The Germans unleashed their new tactical method during the 1918 Michael Offensive, which came within a few dozen miles of Paris until stopped by the mass of newly arriving American forces. As the name suggests, the Germans renounced traditional linear tactics for a system that relied on well-trained, well-led squads and platoons attacking independently, bypassing enemy strong points to infiltrate vulnerable rear areas. These efforts culminated in what historians term “Hutier” or “infiltration” tactics. What fascinates the reader a century on was the discipline and intellectual passion that the Germans used to restore mobility on the battlefield, beginning with an early perception of the need for change followed by a detailed and thorough solicitation of ideas from common soldiers and junior leaders. Lupfer chronicles how the German General Staff followed a systematic process to fundamentally change their doctrine in the middle of the war. The problem to be solved was simple: Prior to the Great War the small-bore rifle, machine gun and quick-firing artillery shifted the balance between firepower and maneuver dramatically to the former, making attacks by linear formations across no man’s land suicidal. They believed that the surest sources of wisdom were sergeants and lieutenants who could see the problem from the viewpoint of a trench step. As Timothy Lupfer wrote in his groundbreaking 1981 Leavenworth Paper, “ The Dynamics of Doctrine,” the Germans sought to restore maneuver to the battlefield by working from the bottom up rather than the top down. The Germans had no time for sloganeering in 1917. Wilhelm Balck famously professed: “Bullets quickly write new tactics.”īalck was one of a class of experienced, practical soldiers who sought a doctrinal solution to overcome the tyranny of trench warfare during World War I. The literature suggests that new scientific developments will influence warfare principally in space and cyberspace.īut there is more to war than firing digits in space and cyberspace. These new dimensions include space, cyber, electronic warfare, and information, among others. The thesis of multi-domain operations is that emerging technologies have added new dimensions to the traditional combined and joint layers of warfare: artillery, infantry, armor and air power. Nowhere is the gap between sloganeering and meaningful doctrine more evident than at the tactical level. The flurry of self-congratulatory prose emerging from multi-domain warfare literature today obscures the fact that a slogan such as “multi-domain” is not doctrine, and doctrine rooted in the fundamental tenets of warfare is a prerequisite for meaningful reform.
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