Ignoring The Obvious Combined Arms And Fire And Maneuver Tactics Prior To World War I

Fairly or unfairly, the stalemate on the First World War’s Western Front is often attributed to the intellectual stagnation of the era’s military officers. This paper traces the development (or absence of development) of combined arms and fire & maneuver tactics and doctrine in the period prior to WW I, focusing on the Russo-Japanese War. The Western armies that entered the Great War seemingly ignored many of the hard-learned lessons and observations of pre-war conflicts. Though World War I armies were later credited with developing revolutionary wartime tactical-level advances, many scholars claim that this phase of tactical evolution followed an earlier period of intellectual stagnation that resulted in the stalemate on the war’s Western Front. This stalemate, they claim, could have been avoided by heeding the admonitions of pre-war conflicts and incorporating the burgeoning effects of technology into military tactics and doctrine. Some go even further and fault the military leadership with incompetence and foolishness for not adapting to the requirements of modern war. The Russo-Japanese War showed the necessity for combined arms techniques and fire and maneuver tactics on the modern battlefield. Specifically, the war showed the need for: (1) the adoption of dispersed, irregular formations; (2) the employment of fire and maneuver techniques and small unit-tactics, including base of fire techniques; (3) the transition to indirect-fire artillery support to ensure the survivability of the batteries, and; (4) the necessity for combined arms tactics to increase the survivability of assaulting infantry and compensate for the dispersion of infantry firepower.

This paper is a case study in the wartime evolution of tactical doctrine. Besides providing a summary of German Infantry tactics of the First World War, this study offers insight into the crucial role of leadership in facilitating doctrinal change during battle. It reminds us that success in war demands extensive and vigorous training calculated to insure that field commanders understand and apply sound tactical principles as guidelines for action and not as a substitute for good judgment. It points out the need for a timely effort in collecting and evaluating doctrinal lessons from battlefield experience. --Abstract.

This book explores the attitudes of the Spanish army officer corps towards the evolution of warfare during the early decades of the twentieth century, and their influence on the armies of the Spanish Civil War. It examines how the Spanish military coped with technological innovations such as the machine gun and the tank, how it adapted the army ́s battlefield doctrine to changes in warfare before the Civil War, and the influence of this doctrine on the outcome of the conflict. Of the different armed forces that fought in the Spanish Civil War, it is paradoxically the Spanish army that remains most forgotten - especially its military doctrine. Scholarship on the Spanish military in this period focuses on its politics, ideology and institutional reforms, touching upon 'hard' professional issues only superficially, if at all. Based on original research and using largely unstudied Spanish primary sources, this book fills a major scholarly gap in the history of the Spanish army and the Spanish Civil War.

This study provides students, historians, other academics and scholars, as well as other researchers and anyone interested in the history of the Anglo-Boer War, with as comprehensive a list as possible of all postgraduate studies completed on any conceivable aspect of the war, as well as any other postgraduate studies which refer, to some extent, to the conflict.

Lethal and Non-Lethal Fires: Historical Case Studies of Converging Cross-Domain Fires in Large Scale Combat Operations, provides a collection of ten historical case studies from World War I through Desert Storm. The case studies detail the use of lethal and non-lethal fires conducted by US, British, Canadian, and Israeli forces against peer or near-peer threats. The case studies span the major wars of the twentieth-century and present the doctrine the various organizations used, together with the challenges the leaders encountered with the doctrine and the operational environment, as well as the leaders' actions and decisions during the conduct of operations. Most importantly, each chapter highlights the lessons learned from those large scale combat operations, how they were applied or ignored and how they remain relevant today and in the future.