Defence and Freedom

2019/11/30

Leopard 2 tanks getting knocked out in Syria

(The action starts at 0:36 min. The huge explosion likely stems from a side penetration by the SACLOS ATGM that reached the front hull munitions storage. A mere 15 quick-to-use rounds can be stored in the safer turret bustle)

The (old) German tanking field manuals that I read strongly implied that the threat (felt like 90% of the threat) was a MBT (T-64, T-72, T-80, but also T-62 and even T-55 well into the 80's). One example; the field manual advised to avoid the middle of a large open field and to instead drive along the edge of woodland. Such a movement is a horrible idea if you fear RPGs, but it's the thing to do if you fear hostile MBTs and ATGMs. Tactics were built on the often only implied assumption that the long-ranged MBTs and ATGMs rather than short-ranged RPGs were the main threat.

The Leopard 2 was devised as a well-rounded duel vehicle to combat tanks. It had great mobility on Central European terrain, great penetration power, and great (though of course not perfect) protection in the frontal 60°. Its reverse gears allowed for quick evacuation of firing positions in a delaying action and its gun depression allowed the exploitation of hull down firing positions in the many rolling hills areas of Central and Southern West Germany. Damaged or broken down tanks were relatively quickly repaired, but the tank was designed to not break down very often anyway. The tank commander had an excellent all-round vision (without head protection), as there wasn't much equipment installed on the rather flat roof. Gunners, drivers and loaders could be 18-month conscripts.
The tank was designed with the defence of Central Europe in mind, with an emphasis on blunting the numerically superior armoured spearheads of the Warsaw Pact. The delaying action against superior numbers was considered to be a very important tactic for attrition of the hostile tank force.

People don't usually seem to be aware of it, but the Cold War Soviet forces and indeed even the late WW2 Soviet forces were rather weak on infantry quantity in the combined arms mix (the Red Army suffered horrible loses in 1941-1945, and was rather bled white by 1945 as was the whole nation till the 60's). That's where the emphasis on artillery and tanks came from. So if you assume a tank- and arty-centric opposition, you expect few infantry forces with RPGs in suitable firing positions. Additionally, the West knew that RPG-2 and RPG-7 were inaccurate (terribly so in crosswind) when it developed the first Chobham tank generation including the Leopard 2. A 30 kph moving tank was at little risk of getting hit by a RPG gunner in a stressful combat situation at 100 m distance.

Now fast forward to the 2000's and 2010's and Chobham generation MBT users find themselves clobbering brown Muslim war bands that are almost devoid of heavy arms and have few ATGMs. MBTs are mostly employed in stationary overwatch missions, or as assault guns. Those wars last years, not months - and troops cannot maintain vigilance indefinitely.
It's as if the Americans hadn't shown that such campaigns are stupid and unproductive. Other powers did the same stupid and unproductive shit in 2015-2019 with no end or gain in sight.

Many of the assumptions of the Leopard 2 design don't apply in such a scenario, and thus the design is suddenly not well-rounded, but rather a mismatch to the mission. Some users rush upgrade kits into service, which adds costs, maintenance demands and mass, and reduces soft soil mobility (which may be decisive on Baltic terrains) and readiness rates.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

2019/11/23

Drone wars

Artificial intelligence made the biggest steps forward in regard to perception, but also good progress on decision-making. It appears to be feasible to create a small autonomous robot that can accomplish a mission set by 2030.

The combination of autonomous robots with miniaturization may yield autonomous robots the size of small birds with useful performance.

Small autonomous drones may be very practical for quantity production. Let's assume that such drones become very effective militarily. The result may be that military power in the 2030's may depend first and foremost on the ability to acquire by production or import millions if not tens of millions of autonomous war drones.

This may spell the end for main battle tanks and other line of sight weapons platforms save for high-flying aircraft: A couple thousand or ten thousands of anti-tank guided missiles were incorrectly predicted to make the concept of main battle tanks obsolete, but millions of tank-penetrating drones would almost certainly make line large and expensive of sight combat platforms obsolete.

