Now that the AAR is done, the game itself having been played long ago now, I figured I’d do a little critique of my wartime strategy. I think there’s a lot to be said about it, good and bad. It is, however, undoubtedly a very tangled topic so I’ll try to look at it one thread at a time.
Definitions
Colin Gray defines strategy as the use of the engagement (battle) in pursuit of one’s policy objectives. I would not read this until half a year or so after the game, but it makes sense, and draws heavily from Clausewitz. I hope that in the following critique I don’t lose sight of the necessity to link my actions to my stated policy, which was, of course, victory in war.
Assumptions
First, I must obviously examine the assumptions that underpinned my strategy. My overall assessment of Discomb was that he was a proponent of decisive battle. He might threaten and boast about incredibly indirect approach operations such as landing at Arkhangelsk but he would not actually carry them out as this would detract too much from the main theater of the war, especially given that ours was a war of total effort (though not total ends). In wars of total effort, the main objective tends to be destroying the enemy’s army and so that he may be dictated to. Before the game, he had proved to be tight-lipped about his strategy except that he would be building a lot of armored divisions and he wouldn’t go straight for Moscow. By the time our war began I did know, however, that he had very little oil. In fact, only about 20,000 units, which I had calculated amounted to about three weeks of constant campaigning if I remember correctly. He obviously did not have much time, kind of like both Napoleon and Hitler.
Strategic Deception
This must be, undeniably, where I had the most clear-cut success. I threatened to land at Gibraltar and attack Discomb in the rear. This hearkens back to previous HoI2 LAN games, particularly one where I played a Leninist USA (this was a variation of the mod that we used for POF), Discomb was the Soviet Union and another friend (not Discomb’s brother) was Germany. The two were allied against me. While I conquered the rest of the Americas, I declared war on Equatorial Africa and conquered many of its territories, I traded them all in return for Gibraltar, from whence I would have launched by armored/mechanized blitzkrieg at them. Unfortunately, we never actually finished that game but the seed had been planted (albeit unintentionally) in Discomb’s mind that Gibraltar would tend to be a strategic objective of mine. Given verbal threats to Gibraltar, Discomb believed them. Nine British divisions were stationed there. Additionally, Germany had six armored and three motorized divisions scattered throughout Western Europe in three corps (one in France, one in Italy and one in Denmark) for garrison purposes. These forces could plausibly have determined some of the battles waged in the east against me. Nonetheless, overall it was a minor success.
Original Strategy
Now, before I go further in examining my strategic performance I should lay out my original strategy. Originally, I was planning to do a fighting retreat at least to the river lines. This is a precedent from (again) one of our previous LAN games. In that same, I was the Soviet Union, Discomb was the truncated Britain and another friend (that same not-Discomb’s-brother person) played Germany. I had heavily fortified the river liens, with level 10 fortifications, and used European Russia as a secure base from which to make armored encirclements before beating hasty retreats as German reinforcements came up. Thus, I planned to do something similar this time, except without the fortifications and with a more elastic approach. I half expected to be pushed all the way back to Moscow, and having to commit every single unit of each of my three strategic echelons to the fight to successfully defeat Discomb. My initial deployments were defensive. My Belarussian Fronts were not even on the front, they were a province behind, ready for elasticity. The mobile corps of each of my Fronts were behind the Fronts to act as reserves, rather than spearheads. The oil setup was geared so that he would really feel his lack of oil. Obviously, this strategy did not happen in any way, shape or form.
The Cult of the Offensive
When gaming, I am aggressive. My mindset is innately offensive. I suppose this is why, in the very first hours of the war, I immediately threw away my elastic defense plan and invaded Lithuania. This might also have had something to do with the fact that I had declared war on Discomb, rather than the other way around. Discomb was not prepared for such a development, so I gained the advantage of tactical surprise. This, and overwhelming forces, led to the complete overthrow of German power in Lithuania; if my Belarussian Fronts had been in offensive deployment rather than defensive I would have likely even encircled the German forces in Lithuania and crushed them. As it is, though I was close, this I did not manage and it would annoy me for the rest of the war. The German forces from Lithuania were the same who would fight so persistently for Konigsberg.
Given the unfavorable Belarussian deployments, no offensive occurred in the center except in support of Lithuanian operations. I remained static, and once the German juggernaut struck I was forced to defend, desperately. In retrospect, I could have tried to push across the Bug River into Poland but my mobile units took some time to reach the front from the deep rear (approximately the eastern border of Belarus) so this really wouldn’t have been that feasible as a possibility and would have left me much more open had Discomb not reacted but had, as in actuality, thrown his juggernaut into northern Belarus.
My offensive in Romania was very limited, amounting to just a bridgehead that was heroically held through hard fighting before being forced back. There’s nothing special here.
In Scandinavia I also had a defensive deployment but also immediately went into the attack. The British had only four corps of troops in the area and by the end of the war only one was left, deep in Sweden. By all standards it would have been a stunning campaign, except that it was in a complete backwater nobody cared about.
In all, the consequences of my offensive mindset meant that I had effectively abandoned a deep elastic defense in favor of, at best, a shallow one unless something truly terrible occurred. My original strategy was probably the optimal one in terms of playing my strengths to Discomb’s weaknesses. He would have run out of oil very quickly and have become spread quite thin. My predominantly infantry army would have been hard-pressed to match his speed initially, but my mobile corps would have been anticipated to have somewhat offset his armored mobility advantage and my greater numbers and successive reinforcement echelons would have meant that eventually my numbers would prove decisive and turn the war back around in my favor.
