Tripwire forces (again)

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It's time to revisit the fallacy of "tripwires". I wrote about it before, but that was ages ago, nobody read it, and I really have the urge to finally deal some imaginary blow to this stupid idea of "tripwire forces" with the Force Z example.

I planned on using this example for years.

Force Z under attack

"Force Z" existed in late 1941 and consisted of the powerful battleship Prince of Wales, the elderly yet still useful battlecruiser Renown and some escorts. Aircraft carriers were not part of it when Force Z made contact with the enemy (the Japanese), but they wouldn't have helped anyway. British naval aviation was no good for anything but highly efficient nightly attacks with obsolete biplane torpedo bombers.

Prince of Wales and Repulse succumbed to the assault of less than a hundred long-range bombers when they were trying to counter the Japanese invasion of Malaya. They were both sunk within hours, on the fourth day of the Pacific War.

Prince of Wales had an extremely impressive armour scheme and both ships were fast enough to evade all but four Japanese capital ships (the Kongo class), and would probably have been able to stand their own against three of them at the same time.

The whole encounter is fascinating in many ways (even the more elderly of the two involved Japanese bomber types had the range and offensive potential to ruin Britain if it had been used by Germany in 1941/42!).

Mitsubishi G3M 'Rikko' torpedo-capable bombers.
Technically they could have de facto encircled the British islands
from bases in France and Norway if used by Germany.
Their range was phenomenal because they were designed
for maximum range with a 800 kg torpedo as payload.
Nobody in Europe had matured such a concept (the Soviets came close).

Strategically, it should have been the deathknell to the idea of tripwire forces.
These two capital ships were stationed forward at Singapore in order to deter - instead they only provided the Japanese with a good idea of how to defeat the Royal Navy piecemeal. Two capital ships of this kind were not capable of stopping the Nihon Kaigun; the best they could possibly have achieved as provoking the Japanese to assign their best battleships (Nagato and Mutsu) to the effort of invading Malaya. Eventually, three bomber groups in Indochina did the trick as well, and did so at tiny losses.

The naval theorist Mahan was concerned about the possibility that the U.S. Navy would sometime be split into a Pacific and an Atlantic Fleet and one of both might be involved in a decisive battle before the other could arrive. he already recognised the risk of splitting one's battlefleet and having it destroyed piecemeal - decades before WW2. The British did it nonetheless, as did the USN. The USN was backed by a big enough industry to effectively rebuild itself during the war. This compensated for the strategic mistake, but it didn't change that it was a big one.

Moreover, forward deployment in general should have been understood as a folly after 1941. Sadly, humans aren't that capable of learning.
NATO kept most of its Central European defensive forces East of the Rhine during the entire Cold War, for example. It was an invitation to the Warsaw Pact to overrun them, especially during one of the hundreds of really, really weird Cold War weekends (when almost all German conscripts returned home). Luckily, the Soviets never bit, as their concern was not really how to defeat the West, but how to avoid being defeated by the West.

Operation Desert Shield initially saw a lone airborne division deployed as an early  tripwire force in 1990, and those troops were fully aware they were ill-suited to deal with a couple thousand Iraqi tanks. They had only two truly effective anti-tank munitions - the TOW and the Shillelagh - in small numbers. Their Dragon and LAW munitions were next to useless against even elderly Iraqi main battle tanks and their artillery would have been very busy with other missions. Again, the potential aggressor did not bite because he wasn't really that aggressively-minded as Western public opinion had assumed based on the propaganda. As far as I can tell those fabulous satellite imagery leaving no doubts about the Iraqi intent to invade Saudi-Arabia in 1990 were still not released (because they never existed).

I cringe every time some 'hawkish' politician promotes the idea of sending troops to some foreign place in order to discourage aggression.
Look, a tiny such detachment is militarily irrelevant and politically no more relevant than diplomatic statements. A substantial, militarily relevant force such as Force Z on the other hand is a nice target for a coup de main. A huge forward-deployed military force such as the Russian pacific fleet of 1904 or the U.S. Pacific Fleet of 1941 might lose a war within hours or days.

The idea that tripwire forces are a deterrent is probably a symptom of arrogance, or of thinking of military forces too much as of representatives. Sure, they would deter if they represented the whole force's power, but all-too often in history the potential aggressor saw them more as an enticing isolated target than as equivalent of the whole thing. It's certainly a political idea, and flourishes best in absence of red teaming. Military minds would in my opinion tend to look at tripwire forces through the eyes of the potential aggressor, and see them also as targets, not only as respectable obstacles.

In short; tripwire forces work really well when they're not needed, and constitute a major strategic blunder if the potential aggressor is really offensively-minded. Tripwire forces are an expression of strategic stupidity. They should be eradicated from the political and military repertoires and vocabularies.

S O

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