The Origins of Maneuver Warfare and its Implications for Air Power. (2000)
William S. Lind
Having just come from a two-day conference arranged by the Military Academy in Oslo, marking their 250th anniversary year, during the course of which we received a number of high-level presentations from various senior people in the Ministry of Defense, it seems to me that you have a somewhat interesting situation here in Norway.
Your government has adopted maneuver warfare as your military doctrine without having the slightest idea of what it is. The Military Academy has quite correctly been attempting to wrestle with this problem from the bottom-up, rather than from the topdown, and indeed after many years of trying to promote maneuver warfare in the US military, particularly the US Marine Corps, I can say that is the only way real change happens. So from that basis, I am particularly glad to be able to speak to cadets. It is an old saying in the military that the only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is getting an old one out, and the good thing about cadets is they do not have any old ideas.
What I would like to do today is talk about what I call the three generations of modern war. There is a fourth, which is where I think things are going, and that is what we spent a great deal of time talking about in Oslo. An hour is not really enough time to cover all four and leave time for questions, so I am going to talk about the first three, and the third is maneuver warfare.
In order to understand maneuver warfare, we need to understand more than maneuver warfare itself. We need to try to develop some historical context, so we can see where it comes from and, indeed, see where we are ourselves in terms of how we think about, and conduct, war. The framework I use for this is what I call the three generations of modern war. For you Hegelians out there, “generations” is short hand for dialectically qualitative shifts, and working with the US Marines, to use the phrase “dialectically qualitative shift” guarantees that the entire audience at that point is reading the label on their beer bottle. So we have tried to simplify the terminology.
The modern period really begins with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. What happens with the Peace of Westphalia is that in Europe initially, and then slowly in the rest of the world, the state establishes a monopoly on war. War from then on is carried out by state forces - by armies, navies and eventually air forces – that are the instruments of government and the instruments of the state. That to us is so automatic that it is our whole image of war. But it is important to remind ourselves, particularly as we look to the future where I think this is all changing, that for most of history that was not true.
Through most of history many different entities fought wars: families fought wars, clans fought wars, tribes fought wars, cities fought wars and companies fought wars. Britain did not conquer India: India was conquered by the British East India Company, a business enterprise that had an army and a fleet. They fought wars for many different reasons, not simply as politics extended by others means, as Clausewitz says. They fought to kill the enemy men, rape his women, sell his children into slavery, and take his land. That is real war! Interestingly, we see that real wars are starting to come back, including in some places where Norwegians have been lately, like Bosnia and Kosovo.
But war in the state framework is what shapes the first three generations. War is between essentially “like forces”: armies against armies, navies against navies and air forces against air forces. Forces with uniforms, ranks, flags and all the other nice stuff that we think of as characteristic of the military The first generation of modern war is roughly from 1650 to the middle of the 19th century, 1850-1860, and we are all familiar with its basic tactics: they are linear - they are the tactics of line and column.
The object is to bring your soldiers, armed primarily with smoothbore muskets, up face-toface with another line of soldiers in different uniforms, and bang away at each other until somebody decides to go home. Navies fight very much the same way because the navies developed their tactics starting about 1650 when the British Navy under the Commonwealth was taken over by generals. They were indeed called generals at sea, and they all knew what a battlefield looked like. It all looked like a line, so they put their ships into lines too. This battlefield of order yields a military culture of order, and therein lies its importance for us. All of the things that we think of as defining a military: it is a very orderly place, with careful gradation of ranks and uniforms and different insignias, medals to denote what combat experience, or these days, non-combat experience one may have. There is a very careful distinction between officers, NCOs and enlisted men. The salutes, all of the things that mark a really incredibly orderly culture, come out of this first generation. They are consistent with the environment in which militaries have to operate. The battlefield of order yields the culture of order, and the culture of order functions very well on the battlefield of order.
There are a few exceptions in the first generation, as General Braddock found at Fort Duquesne, but mostly this is the case. The problem, which is the central defining problem that militaries all over the world are facing today, and have been facing now for 150 years, is that starting from about the middle of the 19th century, the battlefield starts to become less and less orderly, a progression that continues in our days. The culture of order that marks the military is increasingly in contradiction with the environment in which it has to operate. The culture of order increasingly inhibits the ability of armies, navies and air forces to function in an ever more disorderly environment. The culture and the environment become a contradiction. The story of military doctrine and military thought for about the last 150 years is essentially the story of various attempts to come to grips with this contradiction.
