Tag Maneuver warfare

Simpkin on the Long-Term Effects of Firepower Dominance

To follow on my earlier post introducing British military theorist Richard Simpkin’s foresight in detecting trends in 21st Century warfare, I offer this paragraph, which immediately followed the ones I quoted:

Briefly and in the most general terms possible, I suggest that the long-term effect of dominant firepower will be threefold. It will disperse mass in the form of a “net” of small detachments with the dual role of calling down fire and of local quasi-guerrilla action. Because of its low density, the elements of this net will be everywhere and will thus need only the mobility of the boot. It will transfer mass, structurally from the combat arms to the artillery, and in deployment from the direct fire zone (as we now understand it) to the formation and protection of mobile fire bases capable of movement at heavy-track tempo (Chapter 9). Thus the third effect will be to polarise mobility, for the manoeuvre force still required is likely to be based on the rotor. This line of thought is borne out by recent trends in Soviet thinking on the offensive. The concept of an operational manoeuvre group (OMG) which hives off raid forces against C3 and indirect fire resources is giving way to more fluid and discontinuous manoeuvre by task forces (“air-ground assault groups” found by “shock divisions”) directed onto fire bases—again of course with an operational helicopter force superimposed. [Simpkin, Race To The Swift, p. 169]

It seems to me that in the mid-1980s, Simpkin accurately predicted the emergence of modern anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) defensive systems with reasonable accuracy, as well the evolving thinking on the part of the U.S. military as to how to operate against them.

Simpkin’s vision of task forces (more closely resembling Russian/Soviet OMGs than rotary wing “air-ground assault groups” operational forces, however) employing “fluid and discontinuous manoeuvre” at operational depths to attack long-range precision firebases appears similar to emerging Army thinking about future multidomain operations. (It’s likely that Douglas MacGregor’s Reconnaissance Strike Group concept more closely fits that bill.)

One thing he missed on was his belief that rotary wing helicopter combat forces would supplant armored forces as the primary deep operations combat arm. However, there is the potential possibility that drone swarms might conceivably take the place in Simpkin’s operational construct that he allotted to heliborne forces. Drones have two primary advantages over manned helicopters: they are far cheaper and they are far less vulnerable to enemy fires. With their unique capacity to blend mass and fires, drones could conceivably form the deep strike operational hammer that Simpkin saw rotary wing forces providing.

Just as interesting was Simpkin’s anticipation of the growing importance of information and electronic warfare in these environments. More on that later.

Richard Simpkin on 21st Century Trends in Mass and Firepower

Anvil of “troops” vs. anvil of fire. (Richard Simpkin, Race To The Swift: Thoughts on Twenty-First Century Warfare, Brassey’s: London, 1985, p. 51)

For my money, one of the most underrated analysts and theorists of modern warfare was the late Brigadier Richard Simpkin. A retired British Army World War II veteran, Simpkin helped design the Chieftan tank in the 60s and 70s. He is best known for his series of books analyzing Soviet and Western military theory and doctrine. His magnum opus was Race To The Swift: Thoughts on Twenty-First Century Warfare, published in 1985. A brilliant blend of military history, insightful analysis of tactics and technology as well as operations and strategy, and Simpkin’s idiosyncratic wit, the observations in Race To The Swift are becoming more prescient by the year.

Some of Simpkin’s analysis has not aged well, such as the focus on the NATO/Soviet confrontation in Central Europe, and a bold prediction that rotary wing combat forces would eventually supplant tanks as the primary combat arm. However, it would be difficult to find a better historical review of the role of armored forces in modern warfare and how trends in technology, tactics, and doctrine are interacting with strategy, policy, and politics to change the character of warfare in the 21st Century.

To follow on my previous post on the interchangeability of fire (which I gleaned from Simpkin, of course), I offer this nugget on how increasing weapons lethality would affect 21st Century warfare, written from the perspective of the mid 1980s:

While accidents of ground will always provide some kind of cover, the effect of modern firepower on land force tactics is equally revolutionary. Just as we saw in Part 2 how the rotary wing may well turn force structures inside out, firepower is already turning tactical concepts inside out, by replacing the anvil of troops with an anvil of fire (Fig. 5, page 51)*. The use of combat troops at high density to hold ground or to seize it is already likely to prove highly costly, and may soon become wholly unprofitable. The interesting question is what effect the dominance of firepower will have at operational level.

