The field manual is an official guiding document setting down the basics of the combat activities of troops (forces). (Discussing Field Manual).

The field manual is an official guiding document setting down the basics of the combat activities of troops (forces). It defines the goals, tasks, methods and principles of troop employment, as well as the main provisions regarding organization and conduct of combat operations.

Manuals and regulations are of dual nature. While reflecting principles of the modern military theory, they simultaneously have a clearly expressed practical orientation, regulating as they do quite a number of standards. It is the combat guideline documents that most graphically reveal the general, the particular, and the single in military affairs. On the one hand, manuals and regulations reflect the main principles of the military art and regularities objectively inherent in contradictory phenomena of combat activities, i.e., they have the signs of the general in military affairs. On the other, they are a typical expression of the single seen as a sum total of essential traits characterizing some objects and phenomena and distinguishing them from others. Regulatory provisions contain a list of indicators characteristic of a given type of combat operations and a given troop echelon alone.

Yet, when applied to a concrete unit in a concrete situation, regulatory provisions will acquire the nature of the general; actually they come to be seen as the most typical variants of actions and become an officially approved and confirmed theory. In other words, theory comes to be identified, not with scientific tenets underlying manuals, but with standards they expound, which ultimately are viewed as the vehicle of the fundamental in the military education. The normative legal status of field manuals provides for the legal formalization of theoretical and practical recommendations they offer, recommendations that become law for servicemen.

Russia's first manual is very likely the Boyars' Verdict on Stanitsa and Guard Service, drawn up in 1571 by a special assembly of boyars' children (knights), Cossack heads and Cossack rank-and-file under Prince Vorotynskiy. The stanitsa and guard service arrangement was created primarily in the southeast for protection against the Crimean Tartars, with whom Russia was practically continuously at war throughout the 15th and the 16th centuries. The Boyars' Verdict was thus the border service instructions detailing the duties and responsibilities of officials and the entire personnel engaged in guarding the borders. It determined the needed number of stanitsas (Cossack villages) and patrols, their locations and movement routes; it also regulated in detail how they should perform. Everyone concerned had a duty to study the document. Verdict-prescribed rules had to be learned by rote and breaching them was a severely punishable offense.

The first Russian attempt to draw up general military regulations was very likely the Manual of Martial, Gunnery and Other Affairs Relative to Military Science (early 17th century). On the whole, the document was of the encyclopedic nature and could be used as a textbook. The manual directly called for organizing systematic military instruction.

1647 was the year of publication in Russia of the general military regulations called Science and Skill of Military Formation of Infantrymen. And again the manual emphasized the need for a systematic and organized military instruction. It lashed out at those who contended that "our ancestors used to serve against the natural adversary for so many years and occasionally received some of this military science, but did not have that kind of science. Why do it, why torment military people with unnecessary labors, why utter these lowly In all likelihood, the manual was the first document expounding military science largely in the form of methodological recommendations on how to train soldiers.

Obviously, there is some reason to believe that the books like the Science and Skill of Military Formation had for long determined the system of military instruction on the basis of the manual as a document containing the obligatory forms, methods and ways of action by troops and commanders. Those documents were simultaneously of guiding and educational nature. Since then the manuals became vehicles of military science and were identified with textbooks.

Of fundamental importance was the 1716 Military Regulations, drawn up under the direction and with personal participation of Peter I. Its preamble contains an extremely important explanation, obviously written by the Czar himself, saying what the regulations were needed for. Its aim and essence were in putting the military affairs in order. All victories were "only resultant from good order ... the disorderly barbarian way is laughable." (2) The document is necessary for "each officer to know his duty lest he pleads ignorance." (3)

What was understood as "good order" was primarily unified rules or troop action, matters of army organization, military administration, personnel training and indoctrination, and field service. In fact, it was both an official document that in many respects constituted a piece of legislation (it contained some royal decrees) and a military theoretical work (textbook). It was Peter I's efforts to draw up a set of regulatory documents containing the main principles of contemporary military science and practice and having the status of legislative acts that for long determined the organization of the system of military training.

