What military strategic lessons were learned from World War II and are still used today?

[Director]

NATO countries might use mission tactics. US does not and never did.

No, from what I know that is not true. Of course, pinning down US Army tactics and operational thought from 1935 to 2023 in one phrase is... problematic.

One of the advantages the US had during WW2 was the thought the army put into how to expand itself, train soldiers and officers on an industrial scale, and generate the equipment that army could use effectively. By and large, they got it right - and wound up with an army (and marine corps) possessed of a lot of competent low-level officers and a great deal of personal initiative. Often the troops didn't follow the handbook, but they got the job done, and the better upper-level officers focused on what got done and not how.

In Vietnam you had a president who did not trust his generals (and who mostly didn't trust anyone else's competence or motivations) and a set of generals who let an amateur make decisions outside his area of competence when they should have resigned. The result was that the president got fired.

I recommend you read Colonel Harry Summers' On Strategy, a critical analysis of the Vietnam war. He makes a persuasive argument for his thesis that the US Army screwed up by having no strategy and the US government screwed up by not using the successful template of containment, Korea. Tactically, operationally and logistically, the US military was a triumph... but with bad strategy, no strategy and multiple conflicting strategies, all of that was wasted.

Famously, the US army of the first Gulf War was formed by Vietnam veterans in such a way that the mistakes of Vietnam would not recur.

Every army (and marine) publication I've seen, published since the 1930s, has emphasized initiative at the lowest levels. As with any organization, sometimes the US military gives lip service, or fails to execute its ideas, but initiative and mission-driven tactics/operations have been a part of its teaching for a long time. This is sometimes undercut by really excellent communications - it is very, very hard for superior officers to not meddle - but the doctrine calls for initiative in pursuit of mission goals, and an army is formed by its doctrine.

 

[Director]

Well, WWII also proved many times that the best defense is attack. Or maybe because those who practiced it were bold generals with delegated initiative.

Um... that's meaningless without elaboration. Do you mean at the tactical, operational or strategic levels? Do you mean that there were no effective defensive actions?

I would strenuously disagree. There were cases in the Pacific where stubborn defense proved a major impediment to enemy operations - the US Marines on Guadalcanal, or the Japanese on Betio, or any number of battles in the China-Burma-India theater. The chief issue was that the Allies were able to mobilize additional forces to take advantage of a successful defense, grinding up Japanese naval, air and land power before moving onto the offensive and the Japanese were not able to effectively counter-attack during or after their defensive actions. (They were able to use the time gained to fortify additional positions and considered the destruction of perimeter forces acceptable.)

The two battles of El Alamein are instructive, as are Stalingrad and Kursk. In those cases the succeeding offensives would not have been as successful (or maybe possible) without the stiff defensive action which came first. You could discount the preceding defensive action and only credit the offensive action for victory, but that, I think, would be an incomplete assessment.

As Joffre learned in 1914, the pure offensive is not always the best strategy, while a good defense can let you mass your combat power at a critical point, or so blunt the enemy's power as to make offensive action possible again.

I'd agree that successful offensive action is the shortest path to victory. But unsuccessful offensive action, or a frittering away of combat strength in search of offensive action for its own sake, is a good way to give the enemy an advantage if not an outright victory.

So - no - offensive action is not always the best course in every situation. Good generals evaluate forces, logistics, terrain and conditions to determine where they are on a scale running from purely defensive through counter-attacks to pure offensive, and they adjust their operations accordingly.

Offensive action is how you attempt to impose your will upon the enemy. But defensive action is how you resist the enemy's imposition of his will upon you - and both are valuable, and both have a place.

 

[HmJ_JP]

I would disagree, AFAIK, while the incident of the president ordering a squad around was infamous, to my knowledge, it were mostly senior military leaders who did the micromanaging. To me, micromanaging seems like a temptation always present, before modern communications, senior leaders simply couldn't do it, once they could, they had to learn that they shouldn't.

Come to think of it, what about Soviet military actions? Did they really not suffer from micromanagement? And careful, frankly, I would be careful concluding that if we didn't hear about it, it didn't happen.

Also feel like disagreeing here, look at the other side of the world, once the initial shock was over, many a Japanese offense was repulsed with heavy losses. I suspect early axis successes in general owned much to the shortcomings of their enemies in organization, training and doctrine. It seems to me, that was the war progressed, even successful axis offensives became less successful than early on.

Let me explain what I mean by micromanagement: the constant use of the normally corporate world to monitor "progress" with numbers.

The Vietnam War and Performance Measurement

A self-confessed "stats guy" examines the consequences of Robert McNamara's use of performance metrics to support policy decisions.

icma.org

 

[Acheron]

Let me explain what I mean by micromanagement: the constant use of the normally corporate world to monitor "progress" with numbers.

