Third grand post: Primer on modern war methods and concentric circles
I.
For
the sharp eye, the decline of the West seems apparent. We are the losers of the
past 120 years – Faustian man,
Western man, Americans, Englishmen, Germans, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Swedes,
Spaniards, and so forth – for without question our place in the world has
fallen back behind where it was. We lack certainty now. We lack vision now. We
lack a moral center and an imperial project to call ours now.
I
haven’t described what it is I mean by Faustian
man, rather merely sat content borrowing the term from Duchesne and
Spengler. A deeper dive into that term, and into Duchesne’s theses in his book Uniqueness of Western Civilization and
Spengler’s theses in his book Decline of
the West will have to wait.
The
march of progress is one of losing
what I call the Center or the Middle. ‘The Center’ is a somewhat amorphous
concept, but it’s basically the common ground of morality, a shared tongue, a
healthy low and high culture, shared blood, and folk traditions passed from
father to son. Middle classes by power analysis or socioeconomic status matter
as well though they’re not the focus. One of the important things about ‘the
middle’ when it is there and healthy is that the folk have a natural conception
of the divine, the sun, and striving upward. This is the Apollonian part of
Nietzsche’s Apollo-Dionysus dichotomy, the one picked up by Evola as well by
which he frames us as Apollonian or solar folk. Gold is the metal of the
sunlight, and silver of moonlight if we continue this esoteric frame of
thought. The halo is a distinctly solar motif, and it is noteworthy that it
probably originated with Indo-European peoples and is only mimicked thus in
token form by others based on contact with various Indo-European folk. Evola
probably would have objected to this and claimed that the solar motifs are not
specifically Aryan in origin or nature, but rather that they descend from a
deeper Hyperborean tradition; the problem with that is that the Hyperborean myth
seems to have little basis in sound archaeology or linguistics.
In
short, the Middle (or Center) as I conceive of it here is everything that
permits high civilization. It is also a future for our folk. Without this set
of what amount to extended kinship bonds or concentric rings of identity, intergenerational investment, and aesthetic ideals,
there is no reason for every man to not simply pick the pocket of every other
and for wretchedness and ugliness to rule the day. The good or the great takes
work, sacrifice, and may result in failure regardless. The mediocre by contrast
takes by all accounts less, and is safer because expectations are lower so
failure and disappointment are commonplace and expected.
It’s
not important to go on how or why those things are losing ground or being
eroded as I’ve done so elsewhere. The important thing is that the decline is an
established fact and we don’t know what a society or ‘civilization’ without the
middle looks like. The further we get away from those things, from any sort of
traditional society into progress and
the society of the spectacle, the
more alien everything becomes as it appears hypermodernity becomes a more and
more entrenched phenomenon. A folk or civilization without the middle is
basically a husk which becomes more downward looking and self-eating until
there is little to nothing to tear at any longer. As Evola says, the Apollonian
is the anabolic and the Dionysian is
the catabolic; across the West there
is a great imbalance of these impulses, leaning greatly into a dumb, weak,
atomistic Dionysian impulse. [1]
These
things weren’t always the case. How could it be, as I said at the outset, that
the past 120 years were essentially disastrous for the West? I’ve also gone
into this a bit, but things rarely happen for merely one reason. When you
combine prosperity (or degeneracy and weakness) with alien influences,
cosmopolitans, acidic ideologies which might have ulterior motives behind their
construction, and the desire to forsake all history and tradition, you have
what is likely the worst brew one could have cooked up. That still doesn’t
explain everything. There are power politics dynamics behind the success of the
left and the decline of the right, and also military strategy reasons. I
described at least one element of power politics briefly before, that of deep politics.
Part
of the reason I look to a reaction against the liberal globalist order, the
merchant class, and the various other perversions of hypermodernity is because
I see no other way to stem the worst of the Kali Yuga. If we also accept the
worst of Spengler and Evola’s fatalism, it still makes sense to manage the
decline of the West and not merely let it degenerate past any saving or
recognition. The other thing that pushes me forward is a desire to reverse the
utter defeats of Anglo-Germanic civilization in the past 120 years. First we
lost New England and much of the Northeastern US to Catholic Irish and Southern
Italians and Jewish migrants; then Britain retreated from Ireland outright;
then Germany was defeated and shamed twice as men from all sides were dumped in
the grist mills of European battlefields; then we had the waves of negro
migration from the Southern US to the rest of the country starting during
post-reconstruction and ending more or less sometime in the 1960s; then to be
the antithesis not only of the NSDAP but of all past European history, the US
and Britain and the rest of Europe ‘had’ to open the floodgates to the
third-world. If you told the men who stormed from Higgins boats onto the
beaches of North Africa, Anzio, or Normandy that this utter defeat would be the
face of their lands three or four generations hence, I suspect they would have
made good with the enemy. I suspect the same would have been true for men dying
for a similar cause on behalf of the Triple Entente a generation before.
So
if we – Anglo-Germanic folk and our other European cousins – have lost, who has
won? I think there are a few good answers: Jews, cosmopolitan Western elites, foreign
elites, and the broader global south. Some of the pretender powers seeking to
unseat US and Western hegemony are winning long
run but their economic gains vis-à-vis
the West still leave something to be desired even if they’ve made up ground.
Without expanding much here, as I think it’ll have to be a future essay, the
long-term geopolitical strategy of the US and the whole West is untenable.
Current course puts roughly all of us somewhere between Brazil or other South
American countries and South Africa between 2050 and 2100. But I don’t think
the point is for the West to remain a military-economic powerhouse for as long
as possible. The cosmopolitan Western elite of today is essentially a Judaized
specimen who sees the success of the Wandering Jew and wants to become that.
The irony, of course, is that all of the Jews’s success comes squarely to those
former cosmopolitans or Machiavellian power player types of yesteryear who
thought the Jew would be a good weapon against other elites and against their
own middle classes, or else that they were simply fortuitous allies and good to
have around. Of course they’ve in no small part supplanted much of the former
upper crust of the English speaking world.
Anyone
who has looked deeply into the history of Britain, for instance, knows that the
official history of the World Wars doesn’t sit right. It doesn’t make sense
that Germany was some big cartoon villain along with their allies, while
Britain in her secret alliance with France and Russia sat among a choir of angels
after the Boer war. This sort of narrative requires a very selective reading of
history and a very pointed teleology – that is, looking for Britain and those
she allies with to win then and always. If you look a bit earlier to the
Napoleonic wars, things then become clear that Britain was interested chiefly
in checking whoever had potential to become hegemon on the continent, doubly if
this potential hegemon threatened Britain’s naval superiority. Britain joined
an alliance against Napoleon twice precisely to stop him from first possibly
gobbling up over half of the land mass of Western Europe with his Grande Armée,
and then a second time from reviving his empire in a lesser state.
It
also doesn’t make sense that the US intervened on behalf of the righteous twice in about twenty
years, and this coming one hundred years after great antagonism between the US
and Britain. In reality, it would appear that American businessmen lobbied a
president, cabinet, and substantial ranks of both houses of Congress who had
affinity for Britain and to a lesser degree for France. Their stake in the
Great War was thus: in 1914 and 1915, America had sat on the sidelines, a
nominally neutral power but actually sending a great deal of war material and
credit to the Entente powers. Gold flowed from Western Europe and Russia into
the US like never before. A great deal of the war material, which included
small arms, munitions, food, and other supplies, was sold on credit as well
after a certain point. This presented a problem for businessmen watching the
stalemate on the Western front, and the gradual dissolution of Serbian and
Russian power in the East through 1915-16. Any punitive treaty which Germany
might enact with the Western powers after the war might cause them to flounder
in so much debt that creditors such as American military-industrial concerns
might fall by the wayside. That, combined with American interests in
maintaining the British world order and unrestricted submarine warfare by the
Germans made for a perfect mix. Regardless of how unpopular the war was in
fact, the American people would be dragged in kicking and screaming. The same
applied to the Second World War. Both President Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt
campaigned on promises of keeping America out of the wars, but quickly
abandoned those promises when convenient.
There
is sufficient distance now that Napoleon and his men, despite having caused the
deaths of many millions at a time when there were fewer men on the planet, are
looked at coldly. Even though he was essentially the Hitler of his day, the
modern historian can give him a more-or-less balanced judgment such as their
abilities allow. Part of this, I believe, is also because fewer Jews were
liberated then, and because their role in European cities and in those wars was
far less in-the-middle. The whole stench of war propaganda has haunted the
Germans ever since both World Wars, while everything the French did 200 years
ago under Napoleon was very easily cleaned and sanitized for history books. War
between European men, as ugly as things can and did get, can ultimately be
settled fairly after a time. This is true despite the fact that the wars of the
French Revolution and Napoleon were the first mass ‘democratized’ wars in
European history. But the same is not true when the other is thrown in the fray.
II.
Modern
warfare has evolved essentially after
the period of the Napoleonic wars and through the First World War. The first
major innovations in that time were steam engines for warships and locomotives
for supply lines; the second were rifled muskets and pin- or needle fire rifles
as well as major improvements to artillery pieces and their sights. Priming
compounds, metallurgic innovations, and other chemical inventions were an
important bit of groundwork in the mid-1800s that enabled all further
development. This first wave of innovation had all settled in by the 1850s and
‘60s, and by the 1880s, there came the introduction of smokeless powder and
repeating rifles for military use, as well as further betterment of artillery
and the introduction of steel hulls to replace ironclad ships. The
Franco-Prussian war was fought on both sides with needle fire rifles, and the
First World War was fought using the service rifles they had developed 20-25
years later.
The
technical changes need to be noted because the nature of war 400 years ago
differed substantially to how it was 90 or 100 years ago, and how it is now.
400 years ago, the gold standard European infantry units were pike-and-shot
formations. Nearly half the men had pikes and nearly half had matchlock or
wheellock rifles. The reason for this mix was that effective bayonets were not
yet invented and pikes were by far most effective in close combat and against
cavalry, while effective musket fire would rout or devastate enemy formations
within 100-250 meters. Major changes were happening at a rate of about 100
years, such that in 1600 the pike-and-shot formation supported with lancers
reigned, and by 1700 pikes were nearly phased out, muskets were flintlock, and
many countries were experimenting with lighter cavalry. [2]
By
100 years ago, every component of modern war was either present or nearly so, albeit
many were infantile. There were heavy machine guns, light or medium machine
guns, repeating infantry rifles (bolt action), hand grenades, effective
howitzers and mortars, biplane bombers and fighters (albeit low speed and
load), complex rail systems, early trucks, radios, telephones, and a lot of
horses. I don’t emphasize the last ones perhaps as much as I should. I’m noting
the small arms just for the rate of change and because it’s the common
soldier’s first thought. In reality, everything from C3I* to the supply chain
is drastically different in modern war than it was even 250 years ago. The
improvements to small arms, artillery, and C3I made the old drill square suicidal
by 1900, but also allow for the devolution of instruction to a smaller scale
without resort to flags and runners, all of which opened the way to small unit
tactics and over time maneuver warfare with armored and mechanized corps during
the interwar years. Signal flags and runners were the primary means of
communication when the battlefield was both smaller and choked with smoke as
soon as combat started. A modern battle stretches larger areas and timespans
than in the past, and while for instance the battle of Verdun was considered a
rather compact though protracted and horrible battle, it was still larger and
longer than Waterloo. *(Communications,
Command, Control, and Intelligence.)
