> Military theorists have long described the defense as the strongest form of war, and current doctrine agrees.
Indeed - one of the first wars fought with modern rifling, the American Civil War, had General Lee learn this lesson in a very hard way on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, in a failed infantry assault known as "Pickett's Charge."[0]
Lee mistakenly attacked a position that was very easily defensible by Union artillery on faulty theory that it would be weakened due to a (failed) artillery barrage that happened previously. The Union correctly predicted Lee would attack there, and he sent over 12,000 men in a futile assault that resulted in 50% casualties in less than 1 hour, one of the bloodiest hours of the entire war.
Meanwhile going unacknowledged is Lee's defense of Richmond & Petersburg where he successfully innovated trench warfare 50 years before WW1, where we won't talk about the Battle of the Crater.
But hating on Lee is still one of the strongest virtue signals we have. So you'll continue going on about Pickett's charge, Lee 'hagiography' and the Lost Cause mythos.
I suspect you’re projecting a lot of your personal beliefs on whatever you think I’m saying - I’m pointing out that a major casualty event in an extremely pivotal moment in a major US war was decided by a defending force in a city assault, which is what the parent article and quote is commenting about . I’d love to hear where in the parent comment you think is “hating” on Lee, unless you take the position that pointing out facts is “hate.” surely one can point out historical facts without writing an essay on military tactics on every other battle that happened during the civil war - surely you could agree?
I am well versed on this subject and would love a debate. curious you don’t mention fredericksburg because that would actually support whatever point you think you’re making.
Why would I care what you (we? who is we?) think about this discussion? I am hoping the gp comment you’re replying to expands on what they are trying to contribute to this discussion. Also, on that note, what are you bringing?
Why would I care about answering your question? Given the amount of upvotes I've received - plenty of people seem interested. Your narcissism is not my problem. Have a good day!
This is in my opinion an oversimplification. Generally, the success of blitzkrieg had more to do with speed and coordination than the strength of armour. A combination of mechanised infantry, tanks, and close air support were instrumental to the tactics. German tanks were the only ones universally equipped with radio units at the start of the war.
And, counterintuitively, lack of coordination. Blitzkrieg units were uniquely autonomous and trusted to meet higher level objectives how they saw fit rather than following a recipe book written weeks before and miles away from the action.
The point is that tanks at the time were faster(along with mechanized infantry) and virtually unstoppable past enemy lines. This is pretty much unprecedented which allowed them to basically take strategic objectives uncontested.
This would not happen today because the exposed tanks would be taken out by relatively cheap anti tank missiles.
The speed of logistics is more important than the speed of combat troops. Tanks can go behind enemy lines, but only for a short while. If they don't return, they will quickly run out of fuel and become vulnerable.
Genghis Khan would have laughed at the slow German Blitzkrieg.
> Genghis had the advantage that his tanks ate grass, and grass grew everywhere the Mongols decided to conquer.
More like: wherever you didn't have abundant grass, Mongol armies essentially couldn't go, or at least lost so much advantage that they usually chose not to.
On a related point: the southern half of Ukraine has some of the best soil in the world for agriculture, yet for centuries it was very thinly populated and called the "Wild Fields", because it's naturally steppe and living there put you in reach of the Crimean Tartars, descendants of the Mongols who also used the same tactics for devastating raids. Further north, where the land was covered in forest, they did not go.
> That said, they still specifically timed their campaign cycles around the availability of forage in the country to be attacked.
A Mongol army could have reached Paris in 2-3 days, because their troops could operate without support for a while. WW2 Germany still relied largely on horse-drawn carts for logistics, and its armies could not advance substantially faster than a Roman legion.
Afaik, while better anti-tank weapons did come about during the war, a lot of it was also to do with adapting tactics and usage of existing weapons to counter the new "meta". For example, the flak 88 and the 90mm M1 were originally intended for use as antiaircraft weapons and were widely deployed as early as 1936-38. They just so happened to also be excellent antitank weapons, once people figured out how to deploy them as such.
There were several innovations bundled into Blitzkrieg so I don't think it's productive to clarify what the point is.
