Categoría: The Friction in the Military Operations

(CONTINUATION)

The Friction.

Between plans for attaining objectives, and their actual accomplishment, is the arena of execution, which is affected by errors, poor interpretation and omission.

In effect, with voluntary action (different from chaos) exist the likelihood of avoidable and inevitable errors, the fundamental actions and actions of secondary importance, foreseeable facts and hypotheses and not to mention unexpected or imponderable actions that carry with them opportunities for both contenders.

Friction works to remove plans from their complete execution and objectives, no matter how correctly and well-conceived they may be or how well-equipped the force with means, assistance and distribution. Friction derives from the natural, hyperfunctional complexity of military phenomena and can be expressed as the «inevitable” additional price that we must be paid to achieve certain objectives in an operation. When the «price» is higher – when there is a «supertax» – the problem is conceptually and qualitatively different: the «failure», the “mistake” appears in plans, their execution, the means used to pursue them, etc.

The Mistakes or Failures.

Failures or errors result from attitudes, procedures and basic ways of acting that are erroneous, inconvenient, weak, imperfect or mistaken. The existential imprint is what ensures their survival. Failures can occur at strategic, operational or tactical levels of military; they can cause “wears” more effectively than friction and can cause the annihilation of both rival forces and the complete failure of their objectives. Linking failures with friction, and not considering their unique effects, is always a mistake.

The main causes of errors and failures are:

1) Poor planning or conceptualization of objectives, as well as the operations and means to use to achieve them.

2) Poor knowledge of the enemy; his plans, intentions and the various means on which he uses.

3) Lack of consideration of the “transitability” (more than ongoing) of the operational grounds during times and levels of actions.

4) Poor implementation plans at any level.

5) Poor conditions for logistics and communications at any level, as a function of the implementing operations and their decreasing yields.

6) Implementing superfluous or mistaken operations.

The greatest failures must to be avoided or eliminated at all costs before or during the course of the plan, since, by their nature, they put at risk the achievement of objectives at all levels.

The greater failures are more probable in the tactical than in the strategic level but, on the other hand, they are of lesser importance to global plans. One example is fighting a battle without adequate intelligence. It is also «easier» to know if a strategic error is likely to occur (it is another thing if the error could be avoided), as fewer «elements» are a factor, although their importance is greater in action. For example, French military doctrine was mistaken when, in May 1940 they confronted Germany and lost the campaign, the French and their allies having enjoyed their greater (at least land-based) military means over the Germans.

This means that, at the tactical level, failures or errors must wait for, they are generally of less relative importance on a global level, and where and how they will occur is not known in advance. However, at the strategic level failures or errors are more decisive. Yet it is easier (at least for an alert minority at low levels of Command) to know what types of failures may occur, where they will occur and by whom will they be caused.

The Compensations and Corrections of the failures and mistakes.

To stop failures or errors before they occur is, at least theoretically, possible if a method and doctrine – that is, a basically correct style of behavior and command – is followed at all the military functional levels. This, combined with a sound strategy, can prevent failures or errors. Indeed it is this that all good commanders in chief must attentively and jealously execute, but doing so is very difficult, given that it requires concurrence, cooperation and obedience by so many levels, units and individuals in the military.

It is therefore necessary to also prepare for the probability of serious failures and errors by having means and procedures for neutralizing and compensating for them. These means and procedures should center on what steps would effectively compensate for serious failures and errors.

Those made at the tactical and operational levels are economically compensated by actions taken in the operational and strategic echelons, which are qualitatively superior. Among others the most important ways of compensating for errors are: Enveloping and turning fronts operations in the same or contiguous sectors of advance. Opening other fronts, consistent with the overall strategic-operational direction. Using convergent sectors of advance for the same objective. Redoubling efforts by deploying echelons in depth. Pursuing alternative objectives within a larger line of attack, with the primary objective being enemy rather than geography. Using greater reserves, which must be continuously refreshed and reformed at all levels, etc.