One school of thought, to which many defence academics on both sides of the Atlantic subscribe, is that it will reduce mobility and bring about a return to positional warfare. The opposite view is that it will put a premium on elusiveness, increasing mobility and reducing mass. On analysis, both these opinions appear rather simplistic, mainly because they ignore the interchangeability of troops and fire…—in other words the equivalence or complementarity of the movement of troops and the massing of fire. They also underrate the part played by manned and unmanned surveillance, and by communication. Another factor, little understood by soldiers and widely ignored, is the weight of fire a modern fast jet in its strike configuration, flying a lo-lo-lo profile, can put down very rapidly wherever required. With modern artillery and air support, a pair of eyes backed up by an unjammable radio and perhaps a thermal imager becomes the equivalent of at least a (company) combat team, perhaps a battle group. [Simpkin, Race To The Swift, pp. 168-169]

Sound familiar? I will return to Simpkin’s insights in future posts, but I suggest you all snatch up a copy of Race To The Swift for yourselves.

* See above.

Interchangeability Of Fire And Multi-Domain Operations

Soviet “forces and resources” chart. [Richard Simpkin, Deep Battle: The Brainchild of Marshal Tukhachevskii (Brassey’s: London, 1987) p. 254]

With the emergence of the importance of cross-domain fires in the U.S. effort to craft a joint doctrine for multi-domain operations, there is an old military concept to which developers should give greater consideration: interchangeability of fire.

This is an idea that British theorist Richard Simpkin traced back to 19th century Russian military thinking, which referred to it then as the interchangeability of shell and bayonet. Put simply, it was the view that artillery fire and infantry shock had equivalent and complimentary effects against enemy troops and could be substituted for one another as circumstances dictated on the battlefield.

The concept evolved during the development of the Russian/Soviet operational concept of “deep battle” after World War I to encompass the interchangeability of fire and maneuver. In Soviet military thought, the battlefield effects of fires and the operational maneuver of ground forces were equivalent and complementary.

This principle continues to shape contemporary Russian military doctrine and practice, which is, in turn, influencing U.S. thinking about multi-domain operations. In fact, the idea is not new to Western military thinking at all. Maneuver warfare advocates adopted the concept in the 1980s, but it never found its way into official U.S. military doctrine.

An Idea Who’s Time Has Come. Again.

So why should the U.S. military doctrine developers take another look at interchangeability now? First, the increasing variety and ubiquity of long-range precision fire capabilities is forcing them to address the changing relationship between mass and fires on multi-domain battlefields. After spending a generation waging counterinsurgency and essentially outsourcing responsibility for operational fires to the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy, both the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps are scrambling to come to grips with the way technology is changing the character of land operations. All of the services are at the very beginning of assessing the impact of drone swarms—which are themselves interchangeable blends of mass and fires—on combat.

Second, the rapid acceptance and adoption of the idea of cross-domain fires has carried along with it an implicit acceptance of the interchangeability of the effects of kinetic and non-kinetic (i.e. information, electronic, and cyber) fires. This alone is already forcing U.S. joint military thinking to integrate effects into planning and decision-making.

The key component of interchangability is effects. Inherent in it is acceptance of the idea that combat forces have effects on the battlefield that go beyond mere physical lethality, i.e. the impact of fire or shock on a target. U.S. Army doctrine recognizes three effects of fires: destruction, neutralization, and suppression. Russian and maneuver warfare theorists hold that these same effects can be achieved through the effects of operational maneuver. The notion of interchangeability offers a very useful way of thinking about how to effectively integrate the lethality of mass and fires on future battlefields.

But Wait, Isn’t Effects Is A Four-Letter Word?

There is a big impediment to incorporating interchangeability into U.S. military thinking, however, and that is the decidedly ambivalent attitude of the U.S. land warfare services toward thinking about non-tangible effects in warfare.

As I have pointed out before, the U.S. Army (at least) has no effective way of assessing the effects of fires on combat, cross-domain or otherwise, because it has no real doctrinal methodology for calculating combat power on the battlefield. Army doctrine conceives of combat power almost exclusively in terms of capabilities and functions, not effects. In Army thinking, a combat multiplier is increased lethality in the form of additional weapons systems or combat units, not the intangible effects of operational or moral (human) factors on combat. For example, suppression may be a long-standing element in doctrine, but the Army still does not really have a clear idea of what causes it or what battlefield effects it really has.

