On Flexibility

Recovery from Technological and Doctrinal Surprise on the Battlefield

Meir Finkel

• Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780804777155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Libertad política

This book addresses one of the basic questions in military studies: How can armies cope effectively with technological and doctrinal surprises—ones that leave them vulnerable to new weapons systems and/or combat doctrines?

Author Meir Finkel contends that the current paradigm—with its over-dependence on intelligence and an all-out effort to predict the nature of the future battlefield and the enemy's capabilities—generally doesn't work.

Based on historical case analysis of successful "under-fire" recovery and failure to recover, he identifies the variables that have determined these outcomes, and he presents an innovative method for military force planning that will enables armies to deal with the uncertainties of future wars "in real time."

His proposed method combines conceptual, doctrinal, cognitive, command, organizational, and technological elements to produce optimal battlefield flexibility and adaptability. He then demonstrates that, when properly applied, this method can eliminate most obstacles to overcoming battlefield surprises.

Part One

THE CHALLENGE OF FORCE PLANNING FACING FUTURE SURPRISES

1

PREDICTION AND INTELLIGENCE

The Dominant Approach in Force Planning and Its Failure to Answer the Challenge of Technological and Doctrinal Surprise

MILITARY FORCE PLANNING: PRAXIS AND RESEARCH

The goal of military force planning is to enable the “planner” to deal with security threats in the best possible way. According to Avi Kober, an Israeli expert in defense matters, “[t]he theory of force planning is a complex set of principles that directs force organization, structure and arming so that it can wage war successfully according to parameters laid down in the security doctrine. There is no universal doctrine of military force planning.”¹

Various military organizations use different terms and definitions in the force planning process.² Since technological and doctrinal surprise challenges force planning on all levels and at every stage of war, the definition of military force planning should be as comprehensive as possible, that is, it should include all aspects of military force development, beginning with the development of the concept of force employment (as a combat doctrine), through the planning of organization, armament, equipping, education, training, and human resources management, to the implementation of the plans and adapting them to changes. Military force planning deals with the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war.

Given the sensitivity to surprise of warfare doctrine, this book treats the doctrine as an integral part of force planning. All of the abovementioned elements support the development of abilities and expertise in six main areas: maneuvering, fire, intelligence, command and control (C2), logistics, and force protection.

The Sensitivity of Force Planning to Uncertainty

Force planning is directly influenced by the security doctrine, which itself is derived from the national security doctrine, the latter being based on geopolitical, social, economic, ethical, and ideological factors. For example, Israel’s national security doctrine is predicated, inter alia, on limited geographical depth, a plethora of enemies and confrontation fronts, a small but high-quality, technologically developed society, and limited economic resources that preclude a protracted war. These factors led to the development of a warfare doctrine that strives for deterrence, strategic warning based on intelligence gathering, a lightning decision in enemy territory, and force planning based on a limited conscript army, a large, well-trained reserve force, compulsory conscription that puts manpower to the best use, reliance on an extensive intelligence layout for strategic warning, and offensive branches such as armor and air.³

Force planning at the operational and tactical levels is strongly influenced by technological development and scenarios that depict the probable fighting method against defined enemies in specific combat arenas. Uncertainty is an inherent feature in force planning, derived from the need to predict future influences on each of the abovementioned factors and on the army’s ability to achieve superiority on the battlefield.

Thus, while force planning consists of relatively invariable factors, such as geopolitics and population size (or quality), variable factors are also present, so that the uncertainty factor is of supreme importance. In addition, it should be recalled that force planning is carried out on a number of levels. At the strategic level, it is based on relatively invariable factors and deals with the general structure of the army: size, the composition of the conscript army and reserves, command structure (according to the number of fronts), and type of confrontation (high or low profile, conventional or non-conventional). Structure generally remains the same and has practically no need of intelligence input. Force planning at the operational and tactical levels, however, involves the creation of weapons systems superior to the enemy’s and the development of the military capabilities of its units (organization, C2, and so forth) that surpass the enemy’s parallel units. The success of force planning at these levels depends to a large degree on knowledge of the enemy’s capabilities; otherwise, it is difficult to ascertain whether an advantage has been attained. This chapter discusses in detail the basic uncertainty at the heart of force planning.

The planning phase of force planning—the essence of the process—has two main features. The first is realism, based on a rationalistic link between force structure and security requirements; strategic and technological trends; and a compromise between what is desirable and attainable (given the limited resources) and between the military branches that compete for a slice of the pie. The second feature is reality-based flexibility, whose goal is updating and modifying planning decisions according to changes.⁴

Both characteristics illustrate that force planning for the next war is a field that contains a large element of prediction about the nature of the future battlefield. This is also why it suffers from uncertainty-related problems. “External friction” comes from changes that are not dependent on the force “builder,” but from changes in technology, geopolitical conditions,⁵ interaction with the enemy,⁶ and so forth.

Regarding the enemy, the uncertainty factor may expand because of changes in Side B’s force planning in response to Side A’s, a pattern that becomes a vicious cycle as in the case of the arms race. Yehezkel Dror claims that “one of the common failures in military force planning is the inherent assumption that while we develop our force, the enemy’s force planning remains uninfluenced by our activity.”⁷ Changes and modifications in force planning are introduced not only after a battlefield clash, but also on a regular basis in times of quiet. Thomas Schelling, an expert in international relations, studied the action-reaction cycle in the American-Soviet arms race and noted that each side was capable of spurring its rival to boost weapons production:

Thus, by the end of the decade, we (Americans) may be reacting to Soviet decisions early in the decade; and vice versa. The Soviets should have realized in 1957 that their military requirements in the middle 1960s would be, to an appreciable extent, a result of their own military programs and military public relations in the late 1950s.⁸

The source of the “internal friction” lies in problems intrinsic to force planning, such as the development process of military technology,⁹ the difficulty involved in assessing the effect of the weapons and combat doctrine in a full-scale confrontation,¹⁰ the tension between innovation and conservatism,¹¹ and the need to depend on long-term, often unreliable economic support.¹² Another area of internal uncertainty lies in the leaders of state themselves or, to be more exact, government policy on military operations and the level of risk the nation’s captains are prepared to assume at the moment of truth.