More serious errors at strategic level are much more difficult to compensate for, given the importance of this level for operations and combat. Also, it is not wise to assume that militarymeans, for their specialized and scanty natures, will necessarily be too much at this level.

For these reasons, the best way to counter serious failures is to prevent them when at all possible. The carelessness is equivalent here to look for the defeat and to give the enemy the decision in the conflict. But, is it easy to modify, before a defeat, military doctrine? Is it possible before to replace a military cupola? Is it possible to establish a promotion mechanism, that reasonably preserves the integrity of the combined-arms groups, that also takes advantage of the tactical benefits of implicit communications between units that stems from common experience? Is it possible, after a victory, to revise the military doctrine that lay behind that success?

We will consider now errors that do not stem from attitudes or behavior negligent or foolish, to be in the same category as friction, that is, “minor«. How can friction and minor failures be compensated for?

This can occur by using greater “means” (forces, ability, plans and operations ramification, etc.) than the theoretically necessary, given the calculated “correlation of forces” needed for a particular tactical effort. This can mean: reiterating the effort; building up reserves or using of units of greater quality and training; using diverse sectors or axes of advance, seeking for alternative and/or simultaneous objectives within the overall direction of advance, etc.

Failuresorerrors can be attenuated and diminished, but only exceptionally are they nullified.

Actually both phenomena of disorder are superimposed, stemming as they do from plans that are more or less deficient and the natural friction that arises from executing plans that are really exceptionally complicated. Both generate “practical frustration” in their implementation, that should be taken into account.

Exposition of a complex real case, highly illustrative.

This is illustrated by mistakes that affected Germany’s plans and strategies during the war with the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945. During this war, Hitler and his commanders pursued a policy, strategies of state,total strategies and operational field strategies, many of which were plagued by poor decisions.

Still, knowing that erroneous, slanted or incomplete decisions had been made, in those circumstances, could anyone within the Wehrmatch have avoided the mistakes or serious mistakes of Germany’s actions?

In the campaign of 1941, Germany lacked a clearly defined objective and this divided its military effort. Germany’s principal attacks were dispersed between Leningrad, Kiev and Moscow, without existing a single objective of June 22, 1941. Both Leningrad and Kiev were given their own importance, rather than be treated as intermediate goals within a larger campaign. Moscow was not emphasized as a primary objective until October, when the possibility of a reasonable conquest had already disappeared.

Given the demographic and geographical characteristics of the USSR, it is absurd to pretend that the main objective was to annihilate the Red Army before the «Moscow meridian». Even if the top brass of the Wehrmatch wanted to recreate a large encirclement and annihilation operation in several successive battles.

The diversion towards Kiev of the Second Panzer Corp of Guderian came at the expense of the effort of the Center Armies Group advancing towards Moscow. And forced its tanks to detour more than 1,000 kilometers. In practice, to estimate the attrition of its operational movement capacity, these were equivalent to 2,000 km of distance travelled. But, despite the many prisoners captured in Kiev, these were not sufficient to force Stalin to surrender, because this was disregarded at the time.

In September 1941, Leningrad could be taken by the Northern Armies Group. Hitler’s decision to surround the city was made in an effort to avoid the risk of troop losses that would come about by urban fighting, something which had indeed occurred in Kiev. But this decision tied the German Northern Armies to a secondary target. If the city had been taken rather than surrounded, the Northern Armies Group, despite their delay, could join the Center Armies Group to assault Moscow or to reinforce the march of the Southern Armies Group toward the Caucasus the following year, seeking for an economic fundamental target.

Now, occurs a huge mistake of Hitler. And it happens at the level of grand strategy, national strategy or total strategy.

In 1941, more than 50 million Slavs, living in Ukraine, White Russia or Belarus and the Baltic countries, expected the Germans as liberators of the unbearable yoke of the Stalinist communists. Between 1931 and 1937, “Little Father Stalin” had deliberately and calculated massacred some 5 million Ukrainians, for the mere fact of being them. And, never is any «fault» of the whole of a country, of an ethnic group.