People begin to notice the breakdown of the battlefield of order in the middle of the 19th century. Wars like the American Civil War make it pretty clear that you just cannot perform the old 18th century Napoleonic tactics anymore. If you do, you get killed, in battles like Cold Harbor in 1864, when Grant tried to use typical Napoleonic offensive tactics against entrenched Confederate riflemen. The Union casualties were higher proportionally than at the Battle of the Somme. The result was a disaster and country after country sees this happen, and if you look through the military journals in the latter part of the 19th century, in Europe particularly, you find everybody talking about this. The question is what to do about it and a lot of the debate revolves around the question of whether you can trust the troops. One school says: “In the face of this firepower we have got to go to some kind of open order, we have got to disperse, we cannot stand there packed in masses anymore”. The other side says: “You have got to pack them in masses, because you have got to stand right in front of them or right behind them, and if you do not they run away, because you cannot trust them”.
The effect of the debate is that most European armies go into war in 1914 still pretty much doing what they would have done in 1814, that is with packed columns of men. There are a few exceptions: the British have learned some unpleasant lessons this way in the Boer War. In one battle eighteen Boer riflemen defeated two British Guard Battalions.
There were also some German tactics that were decentralized. There were some German units that did not fight in line and column, but a great many did, and the result for everybody was an absolute catastrophe. France almost loses the war in the first three months, attacking in blue coats and red trousers, directly into the machine-guns. She loses 300,000 dead in three months. The Germans have similar experiences in battles like Loos. The Russians, of course, have an absolute catastrophe at Tannenberg; over and over and over again people are finding that the old stuff does not work. The result is that the battlefields in the West just grind to a halt in trench warfare. By the end of 1914 the men are in the trenches, nothing is moving and from then on the question that everybody asks themselves is “How do we get things moving again?”, because sitting in trenches does not have a lot of potential for winning a war. Two fundamental answers come out of World War One, and they are respectively the second and the third generation of modern war. Both are very much with us today.
Modern armies are very much reflections of what we see by 1918. The second generation comes from the French. The French doctrine in 1914 is a catastrophe, it says that all that matters is élan vital, and if you charge with enough fervor into the enemy firepower, you will win the day. Well, again, they almost lose the war, but at least they are smart enough to change. The British never really change, at least not until 1918. The French change pretty fast, they very quickly say: “Well, that did not work so we have got to do something else instead”.
One of the big surprises to everybody in 1914 is indirect artillery fire on the battlefield. Previously indirect fire could only be seen in sieges, and almost all the guns, like the famous French 75, were designed for direct fire. But everybody discovered quickly that if you put the gun behind a hill and sent a guy with a telephone to correct the fire from the fall of the shot, then it is a lot harder for the enemy to knock the gun out. So very quickly the battlefield becomes dominated by indirect artillery fire. 80% of the casualties in World War One are due to artillery fire. The French believe that this is obviously the secret for developing new tactics and they build their new tactics, the second generation of modern war, around artillery indirect firepower. The French sum up their doctrine as “the artillery conquers and the infantry occupies”.
By the end of World War One they have come up with some very carefully worked out processes, methods, step-by-step approaches, for both the attack and the defense. On the attack you use lots of artillery and then with a very careful co-ordination of all the elements, and a careful constant coverage by the artillery fire, the infantry moves forward very slowly to take an objective that is very near their initial frontline. It is a very short-range attack and time is not very important.
What is important is the co-ordination and synchronization of the artillery, the machineguns, the infantry, the aviation, and so on. The general handles it all. He sits in his headquarters with his maps and his telephones, “with his hands as on the handles of a fan”, reaching out to all his different elements, controlling everything in this magnificent symphony for which a very careful score has been written. The orders are very detailed and very controlling. The whole doctrine is very ordered.
On the defense, it is very similar. If the enemy threatens to break through, you bring reserves in from the flanks, you close the breaches. You get in front of him, and again you call in massive artillery firepower, and you very slowly and methodically withdraw, pouring in the artillery until he cannot move forward any further. It is not a doctrine of great results, but the French by this point had long ago given up the idea that you could get great results on a modern battlefield. The effect of firepower was just too great, and the French doctrine is mesmerized by the power of modern firepower, particularly artillery.
The good thing about this solution is that it preserves the culture of order. In the face of the growing disorder of the battlefield, the French seem to have found a way to impose order on the chaos, to once again make sure that all these careful distinctions are maintained. A little book on the fall of France was written in 1942, by a French officer who had been caught up in it, Daniel Vilfroy, who knew what he was looking at.
