry Division (the Big Red One) never fought a battle with the pure linear intensity of a Gettysburg. But, unlike the Army of the Potomac, who got ten days to lick their wounds between battles, the 1st was in contact with German forces essentially continuously between June 6th, 1944 and May 8th, 1945, between D-Day and the surrender of Germany. One of the largest "battles" of that war involved over 300,000 soldiers, but spread over a line more than sixty miles in length by the end, and taking over a month to come to a conclusion. And it was not precisely defined - allied and German soldiers were shooting at each other the day before the battle "started", and they fired at each other the day after it "ended". By World War II, a battle had become simply a term for an escalation in the body count, a momentary spurt of intensity in a scene that already was a continuous battle.
In the Civil War, a major problem was knowing where the enemy was. In World War II this was much easier; you simply pointed in the direction where the most people were shooting you from. In the Civil War you could cut free from your supply lines and live off the land. In World War II you could only do this if the land grew gasoline on trees.
Unfortunately, a great deal of what we know about how to conduct a war was formulated during the Civil War era, when conflict looked very different. In Napoleonic theory armies march and countermarch, sweeping around their opponents in surprise thrusts and feints, occupying strategic positions, and then making them tactically beneficial. Battles were fought in the course of a day and the level of control was very fine - Napoleon could see, in many cases, every element of his army engaged with the enemy. Weak flanks, undefended positions, and sudden opportunities were often obvious. It is in this field that the forumlas of Clauswitz and Jomini were formulated, the arrows on maps that appear so simple, columns that take the enemy in the rear by surprise, cutting of supply lines by flanking maneuvers, all of it.
Modern war is a great deal messier and harder to predict. Most of it is due to the increased lethality of weapons. The machine-gun renders the massed formation of infantry obsolete, men must now advanced scattered and undercover to keep from getting slaughtered. A single artillery shell can spell death to a hundred men in close-packed formation. The end result has been armies that are much more spread out, whereas at one point an army may have needed one man for every foot of front, it may now be one for ten or one for twenty, meaning that the same number of troops can now defend an area many times the length. This makes it easier to overpower a single section of line, but it also greatly increases the effects of friction in war. Maneuvers take longer to control, because your unit is more spread out, changes in orders are more likely to be confused. In enemy territory, the dispersed nature of your opponent means that there is always likely to be some bastard shooting at you, which slows you down. The end effect is that a great many operations move as if in treacle.
This all coalesced in the great nightmare that ruled Europe from 1914 to 1918. World War I rendered all previous military thought obsolete. Armies ran unbroken from the English Channel to the Swiss border. You could not flank your enemy, you could not get in their rear, you could not do anything except engage in the war of attrition that was as futile as it was ridiculous. In the end, thousands upon thousands died as their general struggled to deal with a war in which "battles" were continual, unnecessary, and unrewarding. Only when mobility was restored in World War II could the slaughter be lessened.
So before you go plunging off and start figuring out how to fight your battles, here's a piece of advice that has remained true throughout the centuries:
Don't Fight Battles
Seriously, just don't do it. There's no need. There's no point. There's not even any money in it, so why bother?
The Army claims to train its officers to destroy the enemy by Fire, Maneuver, and Shock Effect. Of the three, Fire, the actual act of killing the enemy in battle, has always been the least effective measure, even if it is essential to the other two. Maneuver is the preferred method of the generals of old. Occupying key supply points in the enemy's rear may force them to retreat without engaging you, cutting off their lines of retreat (as the Russians did to Paulus's Sixth Army at Stalingrad) can force a surrender. A bloodless victory, by either encouraging an enemy withdraw or forcing a surrender, is preferable to any manner of conflict. Even if this is not possible, it may also be the key to forcing an advantageous battle. The ultimate general, even when deep in enemy territory, decides when and where he will fight, and whether he is to be the attacker or the defender. He does this by threatening decisive points taht the enemy cannot give up, for political or military reasons, resulting in a forced combat. The key to this is maneuver, a general should always be able to maneuver cleanly, and be prepared to seize opportunities for bloodless, or relatively bloodless, victories.
The second method, shock effect, depends on human psychology. If maneuver is the key to winning without fighting, shock effect allows you to make the most of the fighting you do. Laugh all you want at the concept of "shock and awe", but it works. In the recent invasion of Iraq, 375,000 Iraqis were sent flying by an outnumbered Coalition force. The key here was not direct battle, which would have required killing or wounding a great many of those soldiers, but rather shock effect. Modern war is terrifying, it is loud, disorienting, difficult to understand, and hard to face even at the best of time. Facing the enemy is hard to do, even for veterans. You have to be assured that there is some chance of survival, that you are not about to be surrounded, that you are not about to die without hope of salvation. When one unit suffers enough in battle, it can break and start fleeing. Panic is contagious; a united army can fight off its attackers, a shattered one cannot, and once part of it gets shattered, the rest of it figures this out. The true measure of discipline is not whether you can win a battle, but whether you can lose it, retreat, and still be active.
Unfortunately, none of us are perfect, and for the most part we still have to fight battles. We can minimize the number we have to fight, and maximize their effect, but in the end we still have to fight them. So you might as well learn how.
There are only two lessons when it comes to fighting a battle; outnumber your enemy and attack them where they are weakest. Numbers are decided before the battle even starts, but can be easily manipulated. Even if you are heavily outnumbered you can gain temporary numerical superiority by attacking them with concentrated forces while theirs are dispersed. It doesn't matter how many men your opponent has elsewhere, all that matters is how many he can bring to the battle. If he has a hundred thousand men, but only a hundred in this particular town, then your small army of a thousand has managed numerical superiority.
Attacking them when they are weakest is somewhat harder because you have to figure out where that is first. The most common way to do this is to "turn their flank". In a conventional battle this means that, instead of attacking them in part of their line, to move your enemy around one end of their position and attack them from the direction they are not prepared for. This is the simplest maneuver in all battles and, strangely, the most important. Generals who can pull it off are considered to be geniuses, and the names of those who do not understand how to use the flanking maneuver could fill the heaviest book. It is both extremely simple, and extremely tricky. Other means may include finding gaps in your enemy's line, in their terrain, or in some other trick that you can pull from a hundred campaigns.
So, use maneuver to avoid as many battles as possible. When it becomes necessary to fight, pick an advantageous position. Concentrate the greatest part of your strength on the least of your enemy's. Hit them where they are not expecting it. And, when all else fails, push right through their center and hope that you have the better force.
Now as to what to attack them with - well, we can discuss that later.