In the wake of the 1990-91 Gulf War and the ensuing “Revolution in Military Affairs,” the U.S. Air Force led the way forward in thinking about the effects of lethality on the battlefield and how it should be leveraged to achieve strategic ends. It was the motivating service behind the development of a doctrine of “effects based operations” or EBO in the early 2000s.

However, in 2008, U.S. Joint Forces Command commander, U.S Marine General (and current Secretary of Defense) James Mattis ordered his command to no longer “use, sponsor, or export” EBO or related concepts and terms, the underlying principles of which he deemed to be “fundamentally flawed.” This effectively eliminated EBO from joint planning and doctrine. While Joint Forces Command was disbanded in 2011 and EBO thinking remains part of Air Force doctrine, Mattis’s decree pretty clearly showed what the U.S. land warfare services think about battlefield effects.

Sketching Out Multi-Domain Battle Operational Doctrine

Small Wars Journal has published an insightful essay by U.S. Army Major Amos Fox, “Multi-Domain Battle: A Perspective on the Salient Features of an Emerging Operational Doctrine.” Fox is a recent graduate of Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) and author of several excellent pieces assessing Russian military doctrine and its application in the Ukraine.

Drawing upon an array of sources, including recent Russian military operations, preliminary conceptualizations of MDB, Carl von Clausewitz, J.F.C Fuller, and maneuver warfare theory, Fox takes a crack at shaping the parameters of a doctrine for Multi-Domain Battle (MDB) operations on land. He begins by summarizing how MDB will connect operations to strategy.

Current proponents suggest that [MDB] will occur against peer competitors in contested environments, providing the US Army and its joint partners with a much thinner margin of victory than in the recent past. As such, US forces should look to create zones of proximal dominance to enable the active pursuit of objectives and end states, and that dislocation is the key to defeating an adversary capable of multi-domain operations.

The essence of MDB will be a constant struggle for battlespace dominance, which will be “fleeting, fragile, and prone to shock or surprise.” Achieving temporary dominance only establishes the pre-conditions necessary for closing with and destroying enemy forces, however.

Fox suggests envisioning the cross-domain, combined arms, and individual arms of ground forces (i.e. direct fire weapons, indirect fire weapons, cyber, electronic, information, reconnaissance, et cetera) as “zones of proximal dominance” or “as an orb of power which radiates from a central position.” Long-range weapons perform a protective function and form the outer layers of the zone, while shorter-range weapons constitute the fighting functions.

[O]ne must understand that in multi-domain battle they must first strip away, or dislocate, the protective layers of an enemy’s force in order to destroy its strength, or its inner core. In the cross-domain environment, an enemy’s outer core is its cross-domain and joint capabilities. Therefore, the more of the enemy’s outer can be cleaved away or neutralized, the more success friendly forces will have in defeating the enemy’s main fighting force. Dislocating the outer layers and destroying the inner core will, in essence, defeats the cross-domain enemy.

Dislocation is a concept Fox adopts from maneuver warfare theory as “a critical component of defeating an enemy with cross-domain capabilities because it denies the enemy access to its tools, renders those tools irrelevant, or forces the enemy into environments in which those tools are ill-disposed.”

Fox’s perspective is well informed and logical, but exploration of the implications of MDB are in the earliest stages. The essay is a fascinating and highly-recommended read.

Multi-Domain Battle And The Maneuver Warfare Debate

The recent commitment by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to developing the concept of multi-domain battle led me to wonder: is this going to re-ignite the currently-dormant-but-unresolved debate over maneuver vs. attrition in American land warfare thinking? Will long-range precision fires and cross-domain targeting change the relationship between fire and maneuver in modern combat tactics? With an emphasis on fires of the kinetic and non-kinetic variety as the remedy to the challenge of anti-access/area denial capabilities and strategies, are multi-domain warfare theorists swinging the pendulum to the side of attrition?

What Is The Role of Maneuver In Multi-Domain Battle?

Consider this description of the Army’s conception of multi-domain battle offered by General David G. Perkins, Commander, United States Army Training and Doctrine Command:

[F]uture multifunctional Army fires units will provide the joint task force with a single unit combining surface-to-surface (land and maritime), surface-to-air, electromagnetic, and cyberspace cross-domain fires. These fires formations integrate with emerging Navy, Air Force, Marine and special operations forces capabilities to provide the commander multiple resilient options for striking the enemy and covering joint force maneuver.