One
of the alien parts of modern war is, as Ernst Jünger pointed out, total
bureaucratization and mechanization of as much of the process of war and the
things around it as possible. This has made feats of individual heroism nearly
impossible such as one can think of even 150 or 300 years ago where a brave
sergeant or well-heeled officer atop his steed could turn the tide of a battle,
or at least stem a defeat long enough for reinforcement at a critical moment.
The modern battlefield can only be understood either in snapshots and
fragments, or else reassembled after the fact from the best available data. The
chaos is such that neither enlisted men on the ground nor senior officers up
the chain of command are in control of a situation, but instead ride as best they
can to the end. This sheer uncertainty is one of the enduring aspects of war to
be fair and was characterized by Clausewitz of course as ‘the fog of war.’ That
will be addressed in greater depth later in the C3I section, but for the moment
suffice to say that the scale, pace, length, and nature of modern war
exaggerates that discordant aspect of war. I think that medals and what one
might deem the cult of the decorated
is something which exists to counteract this aspect, that in reality sudden
death is quite likely in a modern battlefield whether from enemy indirect fire
or other explosive weapons or from machineguns and other small arms, and unlike
in past war this risk of sudden death is not eliminated by walking off the
frontlines. All of this is not to say that heroism is impossible, but simply
that man is fundamentally meant for an old style of warfare where sieges might
drag on but battles are short, where the most sudden and unexpected form of
death are germs, enemy arrows and siege weapons if they have any.
There is a nagging question one could ask
in all of this: for the layman, that is man-who-is-not-warfighter, why bother
with all of this? How is it other than trivia? War is which of the following:
a) fun, b) profitable, c) human nature, d) inevitable result of
political-demographic crises, or e) all of the above? The obvious answer is e). While the fun of industrial war is
cast into doubt, it retains some of the kernel of past warfare such that blood
brotherhood and exhilaration shared on the battlefield remain at least in part.
Most of my writings are sober historical and political analysis. Warfare
figures a substantial part of politics and history. Moreover, it is my belief
that for anyone who wants a good grounding in these things and to be well-rounded,
some familiarity with military affairs is justified not only because some of it
can be readily applied to one’s own dealings (albeit in limited capacity), but
also because anyone looking to step into power will need to avail themselves of
this type of knowledge. If we are to be anything, we are beings in the world
with a will greater than the discontent whiner.
Before
getting into the thick of it, it would do to define some groundwork terms. Tactics are plans, algorithms, and
formulae which lead to successes in the here-and-now; more broadly, it is
defined as “specific actions intended to meet objectives.” Strategy is a broader future-oriented framework, plan, or set of
goals; it describes the end goals and resources, often iterative or over a longer
time. Strategy determines the
possible tactics used, and tactics are
ultimately employed toward strategic ends. An operation is the realization of a military plan into practice,
defined in concrete geospatial terms and timetables; ideally, a good military
has fallbacks and war plans for virtually every conceivable scenario from the
improbable to the near certainty. Scrambling a defense at the last minute
without any proper planning beforehand doesn’t constitute an operation; good
defensive lines, counter-attacks, offensives, and the like all do. Even a
fluid, forward thinking group or military needs these plans simply to know how
to allocate resources, coordinate men and materiel, and spend precious time
whether you look at time as man hours or opportunity cost. In game terms, a
strategy spans the whole of a game, but a tactic usually spans perhaps one or a
few turns, and an operation would be a preconceived plan or pattern being
unleashed across a set of turns (war games are usually played at the operational
level, where strategic concerns are lessened or wholly gone). There is also
some line drawn between general strategy and
grand strategy. The difference
between the two is that military commanders can affect and effect general
strategy, but unless the commanders are coequal with, or in fact are the
political leaders, the actual grand
strategy is in the hands of political leaders. Grand strategy involves a mixture of diplomacy, political
maneuvering, high level intelligence gathering, and economics.
As
with most categories, things blur at the edges so there aren’t any hard and
fast lines between the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. Still, from
the command perspective it makes sense to more strictly line up one’s tasks in
the context of modern organization scale. Clarity and purpose are vital, and
ideally as few people step over one another as possible.
Infantry are ground troops with direct combat
roles. In days of yore, they were solely ‘foot mobile’; there is now a greater
emphasis on the mobile troop, which is motorized and mechanized infantry in the
post-Second World War era. Motorized
is to say infantry carried to battle by wheeled vehicles, whether armored or
not; mechanized refers to light armor
in use by infantry regiments, or used to deploy infantry (in the past these
were tracked or half-tracked vehicles, now they’re mixed; the important thing
is that they’re light armor). Small arms are
any rifles, light machineguns, submachine guns, pistols, or other firearms
which are capable of being carried and used by one man; light weapons are crew-served firearms, anti-tank or anti-aircraft
missiles (guided or not), grenade launchers, and mortars. Armored
units contain a mix
usually of tanks, light armored vehicles, and mechanized infantry as well as
the attendant support crews for maintenance and supply; armor in its vaguest sense merely describes any armored vehicle,
that is a vehicle designed to withstand at least small arms fire (armored
truck) or light artillery (tank). MRAPs, Mine Resistant Ambush Protected
vehicles, are another category of armored vehicle between the armored truck and
tank on the light armor side. Logistics
is the study and deployment of systems of supply. Artillery is a branch of armies and their equipment pertaining for
instance to field guns (155mm howitzer), self-propelled guns, anti-aircraft
batteries, rocket artillery (MLRS), anti-tank guided missiles, and the like.
Naval
and air combat terms I’ll more or less keep to their sections, define and
expand them there. The last thing I’ll stick in here is to unpack NBC and EW. I
use ‘NBC’ rather than WMD because chemical weapons historically were not used
as ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ but rather as battlefield weapons either
generally for area denial or to saturate fortifications. NBC means nuclear,
biological, chemical, and refers to any weapon in line with those
categories, whether VX neurotoxin canister or an ICBM. EW is electronic warfare,
and it’s a combination of communications, optics and RADAR countermeasures and
anti-countermeasures, as well as other things central to various forms of
electromagnetic radiation.
With
the first bit done with, we can get to the meat of it. The goal of this essay
is a comprehensive introduction to thinking about war intelligently from the
ground up. Much of this will not be directly applicable to the individual man
or small groups. That is saved for a later piece on small unit tactics.
III.
The
first thing to understand about modern war is that infantry small arms do not
win wars by themselves (‘a man and his rifle’). So long as an army’s small arms
are good enough or roughly on par
with their peers, other things tend to be more decisive. To use a modern day
example, though the AK74 might be outdated and somewhat obsolete, a country which
decides to use it is completely understandable, especially where they have
stockpiles of surplus ’74s and 5.45x39. The M16/M4 platform seems to be the
best service rifle available, and even replacing that with something that is
marginally better (if at all) has no merit for a large army simply because
there are costs to restock and retrain, and one has to confront the possibility
of shortages in emergency production due to retooling or insufficient tooling.
Production numbers matter more than having the absolute best, since proper
strategy requires good supply. Keep in mind that the original purpose of the
AR-18 platform, on which most would-be M16/M4 replacements are based, was to
provide revenue for Armalite after they sold the rights for military contracts
on the M16/AR-15 platform rather cheaply to Colt, but it was also to provide a
small arm which could be manufactured in countries outside the US as an
alternative to the M16/AR-15 with cheaper tooling.
For
the above example, the AK74 is one part of the infantry kit along with the
RPK-74, PKM, SVD, RPG-7/26/29, and a host of other light weapons. The M16/M4
would complement the M249 (or other LMG), M240B, M14 DMR (or other DMR rifle),
AT4, and other light weapons as well. While NATO kit is often higher quality
than ex-Soviet and Warsaw Pact weapons, the latter are still perfectly adequate
in most cases, especially for outfitting armies more cheaply. Indeed, NATO
stuff is better [generally speaking] not just in terms of infantry kit, but
most everything NATO fields tends to have higher quality standards and the
capability of manufacturing greater quantities too.
The
modern single infantryman is fairly effective to about an average of 250 meters
in the field with typical training. Given more training, selection, and better
equipment, they can extend that effectiveness to about 400-500 meters with
service rifles, and marksmen can extend to 700-800 meters [with DMRs]. Anyone
familiar with these rifles and familiar with ballistics will know that what
range infantrymen are effective to in field conditions is drastically shorter
than the effective range of either the rifles or the ammunition. Even with the
current foot soldier’s detachment, belt-fed machineguns (SAWs) attached to fire
teams and squads are more effective weapons than the individual rifle. It may
be worth noting 200 meters is entirely within the engagement ranges for volley
fire with smoothbore flintlock muskets. Individual fire not so much, but
militaries have never been concerned with that. Given that effective field
range, modern armies have standardized around small bore five to six millimeter
cartridges, with bullet mass generally in the 45 to 90 grain area. The average
infantryman can’t make good use of a cartridge with good terminal ballistics at
one km or more, and so trading off maximum effective range and power for lower
recoil, longer pointblank range, and cost and weight savings is always worth
it. Field hit probabilities are low and so smart armies have realized that
volume of fire is more important in suppressing and killing enemies than trying
to strive for single aimed shots.
Reaching
past 800 meters generally requires deploying machinegun fire, snipers, air
support, mortars, or some other indirect fire. Collectively, these things are
often lumped when used to support infantry as “force multiplication” since only
some qualifies as fire support. Part of the reason it is easier to use force
multipliers to that range than the infantry rifle is the limitation of the eye;
by 300-400 meters and without magnification, it becomes very difficult to see
someone who is lying low or behind cover. Hence, of casualties in the World
Wars, the service rifles actually did relatively little damage compared to
aircraft, armor, artillery, and machineguns. [3] The purpose of the modern infantryman is to control ground and
improve the effectiveness of fire support by providing up to date target
information. [4] They kill and
suppress the enemy too, but small arms and other infantry kit might only
account for between one in eight and one in four battlefield deaths in recent
wars. (Not concerned here with purely third-world conflicts.)
Men
on the ground are still the lynchpin of the modern army despite all of their
limitations, partly because machines are not yet autonomous and partly because
of the inherent limitations of all machines as well (maintenance, operators,
etc.). There is a hard limit on how far one can push a man in an operation;
experience tells us foot soldiers can only sustain a three to five day offensive
and push as far as about 20-25 kilometers, and on the defense they can last
perhaps five to seven days under attack before they have to be rotated to the
rear and exchanged with reserves in either case. If it seems like an offensive
wouldn’t push all that deep in about a week’s time by foot, one has to remember
that since they would ostensibly be meeting resistance of some sort and having
to deal with resupply, they are going to move slower than a forced march in
friendly territory and good ground. They aren’t simply moving a linear distance
over easy unbroken ground, so in effect pushing an average of 5-7 km per day is
actually quite good. After a week in continuous combat, the effectiveness of
soldiers drops dramatically and the probability of psychological issues
increases exponentially with time. [5]
Vehicles
also have hard limits but those are based on the technical ability of the
equipment at hand and maintenance schedules, not anything one can truly
generalize. Modern Western armies tend to supplement the capabilities of foot
soldiers by integrating them with vehicles, so the standard infantry corps are
motorized or mechanized. The only exceptions to this exist in mountainous
terrain or other similarly difficult terrain where helicopters can be used in
limited capacity for troop transport, evacuation, and resupply, but wheeled or
tracked vehicles have dubious use. To clarify, standard procedure is for troops
to patrol in their vehicles as much as possible to cover more ground and
dismount at certain areas either to make their presence known and ‘beat the
ground’ or because of terrain limitations. This also provides them a quicker
means of retreat or ‘exfiltration’ in case of ambush or enemy indirect fire.