This sort of approach to organizing military education, one undoubtedly necessary in definite conditions, held substantial contradictions that persist to the present time. On the one hand, it created an orderly personnel training system, which served to give officers and men the identical knowledge of ways of action and performance skills. Short of that, any regular army would have been an unthinkable proposition, particularly so in the epoch of the linear tactics. On the other, the "regulations-based" approach to officer training shaped the instruction methodology. The educational process was basically about learning by rote the definitions, formulas, relevant tenets, and answers to preset questions. Students were not required to substantiate the tenets they learned, nor were they due to prove them. As generally believed, the main thing was to form good memory skills and to assure subsequent performance to memorized rules.

As created by Peter I, the military education system reflected the main contradiction inherent in the training of military leaders. On the one hand, it was necessary to know the obligatory rules of military affairs as contained in the regulations; on the other, military commanders of any rank had to be induced to develop capabilities for imaginative and independent action. A shift in this ratio may obviously be seen as an objective historical regularity. Regardless of concrete tactical techniques, the 18th-century combat operations were actions by compact masses of troops. This being so, it was only high-ranking commanders who were in a position to fall back on the creative instinct, whereas those who put their decisions into practice were due to strictly follow the regulations, to obey the will of the supreme command, to act practically in a mechanical fashion, as one man, in established combat formations.

It was in order to employ troops in a uniform way, starting from weapon handling techniques and up to the coordinated, standard changes of formation, that Peter's regulations were created.

The year 1755 saw the approval of the new manual called Description of tile Infantry Regimental Formation, which reiterated Peter I's demand for not keeping "to the regulations like to a blind wall." But this reasonable wish proved unrealizable. The regulations imposed numerous forms and rules of troop disposition, primarily for firefight. Actually it regarded the linear formation as the only and most expedient technique, envisaging the use of columns only in specific cases. Seemingly, different varieties of the linear formation provided an opportunity of choice. But the regulations lacked substantiation of their rational use in different conditions of the situation, and therefore they had to be learned by rote. The 1755 regulations focused heavily on uniform performance by units of drill movements and musket techniques in combat. On the whole, the document was considerably permeated with "the Prussian spirit," reflecting the view on a military unit as one complex machine trained to fulfill commands together and fire in volleys. Under these circumstances, officers' initiative was reduced to the minimum, so much so that certain movements did not require shouted commands, just a sign from the fluegelman (right-flank soldier or NCO). This sort of regulations induced stereotyped thinking in most officers, who themselves became cogs in the mechanically streamlined military machine.

After the Seven Years' War, the Military Commission created by Catherine II developed 1763 Infantry Drill Regulations as well as Military Regulations on Equestrian Exercise. The former considerably reduced and simplified drill forms, abolished involved changes of formation, particularly for firing, and gave military chiefs, from company commander up, the right to use their own discretion in training troops under their command, without breaching, however, regulations-imposed formation types. That helped develop initiative and renounce stereotypes, something of much importance in training troops in general and officers in particular. It was the renunciation of absolute uniformity in training that enabled Russian generals P.A. Rumyantsev, A.V. Suvorov and M.I. Kutuzov to use their theoretical findings in practice, reflecting them in well-known works. A characteristic example is Instructions to All Messrs. Battery Commanders, which P.A. Rumyantsev penned in the period of the Russian-Turkish war (1768-1774). After making his recommendations on how to use the artillery, he wrote this: "However, I am not entering into a detailed description of its usefulness; rather I leave it to the own discretion of Messrs. the officers as more skilled gunners." (4)

Paul I's regulations strengthened the Prussian orientation in troop training, which was hopelessly outmoded by the late seventeen hundreds. These prescribed strict execution of what was actually parade-ground musket stunts: "The main subject in training is for the soldier to hold the musket fairly well, his arm fully extended, firm and right on the shoulder, not close to the head in the upper quarter, nor far from the body in the lower quarter ... so that the musket should not move." (5)

Strictly imposed in practical troop training, Paul's regulations assisted emergence of mechanical assiduity in officers. Not only did they stand in the way of, but frequently banned, initiative and independence. That could not fail to affect results of combat operations in the early 19th century. As was claimed as early as then, the Russian army had suffered great harm through the devotion, which Alexander I and his inner circle felt for Paul's 1796 regulations, whose main tenets had been borrowed from the Prussian regulations dating back to 1760.