What would such autonomous war drones look like?

A basic concept would be a kamikaze killer drone. In concept it would be a kind of missile, albeit with loitering and / or waiting ability, possibly also the ability to recharge itself from the environment. It would detect and identify a target, decide to engage, and likely be consumed by the hit. A shaped charge warhead would be used to penetrate vehicles at known weak spots, and a much smaller EFP-style shaped charge could be used to kill individual troops without the need to close in with it the last few metres.

We will no doubt devise and test, if not deploy, numerous countermeasures ranging from netting to drone-hunting drones. So we can expect drones to replay the growing specialisation of military aircraft. Initially, there were observer aircraft, but the urge to kill was great enough to develop ground attack aircraft almost immediately. This created the need for fighter aircraft. Later we added passive electronic reconnaissance aircraft, active electronic warfare (jamming) aircraft (even different types for different wavelengths), refuelling aircraft, transport aircraft, target practice aircraft, decoy aircraft (typically unmanned) and so on.

We might see such a wide range of autonomous drones as well, and in addition to the task specialization we might also have terrain-specialised types. Drones for urban settings, drones for open fields and drones for woodland could benefit from terrain specialisation for low detectability and endurance. Particularly well-equipped military bureaucracies might also include war drones that could submerge in water and thus hide in lakes, ponds and slow-moving rivers - and exploit the underwater stealth for an approach movement. Other drones may be tasked as stay-behind sabotage drones, and hide under leaves, foliage or even in soft soil.

Operational art may become about layering detection and defence against drones, organising supply & stocks, and deploying large swarms of mission-tailored composition to search, probe, push, occupy and finally meticulously clear out defined areas.

Concentrations of drones would be engaged by classic artillery, but other than that the classic trio of infantry, tanks/cavalry and artillery may be replaced by drones.

The first area to become dominated by drones might be mountainous areas, for the classic trio is the least capable there. Artillery has difficulties to hit reverse slopes, infantry move extremely slowly and tanks cannot negotiate much of the terrain.

Meanwhile, drones could handle such terrain quite easily, though flying drones may require enlarged rotors or wings to compensate for the low density atmosphere at altitude.

The last area to become dominated by drones might be urban terrain, as buildings offer many opportunities to restrict the movement of small drones and an army would want to interact with the civilian population rather than just kill.

Autonomous drones would be a novelty, and both the conservatism of the armed bureaucracies and the political desire to not open Pandora's Box too much might delay the build-up of stocks of such hardware. Rapid technological progress might also render stocks obsolete in a few years, possibly reducing their value to that of decoys. That would be another disincentive to a stocks build-up.

The armed bureaucracies would have much disdain for the drone business, as it wouldn't be soldierly, wouldn't follow what the officers were taught when they were till young, armies would need to think like air forces to grasp the matter, the need for most career officers and their skill sets would vanish and so on.

There are thus many reasons to expect a rather slow build-up, even slow R&D. That is, except in nations whose devious leaders seize on such a land warfare revolution as a means to topple the balance of power and succeed with some war(s) of aggression.

Personally, I see little reason to fear robot wars more than human troops wars. We certainly proved that the latter can turn genocidal and easily break societies, nations, if not cultures. To send out drones to kill is no more anonymous than the movement of division markers on Field Marshall Haig's table or the firing of a 155 mm HE shell by a howitzer crew. War drones won't be able to reproduce themselves, so their threat to mankind would be limited by their numbers even if they turn against their human masters.

There's still the Star Trek-ish scenario of fully automated (or simulated) war becoming all-too easy, but don't we have this problem with wars abroad already anyway?

War might finally cease to be much about morale, and become all about readiness and money.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

2019/11/16

One of the saddest things in life

... is to see a friend join a bureaucracy and turn from a person who meant to improve the world into a person who is defending processes that are in the way of improving the world.

I had an orientation week when I began university studies. A senior student led the orientation group and assured us that after a certain amount of studying in the field, we would adopt the way of thinking that characterizes the field. I considered the notion repulsive.