As
implied above, the standard infantry company includes some indirect fire as
well as machine guns, marksmen, and sometimes snipers attached. Most motorized
and mechanized infantry units also fit extra weaponry on their wheeled and
tracked troop transports. In the case of American forces, this ranges from the
M240 GPMG or M2 .50 heavy machinegun, to the Mk.19 automatic grenade launcher
and 20mm or 30mm automatic cannons, as well as the 105mm gun and various guided
missiles. The Stryker IAV is the American all-purpose APC-IFV, while the
Russians use and export the BMP-2/3 and BTR. This means the standard infantry
company should be self-sufficient for some short or low-intensity engagements.
Armor
was developed initially to break trenches and fortified lines as one of the
offensive countermeasures developed in the First World War. As they improved
through the ‘20s and ‘30s through technology and doctrine, the role of armor
has expanded as well to become in effect a highly mobile all-terrain offensive
force with a great deal of concentrated firepower. Originally they had
conceived many varieties of tanks and tank destroyers or tank hunters, but in
the post-war period it has been found that the main battle tank effectively
covers most of those roles well enough – namely that which was asked of medium
and heavy tanks, to kill enemy armor and fortifications, support infantry if
needed, and generally break enemy lines – and scout vehicles, IFVs, and other
light armor subsume the role that light tanks formerly took (i.e. recon and
harassment). Tanks and other heavily armored vehicles have problems in dense
city environs where foot soldiers or other light assets cannot provide adequate
cover, but otherwise excel in most areas. Armored units are always integrated
with mechanized and motorized infantry; even if armored detachments push ahead
of the infantry and other fire support for a short period, operations are
planned for most maneuvers to occur with armor, infantry, and other fire
support in concert.
Without
armor and other tracked and wheeled vehicles, the ability to engage in fast
large scale movements vanishes. The defender always has the advantage both of
shorter supply lines and of deploying from intact infrastructure, especially
important when wheeled and tracked vehicles played little to no role on the
early modern battlefield, namely before 1916. The ability to mount sufficient
firepower to these vehicles to achieve near
parity in terms of effective fire between conventional light artillery and
mobile artillery (such as tank guns, self-propelled guns, etc.) was also
critical, as it further reduced the defender’s advantage in fire superiority. Used
properly, one can both mass armor on the assault, or disperse it otherwise to
counter enemy movements and if one has enough time and resources to whittle the
enemy through attrition. Modern main battle tanks can engage beyond line of
sight provided good targeting data, though the effective range of a smoothbore
120mm gun such as you see on an M1A2 is not as long as an M109 155mm
self-propelled howitzer. All of this means that armored divisions are heavy in logistical terms but are
capable of keeping up with the rest of the mechanized force during the
offensive, and effective ranges are such that with proper targeting data and
air support, armor and mobile artillery can reach beyond the enemy’s grasp.
However,
fire support and the other aforementioned force
multipliers do not exist in the aether winning wars. There is a
long-prevailing belief since about the 1920s that one can win wars solely from
the air or by shelling the enemy enough from afar, but hard-fought experience
seems to say otherwise; and similarly, all the fire support in the world is
useless without followthrough. A determined foe can withstand quite a lot of
shelling or aerial bombardment. Without resorting to NBC or other means to
fully wreck a target area, one quickly runs into diminishing returns on fire
support ordnance used. Thus fire support must be used with operational goals in
mind. This is borne in the concept of AirLand battle, one of the modern
combined arms doctrines which dictates essentially that air assets should be used in furtherance of broader operational
objectives and a high priority is to
be placed first on air superiority, then on long range bombing, close air
support, transport, and resupply. [6]
What
of fire support more broadly? The main purpose there is to soften and
demoralize an enemy before an operation, or to thwart the thrust of one of
their operations. Fire support will not destroy a foe simply because perfectly
accurate fire cannot be guaranteed, and if they have any fortifications they
can retreat into it becomes increasingly harder to harm them. Concentrated fire
can kill a company, or perhaps a battalion, but destroying a regiment or
division level unit with effective fire support is almost impossible even in
the best circumstances. As implied above, the main purpose is to reduce
effective fighting strength of enemy units through casualties caused and to
damage their equipment and possible fortifications (“softening”), and to reduce
the combat effectiveness of their remaining men (“demoralization”). Modern
doctrine says that fire support in the lead-up to an operation should be
relatively short and sharp, with the followthrough quickly on its heels. What
was found with long bombardments in the First World War was that days’ long
bombardments prior to assaults wouldn’t produce much more results than shorter
concentrated shelling, but it did announce a substantial offensive. Part of the
reason is the aforementioned diminishing returns, and part of it is the ability
of the enemy to prepare in reserve trenches and other staging areas behind the
frontlines and beyond the range of effective artillery fire.
Fire
support can be either distributed in operational space and organizational terms
or massed and concentrated. Generally, artillery is organized into separate regiments
and brigades, and in those brigades it is then subdivided into batteries. Most
Western militaries have realized that small units need access to flexible,
on-demand fire support as situation demands, and light weapons available within
the platoon or company level are not always sufficient. At the same time,
supplying and crewing artillery batteries is a complex matter. Local commanders
can request additional fire from artillery units or air squadrons attached to their
division. The platoon and company level light weapons include anti-tank and
anti-air guided missiles (ATGM and AAGM), recoilless rifles, mortars,
under-barrel and vehicle mounted grenade launchers (e.g. M203 and MK19
respectively), general-purpose and heavy machineguns (the modern GPMG like the
M240 is not used as a squad MG), and anti-materiel rifles. Many of these serve
multiple roles in practice, as it is common to see shoulder-fired missiles and
recoilless rifles used to deny and destroy enemy cover just the same as their
intended purpose (killing armor).
Gun
batteries and other fire support have procedures for opening fire. The first
step is that they receive a request for fire with target data from a field
commander. This target data must include specific geospatial coordinates and
the rough number of salvos or shells. Artillery commanders must hand this
information to the batteries and the coordinates must be converted to firing
solutions, which is to say a trigonometric or more complex ballistic
calculation which says how to orient the gun and what lead time should be given
if any (generally now computed). They then calculate flight time and
communicate back to the field commander. After the salvos are done, the
batteries log the relevant details and reset the gun positions.
Destroying
fortifications scales in difficulty depending on how built up they are. Fire
support can be useful here, but some of it will be ineffective. Sufficiently
well-made fortifications cannot be destroyed with small munitions (light
weapons, light artillery, and small high explosives), and must instead either
be targeted with heavier ordnance designed specifically for ‘bunker busting,’
NBC (if worth potential costs), or simply avoided. It should be noted that one
of the primary raisons d’être for the
‘BC’ part of NBC is precisely for eliminating very tough fortifications. If
possible, a very well-fortified line held by the enemy should be punched
through if necessary in a small part, but mostly or wholly avoided and then
surrounded, cut off from supply and reinforcement, and denied its advantages.
Engineer units are used to setup and disable fortified positions, provided they
are given enough support. I consider proper forts separate from ordinary
entrenchments such as an infantry company might establish on their own without
additional supply, manpower, or knowledge from the engineers, or pioneers as
they are sometimes known. They are also used for aiding with logistics
throughput and setting up bridges, docks, depots, and so forth. They are
usually brigade-level attachments to a larger division.
NBC
are a topic unto themselves, but they ought to be treated at least in brief. As
stated above, biological and chemical weapons have a primary purpose for
targeting fortified structures. The secondary purpose of these weapons is
trying to take out high value targets. The problem in either case is that there
is likely to be substantial death outside of the intended HVTs, and biological
weapons in particular aside from spores are difficult to control. Of the ‘NBC’
triad, chemical weapons are by far the cheapest and biological weapons are
middling in expense but require more expertise than chemical weapons. Nuclear
weapons have a high cost of deployment in basically every sense from expertise
required to maintain, manufacture, and use properly to sheer monetary and
resource cost and probable public opinion impact in the event one initiates
first strike (assuming the world isn’t cinder after). Aside from the deterrent
effect, the main purpose of a nuclear weapon is area denial or destruction of some
large concentration of forces or population, exactly the same as a conventional
bomb only more efficient. That said, unless many hundreds or thousands of
nuclear weapons are used, they are simply large bombs with a nasty hangover.
This is true especially now that warheads with less-than-two megaton yield are
preferred. Further, it is my opinion that MAD is a hypothetical framework
rather than fact – and while it is perfectly sensible for nuclear powers to act as though escalation could snowball
that quickly there is nothing that says nuclear powers couldn’t have
conventional forces skirmishes, larger scale combat, or even small warheads
exchanged without letting loose their quivers and making good on MAD. Indeed,
nuclear conflict has been de-escalated multiple times since 1950. MAD is built
on the assumption that drawing back a conflict once major war has broken out or
tactical nukes have been exchanged is highly unlikely despite all incentives to
do so.
One’s
strategic vision needs to be stated clearly. This goes for strategy as such and grand
strategy as well. A clear strategy allows for one to proceed with preparing
the groundwork for war. All too often, a political leader bumbles into a war to
hide their lack of popularity or legitimacy; on the flipside, military leaders
are eager to prove themselves often despite lack of actual practice or
preparation. The result in these cases, and worse when there is some mix, is
almost inevitably disaster.
The
grand strategy, as stated above,
should include a set of political, economic, and diplomatic objectives; how
does one optimally go through a war and maintain power? The foremost priority
generally is keeping either oneself or one’s friends in power, whether in
peacetime or war. How does one obtain the most war material from the economy
without liquidating all of its wealth? This requires striking a balance, since
the only way a man and the government he represents might be forgiven for
taking on a great deal of debt and likely inflation on behalf of a folk is if
he spares them greater ruin in so doing. Who are the best allies one can get,
and how can one avoid roping the most (or the worst) foes possible? One wants
the most help with the fewest liabilities in economy and diplomacy.
Inter-agency, inter-department, and inter-branch dealing; how does one make all
necessary parties work together as seamlessly as possible? Coordination
problems are inevitable, but minimizing them is part of what separates the
great from the mediocre. What information can one acquire on the broad ability
of the enemy to field and sustain an effective military? This sort of
intelligence should focus on the enemy’s logistics, production (including slack
production), NBC production and numbers of nuclear warheads, and resource
capabilities and limitations as well as their ‘home front’ factors like civil
support, regime legitimacy and popularity, government integrity, and potential
manpower reserves. Proper intelligence at this level allows for an accurate
assessment of the relative strengths of two potential antagonists either before
war or at its outset.
