The Evolution of Modern Land Warfare

Theory and Practice

Christopher Bellamy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317419594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Extensively illustrated with 52 detailed campaign and battle maps and diagrams, this book, originally published in 1990, surveys the evolution of warfare in Europe from Napoleon to the end of the twentieth century and in Asia from the Middle Ages. It considers the interaction of technology and warfare. With wide-ranging examples, the book includes two in depth case studies, one on the Soviet Operational Manoeuvre Group and its predecessors in the Russian Imperial Army, the other on the history of land warfare, including guerilla warfare, in Asia. In this book the author demonstrates that military history can be of immense practical help to the modern military analyst and professional. Now updated with a new introduction to take into account changes since 1990, this book remains of essential value to students, teachers & professionals in political & social history, international relations, defence, war & peace studies.

Chapter one

Ground rules

In the fertile coastal strip of Palestine there lies a beautiful plain. Under the peaches and blue ice-cream sky of a December late afternoon merging into evening, it is stunningly peaceful. Here over twenty cities were built, one on top of the other, for good reasons. Cities need food, and so they were built in the middle of a fertile, abundant plain. Cities needed to be defended, and so they were built on a piece of commanding ground. Cities need a reason for their existence, to trade and to thrive, and so they were built at the crossing of two great trade routes, the one running east-west, from the Mediterranean to the river Jordan, and the one running north-south, along the Mediterranean coast. It is therefore called a tel, an artificial mound, comprising city, upon city, upon city. It also became a place for battles, because geography focused armies upon it. The surrounding marshes concentrated them in the narrow plain by the city: so many battles, that this place became a byword for battles, indeed the ultimate battle. It is called Tel Megiddo – Armageddon.

It was here in the year 1469 BC that the Egyptian Pharaoh Thotmes (Thutmosis) III led perhaps 10,000 men in a rapid and unexpected march against rebel Palestinian chieftains. The chieftains had sent outposts to hold the Megiddo pass, a covering force which was easily scattered, leaving the King of Kadesh to face the Pharaoh on the Megiddo plain. Apparently, Thotmes’ army advanced in a concave formation, its southern wing enveloping the rebels, while the northern was driven between the rebel flank and the city of Megiddo itself. The Egyptians therefore enveloped the rebel army, at the same time severing it from its base – the fortress. It is the first battle in history, as far as we know, to have been conducted in accordance with recognized strategic and tactical principles, indeed the first great recorded battle of history. The Egyptians made good use of the chariot, a revolutionary device embodying mobility, shock action, ‘firepower’ from its archers, and perhaps a small amount of protection. Nor was this the only battle of significance for the art of war to take place here. In 609 BC a Jewish army under Josiah was easily defeated in the biblical battle of Armageddon, less interesting than that of 1469 BC from a military viewpoint, if more so from a theological one. Over 2,500 years later, between 19 and 21 May 1918, the British under General Allenby defeated Turkish forces in the so-called ‘second battle of Armageddon’, the umpteenth of Megiddo, in which local Jewish settlers showed him the way through the marshes, a reminder of the continuing importance of terrain. Allenby’s breakthrough was followed by a vigorous pursuit by cavalry, armoured cars and aircraft, which led many to place too much stress on light mobile forces, a misinterpretation of its lessons, in detail, if not in general. Ground, intelligence, surprise, breakthrough, pursuit; firepower, mobility, shock action; envelopment, cutting lines of communication. Since the beginning of the history of war, these factors have not changed.¹

THE DARK SIDE OF CIVILIZATION

A city based on agriculture and trade and located in the Middle East is the right place to begin the study of war as a socio-political phenomenon, as well as military technique. War, as Clausewitz said, ‘is an extension of politics by other, namely violent, means’. It is ‘an act of violence intended to force the enemy to do our will’.² It presupposes the existence of communities organized on some scale, capable of formulating and articulating objectives, and of calculating that the possible risks are worthwhile when measured against the benefits of remaining on friendly terms with the neighbouring community of homo sapiens. War, is the dark side of civilization.