On the whole, the methodological basis of troop training in the early 19th century was made up of military manuals and regulations on the general army scale, which were overwhelmingly a list of obligatory methods and techniques of action to be relied upon before and during a war, ones reflecting the theory and practice of that time. They practically did not mention the use in line units of military theoretical works and other military literature, save for several educational aides of applied nature for NCO's. In spite of repeated orders to use regulations imaginatively, they shaped mass standard thinking and actions. The innovative works by outstanding Russian commanders, which went far beyond the framework of the regulations, were frequently intended only for subordinate, occasionally innumerous, troops. It was only much later that some of these came to be practiced, if not always with official leave.

In essence, military education of officers directly in line units consisted in their practical (combat included) activities on the basis of military manuals and regulations. There was no theoretical training as such. But the view on studying the regulations as a method of mastering the military theory has proved quite stable and persists to this day.

Regulations that generalized the experience of past wars were far from always good for new conditions. Russian military successes in the Russian-Turkish wars of 1768-1774 and 1887-1891 were to a considerable extent due to the innovative methods of warfare invented by such outstanding generals as P.A. Rumyantsev, A.V. Suvorov, and their followers, who boldly breached the norms of regulations not only directly in the course of battles, but also in the process of training of the command personnel and troops. An enhanced attention accorded to the normative approach in officer training during the reign of Nicholas I was a factor leading to the growing role of drill service and drill regulations. Even at the General Staff Academy the drill regulations served as the basis for teaching all chapters of the primary tactics. And the manuals of the late 1840s mostly reflected the "parade-ground" troop action methods as practiced at the Krasnoye Selo Camp.

1856 and 1857 saw publication of Military Regulations of Drill Infantry Service and Military Regulations of Cavalry Service. The documents continued to fully reflect the theory and practice of the Krasnoye Selo Camp. For example, the chapter "Battalion Advance and Retreat" said the following to describe unit actions: "At the command forward march, the battalion shall march forward, keeping eyes on the first NCO color bearer, who should keep his shoulders as correct as possible and follow the line running perpendicularly to the line abreast formation." (6) Published after the Crimean War, this provision relates to rules of attack in an offensive operation, not to a parade. One should think it was quite justly believed that military regulations must propound concrete methods of execution of definite rules. But their transformation in the manuals was of excessively regulatory nature, and since it was precisely the manual that formed the basis of training of most officers, the creative aspect of tactics remained outside of the scope of vision.

The main chapters of the Regulations of Infantry Drill Service--"Company Exercises" and "Battalion Exercises"--were reprinted in the period between 1862 and 1866. They considerably eased the regulation of battalion drill actions in capacity of a single tactical battlefield unit. They recognized company as the lowest-level tactical unit, something that considerably expanded the range of tactical techniques, and, accordingly, imposed new tasks in training officers and troops in general. If previously the company was a component part of the united battalion mechanism, then now the company commander was given greater independence.

In the late 1860s and the early 1870s, there was more attention given to studying the relationship between tactics and the manual. It was believed that tactics as science should provide general foundations rather than definite rules, which must be expounded in manuals. There was criticism leveled at the system of officer training that was based solely on the study of manuals, as well as at the educational materials represented in the manual form and therefore having no educational value. It was stressed that in performing the role of an educational course of tactics, the manual became an instruction that required memorizing and mechanical execution of relevant actions.

M.I. Dragomirov believed that manuals should contain only what had been produced by tactics and was recognized as obligatory for troop actions. In his view, provisions of manuals imposed substantial restrictions on their content. It was also his view that they should avoid giving figures. Filling manuals with regulated provisions and standards that are obligatory by virtue of the legislative nature of the manual will objectively lead to it being obligatory to implement them, i.e., to the stereotype and renunciation of initiative.