He had been an exchange student at the German Kriegsakademie before the war. He spoke about how for the French, in their training and in their schools, everything was a matter of following the steps and the prescribed order, of knowing exactly what phase you were in at every time, and again the development of the very detailed order. He said we only forgot two things: we forgot the enemy and we forgot time. But the very comfortable illusion was maintained that the culture of order had triumphed, and it seemed to work. In World War One the French actually carried the burden of the war on the Western front. They were exhausted by 1917, but by then the fresh American manpower is arriving, and here is where it becomes interesting from an American perspective, because the American military pours into Europe in 1917 and 1918 as a frontier constabulary. Since 1865 we have been fighting Indians, and at first the American commander, General Pershing, says, “We are not going to learn from these Europeans, we are going to show them how to do it”. Both the Allies and the Germans observing the first American attacks said that “nobody has done anything that stupid since we did it in 1914”, because we send blocks of men into the firepower. We are taking 50% casualties in a division in one attack, and we turn to the French and ask them to teach us. And they say: naturellement.
We translated the French manuals verbatim into English, and we issued them as our own. We established a staff school staffed by French officers at Longwy, where the American staff officers learned the French methods. We got French instructors into our units and we absorbed wholesale this French methodical battle, bataille conduite, “conduct the battle like the conductor conducts the orchestra”. This influence persisted between the wars. In 1930, when the American Army felt it needed a doctrine for operational art, it simply took the French manual, on what they called “grand tactics,” and translated it word for word without the slightest change. There was not even a footnote to acknowledge that it was from the French. It was issued as the American manual, which explains why the US Army had no operational art in World War Two.
Air power, of course, is also coming along in World War One. Air power seems to fit very nicely into the same framework. It is another way, from this perspective, to deliver firepower, and what the battle is all about is firepower. So in addition to artillery we can now reach perhaps to longer range than the guns can reach, because we can send bombers over, and they can add their ordnance to the firepower. That view of air power, that war is simply tonnage of ordnance on target, is very much with us today. It is what we call strategic bombing. It is what we just tried with spectacular lack of results in Kosovo, where 37,000 sorties of the most modern aircraft ever seen, all equipped with the latest PGMs, destroy thirteen tanks. It is at the heart of the very existence of the US Air Force, because the argument the Air Force used to get its independence from the Army after World War Two is winning through air power. Winning by pure bombardment of tonnage dropped from airplanes. Interestingly, even the Air Force’s own Strategic Bombing Survey after World War Two said that it did not work, but that has by no means stopped us from continuing to try it.
On the other side of the trench-line something different was happening, and the difference actually goes back long before World War One. It goes back to the time of Napoleon, when in 1806 Prussia, all on its own, decided to fight the French. Napoleon proceeded to beat them at Jena- Auerstadt, and the Prussians suffered one of the most crushing defeats in military history. There was a little group of young officers back in Berlin headed by a Hanoverian named Scharnhorst, who nobody liked because his uniform was always a mess and he read books. He had been warning that this was going to happen, together with a young lieutenant called Clausewitz. They had been preparing for this eventuality, or this certainty, and when it did happen, they were put in power, briefly, for a couple years, to make some significant reforms. One of them was the creation of the famous German General Staff. Another, which is less often noted by historians, is the basis, the root of modern maneuver warfare. They changed what was required of a Prussian officer. Previously the Prussian officer like every other officer had been required above all to follow orders, but they said: “Not any more”. From now on the Prussian officer is expected to get the result the situation requires, regardless of orders, and he is expected to think on his own what that result should be. He of course references orders, and they changed how the order was written, so the order now did not tell you what to do. It told you what result was wanted, and not only from you, but at least two levels up from you - what the unit as a whole was trying to accomplish. You were to reference that, but above all you were to look out there, think about what you were seeing and act on your own, so as to get the result the situation requires.
This change came very rapidly. At Waterloo in 1815 one of these young officers, who suddenly instead of being a lieutenant was a general – this is what happens after defeat - was attached to Wellington. He was with the English Dragoons, and he saw a terrific opportunity for the Dragoons to charge and decide the outcome of the battle, but nothing happened. He could not understand, so he rode over to the British Dragoon Commander and said “Why are you not attacking”? The British commander replied that “I cannot, I do not have orders”. Von Müfflling was appalled, and that night at the ball he told the story to Wellington, and Wellington said the Dragoon Commander was quite right. If he had acted without orders he would have had him courtmatialled. You already see a very great cultural difference between the Prussians and everybody else, and it is the difference that lies at the heart of methodical battle, the second generation of war, and maneuver warfare, the third generation of war, and that is the difference between inward focus and outward focus. Are you focused inwards, on orders, procedures, processes, rules, and “the sixteen step staff planning process”, which is the curse of the US Marine Corps? Or are you focused outwards on the enemy, the situation, and the result? That cultural difference, “focus inward - focus outward” was the basis of why the Germans came up with a very different solution to the deadlock of the trenches in World War One.
