Demoralizing Defeat: An Assessment Of Strategic Breakthrough, From Alexander The Great To Operation Iraqi Freedom – Analysis

By Michael P. Ferguson

Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine loosened a flood of theories about the evolving character of modern wars.1 The first year of the conflict saw numerous breakthroughs but no clear victor, beginning with Russia’s penetration to the outskirts of Kyiv, followed by Ukrainian counteroffensives at Kharkiv and Kherson in the fall.2 

These developments sparked debate among Western defense analysts regarding the dyad of attrition versus maneuver warfare, and further demonstrated that most breakthroughs culminate at the operational level, failing to exploit tactical success for strategic gain. While there are many historical analogues, perhaps three of the most remarkable breakthroughs were those of Alexander the Great at Gaugamela, Germany’s lightning war or blitzkrieg into France, and the 2003 Coalition invasion of Iraq. Each of these cases involved one or more penetrating maneuvers that generated strategic effects far beyond the immediate field of battle, revealing instructive principles for further research and calling into question the valid- ity of theories that view war through the binary prism of attrition and maneuver.

The term “strategical penetration” appeared in the 1966 publication of David Chandler’s history of Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaigns.3 Though historians have used different terms to describe a penetration and its subsequent methods of exploitation, they encompass what is fundamentally the same concept: a maneuver that breaks through an enemy’s lines and produces disintegrating effects on his physical structure, his decision-making systems, and his will to resist. Clausewitz characterized a breakthrough as a penetration, while Capt. B. H. Liddell Hart in 1954 described it as a “strategic dislocation.”4 Modern U.S. Army doctrine adopted penetration as one of its six forms of tactical maneuver in early versions of Field Manual 3-0, Operations, but strategic penetration, despite its rich history, is rarely discussed in the literature and undefined in the doctrine.5 As the Pentagon aims to transform its theory of Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) into a capability and to reform defeat mechanisms in its joint doctrine, studying trends in the breakthrough can help focus efforts.6

Although the practice of strategic breakthrough dates to the period of chariot warfare during the fifth century B.C., the character of war has certainly evolved dramatically since then.7 Yet the war in Ukraine makes clear that breakthroughs in modern warfare remain as challenging to exploit strategically as they are prevalent. This complexity extends from the reality that the demoralization of an opponent, vice his simple material destruction through attrition and maneuver, remains the link between tactical victory and strategic success. This article begins with an overview of terminology before examining the three cases. It continues by identifying potential areas for further research and concludes with implications for the attrition-maneuver debate concerning Russia’s war on Ukraine.

TERMINOLOGY AND SCOPE OF STUDY

A strategic breakthrough is defined in this study as an operational maneuver that penetrates defenses and sets in motion an outcome that directly supports the national aim. Its scope of effects must extend far beyond the battlefield, preferably into the minds of the public and their political officials. Reinforcing the relevance of this maneuver is its desired end, which Jomini described as “the destruction or disorganization of the enemy’s forces.”8 We will return to these two elements later, as the latter complements Hart’s focus on dislocation vice simple material destruction that has come to characterize some modern maneuvers.

Underpinning the strategic breakthrough are the concepts known as defeat mechanisms in U.S. Joint doctrine, two of which this study prioritizes as essential to a penetration: dislocation and disintegration. Although the Major Combat Operations (MCO) Joint Operating Concept (JOC) identifies three such mechanisms, it emphasizes “disintegration as the principal mechanism used to defeat an adversary’s military system” through integrated destruction and dislocation.9 The army defines disintegration as “the means to disrupt the enemy’s command and control, degrading the synchronization and cohesion of its operations.”10 These physical and psychological processes can both support and be supported by a successful breakthrough. Much of the academic research on defeat mechanisms, however, focuses overwhelmingly on the material destruction of systems at war, but a broader historical review of the breakthrough suggests that attrition alone does not produce strategic effects for major powers, and it is in fact the will to fight—the moral and psychological factors—that are most consequential 11 America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Ukraine’s extraordinary resistance to Russia’s repeated invasions are a further testament to this observation.