Years later, I agreed. It had changed me, it had changed how I approached issues and questions, what tools and methods I used to find solutions. It was kind of the point of doing the studies, for frankly, I forgot much if not most of the content (details) of the studying within weeks after the tests. The lasting effect wasn't about memorizing details.

Organisations and professions can suck you in, absorb you, assimilate you - and turn you into one of them. It's scary, but it depends whether it's a good thing or not. An organisation that's on the wrong track will pull those who enter it onto the wrong track. An organisation that's on a good track may make very good use of such an assimilation power.

The challenge remains to guide an organisation onto a good track (such as serving the country, not itself) before it guides YOU onto its status quo track.

This suggests that the secret ingredient of reform may lie in keeping enough of a distance to it. A superhuman ability to resist such assimilation was hardly ever observed.

I wrote a lot about how secretaries of defence should guide the armed bureaucracy onto the path of pursuing the national interest instead of self-interest. Such ministers usually turn into champions of the armed bureaucracy's self-interest within a few weeks.

Maybe a different interaction with a lot more spacing may do the trick. We might tweak the responsibilities, tasks and authorities of the office in order to ensure that a minister of defence is considered by others (and by himself/herself) as first and foremost the nation's first critic of the armed services, not as their organisational leader. Failures and embarrassments of the armed services should not be blamed on the minister if the minister criticised them and punished the underperforming part of the bureaucracy and its chain of command. The minister should not identify as part of the armed services community, but as its worst nightmare - a nightmare that keeps it honest and pursuant of national interest rather than self-interest.

Think of it as leadership by sanctioning failure.

disregard the smile

Maybe you readers would consider it excessive, but I think the uniform dress code should include a "pink ballerina skirt" that the minister could add to the obligatory officers uniform of any part of the armed services for any duration on short notice.

I have a hunch that internal red tape could be overcome real quick if we had that.

We should move to a political culture where we would chastise a minister of defence for NOT 'upgrading' the officer dress code like that if the armed service mismanaged procurement, displayed poor readiness, wasted personnel strength on pointless activities, allowed deterioration of skills, or resisted some novelty for too long.

That kind of political culture might be just enough to ensure that such failures would simply not happen and the skirt would remain a theoretical possibility.

Meanwhile, every minister of defence in the real world of today would consider it an embarrassment to himself or herself if officers were photographed with pink ballerina skirts over their trousers. There's no good reason for it, but that's how we roll. In the end, the fish stinks from the head, and this head is our political culture; it's in what we expect from the civilian leadership. The rot begins at a very fundamental level. Most people appear to think that a minister of defence should work for the armed services rather than for the country.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

2019/11/09

Fund for World Peace

Nervos belli, pecuniam infinitam.

Endless money forms the sinews of war

Cicero

Mankind spent USD 1.8 trillion on military power in 2018, presumably to keep the peace. It's a tragedy that we're presumably keeping the peace against each other, but there's another interesting thing about this sum:

A tiny fraction of it would probably suffice to create world peace at least between states if reallocated to solely this purpose.

I present you the

Fund for World Peace

The nations of the world pay 1% of their military spending into this fund. Within a few years, the fund grows to well over € 100 billion.

A country under attack would receive as much interest-free credit (due in rates after ten to 20 years) from the FWP as needed for its defence whenever the U.N. General Assembly or the UNSC (disregarding vetoes) condemn a country for a direct or sponsored aggression against another country. All U.N. member countries are required to allow arms exports (save for a couple technologically too sensitive categories) to the defending country.

Still, attacked countries might succumb under assault by an aggressor. The United Nations General Assembly may authorise the use of force to liberate such a country, as happened in the case of Kuwait. The FWP would then offer a bounty for the liberation of the country (costs plus 50%). It would also provide a loan for a credible effort (at negotiated conditions).

The fund would accept emergency loans from countries (at their ten-year bond rates, repayable in ten years) if its liquidity is insufficient to meet its mission.

The effect would be that even great powers such as Russia or the U.S. would be deterred from many potential military aggressions because even small powers would suddenly have the economic means to defend themselves or to liberate nearby occupied countries.