The Vietnam War and Performance Measurement

A self-confessed "stats guy" examines the consequences of Robert McNamara's use of performance metrics to support policy decisions.

icma.org

Heard of that, too, but IMHO, these are two separate issues::

Micromanagement is in my view when higher ranks excessively meddle with the tasks of lower ranks, which is bad they are often not qualified, either generally (having never learnt or forgotten what the tasks at that level actually entail) or situationally (not knowing the actual situation well enough to make an informed decision and frankly being unable to, because they got another ob).

What McNamara did seemed to me more a case of GIGO (garbage-in, garbage-out) and/or applying a faulty model. GIGO means you feed a sensible model bad data and therefor get wrong solutions, see Perun's video on lying in the Russia's army. However, I wonder if McNamara's models and assumptions were even good to begin with, haven't read much about it, but it seemed rather crude and simplistic, as pointed out by the article you shared.

 

[HmJ_JP]

You're right, I probably made the association too quick. But the way I was seeing these KPIs review in documentaries, was that it led McN's team to meddle in the staff's decisions and impact their strategy (although that's common to democracies at war, including the UK and France).

 

[Acheron]

You're right, I probably made the association too quick. But the way I was seeing these KPIs review in documentaries, was that it led McN's team to meddle in the staff's decisions and impact their strategy (although that's common to democracies at war, including the UK and France).

Well, the two issues are not mutually exclusive, you can have a bad strategy based on crap models and assumptions and then force them on lower echelons by micromanagement. I'd say they compliment each other in a rally bad and terrible way.

 

[Barsoom]

You're right, I probably made the association too quick. But the way I was seeing these KPIs review in documentaries, was that it led McN's team to meddle in the staff's decisions and impact their strategy (although that's common to democracies at war, including the UK and France).

The armed forces of democratic countries are under control of the civilian authorities. It is natural that they set the political and military strategy, in consultation with military leadership. They decide whether the strategy works to their satisfaction and whether, when or how to change it.

 

[HmJ_JP]

The armed forces of democratic countries are under control of the civilian authorities. It is natural that they set the political and military strategy, in consultation with military leadership. They decide whether the strategy works to their satisfaction and whether, when or how to change it.

I didn't say it's not normal, but it takes time to lessen the friction and find the right balance with chief of staff autonomy and political ingerance. Other forms of government have different issues.

 

[Director]

The armed forces of democratic countries are under control of the civilian authorities. It is natural that they set the political and military strategy, in consultation with military leadership. They decide whether the strategy works to their satisfaction and whether, when or how to change it.

And as long as it stops there, that is a proper relationship between the military and the civilian authorities.

Unfortunately, sometimes it doesn't stop there. If civilians do not understand the military, or distrust its leaders, then civilians can feel they should intervene at lower levels. And if the military does not effectively communicate, in terms the civilians can understand, and lacks the moral courage to resist when civilians try to trespass, then you have serious problems.


This is just my own opinion, though I was alive during it: Johnson inherited a large, expensive conventional military that distrusted Democratic presidents (Truman, Kennedy and now Johnson). The Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations had all been trying to cut the military budget. Kennedy had forced the military to look hard at anti-insurgency warfare, had refused to send in the regular military when the CIA's Bay of Pigs affair fell apart, and had butted heads with hawkish generals during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Kennedy and Johnson saw Vietnam as a place to show America's willingness to fight for its allies against a communist takeover. Neither wanted to spend much or do much to accomplish that. Both feared the military wanted a wide expansion of the conflict for funding, prestige and political reasons (see also "A Glorious Little War' trope). Both thought they had no choice but to expand the war 'a little' to drive the North Vietnamese to the peace table.

The huge American ramp-up in Vietnam started with the Tonkin Gulf incident, which today we see as something between fighting sensor ghosts and outright lies. Congress, instead of attending to its business, handed the whole thing off to the president and gave him virtually unlimited military power.

Johnson did not insist that his military leaders formulate a strategy, and they did not do so. They just always seemed to want more men, more equipment and more money... Johnson's biggest failure, in my mind, was shared by Nixon: This is a political matter which can be settled in peace talks if we can just hurt the enemy enough to make him see that he can't win. The issue was that the Soviets and Chinese weren't really hurting and the North Vietnamese didn't want to divide the country.

Westmoreland was the wrong officer to lead the army in Vietnam. His attritional strategy should have preserved American lives through the expenditure of materiel, but instead it just looked like the army was idling around doing nothing. His intelligence was bad (Tet Offensive), his constant calls for more men and materiel made his civilian superiors distrust him, and - frankly - his refusal to stand up to Johnson and, if necessary, resign meant he abdicated military leadership to civilians who were not competent or equipped to exercise it.