The
narrower strategy still operates
above the operational and tactical level and defines production goals given
economic constraints, supply concerns and limitations, deployment of forces at
the level of the army corps and division, and intelligence regarding for
instance enemy troop deployments and preparations at the same large scale
(corps and divisions). Production is a big part of modern war and requires
years of forethought to sufficiently equip a well-manned force. One of the
principles of production here is, as alluded previously, it is better to
produce more of something which is good
enough than to hunt for the absolute best and sacrifice numbers and the
ability to repair and replace broken items. The more focused the acquisitions
process, the quicker that it whittles away a number of candidates to the thing
that best meets specification with fewest sidetracking forays, the more time
can be spent on further refinement. Similarly, logistics has to be handled in a
smart and smooth way, and the military supply system should guarantee supply
for the minimum necessary along with a few niceties. Every additional item
added to the supply chain is a potentially massive amount of weight through the
system and requires more man hours to inventory and move, and generally
speaking a larger system becomes more unwieldy the bigger it gets. Deploying
forces means not only placing them in spatial terms and on timetables, but also
fitting them into large scale maneuvers which are then elaborated on the
operational level. Lastly, strategic intelligence concerns nuclear targets,
enemy deployments (ground, sea, and air) and nuclear sites, enemy supply lines,
and potential enemy targets and paths of movement (offense or retreat).
A
great deal of strategy can be refined if one thinks of war foremost from the
groundwork level. That is, war requires a series of preconditions to even get
off the ground. These preconditions include sufficient public support,
industrial production, throughput of supplies to area of operations, and (ideally)
cooperation with allies. This was the manner in which someone like Julius
Caesar mastered the battlefield. He was not a brilliant strategist-tactician in
the manner of an Alexander, Frederick the Great or Napoleon. He relied on
mastering the groundwork aspects of war and knowing the strengths of his
forces, and using those strengths to undermine the foundation of the enemy.
Most of the time he would have his legions build around the enemy in such a way
that he nullified whatever terrain advantage they may have had, for instance
high ground, and began to isolate them from their allies and supplies. Even if
your foe is numerically superior on the whole, if you can manage to isolate
them in pockets and bring greater numbers locally, you can destroy them
piecemeal. This requires knowing when to engage or break and when to
encircle.
Getting
to the level of Alexander, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon requires an
in-depth knowledge of one’s forces and their abilities, as well as that of the
enemy, and the uncanny skill of quickly reading the environment and seizing the
initiative. In the day of those three generals and leaders I picked as
examples, they could send out a handful of scouts to survey enemy forces and
sit atop a hill or other elevated spot from safety and read the battlefield.
They usually had a rough idea of what they were doing the day before, and from
whatever intelligence they could cobble together they would have some picture
of the enemy and their intentions as well as the optimal paths forward. Orders
proceed generally in the morning or early afternoon and the army would assemble
from camp into battle order with instruction. That luxury is largely gone for
the modern general, who commands mostly by way of doctrine, training and drill,
memorandum, and radio and satellite communications from behind the frontlines. The
great generals of old also had to delegate command of smaller units to
subordinates of course, but the modern general has more junior officers and
noncommissioned officers simply to try to coordinate most effectively. To a
degree, complexity scales with technology and the added layers of sea and air
war.
There
are a number of present and historical military doctrines used in the past
hundred years. Doctrine is of course the idea of ‘how things should be’ when
set into practice. In other words, it provides an idealized model of battle for
commanders and soldiers to train with and adapt real situations to. These are
developed both to be forward looking and with an eye to the limits of the
forces at hand. The more resources one has potentially available, the more one
has a blank canvas to work with; otherwise, one has very tight constraints within
which one works to define the best available doctrine. Even the best doctrine
developed for a given force is only going to work most of the time and should be adjusted to the situation at hand.
Most countries developed their ideas based on the First World War and refined
them through the interwar period and Second World War. Everyone had developed
their doctrines either for the best possible defense or to overcome the stasis
of fortified war such as existed on the Western Front for most of the war from
1914-1918. However, it should be noted that at least among the would-be
hegemons of the world today there is a tendency toward a certain measure of
convergence. The modern world powers have combined the Second World War and
Post-War doctrines to find something which works within the limits of their
forces.
The
first to talk about is maneuver war, itself not a new concept, having been
around since the days of the Aryan (Indo-European) invasions and settlements.
But between the American Civil War and the First World War, it became
increasingly untenable to the point where cavalry had less and less role to
play until by 1914, the cavalry was basically entirely obsolete and the man on
horse or teams of horse were relegated to roles such as messengers, recon, and
supply. These are still vital but clearly not offensive. Cavalry were integral
to maneuver war between 1600 and 1880; the whole concept requires keeping your
forces as mobile as possible, which means having lighter artillery and training
your men to fire and move. The concept in land war is that one has movement and
firepower, and excelling at one in a given domain requires balancing and
sacrificing the other.
Modern
maneuver war was developed primarily among German military thinkers, but also
from input from French and British strategists, and it sought to overcome the
stalemates of 1914-1917 by way of carefully planned offensives. The later model
stated that the initial plans were to be highly intricate and well-laid, but
later offensives should be looked at as iterative steps and quickly made and
set. Firepower and forces would be massed at a critical point, after a short
bombardment infantry would advance behind essentially a creeping barrage into
the enemy fortifications. They would try to exploit the weakest points and
ignore the strongest points of contact, wrap around the enemy lines and cut off
their communications, supply, and reinforcements, and then encircle them,
ultimately to force the enemy formation into surrender. Fire support would
follow as close to the attacking infantry as possible to keep up with the
frontlines at all time. All emphasis was placed on maximum speed and shock;
after deep pushes are made and large forces wiped out, then less mobile ‘rear-action’
infantry step into mop up stragglers in fortifications and the surrounding area
generally. In the post-war period, armored and motorized units were added to
grant greater speed and mobile firepower. In the German model, armored units
would be generally organized in separate units from infantry divisions, either
on the regimental or division level, so as to grant them greater operational
flexibility; further, under the Prussian General Staff junior officers and
noncoms broadly are encouraged to act independently and bend or break with
orders if it will lead to a better outcome. As with all armored units, they
were combined arms however and would proceed into battle with supporting
mechanized and motorized infantry.
The
United States developed a mode of thought centered on sheer fire and material
superiority in the inter-war years leading into the Second World War. This was
sought to conserve manpower and accomplish all the things stated in the fire
support section. Armored units were largely attached to infantry divisions
directly, and while they did everything that armor was supposed to do,
including targeting enemy fortifications and armor, they were afforded somewhat
less flexibility in operational terms than German armor divisions. The emphasis
in American divisions was on general well-roundedness and trying to be as
well-equipped as possible. Given the American supply and production ability in
the Second World War, this worked out rather well, and American divisions were
among the best rounded and equipped generally. They also benefitted from better
coordination with air and naval assets than most other armies. The downside,
such as it was, is that this pushed generally slower, methodical operations,
and the result was a war that dragged with direct participation from mid ’42
starting with limited operations in North Africa until the war’s end in Europe
in May ’45, and August ’45 in the Pacific. Another downside came in the form of
amphibious operations in the Pacific where effective fire superiority did not
have the desired impact, and a more effective strategy in terms of reducing
losses in theater would have been possible simply by cutting off supply to
those fortified islands and starving them out or bypassing every island that
lacked any strategic importance. The upshot of American doctrine is that once a
good foothold was established, the enemy was not likely to throw them off.
Third,
the common manuals developed by most countries. These emphasized huge,
well-planned operations, whether defensive or offensive. The key here is to try
to plan everything to meticulous detail rather than leaving anything to chance.
This goes back to the massive operations of the First World War, where most
armies gave very little leeway to company commanders or other lower levels of
organization. The French model placed all emphasis on fortifications as they
had in the First World War, this time buttressed by the Maginot Line and a more
robust defense-in-depth. Armor and mobile infantry were supposed to support
regular infantry and patch holes in the line as needed, and fire support was
evenly distributed across the line. The British model placed an emphasis on
mobile infantry with ample but distributed fire support. They viewed mobility
as necessary for having a properly reactive force, especially since the British
land army in 1938 was small compared to continental peers, just as in 1913. The
problem they found here is that this ‘war of great operations’ model was often
inflexible and they lacked sufficient time to prepare operations since they
were not dealing with static frontlines as they had in the First World War. Given
some combination of ample time to prepare, superior numbers, overwhelming
firepower, and proper intelligence, these ‘common’ doctrines are perfectly
adequate; lacking many or most of those advantages, however, adherents of these
doctrines quickly find themselves on the back foot. [7]
Lastly as far as Second World War fare goes,
the styles of mass warfare. The roots of mass war in the modern day lie in the
wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, but there were ancient wars where
whole societies were mobilized for war as well. Where manpower was relatively
cheap and production could quickly meet the needs of most of the military at
least in some capacity, such as post-war PRC and the USSR, they stuck with
this. The PRC opted for an almost entirely foot-based ‘army of the masses’
approach where they had few elite troops and little armor or mechanized and
motorized corps, and the goal was to swarm the enemy with eager but poorly
trained and marginally equipped peasants. The USSR went for a more balanced
approach with a greater mass of armor, fire support, and mechanized and
motorized units. However, they still cared little for conservation of man and
material – there is an anecdote in Dan Carlin’s Ostfront podcasts where an officer is recounting thousands of men
freezing to death and drowning after trying to ford a river in winter – and any
waste thereof on way to accomplishing operational and strategic goals was
considered something between necessary and tangential.
Most
modern doctrines eschew mass warfare. Only ragtag asymmetrical combatants have
retained that sort of anything goes and
damn the cost ethic. Everyone else
tries to incorporate some measure of the conservatism inherent to the other
doctrines which tried to one measure or another to balance preservation of
manpower and materiel with other priorities. But one way to view the maneuver-fire
schools of thought is that movement lends itself to lighter forces or ones in a
strategically weak position where a gamble is worthwhile, as a high focus on
movement from the operations level and up is fairly likely to be a gamble. The
fire school lends itself to those heavier forces and strategically sounder ones
where attrition can be sustained more, since attrition is ultimately how the
front moves with the fire approach. (Note that I use ‘force’ somewhat
ambiguously here as it can refer to either whole nations or units within
nations.)
The
modern PRC and its People’s Liberation Army has opted to go for a more refined
doctrine which is still based on its core on mass conscription, but the modern
PLA has far better air and sea integration, fire support, C3I capabilities, and
is generally equipped like a modern force. Thus their non-nuclear mainstay
looks more like a combination of fire superiority and grand battle plan with
influence from Soviet post-war doctrine. After its experience in the Caucasus
wars, the Russian Federation has leaned more toward a force centered on its
elite units foremost for surgical military actions, with a large reserve
manpower base in case of escalation. It is worth noting, however, that proper
planning is integral to all of the inter-war and post-war doctrines. EU-NATO
forces also tend to rely heavily on their special operations units, for their
capacity as a manpower and materiel reserve for the US is important but would
require wind up time. Most EU-NATO countries have paltry equipment stores,
active forces, and experience, even if conscription is still instated.
For
its part, the US has tried to take stock of the lessons of war from 1939
through 2012 or so. A disproportionate number of interstate and internecine
wars in that time have involved the US, their proxies, or countries receiving
American advisors. It is therefore the US which stands with the greatest level
of accumulated institutional experience over the past 80 years in addition to
its various other perks. Most Western forces have rightly viewed the Germans as
the most tactically innovative group from 1910 to 1945. Thus everyone who could
attempted to imitate them in key ways. However, the US stepped into the role
the Germans once occupied after the Prussian general staff and
aristocratic-military elite were culled both with death in the World Wars and
sanction in the post-war era and the rest of Europe de-militarized to varying
degrees. Germany has since slumped in their military prowess, resigned to be
arms exporters but field a force bordering on nonexistence. One can argue about
how effective the US is as the de facto innovator of military doctrine in all
theaters, but it is present reality.