The premise of a strategic breakthrough’s utility is based on the understanding that uprooting an opponent’s assumptions regarding how a battle might unfold can be decisive because it induces cognitive dissonance. This shock can foment doubt that leads to cascading miscalculations and muddied war policy, or what J.F.C. Fuller called “strategic paralysis.”12 In Clausewitz’s analysis of the offensive maneuver, he describes the process as one of “using mistakes into which the enemy can be lured” to generate effects that disrupt an opponent’s equilibrium.13 Hart went further by arguing that dislocation is in fact the aim of strategy itself, and its “sequel” may be the destruction of enemy forces or a more advantageous position in battle.14

Increased sophistication of competitor anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities and the introduction of MDO as an official operational concept have placed greater emphasis on penetration in U.S. doctrine. Published in October 2022, the U.S. Army’s updated Field Manual 3-0, Operations, describes how the service will fight in MDO. The Army defines MDO as “the combined arms employment of joint and Army capabilities to create and exploit relative advantages that achieve objectives, defeat enemy forces, and consolidate gains on behalf of joint force commanders.”15 In response to guidance within the 2018 and 2022 National Defense Strategies, the U.S. Army intends to stand up an MDO-capable combined arms formation known as the “Penetration Division,” further demonstrating the enduring relevance of maneuver.16 Indeed, the Pentagon’s 2012 Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC), which still informs joint force development, provides a requirement for such capacity:

The penetration is designed to disrupt the integrity of the enemy defensive system, the preferred defeat mechanism, by striking at critical hostile elements, such as logistics and command and control nodes, long-range firing units, and strategic and operational reserves.17

The JOAC continues by implying that a strategy of attrition could be politically unacceptable to the United States, which in turn obligates the joint force to build capabilities that support penetrating maneuvers and systems paralysis:

The historical alternative to [a penetration] is to attack the perimeter of the enemy’s defenses…. Such an approach operates primarily by attrition and does not threaten the integrity of the enemy’s defensive system…. This may actually play into the enemy’s anti-access/area-denial strategy, which likely will attempt to use space and time to inflict cumulatively unacceptable casualties on an advancing joint force.18

More recent studies from experts such as Heather Venable and Michael Kofman, however, argue that paralysis in modern war is a fallacy, but even if true, this would make analysis of strategic breakthroughs critical to understanding why something so prevalent in the past, and present in current joint doctrine, is supposedly nonexistent in the future.19

Penetrating maneuvers must be examined through a historically broad lens because each expression did not occur in a vacuum. They were revisions of previous approaches studied deeply by military leaders and fused with the ways and means available in their time. Although there are many examples of breakthroughs at sea, in the interest of concision this study focuses on the land domain alone.20 Regarding terminology, though the terms breakthrough and penetration are distinct activities in U.S. doctrine, for simplicity’s sake, they are used interchangeably here.21 Finally, this is not a review of grand strategy—or even strategy for that matter—but rather one of maneuver with strategic implications. As such, the following offers the reader Charged by this symbol, the Macedonians managed to spread the Persian left thin enough for Alexander to mount another horse—as he had exhausted several—and take his Companions and some infantry on a lightning charge at Darius, splitting his lines.37 In this instance the violence of the breakthrough itself was decisive, particularly after Darius’s charioteer was killed by a javelin that some thought wrongly had pierced the Persian king himself. Darius was the first to flee, and with him went the integrity of his left flank as the Macedonians broke through and wheeled back onto the Persian center and right.38

The fighting continued, but Alexander would not claim his prize here. Again, as at Issus in 333, the Persian king evaded him. Yet having fled Alexander in both battles, Darius’s claim as god king lost its luster, and the outcome at Gaugamela heralded the demise of the Persian Empire. Ian Worthington surmised that news of this disgrace “spread like wildfire through the Persian line and broke the soldiers’ spirits.”39 David Lonsdale also wrote of the impact this “crushing physical assault” had “on the morale and cohesion of the enemy army.”40 By summer 330 Darius was dead, and Alexander laid claim to all of Persia. Yet this was not enough. Alexander’s string of unbroken victories sparked within him an insatiable lust for conquest that bloated his strategic aims the further east he marched, eventually driving his army to near mutiny on two occasions.41

From Alexander’s experience we may draw two conclusions. The first is that a strategic penetration with cavalry came to personify the Alexandrian way of warfare.42 The second is that the effect of demoralization on the opposing army and not simply its material destruction was paramount to Alexander’s military philosophy. At Gaugamela, Alexander sought to demoralize the Persian army by disintegrating its central control system—the king they called a god—and it worked brilliantly. The centuries that followed bore witness to other leaders who shunned attrition warfare in favor of decisive battle, such as Napoleon Bonaparte. But despite Napoleon’s record of successful break- throughs, his Grand Armée reached Moscow in a state of disrepair that emboldened instead of demoralizing the Russian army in October 1812.43 Like Alexander, Napoleon’s hubris stretched his forces too thin. As the breakthrough evolved over the centuries, militaries continued to draw inspiration from Alexander, culminating in one of the industrial age’s most decisive strategic breakthroughs, that at Sedan.