Virtually unstoppable armor helped, extreme local coordination helped, and extreme general decoupling helped. All of these factors are relevant to Blitzkrieg's success.
See also Russia's campaign to rapidly take Kyiv using highly centralized command that failed catastrophically when faced with mobile, autonomous, hit-and-run tactics using antitank missiles like Javelin.
In the context of the conversation, Blitzkrieg worked because it specifically avoided getting bogged down in heavily fortified urban areas. The German army of WWII was not at all suited to long battles like what they encountered in WWI (see the eastern front casualty numbers for a good illustration of how that went).
Stalingrad (mentioned in the article) is rather famous for being a perfect urban battlefield to grind a massive and well equipped modern (for the time) army into pulp. They couldn't blitzkrieg it, and so it defeated them.
The German Army ca. WWII's entire doctrine centered on (as podcaster Dan Carlin describes it) throwing a haymaker and ending the fight quickly. They by no means had a glass jaw, but compared to the Americans or (especially) the Soviets, they simply could not sustain a battle of attrition. And urban warfare so heavily favors the defenders that assaulting a city is almost always a battle of attrition.
The Blitzkrieg worked because the French political leadership was incapable of effectively directing its military, refusing to budge from a "Defend everywhere! All of the time!" strategy.
Folks forget that the French had rather excellent tanks ~1939 [0], especially in their calvary arms (the Hotchkiss H35 and SOMUA S35).
Which makes sense, since they essentially invented the modern tank in the FT. [1]
The rapid success of the Blitzkrieg was mostly a result of (a) France still being in the middle of re-organizing, equiping, and training their armored forces, (b) some bullshit at Sedan, and (c) French leadership making terrible strategic military decisions again and again [2].
Had the DCr's been supplied (who knew tanks need fuel?) and used to effectively counterattack, as designed, German plans would have ground to a halt.
Instead, you had the French Prime Minister declaring that all was lost six days after the Germans invaded the low countries.
No. There was relatively little actual fighting during the BLitzkrieg. It was about speed and the cutting of communications (in the military sense of roads and bridges rather than radio and telephone). France also had staggeringly poor command structures and they were so invested in the Maginot Line scenario that they simply didn't take the invasion seriously at first.
Surprisingly, one of the best histories of Blitzkrieg I've read was a pop-history book (just called 'Blitzkrieg') by Len Deighton, better known for his spy novels. What it lacks in detail, biographical material and so on is made up for by its broad scope, going from industrial production and methods during the interwar rearmament period through to the logistics of the BEF evacuation at Dunkirk.
The british and French assumed the germans were going to swing though belgium again as they had done in WW1. Also they spread their tanks out as infantry support the germans had concentrated tank units.
Just because the defense is stronger doesn't guarantee it will always win. Take two sports teams with different levels of skill, for example. In a single game, the team considered weaker can pull off a surprise win. However, over a span of several games, the stronger team will usually pull ahead.
In war, various factors, like the element of surprise, can allow the offense to temporarily overcome an inherently stronger defense. In 1940, the Germans quickly overran the French by catching them off guard tactically and strategically. The French couldn't adapt their defense quickly enough and suffered too many crucial losses early on.
Next year, the Soviets fared even worse than the French initially; but due to geography they managed to survive two crucial years and, at Kursk in 1943, they showed how a well designed defense could stop cold even the best German tanks. The French themselves had a similar experience in WW1: after initially surviving for two hard years, they gave the German attackers a very bloody nose at Verdun.
>but due to geography they managed to survive two crucial years and, at Kursk in 1943, they showed how a well designed defense could stop cold even the best German tanks.
At Kursk as your first example? I agree that the battle of Kursk showed the Germans how their best tanks could be crushed, but it's not a good example of your point as I understand it.
Firstly because the main reason for victory wasn't so much the ability to destroy German tanks. The Soviets already had this well before July of 1943. Instead victory was because they knew German attack planning in advance and were able to prepare an incredibly robust defense in depth against them while also concealing a superbly equipped counterattack.
Secondly, Kursk isn't the best example because the Battle of Stalingrad much earlier showed how it was possible to stop and then destroy a powerful, well equipped German Army with a tenacious defense and then even mount a ferocious counter offensive (operation Uranus).