Published after the Russian-Turkish War (1877-1878) were Regulations of Infantry Drill Service and Instructions Relative to Company and Battalion Actions in Combat. The fundamental difference of these documents was in renouncing strict regulation of troop formation in battle. The Regulations and the Instructions recommended putting troops in extended line formations and detaching company and battalion reserves. They also said for the first time that dressing was not required in an extended line formation and that platoons, while keeping to the general direction of advance and subject to the conditions of the terrain, could either move forward or somewhat lag behind lest one unit get in the way of another.

The defeat in the war with Japan compelled a broad inquiry into the state of tactical training. The manual orientation of training at military and cadet schools had led to the stereotyped thinking in officers. The war had shown that all appeals for an imaginative, in accordance with the situation, use of the guiding documents remained a slogan if officer training began and ended with studying the manual alone.

It was revealed that many provisions of the prewar manuals fell short of the conditions of the Russo-Japanese War, specifically their underestimation of the role of fire and overestimation of the bayonet charge, detachment of an excessive amount of forces to reserves, which were ordered to stay for long in closely packed formations, something that led to a rise in the number of casualties, advance in closely-spaced extended-line formations, where the interval between riflemen was one and a half or two paces, etc. Many military specialists expressed the view that training on the basis of excessively regulated manuals was not good for displaying initiative.

The experience of the Russo-Japanese War impelled elaboration, between 1908 and 1912, of a set of new regulating documents: Infantry Drill Regulations, Regulations for the Conduct of Battle by Infantry, Regulations for Infantry Actions in Battle, Field Service Manual, and a number of guideline documents on the use of artillery and cavalry, and engineer operations.

The 1912 Field Service Manual was most suited to the contemporary conditions, embodying as it did all advances in the Russian military theoretical thought and the grave experience of the Russo-Japanese War. It was distinguished by considerably lesser regulation and standardization of troop action methods and approximated a textbook in the nature of exposition of many tenets, something that helped shape non-standard, initiative-oriented thinking in officers.

World War I, like the Russo-Japanese war, showed that it was ruinous to train officers with orientation to regulated provisions of even what was on the whole decent manuals. The dogmatism was so great that following the start of the war there was no artillery preparation of attacks, because it had not been envisaged by the manual. As a result, closely-spaced lines of riflemen advancing without artillery support were literally mown by enemy machinegun and artillery fire while still at a fair distance from the enemy lines, too far for a bayonet charge. Neither did the manual-prescribed battle formations justify themselves. The manual provided for detaching reserves from the company level up, as a result of which first echelons possessed insufficient fire capabilities. Besides, numerous reserves were often used to repair losses, not to build up strength of the strike forces.

A lot of work was pursued in the 1920s and the 1930s to create and improve field manuals of the Red Army. The material of the WPRA Infantry Field Manual (1927) was arranged in accordance with the battalion-element pattern. It lacked strict standards, while the quantitative indicators it did have could be interpreted in a sufficiently broad manner. The Provisional Field Service Regulations of the WPRA (PU-36) was different from both the preceding and subsequent regulations. It was to a considerable extent filled with theoretical tenets. The regulations lacked a clear-cut division into troop echelons. Provisions relative to the corps, division, regiment and battalion were expounded inside corresponding chapters. For example, typically worded Chapter VII, "Offensive Engagement," had several articles devoted to an exposition of provisions for organizing an offensive by corps commander, division commander, and regiment and battalion commanders, that is, was arranged in accordance with the really existing downward- directed pattern of combat organization.