Johnson was a good, effective president in other ways, but his idea of fighting a long, low-level war without involving the American people was counter to American experience from 1845 on. Korea wasn't regarded as a win, but as a dismal failure... and American impatience turned hostile as the casualties kept coming. The draft was incredibly unpopular, the war aims unclear, the client state was corrupt and apathetic, and limiting the war to South Vietnam alone meant all of the damage had to be borne by friendly rather than enemy people.

It was a mess - going far beyond just presidential meddling with tactical deployments - largely created by American overconfidence, a general who did not have the moral courage to resist by resigning, and a president who kept thinking the war could be handled by a political deal.

 

[Acheron]

In any field, having amateurs decide things without deeper understanding nor heeding consultation from expert usually results in bad decisions. In the military field, these can easily be lethal.

 

[Barsoom]

I don't see much difference between US military and civilian leaders regarding Vietnam, they both got it badly wrong. But between McNamara's bean counting and Westmoreland's trying to escalate, I prefer the former.

Anyway, it's a tangent. The real question is whether Vietnam demonstrates that the US military doesn't do mission command. McNamara is trotted out as a reason to doubt it, as if gathering statistics on performance equals micromanaging that performance. It doesn't.

 

[Director]

My opinion is that the professional military - the higher level officers - had little to no faith in the ability of the drafted, poorly-trained, short-term-service soldiers they were getting. Draft evasion among the wealthier and better educated was rife, enthusiasm for the war was pretty-quickly minimal and field conditions were (by American standards) poor. Add to that any army's hatred of static, unprofitable defense, a local population that hated the 'colonial occupiers' and you just do not have a formula for success.

If eventual success depends on imposing your will on the enemy, it is almost impossible to do that from a defense that permits only patrols and counter-attacks... futility sets in.

Unlike WW2, where you could depend on an intelligent and well-motivated, mostly-volunteer corps of soldiers, the generals in Vietnam tried to plan every operation out in advance - which is not unreasonable for green troops. I can't speak to whether good communications let senior commanders meddle - I assume they did, since the consequences of that were not so well known.

In sum, I don't think the US army in Vietnam used a mission-oriented doctrine, in contrast to WW2 and (probably) Korea, despite what doctrine said. I think it was picked up again with the all-volunteer army of the Gulf Wars.

 

[Henry IX]

Well, WWII also proved many times that the best defense is attack. Or maybe because those who practiced it were bold generals with delegated initiative.

I can think of almost no occasions that an attack at the operational level with inferior forces actually worked during WWII. Examples where this did occur:

- Trappenjagd (Axis attack in Crimea)
- Singapore
- Philippines
- Compass (British attack against Italian forces in North Africa)

In both Barabarossa and France the Wehrmacht had significant superiority at the front, although not in absolute terms.

Even in those successful operations where the balance of force looks like it is against the attacker there is usually a significant superiority in critical force multipliers such as airpower, artillery and armour. In addition, the defenders were usually burdened with commanders of unusual incompetence.

Trappenjagd is almost unique in that it involved an attack by forces that were numerically inferior in virtually every catagory that still succeeded, and it occured after an extended defensive battle which gave the Axis forces the intiative.

On the other hand, the list successful defensive battles that involved attackers weaker than the defenders is extensive, including:
- Typhoon
- Stalingrad
- Kursk (Citadel)
- Kokoda Track
- Guadacanal
- 1st El-Alamein


The list of successful defensive battle where the attacker (intially) was stronger than the defender is also extensive, including:
- The Bulge
- Market-Garden
- Seige of Tobruk
- Mars
- Rzhev meat grinder
- Soviet Kersch offensive 1941
- German 'sword and shield' defences in AG North in 1943-44
- Demansk pocket
- etc.

Indeed, virtually every German success post 1942 was either purely defensive or defensive followed by a counter-attack. Those counter-attacks were often successful, but were generally launched against either the exposed flanks of attacking formations or against weakened and over-extended attackers.

The lesson of WWII regarding offense vs defense is probably closer to:
- tactical defence is stronger than tactical offence
- operational and strategic offence is stronger than defence provided the attacker has the logistical capablities to concentrate and sustain their forces.

German doctrine was based around concentrating overwhelming force at the point of attack to counteract the defender's advantage and agressive counter-attacks to retake ground before their opponent could dig in and gain the advantage of the defender. It is worth noting that in 1941-1942 the Wehrmacht almost always switched to a defensive footing when attacked, only counter-attacking once the (former) attacker was pinned in place and could be flanked. This was how they demolished so many Soviet counter-attacks in 1941-42. German defensive lines only started geting routinely broken in the second half of 1943 once the Soviets were able to concentrate and coordinate sufficent forces to both pin the German reserves in place and still have manouver forces uncomitted.

 

[HmJ_JP]

I can think of almost no occasions that an attack at the operational level with inferior forces actually worked during WWII. Examples where this did occur:

- Trappenjagd (Axis attack in Crimea)
- Singapore
- Philippines
- Compass (British attack against Italian forces in North Africa)

In both Barabarossa and France the Wehrmacht had significant superiority at the front, although not in absolute terms.

