Tactics: Evolution of its role and place in military art.

The army that proves able to grasp the spirit of modern combat will come a victor.

Alexander Svechin

From time immemorial military leaders were looking for sure recipes of military victories. Many lives had been lost in military inroads and battles and seas of human blood had been shed before the most inquisitive minds mastered the accumulated experience, discovered secret springs and levers of military success, and found the threads leading to victory. This made practical recommendations on combat tactics possible. With time the original precepts became richer, developed into logical theories to be reflected in all sorts of instructions. At the same time the very nature of military manuals makes it impossible to supply them with the history of tactics, illustrations, proofs, and calculations. The first attempts at writing textbooks on tactics were made in hoary antiquity. The Ancient Chinese "seven books" that included a treatise "On Military Art" by Sun Zi (6th-5th centuries B.C.) were one of the earliest instructions on tactics.

In the millennia that separate us from the ancient Chinese textbook tactics as an art of combat has covered a long and complicated development road, and negotiated a sort of historical step--from the military art of Ancient Orient (India, China, Egypt, and Babylon) through Ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to Modern Times. The nature of wars changed from the pre-machine to machine eras, two world wars and numerous local armed conflicts of the latter half of the twentieth century. Tactics was changing together with them. One can safely say that it is an embodiment of the wisdom of the past centuries that has imbibed the rich and varied experience of mankind's past. Military history is a great teacher: the present day relies on the shoulders of the past and is looking into the future. The bottomless treasure-trove of military art is of an inestimable value: it pushes back the narrow limits of personal experience and enriches it with the heritage of the earlier generations and the wisd om of the military leaders and theoreticians. The great commanders of all times looked at the past with reverence. Napoleon in his time wrote: "Imitate Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus II Adolphus, Turenne, Prince Eugene of Savoy, and Frederick when fighting an offensive war. Read and reread stories of their 83 campaigns to build up your understanding. This is the only means of becoming a great commander and learning the secrets of military art. Enlightened in this way your mind will reject the rules that contradict those by which the great people guided themselves." (1)

It is always useful to study past experience though military history is unable to answer the most urgent questions of today and to lift the veil of the future. What historical experience can do is to instruct the officer, to inspire him, to encourage his creative efforts and profound contemplation, and to broaden his knowledge. This is a lot. History teaches us to avoid what should be avoided at all costs, to escape traps, to find the right solutions of tactical tasks in contemporary contexts.

Studies of combat experience should not be reduced to passive contemplation: to learn the lessons of the past one should look at events in close connection with the conditions and circumstances to which they belonged. It is important to be maximally objective, to take the positive and negative sides into account (mistakes, failures and shortcomings displayed by commanders, staffs, and the troops).

In the past the military press spent much time discussing whether tactics was a science or an art. Those who denied the scientific side of tactics argued that it could not supply the rules applicable under all circumstances of a battle.

From this it followed, they said, that tactics was an art based on the commander's military genius. They referred to Clausewitz who, in his On War had written: "It seems that it is absolutely impossible to supply military art with scaffolding in a form of a positive scientific system that would provide a military leader with an external support in all cases." (2) A denial of the presence of regularities in military phenomena and, in particular, in a battle, inevitably denied scientific nature to the military field. It should be said that Clausewitz as one of the founders of a "positive scientific system" in the theory of armed struggle contradicted himself.

Science and art stand opposed in other fields of human activity, which is incorrect in principle. Every science has its art, that is, its application to life. On the other hand, each art has its science, that is, its theory that generalizes experience and practice. Therefore, the correct answer to the question whether tactics is an art or science is that it is both. Tactics, like strategy and operational art has a scientific theory of its own and its art, that is, the theory's application to life.

Encyclopedias describe the term "art" as high skill and craftsmanship in all fields of human activity. (3) Military art is an especially complicated type of art that differs greatly in content from all other types. When applied to it human will is directed not against dead matter and never against inspired but passive and inert objects but against an active adversary. An operation or a combat are a clash of two wills and two solutions. The sides are seeking their aims and fulfilling combat tasks while fiercely fighting. This makes military art a specific type of art. It defies bare schemes, formal patterns, dogmatic and conservative approach to a much greater extent than any other type. It is based on the military commander's incessant creative quest, bold innovation, audacity and risk. He will dearly pay for mistakes and failures made in battle.

The art of tactics is part of life's general historical development. At different periods it either advanced at a slow pace or moved forwards by leaps and bounds. Tactics as art can be grasped only through the prism of the laws of dialectics. In historical perspective tactics is seen as an integral, living, and dynamic system that promptly responds to the changes in the means of armed struggle, technical innovations, alters the nature of combat context, and the ideas about the war. The art of combat is rooted in life and military practice.