Infantry Field Manual of 1940 (BUP-40), with which the Red Army started the Great Patriotic War, contained quite a number of standard indicators. For example, it prescribed in a rather peremptory manner that force dispositions for an offensive should be as follows: a rifle company--one or two echelons (and it added: "...two echelons are the most expedient formation" (7); a rifle battalion--two or three echelons; a rifle regiment--three echelons. Certain indicators at the same time were not strictly regulated. For example, combat objectives were outlined in a general way: "The immediate objective of rifle companies shall be determined by enemy facilities visible on the terrain, the seizure of which should assure further success of a battalion offensive;" (8) "The immediate objective of a regiment and objectives of first-echelon battalions shall be normally determined by the first aim of action, which should be attained during the initial disposition of battle formation ... and within one system of coordination ." (9)

A number of postwar works show unequivocally that the majority of quantitative standards imposed by the prewar manuals failed to get confirmed in the war years.

It was established that the most important rule of linking combat objectives in an offensive with the time of their performance "...was not always and not everywhere observed in the first period of the war. Some definite influence in this sense was exerted by the adherence of the command personnel to prewar standards. Simultaneously it was not always taken into consideration that the prewar manuals had proceeded from the full-strength composition of units and combined units given their sufficient reinforcement with artillery and armor." (10)

Apart from that, it was stated that, "At the start of the war, while defining the zone of action and depth of advance for a division, they often proceeded from the concept of operations alone, without duly taking into account the nature of enemy defenses, availability of forces and assets, nature of the terrain, and other elements of the situation," (11) i.e., failing to take into account the things, without which any concept makes no sense. This very valuable remark means that before the war the command personnel was busy memorizing manual-imposed standards rather than studying cause and effect connections within the phenomenon or the essence of interdependence between the availability of forces and assets, the nature of enemy actions, and opportunities for dealing with combat objectives.

Views on the disposition of combat formations continually shifted during the war years, but in any event they were at variance with the prewar requirements. For example, the manual recommended the echeloning of troops in an offensive from the platoon level up, as a result of which a first push involved only one-third of forces and assets. Starting from 1943, however, one-echelon disposition of rifle platoons, companies, and, as a rule, battalions, was definitively accepted as the basis. Manuals recommended breaking the divisional combat objective in an offensive down into an immediate objective and a subsequent mission, but in addition to that the practice was to assign also a day's mission, whereas the width of the zone of advance was on the average two or three times as narrow as the one indicated in the prewar manuals.

Apart from that, the duration of fire impact upon enemy facilities in defense in the period of artillery preparation was envisaged from one and a half to three hours and it was considered as sufficient to have 50-100 guns and mortars per one kilometer in a breakthrough zone. During the war years, however, those provisions suffered serious changes.

The past experience enables one to raise the question about the expediency of quantitative regulation in guideline documents of many indicators of combat operations; to an even greater degree this applies to the methodology of studying operational-tactical and specialized tactical disciplines on the basis of the said indicators.

The currently effective Field Manual is characterized by strict regulation of the majority of tactical standards. It imposes quantitative indicators for zones (sectors, areas) of combat operations, breakthrough zones, the system of defensive positions and areas, including the number of and distance between trenches, attack positions, assembly areas, concentration areas, lines of deployment, tankborne assault force marshalling points, rates of advance, composition of elements of combat formation, distance to command and control facilities, etc. In fact, actions by subunits, units and combined units are totally regulated.

The necessity of imaginative application of manuals has been stressed throughout centuries-long history of their existence. There is a point of view to the effect that legal regulation of troop actions is effectuated in the manuals, regulations and instructions within a definite framework, beyond which there are chances for a display of initiative. This view is at odds with the practice of applying the manuals, because actually the right of choice is given precisely within the framework of a sufficiently limited range of standard values, not outside it; practicing imagination is proposed within the limits of legalized provisions of manuals. The majority of those provisions, which are expressed in quantitative terms, are restricted by the indication "up to...," i.e., there is an upper limit of the standard value. Upon being handed down a combat mission by his superior, a commander will "fill in" the outlined standards with quantitative indicators as imposed by the manual for his unit (subunit).