Recently,
the American forces have taken a more counter-insurgent approach based on the
past 50 years of American experience. This particular approach is a sort of
‘balanced’ counter-insurgent tactic that is neither exactly quite on the
humanitarian peace mission side, which would focus entirely on a police-type
occupying force securing order as infrastructure and food aid are doled out; nor
on the harsh retributive side where rebels and miscreants are put down swiftly
as they come. The middle of the road ‘mow the lawn’ during the rebuilding
process can work, but it drags longer than anyone likes and still requires a
great deal of manpower. Moreover, it’s still not particularly ‘humane’ because
the amount of bloodshed either caused directly by American forces or indirectly
as a result of the chaos after the invasion is still high. To some degree,
American counter-insurgent doctrine is hemmed in by the need to have a flexible
force capable of fighting both asymmetric and conventional forces and
political-ideological complications domestically which make committing to the
harsher approach impossible. Historically, the US did fight a more vicious
campaign to quash rebellion in the Philippines after the Spanish-American war.
Conventional
war doctrine for the US is a blend of the fire and maneuver schools of thought,
as per operational needs, thrown with a successor school to AirLand battle they
call ‘Multi-domain Battle’. The thrust of current thought is that while
operations against lesser foes can still follow the AirLand-maneuver model,
against the pretender powers the US has to rely on air force and naval
cooperation to effect superior firepower in theater but with shallow land
deployments more heavily leaning toward special operations. This is largely in
an effort to avoid nuclear escalation. In effect, US forces are currently
unwilling to commit to large scale operations against near-peers because of the
potential of nuclear escalation. Operations in Iraq in 1991 and 2003 were
examples of fair weather maneuver warfare. While the results were impressive,
the enemy was a hobbled force who’d been worn down over an eight year war with
their neighbor only a few years before in ‘91 and by prior attack in 2003, and
American forces were essentially the best of breed at the head of a
multinational client-state coalition in both cases.
Having
established strategy, we can speak briefly about operations and tactics. One
way of conceiving operations is as a series of war and battle plans, most of
which one will never use, yet which are made anyway. These are all for the sake
of preparedness. One must have some idea of the forces at one’s disposal and of
the potential of the enemy to be able to make somewhat credible plans, or else
they’re not really plans at all but fantasies or war games. War games are
perfectly valid and useful but they usually belong to a training regime as they
do not constitute credible war or battle plans unless part of operations
planning. An operation ex ante is a
contingency; during execution, it falls somewhere between a guideline and
blueprint. Nothing goes well enough that the plan ‘survives contact’ and keeps
a correlation of one, but if it holds by better than four-tenths, it is still a
damn good plan. In social sciences, a correlation of .3 or more is considered
swell.
Planning
an operation starts with a given mission. Commanders in the operational theater
proceed to ‘mission analysis’ – ‘analysis of orders, intelligence, and the
production of refined orders and missions to be handed down local forces.’ In
no small part this means seeing what is possible to accomplish and moving from
there, but also taking the highly abstract mission given them and distilling
more concrete steps to follow. Next, they come up with multiple ways of
achieving the stated objectives, and each of these scenarios is then analyzed
in turn or played in a war game. All ‘courses of action’ thus far are compared
and one is selected, with final orders produced based on this course of action.
The plan should include timetables for mobilization and deployment of forces,
including a ‘D-day’ and ‘H-hour’ when the plan could or will take effect. Implicit
here as well is allowance for sufficient provision of forces in theater. [8]
Having
stated all of this, one should not be wholly wedded to operational plans. There
must be allowance for flexibility as
things evolve in the environment. One problem some commanders face is a
sort of stickler, doctrinaire attitude which runs into issues if they are
butting against a peer foe who is willing to bend more. The further the
operation proceeds from D-day, the more adjustment it will need; at a certain
point it will have to be abandoned outright if things proceed long enough and a
new plan will need to be drawn up to take account of new realities on the
ground. This has to do with incompleteness of intelligence at the outset and
refinement of information over time, as well as the fact that one is not facing
a static enemy, and generally terrain and weather conditions may change. That
said, it is still critical to have plans as jumping off points and frameworks
if only for proper deployment of forces and allocation of supplies. It is also
wise to hold men to steadfast deadlines and expect the utmost of them, even if
it requires them to stretch themselves a bit.
Within
the strategic and operational framework, tactics achieve goals in the moment at a stated space and time.
There is some generalization to tactics of course; that is, to a greater degree
than strategy or grand strategy, tactics largely can be seen as formulae which
we milk from doctrine. That said, a good tactician has to be capable of
tailoring those formulae to the world as
it is rather than relying purely on what is on paper and floundering
whenever something is not addressed precisely either in doctrine or training. To
speak broadly again, one generally has two goals in the tactical landscape, the
first being survival and the second being the mission at hand. This is an
obvious but necessary simplification; survival
is a necessary condition for moving forward with anything and accomplishing an intelligent mission
increases the likelihood of friendly success and survival. These are
trivial and relatively obvious statements, but given the number of times
throughout the history of war that men have either thrown their lives away for
seemingly no good reason or have failed to bother to do anything worthwhile
other than try to survive – though to be fair, that is the best one can do at times to simply survive – these things
bear stating and clarifying. [9]
Tactics
are an essential part of operations. Large unit tactics will involve deployment
and use of units between the company and brigade. Though they should stick
somewhat to doctrine, these are fit into operational plans by commanders and
updated or bent as needed. Small unit tactics concern essentially the fire and
movement of groups beneath the company. Most of the time, these are especially
informed by training and doctrine and improvised per discretion of field
commanders. The critical elements one can observe readily are numbers,
firepower, speed, terrain and weather. Other elements inform the tactical
scape, but these are sort of especially unquantifiable things like commander
skill, morale, and human biodiversity which will affect both tactics used and
the distribution of ability of soldiers and commanders in a given force. Everything
essentially flows from these factors. Flanking actions in times of old or new
are at bottom attempts to press one’s local numerical superiority against an
enemy sometimes with other advantages as well, even if that enemy be greater in
number on whole, and defeat them in
detail (that is, one by one).
The
man on the ground at tactical level generally need not know the whole of the
operational or strategic picture. Such volumes of information would generally
in fact hinder their job which is a specific subset of the operational plan.
However, they need to know enough. Thus
the concept of ‘need to know’ and being ‘read in.’ Such knowledge gives them an
idea in any instance whether their efforts are worthy or if they ought to look
elsewhere. It doesn’t matter to the tactical commander whether logistical
weight and supply restriction impedes numbers in theater, especially if such
things are beyond their control or influence; the salient concern is that numbers in fact are limited and how to
proceed from there. As implied above, there is a greater immediacy to the
tactical environment since plans are borne out in the world rather than as pure
thoughtforms. Ideally, it is the case that one outgun, outman, outrun, and
outlast the other combatant, and with favorable weather and terrain to boot;
usually it is the case that one will lack at least one or two of these good
things. One should have some ability to operate with a mix of tactical
advantage and disadvantage and not need to rely on basically dominating an
opponent who was doomed from the onset. Few enough will even pick up a fight if
they perceive such long odds.
Air
superiority is the simple idea of dominating the skies. In actuality, it
consists of friendlies first flying relatively frequent sorties, and then also
having sufficient width and depth of coverage. It is an iterative process of
repeatedly taking to air operations day after day, week after week until
hostilities end. The primary mission here is for multirole and air superiority
fighters to allow other aircraft to continue with their missions as untouched
as possible, and to remove one point of potential contact for ground forces
which substantially improves ground force morale and survivability. Multirole
fighters are capable of air-to-air combat fairly well, along with a variety of
other missions such as CAS, EW and recon, air interdiction, and so forth.
Current generations include the F-35, which replaced the F-16, and the SU-30.
Air superiority fighters are designed primarily for that sole mission. These
include the F-22, having unseated the F-15, and the SU-27.
The
primary purpose of long range bombing is tactical foremost; that is, to
eliminate obstacles in the operational environment. These are things like
anti-air and RADAR installations (the two usually being hand in hand), military
depots, runways and idle aircraft, fuel and supply depots, high value targets
(senior commanders and leaders for instance), as well as large troop and armor
concentrations. The second focus, especially for a larger or longer war, is
strategic. Strategic bombing targets the ability of the enemy to fundamentally
make war by crippling supply, production, and morale, and roughly in that order.
Civilian targets are a legitimate focus but have drawbacks to consider; an open
doctrine of seeking to saturate soft targets for high casualties has a morale
cost both for one’s own troops and for public war support. It also may harden
the resolve of the enemy and, unless the mass casualty events are both swift
and devastating, as in the case of a nuclear strike, they usually will not
bring about a quick end to the war at hand.
Close
air support is an extension of fire support more generally, and involves using
specifically tasked close air support or CAS aircraft as well as multirole
aircraft to support ground troops in operations. These can be fixed wing or
rotary craft, examples of the former being the A-10 and of the latter being the
AH-64. One of the advantages of CAS is that it has a much wider operating range
than traditional artillery. CAS is also particularly good at killing armor and
vehicles as well as anti-personnel missions when there are large enemy
concentrations. One of the downsides, of course, is that they can only sustain
a fire mission for a short time before having to refuel and rearm.
Transport
and supply are straightforward. Modern cargo aircraft like the C-130 have a
large carrying capacity for both personnel and cargo (90 passengers or 20,000
kg payload), and are one part of the transport-supply fleet. These also contain
a mix of fixed wing and rotary craft. In-flight refueling craft are also key to
extended operations as a sortie can be doubled or tripled in range and time. The
bulk of supplies are moved by ship, truck, or rail, but air transport can move
things over large distances quickly.
A
last type of aircraft worth touching briefly are command-reconnaissance-electronic
warfare craft. These enhance the C3I abilities not only of ground commanders
but also of crews in-flight. Electronic warfare will be covered later in
slightly greater depth under the C3I section. In short, they provide additional
tactical information to others in the area of operations and help to coordinate
in real-time from the air. The role of prior recon-EW craft like the U-2 and
SR-71 has been superseded by drones for the operational environment and
satellites and long-range RADAR (e.g. RADAR telescopes) for strategic purposes.
The
air is of course the first meaningful means of force projection in the modern
world in terms of what I’m discussing here and what is going to be used most
often. A mechanized land force can move a great deal to be sure, but they are
far more limited than that same outfit but given a competent and modern air
force. Modern fixed wing craft often have effective ranges between 3500 and
9000 km and service ceilings of about 1 to 1.8 km or more. Detection by eye and
old school AA batteries are both mostly out of the question except for rotary
aircraft. Even for rotary craft, usually by the time they’re present on the battlefield,
air superiority has been established. A good air force can move men and
supplies, and proceed to strike faster than its land or sea-based complements.
Europe’s
rise from a bunch of regional powers to a world powerhouse was tied intimately
to naval strength. The ability to lord over ports and navigable rivers starting
in the 1300s and especially in the 1500s paid dividends, as ship hulls, sails,
and guns improved and the days of the wee seafarer yielded to the ship of the
line. From the late 1500s until the 1930s, the ship of the line or capital ship reigned. The bigger guns
and the more guns one could fit on the deck, and generally the more decks, the
better. As with land armor, there is a trade-off one makes between mobility,
armor, and firepower; picture a triangle where one can have two of the three in
spades but not all three. A fast and thickly plated ship is going to have to
drop weight in turret mounts and ammo loads. By the late 1940s though, the
huge, heavily armored behemoth capital ships became a thing of yesteryear as
ever better gun technology and rocketry came on the scene and virtually
everyone has decided firepower and mobility are better.