At the same time, ground forces with improved maneuver and close combat capabilities allow the joint force to overwhelm or infiltrate dispersed enemy formations concealed from joint targeting and fires. A joint force containing effective ground forces requires the enemy to expose their dispersed forces to defeat in ground combat, face destruction from joint fires if they concentrate, or the loss of key terrain if they displace.

Future Army and Marine tactical ground maneuver units will combine sufficient cross-domain fires capability to enable decentralized ground maneuver and the creation of durable domain windows for the joint force with the mobility, lethality and protection to close with and destroy enemy ground forces in close combat. With combined arms pushed to the lowest practical level, these units will be flexible and resilient with the ability to operate in degraded conditions and with sufficient endurance to sustain losses and continue operations for extended periods and across wide areas.

The Army clearly sees maneuver to be an integral part of multi-domain battle, with an emphasis on closing with enemy forces to engage in close combat. However, it seems to me that the same technological changes that are prompting consideration of the new concept raise some questions:

  • What does close combat mean when ground maneuver elements can be brought under devastating surprise long-range precision fire barrages enabled by drone reconnaissance and cyber and information operations long before they close with enemy combat forces?
  • If even infantry squads are equipped with stand-off weapons, what is the future of close quarters combat?
  • Is the ability to take and hold ground an anachronism in anti-access/area-denial environments?
  • Will the purpose of maneuver be to force enemy ground maneuver elements to expose themselves to targeting by long-range precision fires? Or will maneuver mean movement to advantageous long-range precision firing positions, particularly if targeting across domains?
  • Is an emphasis on technological determinism reducing the capabilities of land combat units to just what they shoot?

The Maneuver Warfare Debate

Such questions seem sure to renew debates regarding the relationship between fire and maneuver in U.S. land warfare doctrine. The contemporary concept of maneuver warfare emerged in the early 1980s, as military and civilian practitioners and thinkers in the U.S. and the NATO countries came to grips with the challenges posed by Soviet military power in Europe. Inspired by the tactical and operational successes of the German Army during World War II, William Lind, John Boyd, Robert Leonhard, and Richard Simpkin, among others, drew upon a variety of American, British, German, and even Soviet sources to fashion a concept that established maneuver and attrition as distinct forms of warfare. In this telling, the First World War had been dominated by an overemphasis on the attritional effects of firepower, which yielded only bloody positional stalemate. In response, the Germans innovated new tactics to restore maneuver to the battlefield, which when combined with tanks and aircraft, led to their spectacular “blitzkrieg” victories in World War II. Their adversaries learned and adapted in turn, and developed maneuver doctrines of their own that helped defeat the Germans.

Maneuver warfare theories informed development of the U.S. Army’s AirLand Battle concept and operational doctrine of the late 1980s. The U.S. Marine Corps also integrated maneuver warfare into its doctrine in the 1997 edition of its capstone manual, MCDP-1 Warfighting. The idea of a maneuver style of warfare had plenty of critics, however. By the early 1990s, the Army had settled for a balance between maneuver and firepower in its combat doctrine. Debates and discussions about deep operations persisted into the late 1990s, but were preempted in large measure by the shift to irregular warfare and counterinsurgency after September 11, 2001. U.S. land warfare doctrine did get a brief test during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but the woefully outclassed Iraq Army was quickly and decisively overwhelmed by American combat power, yielding few insights into future warfare against peer or near-peer opponents.

The last notable public exchange on this topic occurred in 2008 in Small Wars Journal. British defense writer and analyst William F. Owen, argued that a distinction between maneuver and attrition “styles” of warfare was artificial and lacked intellectual rigor and historical support. Eric Walter, a contributor to U.S. Marine Corps doctrinal publications, conceded that existing maneuver warfare theorizing was “fuzzy” in some respects, but countered that the intellectual thinking behind it nevertheless stimulated the U.S. military to sharpen its conception and conduct of warfare. The ensuing discussion thread fleshed out the respective perspectives and the debate continues.

Despite the official enthusiasm of the Army and Marine Corps, there are many aspects of the concept of multi-domain warfare that will need to be worked out if it is to become a viable combat doctrine and not simply justification for development of new weapons. One task will be to overcome the suspicions of the sister services that it is merely a gambit in the ongoing interservice budget battles. (Similar skepticism dogs the associated Third Offset Strategy.) Developing a better sense of exactly how long-range precision fires, cyber and information operations, and other innovative technologies might affect ground combat would be a good place to start.