The methodological aspects of cognizing the profound foundations of tactics presuppose the use of philosophical categories such as laws, regularities, and principles as instruments of sorts of intellectual activity aimed at probing into the nature of combat and its typical features. Tactics is being improved and perfected through dialectical contradictions: the primordial rivalry between the offensive and defensive means; a constant imbalance between the troops' combat potential and new, ever increasing, demands of military reality; a contradiction between the aims of a battle and a chronic shortage of available means, that is, between the realities of the combat situation and inadequate ideas about it, between the old and new methods of waging a battle, between maneuvers and counter-maneuvers, a strike and counter-strike. The resolution of these contradictions has always improved, and continues to improve, tactical actions.

The art of the war is a subjective sphere in which there is always a rivalry between the intellects of the commanders of the warring sides, of the troops that set their military skills one against another. This is a rivalry of weapons and the way they are used, a rivalry of command and control systems.

Throughout the centuries of military history the role and place of tactics in the art of warfare, being determined by the place of battle in the system of armed struggle, changed. Throughout many centuries it was a battle as an instrument of strategy that determined the course of war and its outcome. From the very beginning tactics gave rise to and formulated the principles of preparation for military actions and conduct of war that later became part of strategy. This was due to objective reasons: first, for many centuries the means of armed struggle were far from perfect and all of them belonged to the sphere of tactics; second, the armies were relatively small while the material base was weak. In these conditions wars were a chain of small clashes culminated by a decisive battle.

For a long time the concept of combat was synonymous to the concept of military actions. The Encyclopedia of Military and Naval Sciences published in 1883 in St. Petersburg described it in the following way: "A combat is a general concept... A combat between two armies that determines the outcome of a war or an operation is called a decisive battle or an engagement... A combat between two armies of a less decisive nature that did not decide a war or even an operation but led to a more or less significant changes on the war theater for both sides ... is called an engagement... A clash between independent parts of two armies (their corps or divisions) is called an action." (4)

Large massive armies and operations as a new basic form of armed struggle gave rise to a new and, at first ignored by official military theory, intermediate link between strategy and tactics, operational art. Combat was no longer the main instrument of victory but became part of an operation as a form of war. When the sides acquired several armies one individual engagement, no matter how important, or even a large battle were no longer decisive. The war from beginning to end went through numerous successes and failures, offensive and defensives combats and battles, operations by armies and, later, fronts (groups of armies), and protracted military campaigns of which operations were parts.

The role of a combat as a key to an operation or a war had been preserved until the strategic and operational command acquired their own troops and means excluded from the army's combined units and units. The process had started during World War I when aviation appeared and went on after the war to become intensified during World War II. At that time strategic (operational) command had at its disposal, besides strategic aviation, paratroopers, anti-air defense, powerful mobile tank and motorized large strategic formations and artillery of the High Command Reserve. These forces and assets were used in operations not only to strengthen operational and tactical groups but also to address certain tasks.

Tactics remained the decisive element when attaining operational and strategic goals and a key element of a system of operations. This is explained by the fact that the enemy could be routed only in battles. The majority of the armed forces and assets remained at the disposal of the tactical link. Strategic and operational command used tactical forces and assets and created favorable conditions for their use. While readying for an operation and carrying it out the command determined goals and tasks of tactical groups and units, organized interaction between them and combat and material supply, and coordinated action.

It was at the same time that operational art and strategy acquired some specific principles, one of them being an in-depth multiple destruction of the enemy It was not fully realized in World War II because the task of destruction belonged to artillery that was part of tactical forces with a limited destruction range. Operational and strategic means were employed to a much greater extent than before, yet their role was far from decisive. Operational aims were achieved, in the final analysis, through concerted actions of combined units and units on the battlefield. Outside them the same goal was achieved with the help of air strikes of different depths, the use of mobile groups of fronts and armies in the enemy's tactical and operational defense zones, and airborne and amphibious landings in the enemy's rear. Success was achieved through a combination of tactical as well as operational and strategic means, the share of the latter two being relatively small. The rout of the enemy's main forces was still achieve d on the battlefield, in the tactical zone. Combat remained the heart of the war--neither a battle nor an operation could be devised and won without it.

Nuclear weapons changed the balance of forces and created new relations between strategy, operational art and tactics. Operational art became a component of military art on its own right while the military theory was confronted with a task of identifying new relations between the principles of strategy, operational art and tactics. The earlier correlation between strategy and tactics disappeared: the latter stopped affecting the former in a direct way. The impact became mediated by operational art. Strategic instances came to the fore with powerful means of destruction at their disposal.