Zoologists and anthropologists have demonstrated convincingly that war has little if anything in common with any primeval violent instinct in man. It has still less in common with the response of rats or other communal species.³ It has been argued that naturally carnivorous and predatory animals, like lions and wolves, have an inbuilt self-control mechanism to prevent them slaughtering members of their own species, whereas man as a primate does not, and that when his intellect furnishes him with a club or a battle fleet he is not inhibited from using it on other men. This may have some validity in the case of a bar-room brawl or a crime passionel, but hardly applies to the reasoned, cold, calculated application of organized military force, raised and equipped at great expense from the surplus wealth generated by agriculture and industry. It breaks down completely when one considers the difficulties of maintaining an organized military force in the field for any length of time (even 24 hours) and directing it towards even the simplest military objective. The author agrees wholeheartedly with anthropologists, that comparisons between an ape baring its teeth as a sign of aggression and organized violence in war are superficial and absurd. Anthropological studies provide no evidence that man is naturally violent towards man. In the modern context, the strange bond which develops between opponents in war, and the sympathy which often develops between individual combatants who come into contact when one or both are wounded or taken prisoner, supports this. Organized bodies of men in battle have more in common with sheep than wolves, and although individual aggression is obviously aroused in an atmosphere fraught with fear and danger, the impulse that leads societies to war is intellectual and social, and has nothing to do with the individual’s genes.⁴ Most men’s instincts induce them not to attack the enemy in battle, but to go to ground or run away. Whether the youth of Sparta, the medieval knight, the conscript of 1914–18 or the modern professional soldier, men are required to undergo a long and deliberate training process to make them effective soldiers. With very few exceptions, they have to be thoroughly conditioned to kill their own kind.

It is generally acknowledged that warfare began after men had stopped being hunter-gatherers, and settled to cultivate the land. Cultivating land required an enormous investment of effort, and men were not to be deprived of the fruits of their labours easily. Close on the heels of agriculture came relatively large, organized communities, the first cities. These represented a surplus of wealth, and more often than not this process was accompanied by the growth of organized religion and a distinct ruling class. One does not have to be a Marxist to see that organized conflict has its origins in economic considerations.⁵

There are two sides to every armed conflict. It is not just a question of one side’s inclination to coerce the other, but also the extent to which the latter can be coerced. A community which has nothing worth taking is not a very worthwhile target for aggression. If it is defeated and splinters into fragments living off the land, melting away into the landscape, it cannot be relied upon to ‘do the aggressor’s will’, to paraphrase Clausewitz. Organized, centralized societies were at once better able to wage war, had more reason to do so, and at the same time were more vulnerable targets. A peasantry and urban society, used to discipline and committed to the land or property were more likely to do the will of the new ruler, as they had that of the old. The problem which modern organized armed forces face in dealing with terrorists and guerrilla fighters, presenting no specific large targets, with no identifiable or at any rate accessible power base, underscores this point. Four and a half millennia after the depiction of organized armed forces inflicting calculated humiliation on a defeated enemy, and then retiring to a celebration booze-up, on the Standard of Ur made in about 2500 BC, a bemused Engels wrote to Marx about the American Civil War:

it is amazing how slight or, much rather, how wholly lacking is the participation of the population in it [the war]. In 1813, indeed, the columns of the French were continually interrupted and cut up by Colomb, Lutzow, Chernyshev and twenty other insurgents and Cossack leaders; in 1812 the population of Russia disappeared completely from the French line of march; in 1814 the French peasants armed themselves and slew the patrols and stragglers of the allies. But here nothing happens at all. Men resign themselves to the fate of the big battles … the tall talk of war to the knife dissolves into mere muck.⁶