Shallow Elastic Defense
As noted above, in reality once the German juggernaut(s) hit I adopted a shallow elastic defense. This probably because I felt that the best way to contain a spearhead was to hold the shoulders. The Americans did this in the Battle of the Bulge, and the strategic theorist Edward Luttwak advocates this in his book Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, which I read the summer afterwards. Obviously Luttwak had no influence on my thinking (or perhaps intuition, rather) at the time, but it seems that I was more or less correct. Give way in front of the enemy, but hold on either side of him if remotely possible. The transition from offensive to a shallow elastic defense was smooth. Elastic defense means, as the name implies, an elasticity in your deployments. Defense is followed by counterattack, and all that.
In the Ukraine it became very positional very quickly, but that was primarily because the Germans were first turned back due to my elastic defense and then they turned northward at the very end.
In the center, my elastic defense was centered around the unfortunate 3rd Belarussian Front, whose plight I will examine in more detail later. All local efforts were focused around keeping its supply lines open as much as to isolate enemy units. Even the grandiose plans I had for that one Baltic Front (they became so interchangeable I keep forgetting which was where when) to push on to Warsaw was quickly rerouted to taking Bielsk and opening up another supply corridor. That move also isolated the German shield pocket. This is also the point where my elastic defense became its deepest; the Germans reached all the way to Baranowicze and Luniniec, which were both the third province in from the border.
The Baltic Fronts had a very easy and very shallow elastic defense. It was just a back and forth across Konigsberg, which was at least the second most fought over province after Suwalki, possibly the first most fought over.
There was no elastic defense to speak of in Scandinavia; it was an outright offensive.
The 3rd Belarussian Front
No sane commander would have done this. No sane commander would have let an entire Front of twenty-four divisions (1 HQ, 17 infantry, 2 Mechanized and 4 Motorized divisions) become, for all intents and purposes, the bait. To be fair, it wasn’t intentional; when it was defeated, the Front automatically retreated back to where it had come from, which was Brest-Litovsk. Nonetheless, I could have strategically redeployed them out, though that would have been a bit cheap. I don’t think I even thought of that possibility, however. I just focused on rescuing it, which had the dual-purpose of isolating the Germans. It was a bad situation I had to make the best of.
Decisive Battle
There is no doubt that Bialystok was a decisive battle. Not only did I inflict massive damage on Discomb’s army, totaling a fifth of his entire armed forces (not including Luniniec) but it forced him to sue for peace. But the concept of decisive battle should be looked at somewhat. Decisive battles are by nature quite rare; Michael Howard calls them the military’s philosopher stones. A pursuit of decisive battle can be described as a lack of strategy. It’s more or less the default plan every conventional military attempts to implement. This is because of the great influence both Clausewitz and Jomini still have in today’s militaries (one more justified than the other); both mentioned centers of gravity or decisive points (respectively). Neither attempted to actually explain what they were, but generations of soldiers since have assumed them to be, generally speaking, the enemy army. This especially occurred once Moltke the Elder gave Clausewitz some much needed publicity (and thus inadvertently causing the first of many mistranslations and misinterpretations of Clausewitz).
Anyway, decisive battle is the default stance for most conventional armies. Given the rarity of decisive battle and its sheer uncertainty, to attempt to force one is far-fetched and for it to be such a constant goal for the military is ludicrous. It’s essentially chasing a cloud, and usually just as effective. On the other hand, what else is there? The alternative is either a strategic coup such as dropping paratroopers onto an undefended capital and capturing the bulk of the government or a war of attrition. But the former doesn’t guarantee success (just look at Napoleon in Spain) and the latter is almost as bad (take the wars of Louis XIV, for example). The difficulty is that, as Clausewitz was perhaps the first to point out, war is about two opposing wills. You never know what the other’s breaking point is. That’s the danger of going to war. You can never know if you will actually win. So I’m not particularly sure how this can be an argument against relying on decisive battle, save that it’s even less reliable than strategies in general.
I don’t really know where to go from here. This section in particular was a stream of consciousness about decisive battle so half of it’s probably crap and the other half needs more thought and development. And, of course, I don’t know which half is which.
Coup d’oeil
I hope that’s how you spell it. It is what Clausewitz calls genius, the general’s inner eye with which he can see opportunities. It is the commander’s own innate skill and sense of battle and war. Now that this AAR is over and in writing I’ve had the chance to think about the game, and specifically the war. I think that in the end, it came down to this, to the coup d’oeil. I saw opportunities and followed them through whereas Discomb did not or could not despite my initially disadvantageous position given my immediate offensives and my non-use of many elements of my army that could have made my war so much easier (such as my two airborne corps, which never saw action despite being so expensive).
My insistence on actually creating Fronts and employing them as discrete units paid off because it gave my forces greater flexibility in some ways. My holding the ramparts, especially at Suwalki, would not have been anywhere near possible if I had not had reserve Fronts ready to move out. I’m fairly sure all my Baltic Fronts fought at least one round of battle at Suwalki in the last week and a half alone, and of course they each had the honor of capturing Konigsberg multiple times. Similarly, by creation of a second strategic echelon comprised of NKVD district forces and Shock Armies was undoubtedly very important to my war effort. One and possibly two Shock Armies certainly fought in the Ukraine and at least one NKVD district was engaged, at Baranowicze and later on probably Bialystok. Of course, if I had lost at Bialystok and the Germans were able to get back onto the offensive and push into Russia, the remaining units of the second echelon would have moved to halt, or at least threaten the progression of, the German armored units.
I guess that’s it. I can’t think of anything more to write about that isn’t redundant from earlier updates. If anyone has any particular questions this doesn’t (fully) answer, I’ll certainly do my best to do so.