Ukraine was the grain barn of the USSR and, during the Five-Year Industrial Plan, Ukrainian agricultural resources were diverted towards the objectives of that Plan. The peasants were not assigned seeds and the remaining ones were kept to eat. The peasants were required to deliver abusive quotas of milk, meat and crops. Stalin approved genocide supposedly for the sake of his ideology.

After the victorious passage of the Wehrmatch, Himmler sent the SS. To take care of the Slavs, the Untermensch, the undermen or human subbeens. To obtain cheap, slave labor to the service of the Reich.

And, instead of accepting them and joining a large close and favorable rear, with all the millions of men available as allies. Capable of performing internal tasks of defense of the territory and of first protection of the immense line of communications from the Reich to the Eastern Front. And to integrate them to some extent into the «auxiliary forces» of the Wehrmatch, like the Romanians. And producing in Ukraine goods and services for the Germans. Hitler immediately alienated the will of the Ukrainians: employing the Vesanic occupiers of the SS, who killed them directly or banished them to Germany.

And the ex-Soviet rear was filled with anti-German partisans. That was the only «strategic guerrilla» of World War II. Since it was directly dependent on a constituted state and was an operational auxiliary of the Red Army. Which gave it certain characteristics of «belligerent of right«, distancing them from the simple outlaws or bandits.

In the summer of 1943, when the Soviet guerrilla war reached its peak, some 250,000 partisans were fixing half a million German and allied troops (from Russians, Italians, Hungarians, rear police, to German garrison units). The Germans of the first line were only used in large operations of encirclement and annihilation of guerrillas. Even the small garrison forces, usually a section, with a core of Germans, maintained a proactive behavior: they had to send to patrol periodically to half a section or to join it with an external force, gathered for a more ambitious operation.

In 1942, German troops were within 100 kilometers of Moscow. Nevertheless, Hitler changed the strategic attack of the campaign to the south and its more economically profitable objectives; a change that his generals did not understand. By making that decision, Germany lost forever the possibility of capturing Moscow or Leningrad. Later, Hitler made the delayed decision to divide the South Armies Group, with one part proceeding to the Caucasus and the other advancing toward Stalingrad. The result was that neither Armies reached their objectives.

The acceptance of a battle of attrition and not of maneuvers (this was impossible) in Stalingrad, led the German Army to lose during it its greater and better operational movement capacity, against the Soviet Army of masses, almost inexhaustible. Later, by not allowing the rapid withdrawal of the German 6th Army from that city, when the Soviets established their operational encirclement or, better, before that, causing the German forces debilitating losses due to the lack of suitable and defended supply lines.

Hitler’s decision, in spite of all the criticism it provoked, to fight a late the battle with Soviet forces based in Kursk. Which could have been attacked in April, just a little after Erich von Manstein’s scythe blow against the flanks and rearward of the Soviet Voronezh Front or Armies Group of Voronezh of colonel general Vatutin and the Mobile Group of deep incursion of general Markian Popov, which marched towards the Dnieper’s mouth, centered the German armies again on a secondary target. Even worse was that Germany’s invaluable armored tanks that spear-headed the advance in Kursk (moving hard in rhombus – or armored shaped wedges or Panzerkiel) foundered, when they encountered Soviet antitank in deep deployments forming even “fortified regions”.

The result was similar for the Panzer Divisions, even reinforced by Tigers battalions and the new Ferdinand heavy assault guns, to what Germany infantry divisions faced in Stalingrad: pitting direct force against direct force and high troop looses for both side, were the parity in men and Germany’s superior preparation and tactical doctrine dissipated in the face of concentric high fires.

When a German was worth as a combatant what three or four Russians, according to the conscientious studies of the American colonel Trevor N. Dupuy, from the results of multiple battles of World War II.

(to be continued)