Part of the success of Stalingrad for the Soviets was also due to a major earlier blunder of confidence by Hitler, who thought the 6th army alone was enough to take Stalingrad and ordered its accompanying 4th army to separate away from 6th and continue south to join the rest of the previously already split Army Group South (in an even earlier Hitler order that further weakened the later attack on Stalingrad) for an attack on the Caucasus
I felt Kursk was a good example of the superiority of defense over offense in WW2 as the other factors were generally even (no major surprise, both sides had good logistics etc.) Everything you say about Soviet preparations is right, that's how good you could make a defense with WW2 tech if you knew what you were doing!
>I felt Kursk was a good example of the superiority of defense over offense in WW2 as the other factors were generally even (no major surprise, both sides had good logistics etc.)
Fair enough and I see your point, though I still consider Stalingrad a more interesting example of how effective defense can be specifically because there (unlike at the Kursk Salient), the Soviet forces were at first inferior, weakly prepared and poorly commanded, yet still managed to grind the Germans to a gradual halt before grinding them down entirely through sheer tenacity.
And if we're arguing about the wider viability of both organized and even improvised defense tactics vs. intense, well-done offensive tactics, especially when you draw enemies into a complex urban area, Stalingrad excels as an example of what's possible.
The Blitzkrieg isn't a great counterpoint since the objective is to avoid frontal attacks on heavily defended positions, which is how the Germans did actually manage to get France. Using a blitzkrieg against a hardened position is doomed to failure.
The WWII invasion of France was so successful because they struck through the undefended Ardennes, rather than frontally attacking the Maginot line. In that sense the Maginot Line was actually a success, since it prevented a direct invasion of France from Germany, and forced the Germans to attack through other countries.
Traditionally, you sort of had to take heavily defended positions in order to conquer territory because if you didn't, the defenders would cut of your supply lines and attack your rear.
A key idea of Blitzkrieg (or "maneuver warfare" as it's called today) is that if you can move fast enough, this stops being true. You don't rely on fixed supply lines, and they can't attack your rear when they're not sure where you are and could be somewhere else by the time they organize an attack.
The date is important because it was written before the Ukraine-Russia war's use of drones ramped up. The article doesn't mention drones (UAVs) afaict - how to use them in attack and defense, how to protect yourself - which is today a major omission.
I'd argue it's still the same, there's just a tech accessibility difference between defense and offense. When they are equal, defense still tends to win out but it'll take a bit for the access to catch up.
The counter for drones will be the proliferation of CRAM/CIWS and APS. Currently there exists cheap, publicly available (and commonly heavily open sourced) tech stacks for drones but the same is not the case for CRAM/CIWS and APS. But fundamentally the systems that can effectively kill artillery shells, mortars shells, rockets, and missiles in flight will be able to kill drones as well. There are some differences (such as that drones tend to fly lower/slower) but fundamentally the tech applies the same.
And to be entirely honest this proliferation is almost entirely a software problem. Of course the existence of public hardware designs is important as well but getting effective sensor integration, detection, targeting, tracking, and response at a low enough latency will be bottlenecked by access to high quality domain specific software.
I don't think we've even seen the real potential of drone warfare on the battlefield, yet. Right now their guidance is very crude, little more than the adaptation of consumer FPV technology. Once US/RU/CN have had time to develop the technology, build up the manufacturing and logistics, and give them AI automated target selection, it's going to completely change the nature of warfare IMO.
Instead of dropping tons of expensive guided bombs and shells, attackers will drop tens of thousands of cheaper small anti-personnel hunter-seeker drones that can not only seek out human targets but wait in low power mode for a target to appear if it can't identify one at first. It'll make most kinds of static installations and defenses untenable. Units will have to constantly be on the move and camouflaged, and avoid giving up all kinds of life signs like sound/gunshots, thermal, RF comms, etc. The smaller drones will be able to help larger drones with targeting any armor they can't handle themselves while acting like free flying land mines.