They developed this outward focus through the course of the 19th century. It became, for example, routine to give junior officers, like yourselves, problems in war-games that could only be solved by disobeying orders. The German fitness report considered it a compliment to say “this man is a difficult subordinate”. They spoke of the inherited right of the Lieutenant to make rash, brash mistakes, not any kind of mistake, only rash, brash mistakes. The Lieutenant who sat there and could not make a decision, well, his brief military career would be lived out in the logistic services. But the Lieutenant who went too far, who was too bold and took too many risks, he would have to learn judgment over time, but in the meantime there was at least something to build on, because he was willing to make decisions and take action. He had “Verantwortungsfreudichkeit”. It is one of those wonderful German words that stretches across the whole blackboard and that translates, literally, as “joy in taking responsibility”.
When 1914 ends, the Germans are in the trenches with everyone else, and what does an army like this do? It does not sit there waiting to be told the answer. Everybody starts experimenting. When they find something that works, they do not only pass the information up the chain, they pass it laterally, because this type of military has a lot of lateral communication. They start evolving some things that are working, and out of this comes wholly new tactics. It is the first non-linear tactics, the first break with the battlefield of order that really accepts the disorder and welcomes in many ways the disorder of the modern battlefield.
Briefly, tactically, it first manifested itself in 1917 with the so-called let-them-walk- right-in defense. When the Allies attacked, instead of meeting the Germans at the trench line, they just found a few outposts. As they penetrated further, the outposts got a little more dense, designed for 360 degree defense built around a machinegun. These started to pull apart the momentum of the attack. The attacker would crest a hill and come down the other side. Now German masked batteries would open up and his own observers could no longer see him to support him, and this further pulled apart the momentum of the attack. At the right moment, and it required somebody up at the front to decide what that moment was, the real strength of the German defense came to bear in a counterattack. Not a counterattack to push the enemy out - modern tactics are not shoving tactics - but rather to go deep back to the original line and come around and encircle the whole attacking unit.
The British were stunned, because for the first time whole battalions were going into the attack and nobody was coming back. They were not necessarily dead, but taken prisoners. The whole nature of the defense had changed from holding a piece of ground, to, just as in the offence, destroying the enemy. General Hermann Balck, probably the finest tank tactician of World War Two, who saved the whole front after Stalingrad in a series of defensive actions on the Chir river with the 48th Panzer Corps, went off as a lieutenant in 1914. He had seen it all and knew what he was looking at, since his father was a premier writer on German tactics before World War One. I asked him, “When did the change occur that we think of as Blitzkrieg, and what was it”? He said it all occurred in 1914-1918. Blitzkrieg was conceptually complete by 1918. He said the change was that when we went to war in 1914 our objective was to kill the enemy soldier and blow up the enemy piece of equipment, (strategic air power is the same thing). He said as the war went on our objective changed to taking enemy units as a whole out of play, and as the war went on further our horizon grew bigger.
In 1918, for the first time since 1914, the Germans go on the offensive in the West, in the great “Operation Michael” in March of 1918. The Allies are pretty confident. They have tried to attack for years, and are getting nowhere. Only it does not work that way, because the new German attacks do not try to push a line forward. Rather you have a little group of soldiers, “storm-troopers” we call them, essentially a squad built around a light machinegun and a trench mortar, so you have combined arms at squad level. They are not looking for where the enemy is, to engage him, but for where he is not, to go around him. To find or create little holes, blow through him and move as fast as possible deep into the enemy rear. Simultaneously some units roll up behind the enemy to collapse him from the rear and others continue the attack with unlimited objective into his depth: into his artillery, into his logistics, into his headquarters, etc. Instead of the direction of advance being set by some general in headquarters, it is eventually set from the bottom-up; wherever these guys find or create a hole, they call others in behind them. So it flows like water, as Liddell Hart writes, always seeking the path of least resistance, flowing through the enemy defenses, and it solves the riddle of the trenches.