To
continue with the theme of force projection, the sea is the second major
theater of force projection. It is by far the most sustainable one over long
tracts of time with modern ships and fuel – this is especially true given that
American capital ships and submarines are all nuclear powered. This has a
trade-off, namely that a nuclear reactor has a larger SONAR footprint than some
diesel or electric (steam) engines, but nuclear powered ships can operate at
sea for longer than the alternatives. That aside, projecting strength on the
seas is still important as even today, most international or long-distance
freight is shipped [i.e. over water]. That is not counting strategic resources
extracted or carried from the seas. Thus, being the preeminent naval power as
the US is makes for a prized position, and the pretender powers would like to
contest American force projection on the water as much as the air.
The
carrier is the newest large ship in navies but, for the purposes of American
naval doctrine, stands at the middle. A carrier is a deck for launching
aircraft as well as stowage below for planes, maintenance, crew, and supplies.
It takes what is normally land-based airpower and thrusts it into the seas,
with the caveat that carrier-borne craft must be capable of shorter take-off
and landing even with modern aircraft catapults. Aside from this main purpose,
they generally have no guns aside from perhaps anti-air batteries or
anti-missile defense, which would be anti-air missiles and chain guns or the
like respectively nowadays. It is the last capital ship still deployed by
navies today, and especially in large numbers by the US in the form of the
Nimitz class. They have incredible range, including the ability to stay at sea
for long periods of time. The carrier must travel with escorts or else the
carrier is vulnerable, regardless of onboard EW suites and defenses. Modern
‘super-carriers’ in the employ of the US Navy hold about sixty planes and
helicopters overall in stowage on and below deck.
Battleships
were once the prized capital ships of twentieth century navies. These were
heavy displacement ships, thickly armored, and with ample firepower. Their
decks were lined with huge gun mounts in the form of turrets and casemates. The
main guns measured between twelve and thirty-five centimeters. It was ballistic
computers, heavier armor, and an overall need to fight at extended range that
drove the development of greater firepower. In essence, the design of these
succeeded to the old ships-of-the-line, only steel and coal, petrol or diesel
instead of wood and sail. They were often paired with somewhat lighter
battlecruisers, a compromise between the battleship and the cruiser. These
capital ships have been decommissioned since the nineteen seventies through the
nineties, until the present day where neither battleships nor battlecruisers
are active any longer. Operational costs and staffing requirements combined
with the sheer obsolescence of these steel hulks doomed their viability. In
effect, you can accomplish most of what capital ship fleets of old did with
greater effective range and logistical capability in a carrier group, though some
arguments abound that current anti-ship guided missiles doom the viability of
carriers and other large ships of war once and for all.
Escorts
and destroyers are designed to sail down shallower bodies of water where
capital ships cannot and to ‘screen’ for large fleets. The job of screens is to
extend the formation and range, which in past times was strictly limited to eyesight
as flags, flares, and smoke were the main means of communication over distance.
But since the 1910s and ‘20s, radios have been a mainstay in fleets, and
consequently RADAR and SONAR were picked up quickly by every forward looking
force in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s. One of the classic problems of naval
warfare is knowledge; with two moving fleets (friendly and enemy) it can be
difficult to track and predict the enemy’s position especially if one does not
have aircraft to aid for whatever reason. Screens are supposed to help reduce
this problem, as well as shield the larger ships from aircraft and submarines
as they carry anti-aircraft gun and depth charges. The modern escort destroyers
and cruisers carry little in the way of gunnery – usually one or two pieces of
heavy artillery in addition to smaller artillery and the main missile batteries
and anti-air defenses. Still, they serve the same functions as screens and
pickets of old.
Some
portion of a navy has to be available to sail down shallower waters for a
presence in for instance bays, inlets, and navigable rivers (‘the littoral’).
This includes river patrol boats and littoral craft, as well as much of the US
Coast Guard fleet. These lightly armed, shallow draft vessels are designed to
allow carry crew, recon, and EW equipment down these waterways. Ultimately,
they are there primarily to call in air support or pick up men and equipment
along the waterways when needed. Most shallow water craft are not meant to
loiter for long periods, as despite their low displacement they are obviously
especially vulnerable to guided missiles, improvised explosives, and other
vectors of attack when stationary for long periods, especially given that they
are usually very lightly armed and armored.
Submarines and submersibles a mainstay of navies in the post-war era. As a stealthy platform for torpedoes, their value was long recognized since at least the late nineteenth century. But it was the combination of the nuclear reactor and other superior power generation, improved life support, and ballistic missiles which made them worthy of essentially replacing some of the old capital ships. The Ohio Class is the current ballistic missile sub currently in service with the USN. Foreign submarines are often run by diesel or electric motors due to simplicity of operation and lower SONAR signatures. Nuclear subs are capable of being designed with greater volume, electronics and electrical hardware, payload, and run time (i.e. time between resupply); the trade-off being that they have a bigger SONAR signature and higher cost. Consequently most second-rate powers opt for diesel or electric subs.
Submarines and submersibles a mainstay of navies in the post-war era. As a stealthy platform for torpedoes, their value was long recognized since at least the late nineteenth century. But it was the combination of the nuclear reactor and other superior power generation, improved life support, and ballistic missiles which made them worthy of essentially replacing some of the old capital ships. The Ohio Class is the current ballistic missile sub currently in service with the USN. Foreign submarines are often run by diesel or electric motors due to simplicity of operation and lower SONAR signatures. Nuclear subs are capable of being designed with greater volume, electronics and electrical hardware, payload, and run time (i.e. time between resupply); the trade-off being that they have a bigger SONAR signature and higher cost. Consequently most second-rate powers opt for diesel or electric subs.
Naval
doctrine as of the late 19th century was a contest between two
thinkers primarily, Mahan and Corbett. Mahan came down on the side of decisive
battle and Corbett on blockade and denial. These doctrines are more or less
self-explanatory; Mahan advised that fleets mass their strength, seek out the
enemy concentrations, and defeat them in detail through the fewest possible
engagements. The more scattered the enemy fleet, and more gathered the friendly
fleet, the easier the task of winning these decisive battles. Corbett advised
essentially starving the enemy and frustrating them by cutting them off from
strategic access. Both have merits; Mahan’s advice works well where one has
overwhelming local or general superiority in numbers, technology, coordination,
or other factors which will lead to force imbalance, but it falls short where
two fleets are close enough to peer for any major engagement to risk too much.
Corbett’s doctrine works well where time is in ample supply and there are
plenty of ships to cover the areas being denied to the enemy, but if one cannot
stretch one’s forces to deny areas or in so doing would stretch too thin, then
this falls apart as well. The latter is the more conservative of the two
approaches, and all things being equal, should result in fewer losses over the
course of a war.
Because
of the nature of nuclear-armed ships and aircraft, modern US naval doctrine
tends more toward the Corbett school, as the US Navy can afford to subdivide
its fleet into smaller commands. These smaller units thus engage in area and
supply denial against enemy forces. If need be, they can deploy strategic or
tactical nuclear ballistic missiles, or ballistic missiles with conventional
warheads (‘cruise missiles’). Additionally, each carrier fleet is capable of
maintaining local air superiority. Foreign navies tend to be smaller and in war
time or pivotal operations would likely have to concentrate most of their
forces in a single operational area due to their limited numbers.
I
touched on production as a matter of strategic import, but so critical is it
that it really does deserve its own section. Whole wars are lost substantially
based on one power’s inability to produce needed supplies and materiel, or on
their inability to secure raw materials necessary for supply and production. One
of the reasons I stress the logistical aspect of war and battle so much is
because it is a critical aspect without
which the tactical flash and wizardry cannot move forth. Simply put,
starving men without means of putting up a fight will not fight for long. They
will either die in the case of those dedicated to the point of suicide, like
the Japanese in World War Two, or more likely they will surrender once things
look that bleak.
The
first thing to touch on is general production. Think of the general flow of raw
materials into the economy as well as everything that keeps the civilian and
industrial side of things operating. Keeping steady flow of food, warmth,
consumer goods, raw materials and industrial supplies going not only to the
military but to the population as a whole is of critical importance during
wartime. This is the case for every reason you can think. During peacetime a
more hands-off approach is possible, at least in high functioning countries,
and policy should be focused on securing strategic resources and industries
foremost. When total war is looming, it is necessary to bring the full weight
of the administrative state into action and coordinate society from top to
bottom. If less-than-total-war is the case, one can wait to enact such measures
or forego them entirely, but one must be judicious; waiting too long can cause
critical shortages of materiel in theater, though jumping the gun or pressing
unnecessary austerity will sow dissent and may lead to unintended consequences
in the political economy. The repeated stress on logistical matters is not
without reason – all matters of war should keep supply and production somewhere
in the background, getting at least some consideration.
Then
there is the matter of what we could call strategic
material. These are secondary goods, maintenance items, field rations,
transport and logistics vehicles and equipment, medical goods, and so forth.
Things which support the ability to fight
but do not directly assist in combat generally I would consider strategic in this instance. Modern
armies without these goods will likely perish, often in short order. One way to
conceive this is that shortages in strategic material drastically reduce
fighting morale and increase attrition in theater.
Tactical material on the other hand means, as you might
expect, things like weapons and ammo, fighting vehicles, and other combat kit –
that which lends directly to the fight.
Armies with insufficient tactical material can make do to some degree,
depending on the degree of the shortfalls; unlike with strategic stuff, these
things are usually not going to impact day-to-day survival off the frontlines,
though these shortages will result in reduced combat effectiveness which can be
measured by likelihood of tactical and operational failure, and casualty rates.
But to some degree, shortages in tactical material will not be necessarily or
immediately fatal – note that the Russians suffered shortages of such material
in both World Wars and while they surrendered in the First World War, they
prevailed in the Second.
Everything
that is actually made for purposes of war should be made with an eye toward a
few things: standardization and interchangeability, economy of scale,
durability, reasonable quality control, and cost. The first means that to the
greatest extent possible, everything should be fitted with as few hand-fitted
parts as possible, and items should be serviceable or easy to replace in the
field, as well that they be produced within close enough tolerances that parts
between similar items fit. The second regards production lines and means that
one should produce as few variations and derivatives of a thing as possible,
preferring to streamline and uniform production wherever possible, because that which is made in larger quantities is
easier to produce. This holds especially true for anything which requires
mass production.
Durability
and ruggedness is a necessity for military kit of all sorts generally to stand
up to field conditions and repeated use over time, so few things or ideally
nothing should be fragile in the field. It is also true that most things should
be made with an eye toward long-term use, because only very specifically
disposable items will actually be disposed of. Note the number of “disposable”
mess kits, magazines, or other kit which were in fact retained for years on end
in many armies. Reasonable quality control means both that quality standards
generally should be kept at a relatively high level for all kit, and also that
these standards must be maintained over time and regardless of production line,
batch, manufacturer, or whatever. It also means that one must keep in mind relatively high and balance quality with
the last: cost. Cost must be kept in line to assure as few cost overages and to
insure that the military can be supplied on
the whole, as excessive cost burden will lead to pockets of insufficiency.
