Meditation about Dcotrines

[Klausewitz]

Disclaimer:
This is not about changes i want so implemented.
I think the Land Doctrine trees work well enough as abstractions as they are.


There has been a lot of discussion about doctrines here.
What is firepower, what defines blitzkrieg, etc.

I would argue that doctrinal advances mostly go on two axis with a higher standing dcotrines being able to everything that the 'lower' doctrines are able to do while the same is not true in the reverse.

One axis i would call centralization to decentralization.
A doctrine with a high value of decentralization does not describe a military without hierarchies and no central directive.
Here come the 'also' aspect into play:
All militaries, as a result of their form, are able to undertake centralized actions (though depending on the level of staff development the scale varies). As we come from history we first see huge blocks of people that then desolve into lines, which desolve into skirmish lines which desolve into riflemen swarms which desolve into the dispersed troops of infiltration tactics.
With every change the rank of the person being able to exercise decisive control over the point of contact with the enemy shrinks.
With the huge blocks and lines of the early modern age a general could still maneuver his troops while in battle; That stops when the armies get so big that only part of the whole could be maneuvered.
The parallel increase in firepower forces a dispersion of troops which together with the increase in number leads to troops being spread about more ground then the commander is able to affect with his presence.
This process accelerates and finds its apex for the West in German Missiontactics:
The dismembered parts of a unit are still able to work towards the units goals even while outside the influence of the unit commander.
This goes all the way up and all the way down.
For this good NCOs and junior officers are needed and an acceptance of the individual responsibility and ability of the soldier.
If perfectly implemented a doctrine with a high degree of decentralization allows for an army that plans for large operations but which units are then able to improvise and work towards the common goal even after plans and communications have mostly broken down, while a doctrine with a high level of centralization plans but is completly unprepared if things go of track.
A decentralized army asks:
"Communications are going to break down. What are we gonna do when that happens?"
A centralized army asks:
"How do we prevent communication from breaking down?"


The second axis is firepower to maneuver.
Again, a dcotrine with a huge emphasis on maneuver does not abolish firepower.
Think of a wall.
You need to get on the side of the wall.
If your doctrine is firepower intense, you will grab a hammer and smash the wall until you get a hole.
If your doctrine is maneuver heavy, you look for a door or a weakspot.
Again, i would see the German Wehrmacht as pretty well established in the higher echolons here, though the Americans and Soviets have also come close in instances, but i think unlike with Missiontaktics there is not one perfect example where it was done right.
The historical development again goes from the early rifles that needed to be concentrated to get any effect to the point where the rifle, let alone the fast-firing artillery or the machine gun became so powerful that you could no longer mass lare groups of infantry for an assault (or even for the defense) without suffering punishing losses.
Here the old adage about being able to kill what you can see comes into play.
Even worse, indirect artillery is able to kill what it knows the position of.
If two fire-power heavy armies meet in the field is it first a race to see who can eastblish more artillery faster on the frontline and it then degenerates into a slugging match, in short: attrition warfare.
Neither side can move forward without obliterating the enemy artillery while at the same time even weak artillery can still be sufficient to check ana attack. Unless on side is significantly stronger, both sides will be bled white.
The manuever doctrine realises that their is another way out of the firepower dilemma:
Artillery cannot hit what is not there and speed makes the time you spend in the enemies firezone shorter, allowing for better chances of success.
A French man put it succiently once:
The French, and to an extent English, doctrine of WW1 and WW2 was one of making a battering ram: A thing that is strong and slow and can break walls (incidently that is also true of the English 'tanks') but ceomes useless against anything but a solid wall, while a maneuver army is more like water, undermining obstacles, flowing around them, finding weakspots and opening ever larger gaps.
That works against a wall (a dyke), works also against other forces.

Not also that both of these are connected:
A doctrine will be unable to emphasize maneuver unless it also emphasizes decentralization.