Even in those successful operations where the balance of force looks like it is against the attacker there is usually a significant superiority in critical force multipliers such as airpower, artillery and armour. In addition, the defenders were usually burdened with commanders of unusual incompetence.

Trappenjagd is almost unique in that it involved an attack by forces that were numerically inferior in virtually every catagory that still succeeded, and it occured after an extended defensive battle which gave the Axis forces the intiative.

On the other hand, the list successful defensive battles that involved attackers weaker than the defenders is extensive, including:
- Typhoon
- Stalingrad
- Kursk (Citadel)
- Kokoda Track
- Guadacanal
- 1st El-Alamein


The list of successful defensive battle where the attacker (intially) was stronger than the defender is also extensive, including:
- The Bulge
- Market-Garden
- Seige of Tobruk
- Mars
- Rzhev meat grinder
- Soviet Kersch offensive 1941
- German 'sword and shield' defences in AG North in 1943-44
- Demansk pocket
- etc.

Indeed, virtually every German success post 1942 was either purely defensive or defensive followed by a counter-attack. Those counter-attacks were often successful, but were generally launched against either the exposed flanks of attacking formations or against weakened and over-extended attackers.

The lesson of WWII regarding offense vs defense is probably closer to:
- tactical defence is stronger than tactical offence
- operational and strategic offence is stronger than defence provided the attacker has the logistical capablities to concentrate and sustain their forces.

German doctrine was based around concentrating overwhelming force at the point of attack to counteract the defender's advantage and agressive counter-attacks to retake ground before their opponent could dig in and gain the advantage of the defender. It is worth noting that in 1941-1942 the Wehrmacht almost always switched to a defensive footing when attacked, only counter-attacking once the (former) attacker was pinned in place and could be flanked. This was how they demolished so many Soviet counter-attacks in 1941-42. German defensive lines only started geting routinely broken in the second half of 1943 once the Soviets were able to concentrate and coordinate sufficent forces to both pin the German reserves in place and still have manouver forces uncomitted.

It depends on what scale you're looking at. There have been a lot of successes on small-scale operations.

Capture of Kufra - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[newtlord]

My understanding is that modern "orthodoxy" says that an attacker should have at least 3:1 superiority to have a reasonable chance of success but, because the attacker can concentrate their forces against a single chosen point whereas the defender must disperse their forces to face all possible lines of attack, the attacker can achieve this superiority on a local level even when the total opposing forces are fairly balanced (at least until the defender has time to redeploy their forces in response).

 

[Acheron]

I believe the 3:1 rule refers to combat power, not raw numbers.

 

[newtlord]

I believe the 3:1 rule refers to combat power, not raw numbers.

Indeed. It could be greater numbers, better training, better equipment, more artillery or air support- the point is, you want some sort of major advantage, at least on a local scale, if you're going to attack.

 

[Acheron]

Indeed. It could be greater numbers, better soldiers, better equipment, more artillery or air support- the point is, you want some sort of major advantage, at least on a local scale, if you're going to attack.

Just like surprise attack doesn't have to mean picking a place the enemy doesn't expect, but could also be methods, tactics, equipment, even numbers that are unexpected.

 

[Cavalry]

My understanding is that modern "orthodoxy" says that an attacker should have at least 3:1 superiority to have a reasonable chance of success but, because the attacker can concentrate their forces against a single chosen point whereas the defender must disperse their forces to face all possible lines of attack, the attacker can achieve this superiority on a local level even when the total opposing forces are fairly balanced (at least until the defender has time to redeploy their forces in response).

Yeah, this is a major obstacle if both side is nearly equal, because the defender can move in reinforce and they just need to move 1 reinforce to change 3:1 to 3:2. Rzhev was too hard for Soviet to crack because of that. In Stalingrad Soviet chose to crack far away from German spearhead, and a general attack in other fronts to hold off German reinforcements. Of course in other fronts they mostly failed, but succeed in Stalingrad.

 

[Director]

One lesson from WW2, repeated in Korea and Vietnam, was the priceless value of good intelligence. As one example, consider the massive Soviet deployment around Moscow in 1942 - and the massive German offensive to the Caucasus which benefitted from that deployment. Or look at Kursk, a clear example of what can be done when one knows where the enemy will strike. Iraq War One showed the value of knowing exactly where your enemy is while concealing one's own movements.

Superiority in gathering - and interpreting - intelligence massively magnifies combat power. It was difficult to obtain prior to WW1 but has become a military necessity, so much so that enormous amounts of money, time and effort are dedicated to intelligence today. As one small example, consider that the US military owns its own space shuttle, innumerable satellites and the NSA alone has more than 20,000 employees and spends more than $3.5 billion without counting any black projects.