carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/04summer/peters.htm
In Praise of Attrition RALPH PETERS 2004 Ralph Peters From Parameters, Summer 2004, pp. Goethe , Faust In our military, the danger of accepting the traditional wisdom has becom e part of the traditional wisdom. Despite our lip service to creativity and innovation, we rarely pause to question fundamentals. Partly, of cou rse, this is because officers in todays Army or Marine Corps operate at a wartime tempo, with little leisure for reflection. Yet, even more fun damentally, deep prejudices have crept into our militaryas well as into the civilian world that obscure elementary truths. There is no better example of our unthinking embrace of an error than our rejection of the term war of attrition. The belief that attrition, as an objective or a result, is inherently negative is simply wrong. All else, however important it may appe ar at the moment, is secondary. All wars in which bulletsor arrowsfly are wars of attrition. Of course, the term war of attrition conjures the unimaginative slaught er of the Western Front, with massive casualties on both sides. Last yea r, when journalists wanted to denigrate our militarys occupation effort s in Iraq, the term bubbled up again and again. The notion that killing even the enemy is a bad thing in war has been exacerbated by the defense industrys claims, seconded by glib military careerists, that precision weapons and technology in general had irrevocably changed the nature of warfare. But the nature of warfare never changesonly its superficial m anifestations. The US Army also did great harm to its own intellectual and practical gra sp of war by trolling for theories, especially in the 1980s. Well-trained, well-led soldiers in well-equipped armies do . Yet we heard a great deal of no nsense about maneuver warfare as the solution to all our woes, from ou r numerical 24/25 disadvantage vis--vis the Warsaw Pact to our knowledge that the active defense on the old inner-German border was political tomfoolery and a m ilitary shamand, frankly, the best an Army gutted by Vietnam and its lo ng hangover could hope to do. Maneuver is not a solution unto itself, any more than technology is. This sounds obvious, but that which is obviou s is not always that which is valued or pursued. Those who would be theo rists always prefer the arcane to the actual. Precious few military campaigns have been won by maneuver alone at least not since the Renaissance and the days of chessboard battles between co rporate condottieri. Napoleons Ulm campaign, the Japanese march on Sing apore, and a few others make up the short list of bloodless victories. Even campaigns that appear to be triumphs of maneuver prove, on closer in spection, to have been successful because of a dynamic combination of fi re and maneuver. The opening, conventional phase of the Franco-Prussian War, culminating in the grand envelopment at Sedan, is often cited as an example of brilliant maneuver at the operational levelyet the road to Paris was paved with more German than French corpses. It was a bloody wa r that happened to be fought on the move. Other campaigns whose success was built on audacious maneuvers nonetheless required attrition battles along the way or at their climax, from Moltkes brilliant concentration on multiple axes at Koenigsgraetz (urgent marches to a gory day), to the German blitzkrieg efforts against the Poles, French, and Russians, and on to Operation Desert Storm, in which daring operational maneuvers posi tioned tactical firepower for a series of short, convincingly sharp enga gements. Even the Inchon landing, one of the two or three most daring op erations led by an American field commander, failed to bring the Korean War to a conclusion. More often than not, an overreliance on bold operational maneuvers to win a swift campaign led to disappointment, even disaster. One may argue fo r centuries about the diversion of a half dozen German divisions from th e right flank of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914, but the attempt to win the war in one swift sweep led to more than four years of stalemate on the Western Front. In the same campaign season, Russian attempts at grand ma neuver in the vicinity of the Masurian lakes collapsed in the face of co unter-maneuvers and sharp encounter battlesa German active defense that drew on Napoleons 25/26 strategy of the central positionwhile, in Galicia, aggressive maneuver ing proved to be exactly the wrong approach for the Austro-Hungarian mil itarywhich was ill-prepared for encounter battles. Despite initial maneuver victories against Russia and in the Western Dese rt, a German overreliance on maneuver as a substitute for adequate firep ower ultimately led to the destruction of Nazi armies. Time and again, f rom Lees disastrous Gettysburg campaign to the race to the Yalu in Kore a, overconfidence in an armys capabilities to continue to assert its po wer during grand maneuvers led to stunning reverses. The results were no t merely a matter of Clausewitzian culminating points, but of fundamenta lly flawed strategies. Operation Iraqi Freedom, one of the most successful military campaigns in history, was intended to be a new kind of war of maneuver, in which aer ial weapons would shock and awe a humbled opponent into surrender whil e ground forces did a little light dusting in the house of war. But inst ead of being decided by maneuvered technologies, the three-week war was fought and wontriumphantlyby soldiers and marines employing both aggre ssive operational maneuvers and devastating tactical firepower. The point is not that maneuver is the stepbrother of firepower, but that there is no single answer to the battlefield, no formula. The commander s age-old need to balance incisive movements with the application of wea ponry is unlikely to change even well beyond our lifetimes. Its not an either-or matter, but about getting the integration right in each specif ic case. Although no two campaigns are identical, the closest we can come to an Am erican superpower model of war would be this: strategic maneuver, then o perational maneuver to deliver fires, then tactical fires to enable furt her maneuver. Increasingly, strategic fires play a rolealthough they do not win wars or decide them. Of course, no battlefield is ever quite so simple as this proposition, but any force that loses its elementary foc us on killing the enemy swiftly and relentlessly until that enemy surren ders unconditionally cripples itself. Far from entering an age of maneuver, we have entered a new age of attrit ion warfare in two kinds: First, the war against religious terrorism is unquestionably a war of attritionif one of your enemies is left alive o r unimprisoned, he will continue trying to kill you and destroy your civ ilization. Second, Operation Iraqi Freedom, for all its dashing maneuver s, provided a new example of a postmodern war of attritionone in which the casualties are overwhelmingly on one side. Its essential to purge our minds of the clichd images the term war of attrition evokes. Certainly, we do not and will not seek wars in which vast 26/27 casualties are equally distributed between our own forces and the enemys . But a one-sided war of attrition, enabled by our broad range of superi or capabilities, is a strong model for a 21st-century American way of wa r No model is consistently applicable. Wars c reate exceptions, to the eternal chagrin of military commanders and the consistent embarrassment of theorists. One of our greatest national and military strengths is our adaptability. Unlike many other cultures, we h ave an almost-primal aversion to wearing the straitjacket of theory, and our independence of mind serves us very well, indeed. But the theorists are always there, like devils whispering in our ears, telling us that a irpower will win this war, or that satellite intelligence obviates the need for human effort, or that a mortal enemy will be persuaded to surr ender by a sound-and-light show. Precision weapons unquestionably have value, but they are expensive and d o not cause adequate destruction to impress a hardened enemy. The first time a guided bomb hits the deputys desk, it will get his chiefs atten ti...
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