Understanding Land Warfare

Christopher Tuck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415507547, 9780415507530
• eBook ISBN: 9781134701353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Understanding Land Warfare provides a thorough grounding in the vocabulary, concepts, issues and debates associated with modern land warfare.

The book is a thematic, debate-driven analysis of what makes land warfare unique; how it interacts with the other environments; the key concepts that shape how it is executed; the trade-offs associated with its prosecution; and the controversies that continue to surround its focus and development.

Understanding Land Warfare contains several key themes:

• the difficulty of conducting land warfare

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• the interplay between change and continuity

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• the growing importance of co-operation

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• the variety of ways in which land warfare is fought; the competing theoretical debates; the tensions and trade-offs.

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This book will be essential reading for military personnel studying on cadet, intermediate and staff courses. In addition, it will also be of use to undergraduate and postgraduate students of military history, war studies and strategic studies.

Part I

The development of land warfare

The first part of this book investigates the development of modern land warfare. Despite the many ways in which land, sea and air warfare are connected, they have many important differences. Our first step is to examine the character of warfare on land, its theories and concepts. This is the task of Chapter 1. Having outlined the theoretical basis of land warfare, the next four chapters examine the debates and controversies surrounding how we think about the development of land warfare; the development of the fundamentals of modern land warfare at the tactical and operational levels; and the factors that shape variable approaches to land warfare in the modern world.

1 Land warfare in theory

Key points

● Land warfare has many features that make it unique from warfare at sea or in the air.

● The root of these differences lies in the nature of land itself, in the form of ground or terrain.

● Land warfare is not wholly unique, however, and the effective prosecution of land warfare cannot be separated from such issues as strategy or effectiveness at joint operations.

● Land warfare cannot reliably be reduced to a simple set of principles; its conduct is conditioned by a range of difficult trade-offs.

Skill in the prosecution of land warfare matters. Whether one looks at the European armies of 1914–15, mired in tactical stalemate on the Western Front, or the Iraqi army in 1991 and 2003 locked in an unequal struggle against Coalition forces, problems in relative battlefield performance translate directly into high casualties, immense strategic difficulties and often decisive defeat. But why is land warfare so challenging? This first chapter provides the foundations for an answer to this question by examining the key concepts and ideas that underpin an understanding of land warfare. The recurrent theme throughout this discussion is complexity. It is a banal but fundamental observation that the key distinction between war on land and war in the other environments is land itself. Land, in terms of the physical ground upon which warfare is fought, has innate attributes that make it distinct from the sea, air, or electromagnetic dimensions; these attributes shape the character of those forces required to fight on it. The importance of terrain, its nature and variability make difficult and often changing demands on the forces required to fight over it.

The ideas presented in this chapter provide a basis of understanding for the debates presented in the remainder of this book. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part examines the uniqueness of land warfare based upon the distinctiveness of the land environment and the consequences that this has had for the nature of warfare on land. The second part of this chapter examines the unity of land warfare: here the purpose is to identify the importance for the effective conduct of land warfare of thinking about how land warfare should be orchestrated at different levels and in relation to other instruments of power. Third, building on the previous two sections, the chapter explores some of the key concepts and principles that have developed as guides for the exercise of land warfare in the modern period. The ideas presented in this chapter are developed more directly in Chapters 3 and 4, which investigate how the themes explored here have influenced the development of a definably modern style of land warfare.

What are the characteristics of the land environment?

We focus first on examining what it is that is distinctive about land warfare. The effective prosecution of land warfare rests in part on understanding that land warfare cannot be approached in exactly the same way as war in the other environments. The root of the differences lies in the nature of land itself. Land embodies a number of attributes that shape the prosecution of warfare upon it. These attributes are what makes land warfare different from war on sea or in the air. Some of these attributes are, in a quite literal sense, easy to see; others are less obvious.

Box 1.1 Land forces and land power

For convenience, this book uses such terms as ‘land forces’ and ‘armies’ interchangeably. Strictly speaking, however, they are different. Land forces comprise ground-oriented military organisations including armies, marines, reserves, militias and so forth. So, all armies are land forces, but not all land forces are armies. Land power is the ability to exert influence on or from the land. Land forces constitute a crucial component of land power, but air and maritime forces can also make a vital contribution.

Variability

One of the most mundane observations regarding terrain is also one of the most important militarily: it is highly variable. Land is not a consistent medium. Unlike the sea or air, land embodies great variety in geography, vegetation and population density, different combinations of which can create difficult challenges for land forces (see Box 1.1). For example, mountains, jungles, urban areas and forests are problematic operating environments for vehicles; communication and visibility are difficult; movement is often channelled (see Box 1.2, for example). Deserts can pose fewer problems in relation to visibility and manoeuvre, the latter especially for tracked vehicles, but desert sand poses problems for the reliability of equipment and the stamina of personnel; navigation can also be a difficulty. Land’s variability is magnified by the effects of climate and weather: excessive heat, snow, rain, or mud can transform the characteristics of even flat terrain, constraining manoeuvre, limiting visibility and/or depressing morale. Moreover, this diversity can be heavily concentrated: the same battlefield can exhibit widely differing terrain within a relatively limited distance; the impact of this terrain can vary depending on its location or the distance between features. The theme of variability can take many complex forms:

● First, conditions can be variable even within a given class of terrain: the ‘desert warfare’ of North Africa in the Second World War, for example, encompassed everything from open expanses of soft sand in the east through to the rocky ridges of Tunis with their cork and scrub woods.

● Second, the same terrain can change radically in its effects through climatic conditions or human endeavour. The open steppes of Russia that favoured the manoeuvre of German forces in the summer of 1941, were transformed later in the year first by heavy rain that created seas of mud, and then by snow and freezing temperatures. The Germans transformed the flat floodplains of Holland in 1944 by opening the sea dykes and flooding them.

● Third, geography and climate have no uniform impact: heavy cloud may have no effect on ground forces, but may reduce significantly the effectiveness of air mobility or close air support. Heavy woods or high hedgerows may create difficult conditions for vehicles to manoeuvre and fight, but they can increase the ability of infantry to move unseen. Many of the important effects of geography and climate are also psychological and depend to an extent on the training, morale and resilience of the forces concerned. Often, the challenges of combat can take second place to the misery of heat, cold, rain and/or isolation (see Box 1.3).

● Fourth, and related to the previous point, terrain and climate do not necessarily affect both belligerents equally. It is impossible for a given army to be perfectly adapted for all possible geographical and climatic conditions: thus, in any given context, one side is likely to be better prepared than the other - often the army fighting on home ground. Difficult terrain and climate can therefore constitute a relative advantage for an army. For example, in the early stages of Winter War against the Soviet Union (1939–40) the Finns were better prepared for fighting in both snow and forests than their opponents, inflicting heavy defeats on ponderous Soviet mechanised forces. Preparation for particular locales is complicated by the fact that military organisations must often fight simultaneously in many different conditions. In the Second World War, for example, the US army had to fight in such diverse environments as the jungles of New Guinea, the deserts of North Africa, the mountains of Italy, the hedgerows of Normandy, the forests of Germany and the coral atolls of the Pacific isla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Introduction: understanding land warfare
• Part I The development of land warfare
• Part II What is victory?
• Part III Future land warfare
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index