THE WEHRMACHT’S BLITZKRIEG (1940)

As much myth as fact surrounds the German Army’s 1940 blitz into France. Liddell Hart, who kept detailed logs of public statements before, during, and after blitzkrieg, believed that more “nonsense has been written about it than about any other event of the war.”44 As recently as 2005, German military scholar Dr. Karl-Heinz Frieser was still aiming to dispel “blitzkrieg legends.”45 Yet there is no debate that the armored push through a densely-forested yet poorly-defended point near the Maginot Line led to the fall of Paris in thirty-six days—a key political objective for Germany.46

Numerous conditions made this possible, including flaws in French planning prior to the invasion and a great deal of apprehension from the French High Command after. In Williamson Murray’s estimation, “It is hard to see in retrospect how the French could have made greater errors in preparing for battle.”47 Among them was Paris’ top-down approach to battlefield control that strangled initiative and tactical momentum—a relic of centralized Napoleonic command systems that French military thinking had yet to retire. Also present was a certain degree of luck, but fundamentally the German maneuver was a textbook example of a breakthrough with far-reaching strategic implications.48

Much as Alexander benefitted from his father’s reforms, the German Army had already charted the course to blitzkrieg conceptually when Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933.49 The new chancellor simply endorsed it and put it to use.50 Forefathers of blitzkrieg, such as Gen. Heinz Guderian, Gen. Hans von Seeckt, and Col. Ernst Volckheim, drew from the experiences of military thinkers throughout history to formulate their theories.51 By the time Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, the characteristics of blitzkrieg were evident, as explained in September by Lt. Gerald Niebergall of Germany’s 24th Artillery Regiment: “They are calling it ‘blitzkrieg.’ The panzers break through and get behind enemy lines, where they begin to disrupt the enemy’s communications and supply lines. The sight of enemy tanks behind the lines also panics the enemy. It is apparently working perfectly in Poland.”52

There existed a remarkable degree of secrecy around planning the invasion of France. When on 9 May 1940 orders came to invade, most commanders were oblivious. The plan involved the revolutionary use of armor in the maneuver that finally, as Liddell Hart had suggested, untethered tanks from the umbilical cord of the infantry.53 This piercing thrust was not directed at France’s impressive fortification known as the Maginot Line stretching north to south from Luxembourg to the Swiss border, but rather at the strategic gap in the densely vegetated Ardennes Forest that the French High Command saw as an impenetrable natural obstacle.54 Panzer Group Kleist assigned Gen. Guderian’s 19th Panzer Corps to lead this thrust through the Ardennes in what became a masterclass in combined arms warfare.55 Though tanks often receive much of the credit, the success of armor was only made possible through the skillful application of engineers, airpower, and glider infantry.

By early morning of 10 May, Guderian’s 1st Panzer Division, commanded by Gen. Friedrich Kirchner, crossed into Luxembourg as German bombers struck Allied airfields mercilessly, severing Dutch communications lines and grounding aircraft.56 These strikes, coupled with the French High Command’s reluctance to authorize sorties near Belgian villages, enabled German armor to enter Holland nearly uncontested. Still, a decisive point of the invasion was the impressive airborne seizure of Eben Emael, the northernmost post in the Maginot Line.

This Belgian fort atop the Albert Canal near Liége was home to a full battalion of troops (about 1,300 men), eighteen pieces of artillery, and numerous turrets and machine gun positions.57 Though considered impenetrable at the time, Alistair Horne cited insufficient antiaircraft systems as the primary flaw in its design, while more recent analysis from Canadian Col. Bernd Horn suggested that the fort’s lack of infantry fighting positions and rooftop obstacles were its downfall. It is likely that Horne referred to the constraints on Belgian antiaircraft weapons, which relied on sound and not radar, and thus allowed the quiet gliders to slip through unseen. At any rate, these shortcomings exposed the fort to a critical vulnerability that Captain Walter Koch and his Storm Group would soon exploit.

