Battalion battlegroups and front-lines

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Tanks had mixed success in the First World War, but they showed much promise and European armies and military theoreticians pondered during the 1920's how best to organise and employ tank forces. The epitome of this process was the Panzerdivision / armour division with hundreds of tanks and between 10,000 and 20,000 personnel. These divisions were successful when employed as a whole, but operational success required more than just one division; a whole corps of at least two fully motorised divisions.

Operations in WW2 also showed that these divisions were behemoths that were difficult to lead. German Panzerdivision commanders often reduced themselves to a leader of a much smaller vanguard, while their chief of staff somehow organised that the bulk of the division follows the vanguard.

The later much-reduced (nominally and by lack of replacements) Panzerdivisionen were much easier to use and the well-replenished American divisions employed regimental combat teams similar to modern-time brigades to overcome the excessive size of the division during operations.

Brigades became a NATO standard during the Cold War, in part based on German experiments in the late 50's. We still have many divisions, but it's widely understood that divisions are too clumsy for operational manoeuvre. In fact, sometime in the late Cold War or 90's even the brigade became regarded as too clumsy and the (mixed) battalion battlegroup became the key manoeuvre element, comprising usually only one tank company. Organisation for training was usually kept pure (whole battalion being tanks OR infantry OR artillery), and expected wartime structure  in non-desert terrain would be a mixed ad hoc battlegroup with one or two tank companies, one or two infantry companies, maybe an artillery battery or two and some more support (a total of about 1,000 men and about 100 vehicles). Some peacetime exercises and experiments even went farther and worked with mixed company-sized battlegroups.

There's just one problem with this trend towards smaller manoeuvre elements; It's well-understood from military history that you sometimes need about 50 tanks for a successful true tank-like offensive action. To disperse tanks in smaller packages largely reduces their repertoire against 1st or 2nd rate opposition to fire support guns for infantry; assault guns.

It is thus absolutely necessary for operational success to temporarily mass multiple battlegroups for a combined attack on one opposing forces element (such as a battalion or brigade) or simply for breakthrough against a defensive line.

The Russians appear to not try this any more. A possible explanation is that their (and our!) force structure is the problem: They cover a long front-line, and have mostly mechanised forces to do so. Operational art is in large part about forming and using reserves, but the Russians are stretched so thin that their forces for operational manoeuvre are actually pinned down as line troops along a long front-line: A task for infantry with artillery support, instead done by heavily mechanised forces that need to have their BMP IFVs and other armoured vehicles far forward with their few infantrymen. The AFV fleet suffers a slow yet steady attrition while being exposed like this, without achieving any operational breakthroughs or even exploitations.

It appears that this force structure is fundamentally flawed. The Russo-Ukrainian War shows that front-lines are in fact possible against Russian armed forces that perform at the lower boundary of what was previously thought possible. I myself did not expect this and wrote for years about how front-lines could not happen for lack of troops. Well, the Ukrainians simply mobilised enough troops, dug in and somehow this suffices against the thinly-spread Russian forces.

So let's summarise:

The operational impotence of the Russian land forces may be temporary and end when they free mechanised forces for operational reserves by either shortening the front-line or by introducing large quantities of artillery-backed infantry.

The land forces structures in NATO are unsuitable for the kind of stationary conflict we see in Ukraine, and their only hope of doing much better art of war-wise is to succeed in mobile warfare without front-lines.

Operational manoeuvre against combat-ready opposition is still only possible with local superiority, the historical rule of thumb regarding massing of tanks seems to still apply.

 

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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