 

[EntropyAvatar]

I would argue that doctrinal advances mostly go on two axis with a higher standing dcotrines being able to everything that the 'lower' doctrines are able to do while the same is not true in the reverse.

It's a very interesting analysis. However, I am a bit skeptical of the above. I mean, practicing and becoming skilled at a particular way of solving a problem has a tendency to close off consideration of alternative avenues. This is particularly true in organizations where many decision-makers have to work together: a lot of cooperation depends on being able to predict what other people in your organization are thinking.

So even if some way of operating and thinking about problems is superior overall, it seems like there must be circumstances where it would lead you astray. Like someone getting too complex with the manuevers and getting his own forces cut off.

 

[Klausewitz]

Thanks for the reply.

It's a very interesting analysis. However, I am a bit skeptical of the above. I mean, practicing and becoming skilled at a particular way of solving a problem has a tendency to close off consideration of alternative avenues. This is particularly true in organizations where many decision-makers have to work together: a lot of cooperation depends on being able to predict what other people in your organization are thinking.

That is the point of doctrine though:
A certain synchronicity of thought and action, a common dictionary and a common set of behaviors.
As for closing off avenues, that is not so much a problem when, to take that analogy further, all the approaches are among the same avenue, only different houses.

So even if some way of operating and thinking about problems is superior overall, it seems like there must be circumstances where it would lead you astray. Like someone getting too complex with the manuevers and getting his own forces cut off.

Yes, absolutely.
I don't know who said it:
"In war, the least incompetent army wins!"
War might possibly be one of the most complex environments known to men, things are bound to break down.
People will get themselves cut off, they will get themselves killed.
Let me take my wall and hammer example further:
You have lost your hammer and have come up against a wall.
If you are part of a centralized army, even somebody can see you, has a hammer and can reach you, odds are they won't.
They have to wait for orders which wall to batter.
In a decentralized army (we are talking ideally here, obviously) the other guy will either lend you his hammer or come over and you will break the wall together since he has no wall to hammer at the moment.
Is it still possible for you to be stranded in front of a wall with no hammer? Sure.
But it is less likely as long as friendly elements are around.

 

[tommylotto]

After losing a bunch of battles to a maneuver army -- so long as you haven't already lost your country (because its protected by a channel, ocean or vast swaths of land) -- you are eventually going to learn to plug those holes. Then the maneuver army will run up against a wall that it cannot find its a way around, and it must batter its way through. Basically, a maneuver army relies upon an incompetent opponent. Once you can no longer rely on that underlying premise, it comes back to superior firepower. Defense in depth devolves Barbarossa to Kursk; the Battle of France to the Battle of the Bulge.

 

[Klausewitz]

After losing a bunch of battles to a maneuver army -- so long as you haven't already lost your country (because its protected by a channel, ocean or vast swaths of land) -- you are eventually going to learn to plug those holes. Then the maneuver army will run up against a wall that it cannot find its a way around, and it must batter its way through. Basically, a maneuver army relies upon an incompetent opponent. Once you can no longer rely on that underlying premise, it comes back to superior firepower. Defense in depth devolves Barbarossa to Kursk; the Battle of France to the Battle of the Bulge.