I agree that it's a software problem. The Slaughterbots video [1] is already six years old and all of the pieces to make killer drone swarms were already there (just not as miniaturized as the video). Now there's data in Ukraine about how well individual drones work; AI is getting better and better; the compute is getting cheap enough to just slap on a drone; SOTA single use aluminum air batteries can already enable drones with much longer flight times than consumer batteries. All the pieces are there to make a nightmarish weapon that changes warfare as much as the machine gun, land mine, or air support.
I think/hope civilian organizations get access to this technology or the defensive counterparts before it is banned.
Having guns and food and ammo is good, but if civilians want to have a chance against NYPD or (insert dystopian boot) then night vision, drones for surveillance and offense, as well as drone defense are needed.
Having offensive drone tech in the hands of domestic law enforcement scares the shit out of me. I think we are one human generation away from the Matrix "Sentinels" being a reality. Swarms of autonomous disposable killer drones.
I agree and am a huge advocate for the idea that self defense is a human right.
Civilians should have a right to access to the exact same technology that a government employs with its infantry. I'm not talking Nuclear Weapons or Stealth Bombers, if a 17-year-old recruit can be trusted to operate a drone to kill human beings in a far off foreign country, law-abiding citizens should have access to the same technology. Or, alternatively, we can ban the technology, as long as the police are restricted from using it the same as civilians.
Yes, at least with the right guardrails. The fact that my law abiding neighbor can own a grenade launcher (You actually can legally own a Grenade Launcher with the right paperwork) wouldn’t bother me any more than an aggressive SWAT cop doing a pre-dawn raid on someone’s house.
If you want to own anti aircraft weapons sure, maybe with a license and a background check. If spending a few million $$$ to explode things in the desert is your jam you should be able to do it. Maybe you could even open source it and help develop better weapons for people in Ukraine or whatever.
I assume US/RU/CN/etc will drop them from stealth and supersonic bombers. Everyone else will use basic bombers and cargo planes if they can punch a hole in AA defenses and if they cant, release them from 20ft shipping containers or box trucks as close to enemy lines as possible.
They’re also small enough to deploy with infantry.
CRAM and CIWS are for point-defence; it would be very expensive to cover e.g. 100 miles of international border using those systems. Because drones are steerable, they can fly between the gatling guns and on to their target. Of course, if the target has point-defence, that won't work!
In Ukraine, it seems that a lot of the defender's drones are hybrid surveillance and attack, so they don't know what their target is at launch. You can't point-defend a trenchline. I think the Russians are relying on jammers. Broadband jamming must require a lot of power (and presumably impairs their own comms); narrowband jamming requires knowledge of the attacker's frequency.
CRAM/CIWS generally consists of several weapons systems, and a command centre with the radar, communicating by radio. So those defensive systems are also exposed to jamming, which could be achieved by a high-altitude drone; these systems aren't designed to shoot things at 20,000 ft., although many of them can have a SAM system strapped on.
Anyway, I suspect that drone-antidrone warfare is going to come down to a radio arms-race; i.e. jammer vs. anti-jammer. And you can defeat a jammer using beamforming.
> 100 miles of international border using those systems
Yeah that's not really the point. You use CRAM or CIWS at installations, cities, and maybe even towns. But then you use APS for military vehicles.
You don't need to stop every attack along a border, you just need to protect important installations and population centers.
> You can't point-defend a trenchline
Sure you can't but you can point defend mobile artillery, tanks, and other mechanized infantry. This greatly reduces the actual value you get out of a drone strike. You won't be hitting high value targets without spending a lot of resources in a saturation attack.
> I think the Russians are relying on jammers
They try to and it's not particularly effective.
> So those defensive systems are also exposed to jamming
This is only the case if you communicate by radio. In an active combat environment, if you are setting up installations that may be the best you can do at the time but for regions that are currently at peace, you can absolutely run fiber-optics between the weapons systems, sensor systems, and command center(s), leaving radio comms as a fallback. It's definitely more expensive but if you are installing equipment in a city or permanent military installation, you probably already have access to fiber runs that could be procured as dedicated/dark fiber.
> Anyway, I suspect that drone-antidrone warfare is going to come down to a radio arms-race
That'll definitely be a heavy component of it but the defense side should be able to insulate themselves from the arms race as long as they invest in the infrastructure ahead of time rather than waiting until a hot war starts to protect soft targets.
