By Michael F. Duggan
When you remove shock from the battlefield, you take away decisiveness and introduce stalemate and attrition.1 What barbed wire, flat-trajectory bullets, and machine guns were to the battlefields of 1914-18, drones, loitering munitions, and highly-mobile artillery are to the Ukraine War. On its face, the Offensive Revolution that emerged in the final phases of the First World War, which gave the Second World War its dynamic qualities as Blitzkrieg and made generals like Guderian, Patton, Rommel, and Zhukov look like geniuses compared to their chateau-bound counterparts of the Great War, and which has dominated combined arms doctrine ever since, is failing in eastern Ukraine.
As former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer and weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, has observed, small unit tactics and a decentralized command structure in Ukraine have replaced the “big arrow” offensives typical of the Second World War as fact and the Cold War as theory. As with the failure of the offensive mode of war throughout most of the First World War (cavalry, which had traditionally provided mobile battlefield shock and decisiveness, was rendered useless on the Western Front), strong new defensive weapons have once again bolstered the power of the intrinsically stronger mode of war. If the defensive power of the weaker army is stronger than the offensive capabilities of the stronger army, then stalemate will ensure until attrition once again favors the side stronger in the aggregate. The Russians therefore, have adopted something akin to what historians call the “bite and hold” tactics of the First World War.2 The result, since the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive last summer (a series of attempted breaching operations without air or artillery superiority), has been a front-wide effort of small gains on the part of the Russians, aimed at grinding down the other side.
Some military pundits and wannabe experts in the corporate media have declared the age of the tank to be over. This may or may not be true. The technological side of war is a contest of measures and countermeasures, innovation and counter-innovation, and it is difficult to know if the stymying of the offensive mode in 21st century combined forces combat is a fleeting phenomenon—it seems likely that effective anti-drone technologies are already in the works—or if the tank is going the way of the mounted lancer, chasseur, dragoon, and hussar.
Postscript
On April 26, 2024, the Associated Press reported that U.S.-supplied M1A1 Abrams tanks are being pulled from the frontlines.
Notes
- Russell F. Weigley, The Age of Battles, the Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991) xiv-xv. ↩︎
- Paddy Griffith, Battlefield Tactics of the Western Front, the British Army’s Art of Attack 1916-1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994) 32-33. ↩︎