It should be added that new approaches to the principles of military art called for by the changed conditions were not easy to formulate. There was a gamut of opinions both in the Soviet Union and abroad on the future of military art and especially tactics. For example, the book Military Strategy published in 1962 under the editorship of V. Sokolovskiy insisted that the new conditions called for a radical revision of an interaction between strategy, operational art, and tactics. The authors said: "The idea of a victory in a war as a sum-total of numerous local successes is a thing of the past. The strategic means of today subordinated directly to the high commands that make it possible to score decisive results in a war without engaging the forces and assets of the tactical and operational links have made local successes the result of general strategic successes." (5)

This allowed the authors a conclusion that tactics was put on the back burner. This and similar ideas were a result of "nuclear euphoria" typical of the 1960s when everybody seemed to agree that the next world war would be a nuclear war. In the 1970s, the Soviet military doctrine allowed a possibility of a conventional world war too that added new dimensions to the interaction between the military art's components.

The new conception received its fullest treatment in a book by A. Grechko The Armed Forces of the Soviet State published in 1975. It said, in particular: "Tactics remains the key to operational and strategic success irrespective of the means employed. Operational and strategic designs start with tactics and are translated into reality by tactical means." (6)

One feels that this straightforward assessment of the role of tactics is only partially true. Hostilities today are varied and the role of tactics also varies. In the armed conflicts tactics plays a dominant role. For example, the share of tactics in Afghanistan in the total set of armed action was 80 percent while in the two Chechen campaigns, 75 percent. (7)

It seems that a large-scale war will start with the use of strategic and operational means such as massive missile and air strikes and long electronic air campaigns (similar to the Storm in the Desert) in preparation for land operations. Tactics will have a definite role to play since space-air, air, naval and land operations and battles inevitably involve personnel, crews, detachments and squads that prepare strikes and deliver them. Yet tactics will never be the main element-it will play a secondary role at the beginning of a war. As hostilities unfold and become tenser, the sides will inevitably launch multiple defensive and offensive operations. They will bring tactics to the fore as a prerequisite and foundation of operational and strategic successes.

One may conclude that as long as massive armies exist tactics will continue existing with different roles to play in different types of hostilities.

Today, higher demands are placed on tactics: the theory of tactics should show more flexibility and mobility: it should devise means of hostilities suitable for a large-scale war with an unlimited use of all weapon types (nuclear weapons included) and for armed conflicts with varied adversaries. There can be adversaries with technical or numerical advantages, or both combined, the enemy may apply specific guerrilla tactics. It is the task of tactical thought, military theory and troop training to foresee future developments and prevent the army from being caught unawares. This has already happened more than once.

(*) See "Talking to the Reader," pp. 1-3.

NOTES:

(1.) Strategia v trudakh voennykh klassikov, Vol. 1, 1924, p. 55.

(2.) K. Clausewitz, O voine, Vol. 1, Voenizdat Publishers, Moscow, 1941, pp. 40-41.

(3.) Sovetskiy entsiklopedicheskiy slovar', Sov. Entsiklopedia Publishers, Moscow, 1980, p. 513.

(4.) Entsiklopedia voennykh i morskikh nauk, Vol. 1, St. Petersburg, 1883, pp. 452-453.

(5.) Voennaia strategia, Voenizdat Publishers, Moscow, 1962, pp. 16-17.

(6.) A.A. Grechko, Vooruzhennye Sily Sovetskogo gosudarstva, Voenizdat Publishers, Moscow, 1975, p. 281.

(7.) See: Voennaia mysl', No. 2, 2001, p. 16.

IVAN VOROBYOV (*) does not offer ready-made solutions and easy roads to victory in a combat. His book offers his thoughts about the art of tactics and an attempt to get a glimpse of a commander's creative laboratory. The author is out to show the obstacles to be overcome when looking for an original solution in a battle, to reveal the contradictions and difficulties of command and control, and to demonstrate that the road to victory is a thorny one. The author is convinced that the officers should be taught to think originally, to reject shopworn patterns and approaches, and to avoid bureaucratic quagmire. In short, tactics should be restored to its status of a true art of combat.

Ivan Vorobyov has not limited himself to Russian and Soviet experience--he looks abroad, at the experience gained by the armies of other countries. He relies on the past experience to avoid extremes and counterposing Russian and foreign military thought.

The book looks at the roots of the art of warfare. It treats in detail the theory of an offensive, defensive, and encounter battle, provides recommendations for commanders and their staffs on combat preparations and fighting, as well as on dislocation of troops and their deployment. The problems of all-round combat support have received profound treatment.

The book, with no analogies in this country and abroad, is written in a lucid and imaginative language and is richly illustrated. It trains creative and fresh approaches and as such can be described as an encyclopedia of military art and a reference book for officers of all ranks.