The Perfection of Blitzkrieg

by John Thompson

01/20/03

Battle has always been a contest of wit and strength. As the crisis with Iraq goes towards its inevitable end, the US has just dispatched its 3^rd Mechanized Division towards the Persian Gulf — one of its strongest formations, and one of its smartest.

While God is on the side of the big battalions, size is relative. One hundred men with rifles are a lot ‘larger’ than 1,000 with spears. Wit is harder to measure, but he who fights with his brains always has an edge — ‘a force multiplier’ over his opponents. It is possible for 1,000 spearmen to beat 100 riflemen if they use deception, clear communications, a good plan, and react faster to changing circumstances than the other side does. If, however, the riflemen fight as smartly as the spearmen, the result is quite predictable.

Being strong is easy — for those with the money and willpower. Fighting smart is more difficult to arrange, although it helps to have carefully trained soldiers and leaders schooled to be flexible, adaptive and intelligently aggressive. Most of the great commanders in history inculcated their subordinates with these attributes, but conservative peacetime militaries mitigate against their continuation. It also helps when, besides the usual considerations of firepower, protection and speed/mobility, if effective measures for command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) have been established.

In WW-1, the Industrial revolution had provided armies with new weaponry, but not yet with adequate technologies for mobility and C3I. The net effect of this was that most commanders, reliant on flimsy telephone gear (backed by runners) often lost any ability to command once their men walked out of the protection of their trenches into the teeth of industrial firepower. It took a four year tutorial — which many commanders flunked altogether — to find ways to break the impasse; but it was only after 1918 that new methods for battlefield mobility (reliable trucks and tanks) and communications (reliable radios) became possible.

Some of the junior officers who survived World War One spent the next two decades considering ways to ensure that smart fighting could spare their nations the worst effects of war when both sides are almost equally strong. Following the lead of British pioneers like J.F.C. Fuller and Liddell Hart, Germany’s Hans Guderian helped to formulate the concept of Blitzkrieg. In the USSR, M.N. Tukhachevsky — possibly the 20^th Century’s greatest military theorist — formulated a concept called Deep Battle before being purged by Stalin in 1938. His surviving protégés became the Soviet Union’s top battlefield commanders in the latter half of the Second World War and went on to promote his theories following their mentor’s posthumous "rehabilitation" in 1961.

What these theories envisioned was the use of fast-moving formations and weapons systems striking throughout the entire depth of an enemy’s defences with such rapidity that the attacker induces psychological paralysis in his enemy even before the main blow is struck. American theorists who helped establish current US doctrine in the 1970s call this "getting inside the enemy’s decision loop" — where the attacker moves so quickly that the defending leaders are unable to react except to situations which have already been changed, and which they can’t see accurately anyway.

Using the potential of computers, helicopters and guided missiles (which Guderian never thought of and Tukhachevsky barely foresaw), the US has created formations and weapons systems that completely dominate a modern Battlefield — and the terrifying performance of their Army in the 1991 Gulf War foreshadows what could come this time.

The 3^rd Mechanized Division could destroy at least three times its numbers without much breaking into a sweat — particularly in the open ground away from Iraq’s cities. The Division is able to move about a 100 km in a day while destroying anything it encounters — often before its opponents have any chance to fire. As it grinds forward, its M1A2 tanks and Bradley MICVs will rumble over the remains of headquarters, air defence sites and artillery batteries than have already been eradicated by the 3rds’ Paladin self-propelled guns, MLRS rockets and Longbow Apache Helicopters. Any Iraqi troops they care to encounter will already be without leaders, support or supplies.

The 3^rd Infantry Division, like the other battlefield components of the US Military are the perfection of Blitzkrieg and Deep Battle. Faster than the Iraqis, much better armed and far better protected, these troops fight to blind and immobilize enemy leaders and leave them with no choice but surrender. Saddam Hussein’s generals will be the real frontline in the coming war.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca