Tempo and losses

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I read books for their gems - small bits of most interesting info or thoughts - not for the whole work. A book from an unknown author with many mistakes and boring style can still be fine to me if it has four or five gems in it that add missing mosaic pieces to my knowledge.

I'd like to show you one such gem, it's from the book "Air Power and Maneuver Warfare" (which didn't have many mistakes and wasn't very boring):

Tempo sharply reduces casualties and logistic demands. This is the logical result of maneuver impacting the enemy before he can react coherently. The Soviets in their detailed postbattle studies (table 1) made elaborate correlations demonstrating this phenomenon. Their data show that, in addition to reduced demands for ammunition and fuel, fast-breaking advances of 20-50 kilometers a day resulted in three times less personnel losses and 1.5 times less tank losses than when the tempo of advances was 4-10 kilometers per day.

The OODA-esque interpretation is too simple (slow advances were often simply advances which faced a more powerful defence and no amount of elaboration in statistic analysis can cancel this factor out).

Still, the correlations between losses and apeed of advance as well as between operational success and speed of advance are strong. You should want to move quickly in land warfare for greater success and lower costs. The challenge is of course how to do this right, and this goes back even to training, hardware characteristics design priorities and organization.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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