This means that ruggedness and quality cannot be the only factors in designing
and producing items, as weight and expense matter as well.
One
must also consider readiness: essentially, the ability to call up forces at
short notice and address a variety of threats. The fewer forces one can summon,
the longer time required to call them, and the less variety of threats one can
counter, the less one can call one’s forces ready in general. The ideal is for
a large and highly professional standing army to be available with ample
stockpiles of supplies and equipment to supply them for upwards of 15 to 18
months in a high intensity war, and the means to expand production and
conscription on short notice. This is never the case in reality. Larger
militaries usually have to trade off some professionalism for their size, and
stockpiles tend to gather obsolete or expired items that have to be rotated out
regularly which makes militaries hesitant to invest in large stockpiles which
are rarely used; many countries also have problems mobilizing and expanding
their militaries on short notice.
Given
what has been addressed on doctrine, particularly nuclear doctrine, there is
some question as to how relevant mass armies are in the 21st
century. If the major powers are currently unwilling to field anything but air
and naval assets or special forces against each other, and most deployments in
third world theaters will be limited to perhaps ten to twenty divisions, there
is some question as to how necessary mass land forces are. Some have called
them flatly outdated and called for a complete overhaul of Western military
doctrine to reduce future reliance on armored and infantry divisions.
Nonetheless,
air and sea assets and logistics capabilities are the primary determinants of
force projection and how quickly readiness can scale on short notice. Neither
air nor naval forces can be quickly built; the nature of them, like
fortifications, armored forces, and infrastructure, need rather longer periods
to build up. It’s also the case that deploying forces overseas requires
adequate air and naval forces, and deploying large forces at any rate requires
adequate logistical throughput and infrastructure.
Communications,
command, control, and intelligence are key to a commander’s ability to issue
orders and for his subordinates to maintain peak effectiveness. I’ve touched on
each of them briefly across the whole of this piece, but wrapping them up here
is fitting. C4ISR is the ‘new’ initialism de jure, but C3I is easier to cover;
EW, computers, surveillance and recon are ultimately functions of
communications, command-control, and intelligence. Communications (abbrev.
comms), quite simply, is the means by which one conveys messages to
subordinates, but also by which news reaches superiors – two-way exchange of
[hopefully novel] information. Command and control flow from communications,
and they’re the means by which one gets subordinates to first know one’s will and then to carry it out. Intelligence is the lateral exchange of
information with the intention of concentrating and aggregating it at the top.
I
mentioned coordination problems prior. C3I is meant in no small part to try to
smooth those problems out, and one of the most vital aspects to that end is
communications. As mentioned prior, in the past (chronologically), it was
spoken or by hand gestures, flags, messengers, smoke and flare, and the
telephone. Now the encrypted radio and satellite feed are the go to wireless
communications. Encryption and decryption are vital to modern communications,
but further treatment of that belongs in EW since these are electronic
encryptions beyond the level of substitution or polyalphabetic ciphers one uses
to encode written messages. Modern communications extend the effective breadth
of the battlefield and allow for more effective fire support and inter-branch
and inter-disciplinary coordination. However, comms themselves have to be
coordinated and subject to the chain of command. Modern armies have entire
staff dedicated to communications and signals (SIGINT belongs under intelligence),
with accordingly large coordination centers to process traffic. More of this is
automated with satellite communications than in the past with analog radios.
Without comms, the commander is cutoff from his forces and the forces are
isolated from ‘big picture’ orders.
Strict
systems must be in place to insure that everyone does more or less what they
are supposed to. This is command and control. Properly, it is a system of
incentives, of ‘carrots and sticks’ by which everyone from senior officers to
enlisted men are encouraged to act as one body as much as possible. It is also
in part the training and doctrine that enables them to operate under periodic
instruction, retaining enough discipline to follow orders as they come but also
enough independence to maintain coherence if the flow of orders falter for some
time. Discipline is key and must be drilled repeatedly at all levels. Some
equipment figures into command and control, at least in part, and the whole
military hierarchy exists explicitly for this purpose as well; staff officers
serve as aides to commanders and intermediates to their subordinates, and
noncommissioned officers serve as technical personnel and advisors for field
officers and commanders in addition to assisting with field command. As
mentioned prior, it was modern communications and weaponry that forced the
adoption of muted or neutral colors for uniforms as in the black powder days,
uniforms were bright to remain as visible as possible for command-control
purposes; and these changes along with mass armies, and ever greater and less
manageable frontlines made the move toward small unit tactics necessary (stated
before). The campaign and tactical map of today are by far more sophisticated
than that of 200 or 300 years ago, as they are aggregated satellite data rather
than the painstaking result of cartographers charting surroundings but the
ground level idea is the same.
One
must also stress the importance of organization; military units, like society
broadly, submit to a hierarchical organization, and the degree to which the
hierarchy is clear, intelligible to navigate, and strictly observed influences
the success of a military.
Knowing
what one’s foes are up to while covering up one’s own activity isn’t half the
battle, but damn if it doesn’t feel close. Having proper insight can tell you
whether you have a chance at all, or where to concentrate your forces at a
critical time. This all falls under the umbrella of intelligence, which is
subdivided into signals (SIGINT), human intel (HUMINT), cryptography and
electronic warfare (addressed separately). SIGINT is the analysis of signals,
largely electronic signals and along with crypto and EW forms the majority of
intel activities. HUMINT is the ‘classic’ means of intel, gained by networks of
spies, informants, and double-agents. HUMINT whether in military intel or the ‘national
security’ side of things tends to rely heavily on informants foremost, and the
primary purpose of most HUMINT officers is to find informants of one stripe or
another.
EW
is tied at the waist to intelligence, but it’s such a large part of the modern
battlefield that it is definitely worth addressing separately. It includes
electronic cryptography, most wireless communications, RADAR and SONAR and
similar tech intended to detect movement (friend or foe), cyberwarfare,
infrared detection and camouflage and so forth. The critical importance of EW
really came to be in the Second World War with greater electromagnetic
emissions, and it was the Americans and British who realized this and
capitalized on the electronic warfare front first and most. The Americans
deployed large numbers of picket line destroyers which acted as mobile RADAR
platforms as well as bombers whose job was to drop chaff and carry EW equipment
over known enemy RADAR sites during sorties. In the modern day, EW is devolved
to a greater number of units with everything from destroyers and scout vehicles
to command and reconnaissance planes being fitted with EW equipment. All ‘secure’
electronic communications now tend to use some form of two-way encryption;
anything which lacks encryption is insecure by definition as it can be intercepted
and read with simple electronic monitoring, and this has been true since WWI.
IV.
Three
sets should draw the difference between operations level and strategic thinking
and force imbalances. The first one, a gulf between operational and strategic
thinking, is the US in South Vietnam. US and ARVN joint forces had continuous
operations-level successes from 1961-‘62 when the US started taking a more
proactive role until 1975 with the final withdrawal. The largest offensive from
the North, the Tet Offensive, proved to be a massive operational blunder for
the North Vietnamese forces. The US had air and naval superiority but had halted
bombing campaigns several times, especially during negotiations, allowing for
the North to improve their SAM coverage and other air defenses as well as
repair supply lines; there was also unwillingness to project northward for fear
of stirring conflict with the USSR and PRC. Sound strategy for a proper victory
would have dictated either lending greater material support to the South until
the Chinese and Russians were tired of supporting the North, or gambling that
the foreign support would wither away and the US would be more-or-less
unopposed but for advisers on the ground if the US invaded the North. Long-term
prosecution of a war requires the full supply, C3I, and morale-home support
complement to permit operations. Communist sympathizing press and a divided
elite undermine that and make proper strategy impossible. In short, the
operational wins of ARVN and US forces are ultimately undermined by grand
strategic failings.
The
second example is the US during the Second World War. I have all sorts of problems
with the war conduct in fact, of course, but let us set that aside for an
analysis of strategy. The US, Britain, and USSR as well as the remnants of
various exiled regimes banded together and actually drafted a common strategy
through memoranda, papers, law and treaty, and conferences; there were also the
very deep negotiations related to technology, resource and materiel sharing.
Contrast this with their rivals whose ‘Pact of Steel’ was largely informal, and
where the powers’ advisors and diplomats met one-on-one and the military
command and state both had veto on any proposals – consequently there were few
strategic aims or cooperative ventures of the ‘Pact of Steel’ or Axis powers.
The problems for Germany don’t stop there; in both wars, Germany was in a poor
geopolitical-grand strategy position with weak allies, and in the Second World
War, they had to rebuild most of their military from a poor hand under
Versailles in about eight years. Much of their interwar air and naval doctrine
is built around these shortcomings in supply and production.
We
think of Britain now as a second-rate power, but then they had arguably the
second best navy behind the US as well as a good industrial and supply base and
C3I abilities (I consider cryptography and electronic warfare generally under
the C3I umbrella). The USSR had the largest supply of manpower, untold raw
materials, and a big if spotty industrial base. Britain and the USSR also had
weaknesses to be sure, but these strengths far overwhelm those strengths of
Italy, Japan, or the minor Axis powers. A similar analysis applies roughly to
the First World War and Germany’s allies then as well, only Britain was a first-rate
naval power and a net creditor. Furthermore, the US instituted a policy of
streamlining military procurements in ’38-’39 in anticipation of future war,
and the result of doing this while maintaining high quality standards was overall
the best outfitted military in everything from hand radios and RADAR to fighters
and four-engine bombers, carriers and supply ships, trucks and tanks, and
flamethrowers and service rifles. The Axis to improve their strategic situation
would have had to coordinate better, avoid roping the US inasmuch as it was
possible, and deal with Britain one way or another before turning to the USSR.
Indeed, Germany’s grand strategy in both wars should have been rather similar;
avoid bringing in more enemies unless a
knockout blow of current rivals is virtually assured. At such a point as an
enemy seems wont to join regardless of one’s actions, one ought to try to bring
speedy end to the war without expanding its scope, and delay the entry of
potential outside enemies as long as possible.
The
quick and dirty lesson is that Germany was often times tactically and
operationally brilliant during the Second World War, and really during the
First World War as well, but failed to make it count on the grand strategy
field. While the political, tactical, and operational successes from 1938 to
1940 were stunning, 1941 was the start of a chain of rash decisions which
ultimately undermined the whole grand strategic effort by first adding a giant
foe with Operation Barbarossa and the USSR, and then a second in the US with
the declaration of war after Pearl Harbor. The Wehrmacht had not been crushed
until late ’43 with Kursk and the loss of most of Italy, but it’s difficult to
conceive of a way that they could have gotten out of mid ’42 either. Any of
their ‘Wunderwaffen’ projects could not have stemmed the tide either simply
because they would have needed, for instance, more advanced V2s to be produced
and deployed in sufficient numbers to swing things the other way, say, in the
Battle of Britain. All of those projects were too little and too late. Part of
the reason I suspect that they repeatedly went for these ‘gambles’* is because
of the weaker strategic-grand strategic position of Germany which means that
they cannot sustain a war of attrition to the extent the other side’s powers
can. *(e.g. Battle of Britain and Barbarossa in WW2, unrestricted submarine
warfare and 1918 spring offensive in WWI, etc.)