In 1918 when the Germans attack the British 5th Army they push it back 40 miles. In fact they destroy it, there is no 5th Army, and everybody is stunned. This is Blitzkrieg. In 1940 the tanks make a critical difference, because what loses the war for Germany in 1918 wins it in 1940. In 1918 the Germans are foot-infantry, moving forward with horse-drawn logistics and artillery over ground that has been churned into a moonscape by all the shelling, and the Allies can shift reserves laterally by rail faster than the Germans can move forward on foot. In 1940 the tracked vehicles in the panzer divisions can move forward faster than the allies can shift the reserves, which are still moving by rail.
Operational mobility differences are very important in maneuver warfare. Tanks make the difference, but all the concepts, all the thoughts that we think of as Blitzkrieg are there by 1918. This is maneuver warfare, and this too has its equivalent in aviation. Just as strategic bombing is the pure French war-by-bombardment, so also air power has its relationship to the use of firepower in maneuver warfare. Firepower as it was used in maneuver warfare by the Germans in World War One, which included aviation, was there to facilitate movement. It was there to raise tempo and facilitate movement, not just to blow things up, and that meant it had to be very, very intimately linked with what the guy on the ground was doing, which is the infantryman and later the tanker. The great German artillery genius of World War One, General Bruchmüller, before an assault would visit each of the infantry units, and he would have a discussion with them and he would explain what we can do for you and what we cannot do for you. Here are the kind of opportunities that we are going to create. Here is where you need to work to take advantage of this, and it was all worked together. Not like the French as a score of a piece of music, but with a shared understanding of what each could do, and how the pieces could fit together, not synchronization, but harmonization. So that instead of being an orchestra with a score, they could be like a jazz group jamming.
Air can also follow this path, and has historically very often done so. The Germans developed whole “Staffel” of “Kampfflugzeuge” in World War One, which were ground support aircraft, that is special aircraft types. They had a machinegun pointing down from the bottom of the airplane, so that the gunner could fire down into the trenches. They were very effective, they would come in very, very low, they would fly the contours of the land, fly right over the trenches, particularly when the Allies started to withdraw and wanted to start moving in columns; these aircraft made it very difficult to do that.
World War Two was very similar. The Germans used aircraft to facilitate movements. When Guderian needs to get across the Meuse at Sedan, and has problems with the French artillery, he sets relays of Stukas that are constantly diving on the artillery. Even when they are out of bombs they are diving on the artillery to keep the gunners away from the guns. They understand it is not just blowing things up, it is time. It is timing. It is an integrated action with what the guys on the ground are doing. In the book Air Power and Maneuver Warfare it is pointed out that the most effective air force in World War Two is the one with the worst planes and the worst pilots, the Soviet Air Force. Why? Because the Soviets understood correctly that the German defense at the operational level depended on shifting operational reserves quickly, laterally. Well, if you are going to move fast you have got to move on the roads. So they focused their air power on attacking German columns that were moving on the roads. It did not destroy those columns, but it slowed them down, and the loss of time meant that the Soviet ground forces penetrated before the defense could shift and coalesce. Air power used that way, in this very intimate relationship with what is happening on the ground, has consistently been important and effective. The problem is that it means you airmen do not have your own show. It works against the notion of the independent air force that can essentially do what it wants to do, and live a life independent from the ground force. An effective air force is one that is a support air force. It is not a show on its own.
It is not doing its own thing. It is married so intimately with the ground forces that when we asked the greatest ground support pilot of all time, the famous Stuka pilot Hans Ulrich Rudel, what piece of advice he would most like to pass on to his successors in his business, he said always think of yourself as a soldier, not a flyer. So not surprisingly, this message is one that most air forces have done their utmost to ignore.
Now I want to look a little more behind the tactics of maneuver warfare and specifically the tactics of aviation. We have been trying to revive some of this in the Marine Corps recently with an effort called “Jäger Air”, and we have some Marine pilots who are very, very interested in ground warfare. It is an up-hill battle, because most, and particularly the Marine aviation school MAWTS, are devoted to independent air power.
But what I want to do is look beyond that to the common culture that aviators and soldiers must share if maneuver warfare is to work, because the whole point of my talk here is that maneuver warfare is not a replacement formula. What maneuver warfare is, is a whole different organizational culture, and if it is not that, then it is just, as it is currently in Norwegian defense documents, a nice phrase that nobody knows the meaning of and that in the end is not going to make a difference. As I mentioned, the origins of maneuver warfare, in the German Army, lie in a cultural change that begins in the time of Napoleon. This cultural change is deepened in World War One, because before the war, only the officer had this kind of initiative, only the officer got mission type orders.
