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Anyone who then believes that a few forced marches will give him a good start and help him make a stand is dangerously wrong. The first movements have to be almost imperceptibly short,
Otherwise the pace is bound to increase till withdrawal turns into rout. More men will be lost as stragglers than would have been lost in rear guard actions. And the last vestiges of courage will have disappeared.
A lost battle always tends to have an enfeebling, disintegrating effect; the immediate need is to reassemble, and to recover order, courage, and confidence in the concentration of troops.
What an uneven contest! One imagines complete confusion on one side, and on the other an attacker concerned merely to profit by it. This image explains the many schemes for night attacks put forward by those who have neither to lead them nor accept responsibility for them. In practice they are very rare.
In a night operation, then, the attacker seldom if ever knows enough about the defense to make up for his lack of visual observation.
It follows from all this that the attacker needs his eyes in night operations just as much as does the defense. Therefore special reasons are needed to justify a night attack.
For weeks on end Frederick the Great would camp so near the Austrians that both sides could have exchanged cannon shots.
Armies nowadays are no longer independent organisms, self-sufficient in matters of supply and encampment: as a rule they think it wise to leave a full day's march between the enemy and themselves.
desperate situations in which one's troops are so heavily outnumbered that only the utmost daring offers any prospect of success.
Engagements that do not start till dawn, and in which darkness is used merely for the approach, are not true night operations at all.
The terms “army” and “theater of operations,” then, normally go hand in hand, each confirming the other.
The only remaining factor that can produce marked superiority, aside from familiarity with war, consists of the talents of the commander-in-chief,
The decisive importance of relative strength increases the closer we approach a state of balance in all the above factors.
In a battle consisting of a slow and methodical trial of strength, greater numbers are bound to make a favorable outcome more certain. In fact in modern war one will search in vain for a battle in which the winning side triumphed over an army twice its size.
Where the weaker side is forced to fight against odds, its lack of numbers must be made up by the inner tension and vigor that are inspired by danger. Where the opposite occurs, and despair engenders dejection instead of heroism, the art of war has, of course, come to an end.
The hard-pressed army, not expecting help where none can be forthcoming, can only trust to the high morale that despair breeds in all courageous men.
This distribution of elementary military strengths among the three main arms demonstrates the superiority and versatility of infantry in comparison with the other two: it alone combines all three qualities.
The degree of independence of the three branches, then, is infantry, cavalry, artillery.
Let us recapitulate the results of these reflections: 1. Infantry is the most independent of the arms. 2. Artillery has no independence. 3. When one or more arms are combined, infantry is the most important of them. 4. Cavalry is the most easily dispensable arm.
In theory, then, there is an optimum proportion between the arms, which in practice remains the unknown X, a mere figment of the imagination. But it is possible to calculate what would happen if one arm were greatly superior or inferior to the same arm on the other side.
An excess of cavalry should never be considered a direct impediment to an army, an organic disproportion. But it does weaken the army indirectly, because of the problems of maintenance and because we must recognize that at the cost of an extra cavalry force of 10,000 men we could maintain an additional 50,000 foot soldiers.
An excess of guns will impose a more passive and defensive character on operations. Greater reliance will be placed on strong positions, major natural obstacles, and even on positions in mountainous areas. The idea will be to let terrain difficulties take care of the defense
Shortage of artillery will have the opposite effect. It will bring attack to the fore—the active principle of movement. Marching, exertion and continuous effort will become arms in themselves,
Where cavalry is plentiful, wide plains will be sought out and sweeping movements preferred. With the enemy at a distance, we can enjoy greater peace and comfort, without his being able to do the same. Since we are the masters of space, we can be daring in the use of bold flanking movements and generally more audacious maneuvers.
A serious lack of cavalry impairs the mobility of an army, but without increasing its destructive powers as an excess of artillery does. The war will then be marked by prudent and methodical proceedings.
foot soldiers were plentiful merely because cavalry was so expensive that all those who could not be equipped as cavalry automatically became infantry. Infantry was therefore merely making the best of necessity:
Let us now summarize the conclusions to which these arguments have led: 1. Infantry is the main branch of the service; the other two are supplementary.