Koch’s unit of roughly 260 men, comprising mostly sappers and divided into four detachments, had trained on models of Eben Emael since 1939.58First Lieutenant Rudolph Witzig led the 85 men of Storm Detachment Granite who would take the fort. Under cover of darkness in the early hours of 10 May, they loaded eleven gliders in Cologne before Ju-52s towed them 8,000 feet above Aachen and released them to begin their silent descent.59 Despite moderate complications, by the next day Witzig’s outfit had destroyed the weapons positions with shaped explosive charges and the Belgians there had surrendered.60 Horne emphasized the “psychological impact of the sudden collapse of Eban Emael,” which triggered rumors of a secret German weapon, drew Paris’ eyes north toward the Line and away from Ardennes, and caused demoralization to spread like “germs of a deadly plague.”61 The seizure of Eben Emael proves that deception and psychological warfare were core elements of the breakthrough to Sedan.

Loss of the fort gave way to an orchestra of com- bat engineers clearing obstacles and blowing bridges across the 19th Corps’ front, but even these measures could not prevent the occasional stall of the panzers’ advance. While bunched up in a snaking convoy that stretched nearly 100 miles, German officers looked up anxiously at the sky awaiting French bombers to appear—but they never came. 62 Guderian’s lead division fought a decisive battle on 11 May near Suxy while the French High Command still believed the German main effort lay between Maastricht and Liége, about 50 miles north of the Ardennes Forest.

As Luftwaffe squadrons continued pummeling targets to enable 1st Panzer’s advance, it was not until midafternoon that French pilots received authorization to release ordnance over towns, but the blitzkrieg had already moved into the densely vegetated Ardennes, and it was too late. Delays like this prove that Germany’s otherwise brilliant plan may not have been successful were it not for numerous mishaps on the French and Belgian side.63 Guderian did not experience an enemy air attack until the morning of 12 May, and even then, it was rather ineffective.64 On that day, 1st Panzer broke through the Ardennes and before dusk occupied Sedan relatively unopposed, thus securing a foothold in France. Little more than a month later, lead elements of Germany’s 87th Infantry Division entered the open city of Paris, and France’s Ninth Army was no more.

The breakthrough at Sedan was so shocking to the French and European consciousness that it all but secured Germany’s victory. Like Alexander before him, though, Hitler’s impressive victories in Poland and France imbued him with delusions of grandeur, which led to a slew of disastrous overreaches the following year. One of these began on 21 June 1941 when three million German troops crossed the Soviet border and by 30 September received orders to storm Moscow.65 Still, Gen. William Donovan, founder of the Office of Strategic Services, divulged that many resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied France only began jumping on the “bandwagon” after D-Day in June 1944, even though British intelligence had agents there as early as 1940 supporting the underground movement.66 It took the largest multinational beachhead and airborne assault in history to reinvigorate European morale after blitzkrieg.

Guderian admitted that this maneuver was in part the brainchild of British officers and armor advocates J.F.C. Fuller and B. H. Liddell Hart, and by extension a continuation of the type of Alexandrian warfare both admired.67 Indeed, historians have long since compared Alexander to Hitler, if only for their capacity for slaughter and favor of the offense. Yet perhaps their greatest military similarity is their contribution to the study of the penetrating maneuver.68 The world saw many breakthroughs after 1940, but the 2003 allied invasion of Iraq bore witness to a sophisticated new type of penetration that for all its novelty possessed the same characteristics, and remained vulnerable to the same flaws, as those centuries prior.

THE COALITION BLITZ TO BAGHDAD (2003)

A unique aspect of the modern breakthrough is the robust application of airpower and special operations forces (SOF) to shape and soften the battlefield. This form of strategic penetration is less about the traditional outcome of destruction and more the secondary effects highlighted by Jomini and Liddell Hart of disintegration and dislocation. However, they still possess the same fundamental purpose that drove Alexander to charge Darius at Gaugamela: the demoralization of an enemy rather than the simple attrition of his forces.