I think you are jumping too short.
The Battle of the Bulge is an attack of a Germany that is already the loser of the war, with depleted, ill-trained forces against a seasoned force with superior firepower.
Actually i would say that the Bulge is a testimony to the strength of the maneuver army and not a testimony of its failure.
About Kursk i do not know enough and will therefore not comment (Ah, remember: 2:1 superiority for the Russias and something like 4-5:1 disparity in casualties; i doubt that is a good arguement against maneuver either).
On the larger picture though i believe you misunderstood my original comment.
It is not maneuver vs. firepower.
The German army did not slash all cannons and MGs from the ToE of its armored maneuver units and then won fights by some 'maneuver power'.
The development is linear:
Rifles to machineguns which make advances impossible until they are silenced requiring direct fire guns to silence them which then need to be able to follow the infantry to silence further weapons in their path which then become vulnerable to counterartillery... unless they are maneuverable enough or well-armored enough to escape said fire -> tanks.
Also the Defense in Depth is not the end of maneuver warfare, it is maneuver warfare itself (normally) and can only be counter by it.
Defense in Depth, to keep our terms in agreement, is yielding space from a forward outpost line into a battle space where the attacker will then checked by mobile reserves.
If you try to batter your way through a defense in depth by firepower, even more with centralized firepower, you will again and again run into machineguns not found and your troops will be stranded there until the artillery comes to the rescue (which is why William S. Lind famously described US and French tactics as 'stumbling into the enemy and calling for fire support'), while the maneuver force will destroy, often with organic firepower, what outposts and enemies they can while they avoid what outposts they must, flowing around them and leaving them for the following waves to deal with (or even coordinated artillery).
And while maneuver is generally superior to firepower because it can do what firepower can do but also maneuver, it is not absolved from having sufficient assets for the challenge.

 

[Secret Master]

After losing a bunch of battles to a maneuver army -- so long as you haven't already lost your country (because its protected by a channel, ocean or vast swaths of land) -- you are eventually going to learn to plug those holes. Then the maneuver army will run up against a wall that it cannot find its a way around, and it must batter its way through.

Doesn't this assume that you have enough units and firepower to plug those holes properly?

In a small theater with lots of units at full strength, this might make sense. The Western Front in WWI and the race to the Channel. But if the area of operations is big enough, or the amount of forces available to both sides are small enough, then it may be impossible to be strong in every location. And then maneuver (and it's good friend deception) comes back into play.

And this seems to me to be the basis of the whole schwerepunkt issue. You can't be strong everywhere, but you can have the tip of the spear point at a weak spot. Then you just push it in until the enemy yields.

In fact, it seems to me that the failures in France and the successes and failures on the Eastern Front bear out how difficult it is to be strong enough everywhere to neutralize maneuver. Guderian and Rommel should not really have been allowed to get away with their shenanigans in France, but there were a ton of problems with trying to "plug the holes" during the Battle of France. Sure, the French Army ran out of room to continue the fight, but their attempts to be strong everywhere at once when they lacked material superiority to pull it off netted them nothing.

Against the Soviets we see the same thing. Despite it's size, the Red Army suffered repeated problems dealing with maneuver until they, too, got better at it. Sure, Lend-lease helped them gain the upper hand in material terms, but even with material support, the Red Army still couldn't be everywhere at once, even during Case Blue.

The only part of the war where I think maneuver was neutralized significantly was the Italian campaign. And even then, the Allies tried to use amphibious landings (Anzio and such) to get around the attritional slog. But in that campaign, there were enough defending forces to prevent any hardcore use of maneuver warfare. The front is too narrow and the forces involved too numerous.

I want to point out to @Klausewitz that I agree with a lot of what you wrote (and I can tell you served in a military force with strong NCO leadership based on your post), but I want to emphasize that intelligence and deception are vital components to maneuver warfare. And that goes back to the whole "centralized-decentralized" axis. Improvisation among subordinate commanders is great, but someone might argue that a more centralized army might have more success with feints and demonstrations than a decentralized one.

You don't want Patton to actually cross the English Channel with FUSAG and invade Calais during an improvised operation, since the whole point of FUSAG is that it doesn't exist and it's meant to draw German attention away from Overlord. (Although the mental picture of George C Scott as Patton crossing the English Channel by himself with a handgun and making quips is quite entertaining.)

 

[shri]

Italy or the Balkans was bound to be a failure for "maneuver" due to the "terrain", with mountains, hills, valleys, rivers, forests and other natural obstacles favouring the defender even with numerical inferiority of 1:2.

The North European Plain from Brest to Brest-Litovsk and Lemberg (Lvov) to Stalingrad in the Steppes were ideal "Blitzkreig" terrain (though the term itself is a misnomer).
Terrain and Weather play a very large part.