But order of battle is really more a matter of tactics than strategy, and our only point in tracing its development here is to show how tactics, by reorganizing the whole army into smaller units, has paved the way for strategy.
First, an order progressively loses in speed, vigor, and precision the longer the chain of command it has to travel, which is the case where there are corps commanders between the divisional commanders and the general.
that only a combination of the three arms can make a unit of the army independent. Combined arms are therefore desirable, to say the least, for any unit that frequently finds itself operating in isolation.
In short there are hundreds of cogent local and special conditions to which the abstract rule must yield. Experience shows nevertheless that abstract reasons are used more frequently and thrust aside less often than one might suppose.
a. The whole will be unwieldy if it has too few subdivisions. b. If the subdivisions are too large, the commander's personal authority will be diminished. c. Every additional link in the chain of command reduces the effect of an order in two ways: by the process of being transferred, and by the additional time needed to pass it on.
the number of subdivisions with equal status should be as large as possible, and the chain of command as short as possible;
Anyone who would deny the delays that occur not to speak of the confusion that results, when in order to aid the infantry a cavalry unit has to be sent from somewhere else—possibly a good way off—would betray a total lack of operational experience.
In our day the engagement is the edge of the sword, and time out of action is its reverse edge. The whole is so thoroughly welded together that it is not possible to distinguish where the steel starts and the iron ends.
This need for cover does not of course mean that part of the army has to be detached in order to protect the area on its flanks—the so-called weak point—from the enemy. In that case, who would defend the flank of the flank?
Flanks are not in themselves weak points, for the simple reason that the enemy has flanks as well, and cannot endanger ours without incurring a similar risk to his.
Corps posted on the flanks may thus be seen as lateral vanguards, charged with delaying the enemy's penetration of the areas beyond
When the enemy approaches to seek a decision by means of a general engagement, the strategic phase is over, and everything focuses on the moment of battle. All reason for divided disposition is now at an end. Once the battle is joined, questions of quartering and supply are suspended. Observation of the enemy on the front and flank and reducing his impetus by moderate resistance have served their purpose. Everything becomes part of the greater whole, the main battle. The best criterion of the value of a divided disposition is that the separate distribution is a conditional state and a
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Advance guards and outposts belong to the category of measures where the threads of tactics and strategy are interwoven.
outposts are the eyes of the army. But the need for them varies.
We should, therefore, not be surprised if military history yields no definite or simple rules on the use of outposts and advance guards, but rather a jumble of diverse examples.
The point of such resistance may not be simply to give the main force the time it needs to prepare for battle, but also to make the enemy disclose his dispositions and intentions prematurely. In that case the value of observation is substantially increased.
So in cases where the vanguard covering the center is much stronger than that of the flanks—when, in other words, it consists of a special advance corps—it no longer simply serves the purpose of a vanguard, which is to shield the troops immediately behind it from a surprise attack: as an advance corps, it will have a wider strategic role.
The briefer its rest, the less the army needs to be completely covered: a single night is too short, at any rate, for the enemy to find out what is covered and what is not. The longer the rest, the more completely each point of access must be watched and covered.
The upshot is that in the first case the enemy will be hard put to dislodge an advance guard and attack the main force, all on the same day, as experience tends to bear out. Even in the second case the enemy will have to dispose of the advance guard before noon in order to have enough time for the main battle. Since in the first case night comes to our aid, it becomes clear that much time can be gained by posting the advance guard farther ahead.
So our final conclusion is that an advanced corps derives its operational value more from its presence than from its efforts; from the engagements it might offer rather than from those it actually fights. It is never intended to stop the enemy's movements, but rather, like the weight of a pendulum, to moderate and regulate them so as to make them calculable.
Marches, then, are the principal basis for the modern order of battle, as well as being its principal beneficiaries.
movement itself began to rank as an autonomous principle of fighting. Victories were being won by means of unexpected movements,
One only need consult the march tables in Tempelhoffs History of the Seven Years War to gain an insight into these conditions and the constraints they imposed on warfare.