In March 2003, Iraqi Army numbers were vague, resting somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000 in strength, while the loyalist Republican Guard, pulled mostly from the Al Anbar province in the Sunni Triangle, consisted of roughly 60,000 men.69 Regarding conventional forces, Iraq’s 11th Division held the south near Al Nasiriyah, while the 6th, 8th, 14th, and 10th Divisions took position along the Tigris River arrayed south to north through Al Amarah. Saddam tasked his Republican Guard divisions to encircle Baghdad and fight to the death, assuming any Coalition forces who made it that far would crumble against a wall of his fanatic supporters.70 Not included in these numbers were the irregular fedayeen spread about the country in unknown strength, composed of foreign fighters as much as Iraqis. Having suffered a crippling defeat twelve years prior in the First Gulf War and fighting a near decade-long conflict with Iran just before that, an Iraqi force already fitted with poorly maintained Soviet equipment faced an American military at the height of its technological dominance.

American planners therefore selected a much smaller force than the one used to push Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991, assuming modern weapons would compensate for a lack of mass. Williamson Murray and Robert Scales explained this revolution in one of the earliest military histories of the invasion:

Instead of focusing on overwhelming num- bers, planners focused on electrons—sensors and information systems that displayed with greater fidelity than ever before what was happening on the battlefield. This allowed the Coalition to apply fewer numbers in precise ways aimed at the psychological dislocation of the enemy.71

While awaiting presidential authority to invade, military leaders took the initiative to position forces in Kuwait under the guise of training exercises beginning in late 2002. Meanwhile, President George W. Bush built a coalition of 37 partner nations to fight alongside U.S. forces.72 By 19 March, special operations teams from the United States, Poland, and Britain had carried out several high-risk, covert shaping operations in Iraq.

Under the direction of U.S. Special Forces Col. John F. Mulholland, teams destroyed long-range ballistic missiles and their launchers to deny Saddam the option of attacking America’s allies in the region. Navy SEAL operators under Capt. Robert S. Harward, along with European commandos, secured petroleum reserves on land and offshore while the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment eliminated early warning systems and observation posts along Iraq’s border with Kuwait. As this took place, U.S. Special Forces Col. Charles Cleveland directed elements to link up with Peshmerga forces in the north while a widespread psychological warfare campaign took place across the country.73

These well-coordinated operations dislocated Saddam’s security apparatus from critical resources it relied upon for situational awareness and intelligence. As a result, before the invasion began the Iraqis were disintegrated and incapable of assessing Coalition intentions, as evidenced by Saddam dedicating a significant portion of his combat power to guard his flanks in anticipation of incursions via Iran and Jordan that never came.74 In essence, the Coalition achieved strategic paralysis against Saddam’s regime through a systems disintegration approach that enabled a strategic breakthrough.

The invasion began on 20 March 2003 with an early-morning F-117A Nighthawk strike on the suspected location of Saddam Hussein and his two sons, Uday and Qusay.75 Like Alexander’s run at Darius, the strike was unsuccessful, but, as at Gaugamela, it had other effects in the psychological domain. The bombing made apparent to Saddam that the United States intended to remove him and his sons from power and was prepared to strike deep within Iraq’s borders to do so. Thus began the air campaign that coincided the following day with a ground invasion through Kuwait.

The main force consisted of the U.S. Third Infantry Division, U.S. First Marine Division, U.K. First Armoured Division, elements of the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, and various smaller units such as the British Paras and several attack aviation units.76 Though all this power was aligned under U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) based in Tampa, Florida, the Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC) and Air Component Command (CFACC) planned and executed the operational maneuver. All told, the Coalition entered Iraq with a force of approximately 60,000—less than one tenth of the combat power used to expel Saddam from Kuwait in 1990.77

Drawing on the historical success of blitzkrieg, the armored divisions planned to advance north to Baghdad straddling the Euphrates and clear a path for the infantry who would mop up any dwindling resistance in the cities to the rear of the tanks. The U.S. Army’s official history of the war used declassified documents to reveal that America’s apprehension during the Gulf War convinced Saddam that the Coalition would not invade, and if it did, it would seize and hold cities sequentially.78 In this light, it appears Saddam attempted a strategy like that of Russia against Napoleon on his way to Moscow in 1812, looking to exhaust the Coalition’s supply lines before it reached Baghdad.

Securing the cities was indeed critical due to the 300-mile logistics routes upon which the lead elements relied for resupply of fuel, food, and ammunition. But Coalition forces sacrificed security for speed as Alexander and Guderian had done before them, and it paid off. By 5 April, the Third Infantry Division began conducting “thunder runs” into the heart of Baghdad, splintering the ill-equipped Republican Guard charged with defending the city.79

Saddam’s regime fell in twenty days, roughly sixteen days faster than the Wehrmacht took Paris.