Going back one generation, We can see in the "Great War" the Serbian Campaign was quite tough, though Romania was easy. Gorlice-Tarnow and Brusilov offensives were wildly successful but the ones in the Northern Sectors (Baltics) were not as successful.
Italy was a draw till the Germans put in von Below's army cracked it open and the Western Front was a draw till Ludendorff went a tad too optimistic.
But Russian front was always mobile except in some places.

Even in WW2, the US. post D-Day had a easy path to the German Border but faced a tough obstacle in the "Hurtgen Forests" and the mythic "Siegfried Line" (most of it was on paper).
The Russians had a huge success during "Bagration" but not so easily done in the Baltics or at times in the South.

2 major examples of successive defensive "Blitzkreig" were done on the South Russian Front- 3rd Kharkov and Targu-Frumos.

 

[Klausewitz]

I want to point out to @Klausewitz that I agree with a lot of what you wrote (and I can tell you served in a military force with strong NCO leadership based on your post), but I want to emphasize that intelligence and deception are vital components to maneuver warfare. And that goes back to the whole "centralized-decentralized" axis. Improvisation among subordinate commanders is great, but someone might argue that a more centralized army might have more success with feints and demonstrations than a decentralized one.

First, thanks for the critique and the feedback.
Second, i don't know that i necessary agree with the superiority of a centralized approach to feints and subterfuge.
While decentralized armies by necessity spread the information about their intentions wider (everybody ought to have the information important to at least two levels higher up the chain, meaning the ordinary infantry soldier at least knows what his group is supposed to achieve within the frame of his company and his regiment, there is also the option of telling the subordinate commanders that this is the feint and this the main effort... though why one would want to forbid oneself the possibility of success on the feint if that proves more readily attainable is beyond me.

Italy or the Balkans was bound to be a failure for "maneuver" due to the "terrain", with mountains, hills, valleys, rivers, forests and other natural obstacles favouring the defender even with numerical inferiority of 1:2.

No, they are bound to be a failure for mechanized maneuver but there is no reason why formations of gebirgsjäger or jäger infantry couldn't practice maneuver warfare.
Again:
Maneuver warfare is not bound to equipment.
An infantry soldier can operate on a maneuver doctrine as readily as a tank commander; the intent in both cases is the same.
Both try not to be where the enemy expects them to be (and can hit them) while trying to manufacture opportunities for exploitation.
Blitzkrieg is manuever warfare, but not all maneuver warfare is blitzkrieg.

Going back one generation, We can see in the "Great War" the Serbian Campaign was quite tough, though Romania was easy. Gorlice-Tarnow and Brusilov offensives were wildly successful but the ones in the Northern Sectors (Baltics) were not as successful.
Italy was a draw till the Germans put in von Below's army cracked it open and the Western Front was a draw till Ludendorff went a tad too optimistic.
But Russian front was always mobile except in some places.

Even in WW2, the US. post D-Day had a easy path to the German Border but faced a tough obstacle in the "Hurtgen Forests" and the mythic "Siegfried Line" (most of it was on paper).
The Russians had a huge success during "Bagration" but not so easily done in the Baltics or at times in the South.

This list is a bit to general for me.
This is actually so general i am not quite sure what you are getting at.
I am also a bit stumped:
Did the Austrian Army practice auftrags- and firetactics in WW1 like the German Army?

 

[shri]

This list is a bit to general for me.
This is actually so general i am not quite sure what you are getting at.
I am also a bit stumped:
Did the Austrian Army practice auftrags- and firetactics in WW1 like the German Army?

The 2 references i made in the lower paragraph are to the Eastern and Western Fronts in 1944.
And in both cases i have cited specific examples that - Terrain, Weather and other such obstacles made it into a "war of attrition".

BTW - Italian Front in WW2 was also mostly about using terrain multipliers and fighting a war of attrition.