During the war, that broke down. By 1918 the commander of the “storm troop” is a corporal. By 1918 mission type orders and the culture of initiative had to extend down to the most junior soldier, and this was enshrined in the German post-war regulations. To understand the culture we need to start, as I did at the beginning, with the nature of war. Maneuver warfare accepts that war is not an orderly business. It is fog and friction, uncertainty, rapid change, ambiguity, incomplete and often wrong information. There is no such thing as information dominance, there is no such thing as a crystal ball that through technology is going to allow you to know what the enemy is doing. You cannot even find out for the most part what your own side is doing. That is inherent to the nature of war, that is the automatic result of what we call “the independent hostile will of the enemy”, a buzzword phrase that means the other guy keeps doing stuff you never expected.
The object, from a maneuver warfare perspective, is not to overcome this by imposing order on it, but rather to use it to your own advantage, to be able to operate better in this environment than your opponent. This is done, not by staffs creating elaborate plans, but by commanders at every level from the most junior to the most senior making decisions on the spot on their own responsibility. We are back again to “Verantwortungsfreudichkeit”. The key to turning this chaos to your advantage is to be able to operate, not only better than your opponent, but constantly faster than your opponent. Maneuver warfare understands that warfare, not just formal warfare but many types of conflict, is less about space than time. Tempo itself is a weapon, and often the most powerful weapon, and ironically our best understanding of this comes from a fighter pilot and from air combat - the work of Colonel John Boyd and the concept of the OODA loop.
John Boyd, as a young officer, as a captain, invented the energy management tactics that are now used by every air force in the world. The Germans had actually discovered them during World War Two, but never wrote them down. He codified it mathematically and made it the basis for air force training and doctrine. John also had that characteristic of the German officer of being a somewhat difficult subordinate. He was called back as a captain to brief the Chief of Staff of the Air Force on his work, and John was always rather sensitive about doing something and not really being able to explain it all. This took some time, and on their way in to the Chief’s office he was told that the Chief could only give him fifteen minutes, and John said: “Then I will not brief him”.
John went on looking at fighter combat, particularly fighter combat in Korea, to develop what he called the OODA loop. He noticed that by most conventional measures the MiG-15 was actually superior to the F- 86, yet in fact we got a 10 to 1 kill ratio on the F-86 over the MiG-15.
The question was why. He talked to pilots about this, and he found two very subtle but key superiorities. First, it was much easier to see out of the F-86, which had a bubble canopy instead of a faired canopy. Next, the F-86’s high-powered hydraulic controls allowed it to change from one maneuver to another much more quickly than the MiG.
The F-86 pilot would put the MiG through a series of different maneuvers, and each time it took longer for the MiG pilot to figure out what was going on, and to adjust to it. That time differential could be converted into positional advantage, and the F-86 ended up on the MiG’s tail. John generalized this, and this is really sort of the core explanation of what is going on in maneuver warfare, as the OODA-loop. He said that in every conflict, people go through repeated cycles of observing, orienting, deciding and acting, and whoever can go through the cycle consistently fastest gains a tremendous advantage.
Let us say that the cadet in the front row here and I are in a conflict of some sort. We start by observing: with own eyes and ears, from military intelligence reports, radar and so forth. On the basis of that observation we orient, we make a mental snap-shot or picture of our relationship to each other in this time and place, which may or may not be accurate, which immediately shows you the importance of deception. On the basis of that mental snap-shot, we decide to do something, and then we act.
Now, what happens if the cadet can consistently go through this cycle faster than I can?
By the time I am ready to act he is doing something different from what I observed, and my actions are irrelevant. We cycle again. Again I am irrelevant, but now by a larger margin in time. Each time we cycle I fall further and further behind, and at a certain point it hits me that nothing that I can do will work, and at that point I tend to do one out of two things. I tend to panic, or I tend to give up.
This is exactly what happened to the French in 1940, when French second generation warfare and German maneuver warfare meet. Everything that the French do is right, but it is always too late. The margin by which it is too late grows steadily through the course of the campaign. At one point the British liaison officer reported back to his headquarters that he was with the French 9th Army, which was at a critical position where the Germans were going to come through. The staff is in tears, the general is in hysterics, and no one can even answer the phone. At that point, they had not even suffered their first casualty, but they knew it was over, because their method could not operate at a tempo fast enough to match the Germans. If all you know is your method, if it does not work, it is over. All you have learned is your method, all you have learned is your multi-step-process, your internal focus, and it can not adjust to a tempo which is driven faster than your method can accommodate.
