A high end conventional land warfare doctrine (I)

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I wrote before about the support group fractal, and I did so before writing this post because it provides an important quantitative foundation for this new series (evident in part II).

 

About 13 years ago I was thinking about how to replace the functions of the defended front-line that we saw during the world wars and the Korean War. I wrote about this issue here a couple times as well (see at bottom).

My first attempt to replace the front-line with a different concept replaced the front-line with a narrow (few dozen km) skirmishing corridor. This corridor would consist of few layers of areas assigned to individual platoons for surveillance and harassment (skirmishing). The stiff trench frontline of 1914/1915 had been replaced by an elastic defence by 1918 already, and this elastic defence that permitted an enemy advance by a few kilometres until the push reached a main line of (then stiff) resistance was already official German defence by the 1920's. I basically gave up on the stiff backbone, mechanised formations would instead manoeuvre against penetrations of the narrow skirmishing corridor. It's basically today's state of the doctrine in NATO plus this stability-giving narrow skirmishing corridor in the front. The all-mechanised forces seem too inefficient, too fragile, too quickly exhausted and too unreliable to me when they're not enjoying the functions of a front-line at all. It's like fencing without protection and parrying.

Infiltration and exfiltration through this narrow corridor were supposed to be observed, reported, costly and slowed-down by caution. The troops that would form this (movable) skirmishing corridor would be motorised infantry platoons, and these platoons ended up being conceptually so similar to the German-Austrian Jagdkommando/Jagdkampf concept that it seemed utterly non-original to me even though I had a different operational level* concept in mind. I called these "light skirmishers" and moved on to think about how skirmishing could be done with mechanised forces. I wrote about that here as well even before 2010, but more about that later.

My "light skirmisher" concept has long since been fused with the alternative non-nuclear, non-mechanised defence doctrines developed during the 1970's and early 1980's by Spanocchi, Simpkin and others. This means it's no more meant to be a narrow corridor manned by professional troops, but a few hundreds of kilometres wide skirmishing corridor manned by reservists. Again, they didn't seem all that original, but my intent was still a different one.

Imagine a militia in a country that's actually thinking of defending itself on its own soil, not just of defending its alliance away from home soil. Think Poland, Baltics, Romania (not so much Finland, its geography is too special). This militia would consist of territorially-specialised battalions of varying sizes (depending much on how many volunteers can be found in the region). The battalion would have little combat support, but a large quantity of light skirmisher platoons with a high degree of autonomy including quality long-range radios (beyond-the-horizon HF and satellite). This militia would serve as point security and river line surveillance forces until they become stay-behind forces that were bypassed by superior opposing forces. 

These stay-behind militia forces would not fight combat troops much, but they would harass support troops, raid forward bases (supply dumps, forward helicopter bases and so on), HQs, demolish bridges and so on. They might cause some direct damage and create a substantial diversion effect, but most of all they would maintain surveillance of the area and report changes to corps HQ. The last point alone would already shape the battlefield extremely in favour of the militia's side, as the invader would be at a grave disadvantage on the invaded soil.

A similar effect could be had with long range scouts / LRRP / Fernspäher beyond the friendly territory or in very low population density areas and in forward areas where they militia fails to maintain satisfactory surveillance. The surveillance of less stressful locations can even be used in a rotation so the Fernspäher specialists (NOT gold-plated special forces-ish B.S.**) aren't in the most stressful locations for weeks.

So this is the first basic way to divide the theatre of land warfare:

1. "rear" areas (say, Western Poland)
2. indigenous militia-monitored areas with more or less harassment of invaders (say, Northeastern/Eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia)
• militia acting as security&surveillance forces
• militia acting as guerilla&surveillance forces when bypassed by OPFOR
  
3. "red" areas with Fernspäher surveillance at least at points of interest
4. "red" areas with only satellite surveillance

Part II will cover the manoeuvre, heavy skirmishing and raiding forces and how the support groups particularly at brigade and corps level influence geographic deployment.

related:

/2009/09/square-trick.html

/2011/10/functions-in-military-theory-front.html

/2014/05/blog-defence-and-freedom-theses.html

S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*:  For the purpose of this blog post think "thinking at the corps level".

**: No adventure vacation bullshit like helicopters, kayaks or parachuting. Movement by rather civilian-looking 4x4 vehicle to within few km of the objective, hiding the car, nighttime movement to establish observation and hiding posts, surveillance for days, then everything backwards. Most movement in car would be done together with a relatively combat-worthy armoured recce-ish unit that's infiltrating or exfiltrating itself. The surveillance teams would peel off from an infiltrating armoured recce convoy, later join an exfiltrating one. These surveillance teams would be active duty troops, but not special forces.

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