The
last of these will just be between the US as it is today and imagined rivals. First,
let’s imagine a ragtag rival similar to what the US has faced in Iraq or the
–stans. Because of deficiencies in a foe like this in basically every single
aspect of modern war, they cannot bring a military to bear on the battlefield
which will stand a chance against the US; even if outnumbered in theater three
or four to one, American forces will always have better training, small arms,
C3I, fire support, supplies, and air and naval superiority, and so forth down
the line. These deficiencies stem from human biodiversity type factors and lack
of social and economic capital at the foundation. Despite being outnumbered in
theater, the Americans can usually actually bring greater effective numbers in
any given engagement simply because of better coordination. A ragtag opponent
like this has to rely on so-called asymmetric tactics, where their goal is
ultimately to drive the cost of occupation or conquest to the point that
American forces (or whoever else) decides that the prize isn’t worth the asking
price. They cannot force decisive battles; in Vietnam, the irregular forces in
North Vietnam learned with the Tet Offensive that trying to do so against a
superior force like the US is a waste of resources. A strategic defeat of
Americans against ragtag, asymmetrical enemies comes not due to strings of
operational failures, but generally stalling or mediocre progress in meeting
strategic goals in the occupation and consequently, long-term demoralization.
But
the near-peer rivals have problems too. As above, first we’ll go with something
simple and fake to illustrate. The fake near-peer will have a smaller navy and
air force but a comparable army as far as scale goes. The first issue with the
fake near-peer is generally lack of practice; even those near-peers who do have
practice – namely Russia – it doesn’t
look good. Despite the middling success of the US in the past 30 or so
years, there haven’t been operational failures on the scale of what Russia’s
regular forces and proxy forces have suffered, for instance in the Caucasus or
Ukraine. The second is a lack of social stability; usually a strong military is
one of the main forces that buttresses the whole society in the near-peers,
without which the whole of the realm descends into tyrannies of petty crime and
poverty. Third, there is also usually mediocre to pathetic economic
development. The economy is the engine of production not only for the consumer
but for war industry. Fourth, there are usually all sorts of problems with
limited access to strategic industries and resources. In the modern day, these
include not only oil, rare minerals, arable land and food, and potable water,
but things like satellites and rockets, advanced microprocessor production and
semiconductors, and so on. One of the reasons that American strength has stayed
for the past 70 years is because it has maintained access to all of these
industries and resources either directly or through client and puppet states.
Even the loss of some strategic industry from the US abroad still has not
closed this vast gulf we see [yet]. Thus the fake near-peer is economically,
strategically, and geopolitically weaker – with a military force that has
little to no real experience, and substantially lesser air and sea capabilities
to boot. The goal of the fake near-peer (and the real ones) is to find subtle
ways to cut into American hegemony and bide its time while American power
declines, at which point they hope to swoop onto the world stage as a greater
power, ideally having avoided any open conflict with the US when it was at its
peak.
The
US and its sphere of influence, especially the EU and NATO – most of which I
consider puppets and clients of soft US imperial power at the moment – form a
massive extension of US military might. The important thing to note with the EU
and NATO is first that there are bases all over NATO countries from whence the
US can operate at a moment’s notice, and the second is to notice that every
NATO country has to submit to logistical standardization. Even if they have
lackluster arms production and stockpiles in fact, if tensions rise, there most
likely will be an 8 to 24 month escalation period where forces will be drawn up
and most of NATO will be a very large addition to the American manpower
reserves. If need be, a very large NATO army can be quickly raised, trained,
and armed with whatever stocks are on-hand, be the equipment from the US or
other members and it makes little difference. If you contrast this with the
counter-American sphere, where China-Iran-Russia are not really a coherent
group except that they all want more or less to counter American power for the
moment, there is no logistical standardization, no common interests aside from
momentary self-interest (namely, ‘against the US’), and no agreements to pool
manpower or share bases. The result is that the US has by far the greatest
force projection, something which it worked long and hard for and which will
probably wane over time but not immediately and not all at once.
Why
do I refer to all of these client-states and puppets operating at the behest of
the US? There are many names developed by the dissident right – dildolech, Cthluhu, the Cathedral, blue
empire, the globo-homo gayplex – and while all of these have problems (I
actually prefer the last the most), what they’re trying to get at is the post-war international order as an
expression of soft American power. That is, America is an empire that
operates more in the way of the Punic-Phoenician empires of old rather than
Rome. Despite the parallels we hear drawn to the Roman Republic (or empire) and
the Romano-Hellenic aesthetic actively cultivated by classicists from the 1600s
through the early 1900s in the West, including in the US, American imperial
power quickly abandoned ambitions of conquest and direct control such as Rome
did after westward expansion stopped and we gained territory from Spain in that
war. The US controls the world through NGOs, the IMF and World Bank, the CIA
and NSA, diplomatic protocols, multinationals, and our allies who I generally
believe are essentially a combination of puppets and clients. At the stage of
the world we are in now, the only independent actors on the world stage are the global hegemon (the US) and the regional
pretenders (China, Iran, Russia). The EU and NATO are extensions of US power in effect.
There
is a further question: if the US is this big gay world hegemon from our vantage
and there are competing power centers, why do so many countries partner up with
American power? I think the answer is pretty simple once you dig deep: the
alternatives are shit. The Chinese have relatively pathetic power projection
for the most part, and there’s no evidence that
they would actually make a better overlord. Stick with the devil you know. Sub-Saharans
may be glad to take them on, but no one else is begging to become Chinese
clients. Iran and Russia are both mediocre to anemic economically in addition
to their lack of force projection. While both are trying to improve their
projection – Iran by being patron of the
Shi’a and having a roadway their troops and supplies can travel from Tehran
to Damascus without interference, and Russia by being patron of the Slavs and becoming the pipeline of oil and LNG to
Eastern Europe as well as gaining more access to good ports and forward bases.
Still, Iran and Russia suffer similar problems to the Chinese; outside of
Shi’ites, no one wants what Iran peddles, and outside of a few Orthodox Eastern
Europeans, no one wants Russian meddling – and even most Eastern Europeans are
tired of Russian shit and would actually prefer to hop on the globo-homo
gayplex simply because of the promise of anti-corruption measures and better
material gains. (High corruption is one of the means by which Russia maintains
their power in my opinion.) I also think it worth noting that while the US and
the rest of the West suffers from a great deal of nihilism and
technodystopianism in the onslaught of hypermodernity, the pretender powers are
not immune to this and in fact seem to succumb to it at least in fits and
starts. The US so thoroughly brought its actual, viable competition to heel
between 1945 and 1955 or so that until US world hegemony collapses outright, I
don’t think you’re going to see mass defection from the post-war international
order.
Furthermore,
the near-peers (China-Iran-Russia) have the problem that none of these actually
rival the US in terms of sheer military power. China may have a larger nominal
manpower reserve, but much of their military does street patrols and other
domestic work which is vital to the national stability of China; their social
credit system is an attempt to reduce the need of the military to maintain
social cohesion, but that is a long-term project which is yet to yield much by
way of real results. The US has a very bloated military-industrial complex, but
the acquisitions process still produces effective, quality standard issue
equipment almost without exception, even if cost-overages are now no longer
exceptional but normal. None of them rival the formal C3I capabilities of
American-NATO forces. None of them have a naval or air force which can actually
go toe-to-toe with American power either, and so they have all joined up to
focus on building cost-effective countermeasures to American force projection
such as anti-ship guided missiles and newer SAM.
To
recap pithily: Small arms and infantry
while vital, have serious limitations and must be viewed as parts of an
integrated system. Similarly, all
fire support and force multiplication must be viewed as means to improve the
odds of operational success. Strategic
aims must be stated clearly and groundwork of supply must be well established
for operations to be possible. Tactical
and operational success must lend toward strategic ends. Naval and air forces exist in addition to
their fire support roles as area denial and force projection. Modern technology qualitatively changed
warfare since the Renaissance on the land, sea, and now in the air. All military assets require steady
production for everything in the supply chain, including stockpiles and spares.
Readiness is measured in how long it would take to draw up existing reserves,
or expand new reserves, given realistic production in said time; another
consideration is how quickly forces can be deployed. Lastly, the importance of
C3I – that is, Communications, Command, Control, and Intelligence.
These
aren’t the only aspects of war. These are the fundamentals of modern strategy
as I see it. At a later time, I’ll get more into geopolitics and small unit
tactics.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiCtdi5nCoA (Evola himself, interview in French –
ignore the annoying text boxes and music)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YqKf3v2aPs (Bowden on Evola)
http://colonialwarsct.org/colonial_military_warfare.htm
https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-I
These
are generally good background for period warfare for ‘the modern age’ from
about 1600 to 1900. ‘The Great War’ channel on YouTube is a good week-by-week
retelling of war history (for the layman) one hundred years back, even if it
tends sentimentally left. ‘Military History Visualized’ gives good primers on
tactics, strategy, and organization.
http://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/wwii/woundblstcs/chapter1.htm#table14
Other
data is actually hard to find, but read period accounts like Storm of Steel and With the Old Breed (two books I did read, which is why I mention
them) to get an idea of the effects of indirect fire versus small arms fire in
modern war. I’m including the World Wars in the umbrella modern war for now.
[4] https://www.mtu.edu/arotc/cadet-portal/docs/fm3-21infantryrifle-sqpl.pdf (Official US Army doc.)
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/accp/in0503/ch1.htm (Strategy-policy think tank.)
http://www.cs.amedd.army.mil/FileDownloadpublic.aspx?docid=6ab094ec-aa0d-4402-8441-4ff5115bb56e
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3604-combat-leaves-soldiers-drunk-with-fatigue/
http://canadianmilitaryhistory.ca/broken-in-battle-a-look-at-battle-exhaustion/
[6] https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/mcgrath-fire-for-effect.pdf
http://www.nids.mod.go.jp/english/event/forum/pdf/2014/09.pdf (this and the next discuss AirLand
battle and its replacement)
https://warontherocks.com/2017/06/multi-domain-battle-airland-battle-once-more-with-feeling/
https://calhoun.nps.edu/bitstream/handle/10945/43177/Porch_Military_Culture_2000.pdf;sequence=1
(Overall
decent read, one major error about tank destroyer doctrine – US tank destroyers
were a primarily defensive, cost-savings stopgap, end up getting used as
general purpose armor and after the war concept was abandoned because everyone
realized that it’s better to produce more tanks)
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a242215.pdf
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2005/RAND_MG253.pdf
[8]https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/oplan.htm
https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~tpilsch/INTA4803TP/Articles/Three%20Levels%20of%20War=CADRE-excerpt.pdf (‘three levels of war’ rundown)
http://armchairgeneral.com/tactics-101-the-importance-of-mission-analysis-in-planning.htm
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791279/obo-9780199791279-0060.xml (short definition of tactics and a
reading list that looks decent)
[naval
doctrine] https://warontherocks.com/2017/07/russias-new-and-unrealistic-naval-doctrine/
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a527764.pdf
Strategy
Reading List:
The
Power Broker, Caro
The
48 Laws of Power, Greene
The
33 Strategies of War, Greene
Strategy:
2nd, Liddell Hart
The
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Kennedy
God
and Gold, Mead
The
Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, Luttwak
The
Irony of American History, Niebuhr
Clausewitz
Machiavelli
Art
of War, van Creveld
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