Now the question is how do you keep up the tempo? One answer is operational art. Operational art is the art of deciding when and where to fight, and when and where not to fight, on the basis of what you are trying to do strategically. It is the linkage between tactics and strategy, something that is often missing in air operations. I remember a friend of mine who was flying over Vietnam. After over 500 missions over the Ho Chi Minh trail, he said to his navigator that there has got to be somebody back in the Pentagon who knows how many missions it takes for the enemy finally to give up!
Air power, and attrition warfare generally, try to win strategically by accumulating tactical successes, by counting how many things they have hit. It is the body-count business, and the US headquarters for Kosovo was lying through its hat, saying how many tanks they had bombed and so forth. Maneuver warfare perceives it differently. Maneuver warfare tries to get as directly as possible at the strategic center of gravity of the enemy, by economizing on engagements. Why? Because even victorious engagements slow you down - you have dead, you have wounded, you get damaged and broken equipment, you are out of fuel, you are out of bullets and the troops are tired.
You have got to slow down, you have got to pause. So operational art is essentially the art of trying to fight only when and where it really benefits you strategically. A good example comes from the 1940 campaign when Guderian got across the Meuse at Sedan. There were strong French forces moving up from the south, and he could have stayed there. He could have fought them and probably beaten them, having destroyed a couple of French divisions. Instead he used a minimum force to hold his crossing and threw everything towards the English Channel, because he knew that was what would be decisive strategically, splitting the Allied forces in Belgium from those remaining in France. That was far more significant than accumulating some tactical victories over some French divisions, and that was operational art. An enemy, if he is good, is often going to make you fight when you do not want to, but your operational art is trying to minimize fighting because fighting slows you down.
From an air power standpoint, air power again cannot play a critical role on its own. Air power has to be linked intimately to what is happening on the ground. In one of these “Jäger Air” experiments we gave a Light Armor Vehicle (LAV) company a couple of navy trainers to act as this kind of aviation with infantrymen in the backseat controlling the aircraft.
As with German two-seater aircraft in World War One, the pilot was not the captain of the aircraft. The observer was the captain of the aircraft. They would fly over, they would say there is an enemy over here, there is an enemy here, you just missed a turn you wanted to make because with the dust cloud you could not see the road. The ground company commander said he could move twice as fast with twice the security that he could before. That is the kind of pay-off that you could get with aircraft in maneuver warfare, by supporting. The aircraft is not going off on its own and doing its own thing.
Obviously reconnaissance, the first job given to aviation in World War One, and in many ways still the most important, plays a critical role here, but most air forces consider reconnaissance to be very low on their priorities, because no one makes ace by bringing back photographs. The role of being able to see over the next hill is absolutely critical for the guy on the ground, but it is not a glamorous role from the air forces’ standpoint. It is not nearly as much fun as blowing things up, or at least thinking you have blown something up. So air power has a key role to play, but it is not a comfortable role institutionally, which is why we tend not to see it.
Operational art is essential to keeping up tempo, but so is something else, and that on a tactical level is what we call tactics of surfaces and gaps. Modern ground tactics are not about closing with the enemy, but bypassing and collapsing him, just like those German tactics in 1918.
The object is not to find where the enemy is, but where he is not, so that you can go through him, so that you can go around him, so that you are all over his rear area. Since the Greeks and phalanx warfare, most formations have collapsed from the rear: the object is to get behind the other guy to collapse him from behind. How do you do that?
Just as in 1918 you can only do it by radically decentralizing authority and decisionmaking. You cannot keep up tempo in a military where information is collected at the bottom, then passed up the chain of command to some headquarters, where a bunch of staffers chew on it for a while at meetings and design elaborate computer slides, and then an order from the general comes working its way back through the chain. Forget about it.
The only way you can keep up the tempo, the only way you can take advantage of fleeting opportunities that appear unexpectedly, is by radically decentralizing authority. This is a culture of initiative and not a culture of obedience. This is a radically decentralized military culture. It is a break with the hierarchical culture of order, and it cannot work any other way. The immediate answer from the culture of order has been for the past 150 years, “But my God you will lose control”! Well, first control is not a very good word to think of in terms of war anyway. You do not control war. A very good new book by a young British author, a young British civil servant who understands this stuff very well, on the differences between British and German training and tactics between 1888-1918, is titled correctly, Command or Control, not “command and control”. The answer is that this military culture of initiative has a counterpart in discipline. It is a culture not of imposed discipline like the first military generation, where the sergeant walks behind the troops with the short spear, the symbolic purpose, and sometimes the real purpose, of which is to stick anybody who is trying to run away. It is a culture of self-discipline.