Really, I was focused on the Russia-Ukraine conflict; Russia sends scores of drones over the border every night, aimed at civilian infrastructure, including power generation and distribution, medical facilities, ports and warehouses, as well as civilian housing.
Just installing point defence for all the power generation would be expensive. Point-defence for e.g. Odessa or Kharkiv is impossible, because they are cities, not "points".
I want a tool that I can use to feed it a block of text or a URL to a website and it will give me an LLM and a text prompt that would yield said text/website.
I decided to ask ChatGPT 3.5 about what a Westpoint Academy instructor would have to say about defending a city and defensive tactics beyond those commonly known and the answer was not nearly as interesting.
Those have been part of the common language of city defense since at least Operation: Desert Storm in 1991, and in regular use for as long as sieges (and therefore cities) have been a thing.
One of the ways to win a war without winning a battle is to make winning so morally costly to your enemy that their own troops balk at the doing. Its not a super effective method, and usually fails (propaganda tends to win in that particular game of rock-paper-scissors), but it can certainly be effective as a delaying tactic, or as a method to damage your enemy's morale.
There have always been statespeople and military leaders who argue that human shields are unsporting, but the main pressures on military strategy are evolutionary, rather than ethical. Thus, if its horrific but it works, it must not be that horrific. More broadly, arms races typically amount to "we believe the other side has the technology to commit X atrocity. We therefore need the same ability to commit that atrocity, else we appear weak"
I said as much in response to another (rightly) dead post:
Human shield tactics are basically as old as permanent settlements, because forcing your enemy past their own ethical limits has always been a tactic of occasional effectiveness. Its basically how insurgencies work against technologically and numerically superior opponents, and this has been true for millennia.
And for just as long, there have been military and political leaders describing it as cowardly or unsporting. But again, the state of the art of military tactics is a catalog of what works, not what's ethical. The practice of war itself is, by and large, unethical. If it didn't work, they wouldn't keep doing it. Speaking entirely for myself, I don't ever want to be in the mental state to say "its ok for the SWAT team to shoot through the hostages; its their fault for going to a bank that could be robbed in the first place".
Absolutely, the party that provoked the war in the first place is in the wrong for the attack that provoked it. But that doesn't give the side prosecuting the war carte blanche to respond as brutally as they please.
It's weird that you are trying to say without saying that Hamas provoked the war he's talk about. Israel has been at war with Palestine continuously since it was founded.
I think its inarguable that Hamas instigated the conflict that flared up on October 7 (I think its fair to call it a war, just to put it in the same bucket as other high-level conflicts in the region, and in contrast with the lower level conflict that's defined everyday life in Palestine/Judea since at least 1948). Whether or not that instigation was justified, and whether or not Israel was justified in its response, are more complicated questions I don't want to address here. I'm not super interested in having that latter discussion here, since it will primarily trigger an upvote/downvote cycle, without adding to the discussion about urban warfare.
I am only highlighting that deriding Hamas' current tactics as a cynical new low is pointedly ahistoric (even in the context of Palestine/Judea), and that its sort of hypocritical to only criticize the side using human shields, and not the side shooting at/through the human shields.
There's a not entirely dissimilar event in history: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Germany kept a bunch of Jews locked in the (at the time) world's biggest open-air prison, and built a wall around it, and shot everyone who came close to the wall. The Jews started smuggling weapons into the prison, and when the Germans came to collect them for murdering, they murdered a whole lot of Germans instead. No doubt if Germany hadn't been totally defeated by the Allies shortly after, if they'd won the war and gotten to write history, they would have called it an unprecedented and unprovoked terrorist attack.
Indeed - one of the first wars fought with modern rifling, the American Civil War, had General Lee learn this lesson in a very hard way on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, in a failed infantry assault known as "Pickett's Charge."[0]
Lee mistakenly attacked a position that was very easily defensible by Union artillery on faulty theory that it would be weakened due to a (failed) artillery barrage that happened previously. The Union correctly predicted Lee would attack there, and he sent over 12,000 men in a futile assault that resulted in 50% casualties in less than 1 hour, one of the bloodiest hours of the entire war.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickett%27s_Charge