UNCERTAINTY AND SURPRISE IN BATTLE

Uncertainty is one of the most basic elements in war and is inherent in every combat situation, frequently taking the form of surprise. Surprise on the battlefield can stem from the enemy’s intention or an assessment failure by the victim even when the enemy did not intend to spring a surprise. Sometimes surprise occurs because of a failure in executing the plans and without the enemy’s resistance, or it may occur because of unplanned success.

In his book Surprise Attack, Efraim Kam divides the surprise-causing factors into four types:¹³ the attack itself or more commonly known as the surprise attack, timing, place, and method and means of applying force (type of attack). Kam includes technological and doctrinal innovations and their application in the last category. He identifies two types of technological surprise: surprise due to unawareness (for whatever reason) of innovations (e.g., the Japanese torpedo at Pearl Harbor) and surprise due to ignorance and misunderstanding of the impact of a known technological or doctrinal factor. The innovative use may be expressed in quantity and/or the manner of implementation that catches the victim by surprise. For example, Egypt’s method of using the Sagger anti-tank missile in the Yom Kippur War or Israel’s “Operation Focus” that destroyed the Egyptian air force in the opening hours of the Six-Day War. This factor had little to do with the enemy’s intentions; instead, it depended almost entirely on its capabilities.

In Barton Whaley’s classic work, Stratagem: Deception and Surprise in War, five elements or modes of surprise are categorized: intention, time, place, strength, and style. The last category incorporates doctrinal and technological surprise.¹⁴

Surprise in strength relates to the order of battle (ORBAT) employed by the enemy. The Germans’ force concentration in the Battle of the Ardennes Salient in December 1944 is an example of this kind of surprise. Surprise in combat strength relies to a greater extent on an assessment of the enemy’s intentions and to a lesser extent on its ability.

The type of surprise least influenced by identification of enemy intentions is technological and doctrinal surprise. However, the likelihood of this type of surprise occurring is quite high (see below).

Is battlefield surprise an ordinary occurrence requiring a basic, systematic approach to the problem, or is it a rare and unique phenomenon? A brief look at military history and the doctrines of the world’s armies shows that surprise may be, paradoxically, the most consistent element on the battlefield because it lies at the core of combat activity and is the epitome of the art of warfare. As a war principle, surprise is employed by all armies. The British military theoretician Richard Simpkin asserts, “Perhaps the one military matter over which there is no dissent is the value of surprise.”¹⁵ The Israeli scholar Yehoshafat Harkabi is of the same opinion.¹⁶ Evidence of the universality of surprise is its presence in the works of military theoreticians throughout military history¹⁷ and in military doctrines the world over.¹⁸ Robert Leonhard, an American officer who has written about war principles in the information age, rejects most of the traditional principles but insists that the principle of surprise will always remain valid.¹⁹

The universality of surprise has led many armies to devise an entire doctrine on the art of deception, dissemblance, and stratagem in order to achieve surprise at various levels of war.²⁰ Deception combines active operations with passive activities (such as concealment and camouflage). Even when basic deceptive moves are not employed, concealment alone can cause surprise. Ronald Sherwin and Barton Whaley made a statistical analysis of ninety-three cases of strategic attack in the Western world (between 1914 and 1973) and found that when deception was applied, there was a strong likelihood that surprise resulted; but even without deception, surprise was attained in many cases.²¹ An expert on the psychology of military intelligence, Richards Heuer, claims that an enemy who is aware of the various cognitive and conceptual biases lying at the psychological base of deception, “holds most of the cards. . . . Perceptual tendencies and cognitive biases strongly favor the deceiver as long as the goal of deception is to reinforce a victim’s preconceptions, which is by far the most common form of deception.”²²

Deception, like intelligence in general, works against the enemy’s capabilities and intentions. Since the book’s main focus is technological and doctrinal surprise, it deals only with the enemy’s capabilities. Handel divides the deception of capabilities into two categories:

A. Concealing one’s ability in order to trick the enemy into underestimating the real strength of the side perpetrating the deception (example: Germany before 1933, the Soviet Union before 1941, and Israel before 1967).

B. Enhancing one’s ability by dissemblance, selective exposure of equipment, weapons, and so forth to create deterrence (examples: Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s, the Soviet “bomber gap,” and the “ballistic missile gap”).²³

According to Hecht, technological deception is concerned only with misleading the portrayal of technological capability (he removes the quantitative element from deception of capabilities). This is done for three purposes: to mislead the enemy regarding the technological capability of the deceiver; to mislead the enemy regarding his own technological capability; and to convince the enemy that the deceiver possesses technology that it does not really have.²⁴

Deception of the fighting method can occur as a last-minute change. This is not done as a ruse but for other operational needs, though the side perpetrating it is aware of the information gap being created in the enemy and exploits it accordingly. Handel summarizes the use of deception by stating:

Since no effective measures to counter or identify deception have yet bee...