The German training literature from World War Two says explicitly that imposed discipline is useful, if at all, only in the earliest stages of training. There are two glues that enable the self-discipline to work with the initiative to keep the thing from flying apart. The first we have already touched upon: mission-type tactics and mission-type orders. The order does not tell you what to do, it tells you what result to get. It lays that on you as a bur-den, as the term “Auftrag” suggests, which literally means “I leave the burden on you for getting me this result”. The order usually has this writ great and writ small. Writ small is the mission for your unit, “here is specifically the result I want from your unit”. Writ large is the commander’s attempt at least two levels up, and intent overrides the mission. If you go out there and say, wait a minute, if I do as I have been told in this order, in this mission, the situation is different from what they thought it was, and it is not going to serve the intent, then you act according to the intent. It overrides the mission. It is what the Germans call, “the ticket till the end of the line”.
The second glue is what we call the concept of “Schwerpunkt”. This is hard to translate. The Americans call it “point of main effort” and it becomes a point on the map, but that is not it. The “Schwerpunkt” is the commander’s bid for a decision. In maneuver warfare you are al-ways going for a decisive result, not an incremental result, and the commander is there-fore thinking through the battle. The Marines who were first introduced to this suddenly discovered that they had to think through a battle for the first time in their lives. All right, what action am I going to take that is going to be decisive? That is the “Schwerpunkt”, and it is usually expressed as a unit, because you decide that I am going to do that with this unit, and then you radically concentrate your combat power to support that unit, taking great risks elsewhere, if necessary. For example, one of the most useful things to do as “Schwerpunkt” is to have aircraft right overhead all the time. That means probably nobody else is going to get any aircraft. Artillery would be very similar. It will generally be concentrated at a “Schwerpunkt”.
For aviators, it definitely means that you cannot do what Marines love to do, which is to come to the scene and say “Hey you guys, we are here for the next ten minutes, use us or lose us”. The air cannot come when it is convenient from its standpoint in terms of getting back to the club at 18:00 for a beer. It has got to be there when the guy on the ground needs it.
The key point here is a radically different culture. It is a culture that is outwardly focused, not inwardly focused. It is a culture of initiative, not a culture of obedience. It is a culture of self discipline, and not a culture of imposed discipline. Everyone is working cooperatively in this to the shared result, toward the intent, toward the goal that everybody understands, and they can take all sorts of initiative, playing off one another, not following the generals as the conductors of the orchestra, but again like the jazz group jamming, so that you get a very dynamic, fast-moving, high-tempo organization. Can air operate this way? Sure it can. Can aviators use mission-type orders? Of course. I was in an exercise with the Marines a few years ago where a friend of mine, a Harrier pilot who is very deeply into the Germans, ran the red air, which was outnumbered three-to-one, and at the critique, blue admitted honestly that red air had been totally dominant.
How did he do it? He used mission type-orders. There was no ATO and nine-line brief. There was none of that crap. He used the same map as the ground commander, and he explained that here is the ground situation, and here is the result we want from you. The aviators loved it.
The squadron commander said, “This was the first time in my life I have ever done anything but fly wing for somebody, the first time I have ever been a commander”. It so raised the tempo that though they were heavily outnumbered, red air dominated easily. All of these things can work in aviation, but aviation itself only works if it is in this intimate marriage with what is happening on the ground. The guy in the cockpit has to look out of the cockpit and see the situation on the ground, understand what he is seeing, and know what it means. If he is reduced to a narrow technician who is told to put a bomb on this grid square, then he cannot possibly operate in this manner.
Air will most surely not be effective because it is commanded by a centralized organization, by people who cannot possibly make the decisions in a timely manner as events unfold on the ground. Just as the 19th century debate was resolved by saying you have to trust the troops, in the 20th century debate on air power you have to trust the pilot. But you also have to train the pilot so he can operate this way. He needs to spend time on the ground, with ground units, doing ground tactics. You have to have aircraft hat can operate in this environment. I only know one at the moment in western inventories that can, and that is the A-10. You have got to have an air force that above all else wants to be part of the ground battle and the ground campaign. That is the challenge for air forces, and that is why the most expensive part of the modern militaries, the air force, is also usually the least effective, and contributes the least to the outcome of the battle or the campaign.
Published in:
From Manoeuvre Warfare to Kosovo?
Edited by John Andreas Olsen
The Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy 2000
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