As an evolution from blitzkrieg, the invasion of Iraq was a groundbreaking demonstration of joint, combined arms warfare. No single instrument was decisive. Rather, the careful synchroniza tion of many forms of power was key to success. From the widespread use of special operations teams for shaping the theater to the rapid employment of airpower in the deep fight, the fall of Baghdad was made possible by means that pried apart Iraqi defenses and enabled not one, but two breakthroughs within three weeks: the first at the southern border with Kuwait and the second at the perimeter defense surrounding Baghdad.

Like the French High Command and Darius before it, Saddam did not believe his enemy would commit to a full-scale invasion, especially one that pressed all the way to the capital, because American officials had been reluctant to do so previously.80

In turn, Saddam did not prepare for one. If the Coalition’s goal was to destroy the Iraqi Army’s ability to coordinate and fight as a cohesive element, it achieved that consummately. But what followed were objectives disconnected from the original act of penetrating Baghdad, which simply fractured the existing army and created new but less hierarchical threat groups.81 The Iraqi Army was dislocated and disintegrated, but not necessarily demoralized or destroyed, as many of its members evaporated into the cities and joined the insurgency already underway with the fedayeen.82

U.S. forces failed to adequately anticipate or appreciate the complexity of the operation’s fourth phase, when Saddam had been removed and Coalition forces were charged with conducting stability operations by erecting peacetime governing institutions even as combat operations persisted.83 Large swaths of irregular fedayeen were not demoralized but rather energized by the presence of a foreign occupying force—as were thousands of fighters around the world who flocked to fight the Western invaders.84 Like Alexander’s tunnel vision in Central Asia, Western policy became fixated on simply getting to Baghdad and removing Saddam, and thus encountered great difficulty after doing so.

From the coalition breakthrough we may draw three lessons that contribute to a richer understanding of the history of strategic breakthrough. The first is that a dislocated and disintegrated force, if not also demoralized, will find creative ways to resist even a much larger opponent. Second, the sophistication of an opponent’s defense is concomitant to the scope of conditions required to penetrate said defenses. Setting conditions for a breakthrough was a separate campaign of equal import even against Saddam’s second-rate army. This process would likely be far more complex when facing modern A2/AD systems.85 Yet conversely, developments in long-range precision fires, precision strike, offensive Cyber, and clandestine activities could make paralysis more likely because they provide additional options for targeting critical nodes that an enemy relies upon to mobilize and sustain its forces.86 Finally, past is not always prologue. Saddam’s experience with the U.S. military in 1991 polluted his thinking in 2003, and ingratiating aides only contributed to his rosy assumptions about a supposed lack of political will in Washington.

FURTHER STUDY OF THE STRATEGIC BREAKTHROUGH

From this study one may conclude that despite great leaps in military technology and the character of warfare, war’s common nature exposes fundamental truths in the strategic breakthrough that remain constant. Among them are:

• Successful breakthroughs depend on massing effects, not necessarily forces, at the decisive place and time to dislocate control nodes,disintegrate an opponent’s organization, and demoralize his forces.87
• Breakthroughs end in failure most often not because of inferior technology or tactics, but because the process of demoralization remainstechnologically agnostic.
• Many breakthroughs are preceded by political and military deception campaigns, which means the most effective are also the least expected.
• The most successful breakthroughs tend to incite within their arbiters a hubris that leads to catastrophic overreach.

Even in the digital age, these maxims lend further credibility to the conclusions of Thucydides, Napoleon, Clausewitz, Col. Ardant du Picq, and Michael Howard regarding the moral nature of war.88 The realities of trench warfare in Ukraine area further testament to this truth.89 One potential framework for additional study involves using these findings to examine penetrations within the context of center of gravity (COG) analysis or theories of victory (TOV) and theories of success (TOS).90

In 2008, J. Boone Bartholomees, Jr. questioned America’s ability to connect a TOV on the battlefield to its political origins.91 Since then, scholars and practitioners have expressed the need for a TOS that incorporates such considerations.