The above references in the upper paragraph are to the German army in the Great War.
Compare the German offensives - In Verdun, Romania, Servia and Baltics and Gorlice-Tarnow (roughly 2/3 of Army Group Mackensen in Servia, Romania and Gorlice Tarnow were allied soldiers- mainly Austrians, some Turks and a lot of Bulgarians). So, it was not that the Austrians couldn't fight. Again in 1917 Caporetto, Army Group Below had over 50% Austrian Empire Soldiers under its command.
The same Austrian soldier who performed so atrociously under Conrad was doing a decent performance under Mackensen and Seeckt, again in WW2 you see the Italians performing decently when under the command of Rommel or Kesselring but atrocious when under Graziani.
It was more of - lack of Good Commanders that made many offensives fail. If you have an "idiot" like Gamelin then, you are bound to fail, on the other hand, Maneuver was countered well by the British Generals from 1942 onward, they decided to re-fight the "100 days offensive" type battles and succeeded.

 

[Sir Garnet]

Maneuver warfare has multiple incarnations not just among different countries but sometimes within the same country's military. German maneuver warfare can be conceptualized as like fluid dynamics, probing to find the hard and soft surfaces, the joints, and the gaps in the dynamically evolving opposing position and apply pressure best calculated by the commander finding and seizing the opportunity to dislocate and breach the enemy's physical and psychological deployment, and then use a breach to strike deep, which can have an effect out of all proportion to the force applied. This approach is attractive for an army needing to economize force and resources but having a quicker OODA loop and the ability to seize upon and execute quickly against opportunities to gain tempo until the enemy becomes uncoordinated and "falls into confusion" in the classic phrase. Opportunities can take time to mature. This is not an easy method to reconcile with operations conducted to a map and a timetable or weak OODA cycle/tempo skills and experience. Having a long established and very effective staff system that provided its members with a common professional perspective on doctrine, military planning and operations was a major contributor to effective German maneuver warfare of this kind, as were Prussian military traditions along this line.

The Soviet method of maneuver warfare, to which US practice bore resemblances despite avowed inspiration from the German model, was to focus on on developing a superior correlation of forces (men and material) and a well-prepared use of massive power and speed (shock and awe) of execution along a segment of the front to force openings to exploit rapidly and rupture and then roll up that segment of the front, then press on to deep objectives. An offensive operation in one sector might be aided by the ripple effects of earlier offensives down the line and in turn could assist the next timed strike. This method does not rely as much on transient tactical and operational opportunities and uses planning and superior power forcefully applied to lock down possible weaknesses and deny the enemy time and operational flexibility (and reduce their potential for early OODA or tempo gains) while creating its own opportunities for exploiting enemy confusion. This can look a lot like an old-style "grand battle plan" on the surface.

 

[Klausewitz]

This can look a lot like an old-style "grand battle plan" on the surface.

But it really is... ?

 

[ObssesedNuker]

But it really is... ?

Not once you start digging beneath the surface, Deep Battle places much more emphasis on speed and shock then Grand Battleplan. Comparestuff like Operation Goodwood or Second El-Alamein too Operation Bagration or Rumianstev.

The reason for this difference comes from the fact that both doctrines were originally founded upon experience from WW1 and it's related conflicts (the Russian Civil War), but the experiences for the relevant powers which went on to develop these doctrines was very different. The Russo-Soviet experience in these conflicts was one where the force:space ratios made a truly static situation impossible: weak points that could always be found and pushed. Therefore, maximizing the speed with which operations unfolded was of vital importance so as to exploit advantages before the enemy could move to counter. For their part, the Anglo-Frenches experience on the Western Front was one where the force:space ratio brought about a extremely static situation where weak points were much rarer and harder to identify. Trying to move faster didn't bring the same dividends and could sometimes backfire by piling up the casualty count. As Winston Churchill observed of World War 1: "In the west, the armies were too big for the land. In the east, the land was too big for the armies."