Some typical conclusions arising in the course of operational plan-making are these: "the size of the defensive area indicated by the commander makes it possible to have two battalions in the first echelon." This means that such an essential element of the plan as combat formation is substantiated with the help of a simple arithmetic comparison of the assigned size of the defensive area with the standard size of battalion defense areas, rather than on the basis of analyzing and revealing the essence of a concrete situation. The indicated number of positions automatically determines the echeloning of the combat formation, although this sort of plan may result from something other than an evaluation of the situation. For example, a two-echelon formation is the most typical and possibly the most expedient one in a given situation. But it is by far not a matter of indifference how a commander comes to this conclusion, whether he does so on orders from his superiors or on the basis of revealing the controversial e ssence of the real situation.

The regulated nature of field manuals has a substantial impact on the molding of the way of thinking, which officers assimilate while being trained at military educational establishments and during their practical activities. The method of acquiring knowledge is of fundamental importance in this respect. If the basic provisions of manuals and regulations are expounded in the reproductive form, actually in capacity of standards, studying this kind of material requires that the student in the first place use his memory. As a result, he fails to master the mechanism of creative thinking necessary for the conscious application of some or other provisions contained in the manuals. There is no doubt that the demand to prove the latter tends to invigorate the teaching process and assists in developing the tactical thinking, but it does not change the essence of the standard approach to theoretical training. In any event, it is a "manual-induced" way of thinking that takes shape, which implies that creativity is perm issible within the framework of standard provisions.

It should be mentioned that the field documents of the U.S. Army contain no standard quantitative indicators. Actually they are a stable code of operational and tactical principles formulated on the basis of effective military experience, a code which may be used as the foundation for drawing up temporary instructions on ways, methods and order of combat operations.

These manuals are systematized teaching aides containing sufficiently long-term (stable) general provisions, which provide the basis for shorter-term (temporary) and more concrete provisions, standard included, which reflect the realities of each particular period of time.

The currently discussed draft Field Manual of the Land Forces by tradition contains a big number of standard provisions, which prove short-term in conditions characterized by the rapid advance of weapons and methods of warfare.

It seems expedient to give up many quantitative standards, and even less so to indulge in indication of rigid restrictions. The manual ought not to be turned into a set of instructions; on the contrary, it should make a document aiding inculcation of a creative way of thinking in officers. It is enough to formulate designation of different provisions and requirements to them. For example: "The second trench shall be organized within such a distance of the first one as to enable defending subunits to support by their fire subunits occupying the first trench as well as to conduct fire on the approaches to the forward edge of the battle area and to cover with fire obstacles before it." The omission of a concrete quantitative standard in this case is explained by the fact that the defending subunits might have weapons with different capabilities and operate in different conditions against the adversary, who also possesses different modern weapons. In turn, separate quantitative indicators can and must be present in capacity of recommendations in additional, unofficial teaching materials.

As the present writer sees it, the officer, given this kind of approach, will be guided primarily by the essence of this or that situation, not by quantitative indicators, which may change subject to concrete conditions.

In any event, the field manual remains the fundamental document to be studied in depth and mastered in practice by the officer personnel. It is of exceptional importance therefore that it be an instrument helping to inculcate in commanders and chiefs the ability to direct troops in different, complicated conditions of the situation in a non-standard, creative fashion.

NOTES:

(1.) L.G. Beskrovniy, Ocherki po istochnikovedeniyu voennoi istorii Rossii, AN SSSR, Moscow, 1957, p. 66.

(2.) Ibid., p. 115.

(3.) Ibidem.

(4.) Ibid., p. 143.

(5.) Ibid., p. 146.

(6.) Voinskiy ustav o stroyevoi pekhotnoi sluzhbe, Part III, Batalyonnoye ucheniye, St. Petersburg, 1856, P. 35.

(7.) Boevoi ustav pekhoty Krasnoi Armii (BUP-40), Part 11 (company, battalion, regiment), Voenizdat Publishers, NKO SSSR, Moscow, 1941, p. 53.

(8.) Ibid., p. 163.

(9.) Ibid., p. 279.

(10.) Razvitie taktiki Sukhoputnykh voysk v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine, VAF, Moscow, 1980, p. 30.

(11.) P.M. Petrus', Rasvitiye taktiki nastupatel'nogo boya strelkovoi divizii v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine, VAF, Moscow, 1958, p. 18.