It is necessary then to recognize some of the ways modern states might adapt the strategic breakthrough for the Information Age. Just as Alexander aimed to disintegrate the Persian army’s ability to coordinate and fight at Gaugamela by removing its king instead of simply killing its soldiers, a theory of modern breakthrough involves similar designs. Military theorists in the Chinese Communist Party characterize this as systems warfare, a process of attacking an opponent’s critical systems that allow it to fight rather than the opponent itself.92 The defeat mechanism of disintegration compliments a systems warfare approach.

This idea is a byproduct of the Information Age’s introduction of constraints principles to military operations, in which the more tightly integrated battlefield networks become, the less disruption its individual parts can sustain without causing the entire system to collapse. Cyber and counter-space attacks are not yet powerful enough to be decisive in war, but they could set conditions through a digital penetration that disrupts military mobilization, early warning, and response systems, thus exposing a nation to paralysis and exploitation.93 As of August 2023, U.S. officials were searching for suspected Chinese malware that had infiltrated critical infra- structure networks and could potentially disrupt military mobilization and logistics.94

Moscow’s cyber-attacks and targeting of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure in late 2022 challenged Kyiv’s resolve, but the depletion of a significant portion of Russian combat power before winter prevented the attacks from demoralizing Ukrainian resistance.95 The strikes were, however, emblematic of systems warfare. Modern armies are largely connected by networks that commanders rely upon to make decisions and measure effects; therefore, maneuver is not the only means by which an enemy can be physically and psychologically dislocated. Sophisticated counter network attacks will become more valuable, especially as armies further disperse their forces and supply depots to confound increasingly advanced detection, targeting, and fires capabilities.96

Reliance on digital networks in modern war has also given life to conversations surrounding the role of systems warfare in support of multi-domain operations, including how the concept might contribute to reforming defeat mechanisms.97 Frank Hoffman, Marinus Era Novum, and Heather Venable are noteworthy contributors to this conversation, and the attrition-versus-maneuver dialectic permeates the debate. In 2012, Canadian Forces officer Cole F. Petersen characterized the binary attrition-or-maneuver structure aptly as a false dichotomy.98 Neither approach is objectively superior to the other because it is the combined effects of attrition and maneuver on the cognitive domain of an enemy, and subsequent degradation of his will to resist, that induces victory. The conclusions of scholars such as Stephen Biddle and Frank Hoffman appear in line with this assessment.99 Petersen further observed that because attrition and maneuver are also tactical concepts often injected into strategic discussions, Western doctrine should instead use annihilation and exhaustion in strategy formulation.100

Still, though, the aim of both is to render an opponent unwilling (exhaustion) or unable (annihilation) to resist. Eado Hecht’s paradigm that portrayed defeat mechanisms as ways of targeting either the will or capability of an opponent reinforces this perspective.101 In either case, the question remains: what will most effectively demoralize an enemy under conditions deemed acceptable to the national interest? The answer to that question might be attrition through a robust defense that gains decision space in one instance and maneuver with a bold offense in another. Discerning which may have the greatest demoralizing impact on an adversary can help link operations to strategic effects.

DESPITE ATTRITION IN UKRAINE, THE UNITED STATES NEEDS TO MANEUVER

This study has shown that attrition can set conditions for strategic breakthrough, whether through systems or personnel destruction, whereas the demoralizing effect of a successful penetration can create opportunities for further attrition. Alexander pursued the former while the Wehrmacht in France and the Coalition in Iraq applied the latter. Even while extolling the superiority of attrition, William F. Owens conceded that maneuver can “gain a positional advantage relative to an opponent” which “may be used to deliver overwhelming violent attrition.”102 Franz-Stefan Gady and Michael Kofman acknowledged the enduring presence of this reciprocity more recently while lauding Ukraine’s strategy of attrition against Russia:

[Ukraine’s] offensive effort proved successful in autumn 2022 because the conditions had been set by Russian forces’ structural personnel deficit and extensive attrition. The attrition had multiple causes, including combat losses, soldiers who refused to fight and depleted morale due to exhaustion. Attrition has been both sides’ primary approach at the tactical level of war; manoeuvre warfare yielded operational results because extensive attrition made it possible.103

Debate continues over Ukraine’s strategic approach, but Russia’s attempt to seize Kyiv within the first week of the invasion is a far cry from a strategy of attrition.104 Poorly imagined maneuver is not evidence of maneuver’s futility, and Ukraine’s effective use of attrition does not signal an evolution in warfare. In his examination of George Washington’s Revolutionary War strategy, Russell F. Weigley characterized attrition as a “strategy founded upon weakness” in relation to one’s opponent—an assertion supported by Washington’s own writings.105 Smaller armies or those with restrictions imposed upon their operations often use attrition to gain time, degrade enemy morale, and preserve forces. In essence, it is a strategy of deliberate protraction.