LEVELS OF CONFLICT: CONVENTIONAL’ AND GUERRILLA’ WARFARE

This book focuses primarily on the big battles, but if the populace as a whole in the area where those battles take place chooses to become involved, they have always been able to exert some influence on them, and sometimes the populace do not resign themselves to the fate of the big battles. The phrase ‘war to the knife’ comes from the Peninsula, which also gave us the Spanish word guerrilla. The Spanish guerrillas were a great nuisance to the French, but the big battles alone were decisive. The same is true of Soviet partisan operations in World War Two. Very large partisan forces operated in the German rear, conducting thousands of demolitions synchronized with Soviet main forces operations, but the Germans never lost control of the railways. In parts of Asia, where terrain and economy have suited, the ‘big battles’ have for hundreds of years represented vortices in a sea of less intense ‘guerrilla war’ (Chapter 6). There is a distinction between guerrilla warfare in conjunction with major conventional operations (the sense in which it was originally used), and terrorism in circumstances where a state of war cannot be said to exist. However, the moment armed clashes occur on any scale, principles of warfare – destruction of the enemy’s will to resist, intelligence, fire and movement, encirclement, communications, logistics – apply. For this reason, the author is against the use of the term ‘low-intensity’ warfare: a bullet in the stomach is a bullet in the stomach, whether it comes from a member of a political group with a long name operating in an internal or ‘unconventional interstate’ conflict, or whether it comes from a member of 3rd Shock Army. Broadly speaking, there are two types of actions: police and anti-terrorist actions, at the lower end of the spectrum, and ‘local wars’. The latter, while not total wars like World Wars One and Two, are, very obviously, wars, and conform to the same principles of military art as conflicts on a broader canvas or conducted for more uncompromising motives. The ground rules explored in this chapter apply equally to ‘guerrilla’ and ‘low-intensity’ conflicts, although the form in which they are expressed may appear different.

NATURE OF WAR

A thousand years, more or less, elapsed between the conflicts shown on the Standard of Ur, using technology specially designed or adapted for military purposes and probably some kind of deliberate tactics, and the recognizably professional Egyptian conduct of the Battle of Megiddo in 1469 BC.⁷ Since then, it has been possible to identify certain key elements in the conduct of war. From one viewpoint, there are four principal elements. The first that springs to the modern mind is technology. The second is the complex question of how armies are organized to function most effectively, and, indeed, the ability of a state, regime, or movement to maintain and supply them at all. This has been extremely critical throughout military history, and will be called, for the moment, logistics/organization. The next element is the way armed forces are handled, which is best called military art. Military art has traditionally had two key levels, strategy and tactics. The terms come from the Greek strategos, meaning the office or command of a general, and tactics from Greek taktika, ‘matters pertaining to arrangement’.⁸ Clausewitz defined tactics as the use of armed forces in an engagement, and strategy as the use of engagements for the object of the war.⁹ Wavell used the analogy of a game of cards, strategy is the bidding, and tactics the way the hand is played.¹⁰ In the last century or so, this at first sight simple, though always elusive, division into two has become more complicated, and a third, intermediate level has emerged. Or, rather, it has been formally recognized, since it arguably always existed in some form. The latter is known as operational art (between tactics and strategy), and is explored in detail in Chapter 3. The last of the four elements is command, control, communications, and intelligence, an interlinked and mutually supportive cluster of capabilities described as C³I (‘C cubed I’, the ‘cubed’ stressing the fact that the various parts are multiplied together, not merely added). Without communications, there can be no command, no control, no usable intelligence – and so on.

Ancient armies were relatively small and victory depended primarily on a combination of technology and appropriate technique (see Chapter 2), plus tactical skill on the part of the commander. Armies were rarely more than equivalent to a single corps in strength, could live off the land, and did not have to worry about lines of communication. Weapons, too, were simple: edged weapons could be repaired by artisans accompanying the army, and even arrows and javelins could be recovered. Ancient armies were therefore freed from logistic constraints, and everything, unless plague intervened (the destruction of Sennacherib’s army) depended on the conduct of the battle itself. ‘Strategy’ in fact evolved from logistic considerations. It was only when armies became increasingly dependent on consumable ammunition, and larger amounts of forage and rations than the country could easily supply, that their movements and dispos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Ground rules
• 2 Technics and warfare
• 3 The expansion of the battlefield and the operational level of war, 1800–1918
• 4 Air–land battle, 1918–77
• 5 Case study one: corps volant to OMG: the practical utility of military history
• 6 Case study two: Don’t get involved in a land war in Asia
• 7 Some conclusions and prognoses
• Notes
• General select bibliography
• Index