Offensive Versus Defensive Strategy
If weapons, tactics and training are in a state of flux, what of the basic plan, or ‘doctrine’, that an army embraces to fight its wars ? It’s generally been believed that the only way in which a war can ultimately be won is through mounting a successful offensive.
No matter how effective one’s defensive battle may be, it cannot on its own ‘bring the war to the enemy’, or completely destroy him, unless it is supplemented by some sort of attacking move. Therefore, efficiency in the assault has been seen as the touchstone of military competence, and it has often been claimed that truly high military morale can be achieved only in the offensive, especially when the attacking army enjoys surprise and has wrested the initiative away from the enemy.
The problem, however, is that reckless assaults tend to result in more casualties than do careful tactical defensives, thereby rather quickly demoralizing the attacker and giving correspondingly high reassurance to the defense . Thus it is not good enough just to recommend the offensive on every occasion - as the French came close to doing in 1914, and as in recent times, both the Soviets and the Israelis have sometimes seemed to do.
In the October War of 1973, the Israeli tactic of having tanks forge ahead and leaving the infantry behind led to problems in Port Suez, for example. When the Israeli armored spearhead arrived there, what infantry there was with it dismounted too late from its carriers. In the maze of streets, Egyptian antitank teams took a heavy toll of both tanks and infantry as a result.
There must also be some stratagem for deceiving the enemy, and some means of limiting the risks to the offensive and of assuring its success by scientific all-arms tactics. In 1939-41, for example, General Heinz Guderian’s doctrine for his Panzer divisions included both a belief in all-arms co-operation and — wherever possible — the aim of by-passing identified centers of opposition in order to take them from behind. Indeed, it may not even be too much to claim that the secret of his successful assaults lay mainly in his concept of avoiding enemy positions and pushing hard only through the points that had not yet been properly manned.
His idea followed the classic German belief in encircling the enemy through a strategic offensive, but then fighting a tactical defensive battle on favorable terms to prevent the enemy breaking out of the trap.
In the years since World War II there has certainly been plenty of emphasis on the attack; for example, in the concept that General William C. Westmoreland put into practice in Vietnam, of heliborne ’search and destroy’ operations. Soviet offensive doctrine has also described how heavy spearheads, ’supercharged’ by agile, flexible operational mobile groups (ONIGs), would he helped forward by airborne and other deep penetration forces which unroll a -carpet’ along the road ahead.
Most recently of all, during the 1980s we have seen a re-alignment of Western military doctrine for Germany away from static defense and towards a fluid, offensive scheme of maneuver by armored spearheads. The American Field Manual 100-5 of 1982 is the most important milestone in this development, as it envisages an ‘extended’ mobile battle by all-arms teams, using armor, helicopters, sophisticated surveillance, deep-attack missiles and air power. It all adds up to a fast-moving battle that is in many respects very similar to the Soviet idea of ‘intermingled’ combat by OMGs and other deep- striking forces.