While discussing delays to Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive in May, President Volodymyr Zelensky said equipment shortages would make the casualties associated with such a maneuver “unacceptable.”106 The value of attrition and maneuver is as circumstantial in Ukraine as it has been elsewhere—commanders and doctrine writers can ill afford to select one or the other as uniquely emblematic of the future.107 That said, the strategies of Washington and Zelensky suggest that attrition is most effective in defensive wars where resistance and survival are key strategic objectives. This method is less germane for expeditionary militaries, such as those of the United States, Britain, and Australia, that rely upon a strong offensive capability to gain strategic access and project military power globally as opposed to defending locally.

For the United States to achieve this access against an adversary with like means, the evidence suggests that a systems disintegration approach targeting space assets and commercial network infrastructure could be the most effective way to produce a strategic breakthrough. Martin Van Creveld foresaw these dependencies in 1985. His concerns would likely be amplified by the contested logistics challenges associated with, for instance, a hypothetical conflict in the Indo-Pacific region:

Without a firm directing hand providing for the uninterrupted flow of supplies, replacements, and reinforcements a machine-age army will cease to function within a matter of days in the same way as an automobile factory deprived of its supply parts. Insofaras such an army consists of more special- ized parts and to that extent is more dependent on mutual cooperation, its disintegration may possibly be more rapid and more complete than that of a preindustrial force.108

Recent testimony from senior U.S. Space Force officials supports this assessment.109 In other words, an expeditionary power such as the United States can hardly rely on a strategy of attrition if it cannot disintegrate an enemy’s operational integrity and penetrate its A2/AD defenses to gain the positional advantage that makes attrition possible. For the United States to gain such an advantageous position, it must maneuver into one.

There remains much to learn from the war in Ukraine, but those lessons are not a universal template for the future of warfare, nor do they necessarily foretell the conditions of America’s next conflict in a way that should compel the joint force to abandon its doctrinal and conceptual foundations in maneuver. Researchers must be careful to avoid flirting with presentism by drawing overly broad inferences from the latest war. Each conflict, when viewed in isolation and particularly as it is unfolding, has no more of a monopoly on the future than its predecessors.110

CONCLUSION

Strategic breakthroughs have for thousands of years been the method of choice for achieving dislocation, disintegration, and demoralization of an opposing force. They must be shocking enough to destabilize an opponent’s response systems and impose—if only temporarily—decision paralysis. The targeting of psychological nodes through a systems disintegration approach that disrupts the assumptions behind an enemy’s plans makes this possible. Without this element, material destruction alone, whether through attrition or maneuver, is more likely to protract war than bring it to an end. This study also reveals a paradox: the more effective the breakthrough, the more hubris it instills in its arbiters, thus increasing the propensity for overreach.

Alexander’s seamless chain of victories fed into his dream of conquering the known world.111 In 1941, less than a year after taking Paris, Hitler thought it wise to betray Joseph Stalin and invade Russia using similar tactics under the assumption he could destroy the Soviet Union in ten weeks.112 The United States, reveling in the speed with which it deposed Saddam Hussein, spent the next two decades struggling to build constitutional democracies with cohesive national armies in tribal regions of the Middle East. In each instance, both maneuver and attrition played a role, but their strategic effects in isolation were indecisive, whereas their interplay proved critical.

Many successful breakthroughs ultimately end in failure due less to poor tactics or even shortfalls in theories of victory and more to flawed theories of success related to the presumed effects of material destruction on the moral forces of the opposition. For Hitler in Russia and the Coalition in Iraq, these lessons came at a high price after grinding campaigns of attrition followed their breakthroughs. Maneuver, then, most often fails in the exploitation phase where demoralization must link tactical activities to strategic outcomes by influencing the moral dimension of war.113 Identifying the causal forces of societal demoralization in further research could help shape a clearer understanding of the roots of victory and failure in past conflicts, while also informing the visualization of those yet to come. 

• About the author: Capt. Michael P. Ferguson, USA, is a Ph.D. Student, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• Source: This article was published at NDU’s PRISM Vol. 10, No. 4

Endnotes are available at the original PDF