It wouldn't be perfect. The decision-making could be flawed, powers could try to exploit the rule set and some powers might not fear countermeasures because they can threaten the use of nuclear munitions. Still, it would be a powerful deterrent - for a tiny fraction of the current annual expenses.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

2019/10/26

German / European Syria policy

The wannabe chancellor candidate of the conservatives in Germany is bungling in Syria policy with a proposal for military protection mission that almost nobody else in Europe appears to want.

The problem right now is that you cannot have a satisfactory Syria policy these days without either having very low expectations or a satisfactory Turkey policy.

There, that's the real issue:

What's the Turkey policy?

Turkey is NATO member, and it appears settled that it won't join the EU in this generation. Its autocratic government is dominated by a nationalist-pseudoreligious party and its undisputed leader.

Turkey clearly chose to have improved and more close relations with Russia, regardless of the incident about a shot down Russian aircraft.

Turkey's geostrategic role is extremely important. It controls the Bosporus, is in striking distance of Crimea and Suez Canal, is neighbour with Syria, Iraq, Iran and Georgia. It has at least the potential to bridge between Orient and Occident, though not with the current president. The Turks dominated Arab countries for centuries in the Ottoman Empire, and there's a certain justified unease about their changed policies regarding especially Syria, but also northern Iraq.

Meanwhile, Turkey is a multi-ethnic country that oppresses the Kurdish minority, maybe because it cannot afford to accept the notion of not being a nation-state.

https://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2012/10/turkey-and-geostrategy-again.html

So what is the European Turkey policy? I understand the United States have a dysfunctional foreign policy right now that doesn't extend past personal interests and fixations of its president, but what's the European strategy?

(1) Do we try to keep Turkey in NATO at all costs, appeasing it regardless of aggressive actions and sporadic cuddling with Moscow?

(2) Do we try to at least keep Turkey from joining Russia's bloc? We should then neutralize them in NATO; there's no way to kick them out, but they need not be involved in secret affairs.

(3) Do we try to push for a preferable political leadership in Turkey?

(5) Do we ignore Turkey and its actions?

We need to have and settle on a satisfactory Turkey policy before we can devise a satisfactory Syria policy. Else, we wouldn't know if to wield the power of the UNSC against Turkey, for example. Armed forces protecting the Syrian Northeast make sense only if they are meant to actually protect it, even against advancing Turkish forces of against advancing Turkish proxies supported by Turkish forces.

The current Syria policy appears to be short-sighted, incomplete, and many important actors do not appear to have thought enough about the Syria case.

About the German Minister of Defence: It was a folly that the proposal to send protection troops to NE Syria came from the Minister of Defence instead of from the minister of foreign affairs. A policy trial balloon about protection troops from the minister of foreign affairs with some dissent from the Minister of Defence would have damaged intra-NATO relations less. The military policy origin needlessly puts the military policy question (is Turkey really considered a NATO ally or a great power to be restrained) into the field of view more than if the minister of foreign affairs would have done it.

It's indeed a double folly, for the proposal isn't even national policy; the cabinet is divided about it.

https://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2017/04/europes-defence-in-long-term-in-light.html

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

2019/10/19

A couple notes

.
1)
For the first time ever, I noticed a major news outlet mentioning that Article 1 of the North Atlantic Treaty makes aggressions illegal. Hooray!
Now apply this insight beyond just Turkey.

2)

Not-so-fun game: Try to come up with ways how the' president of the united states' a.k.a. "lying moron" could possibly serve Russian interests better than he already does.

- He drove oil prices up with Iran

- He drives wedges into NATO

- He seems to drive Turkey out of NATO into Russia's arms

- He utterly destroyed U.S. diplomatic capability - there's no ability for actual diplomatic agreements left. That's in part becuase of State Department disassembling, in part because he's not giving real guidance to diplomats (so all negotiations are a mess) and in part because he's proving his country to be utterly unreliable (up to signalling that ratified treaties are merely the starting point for a shakedown for a fictional better deal).

- He worked hard to get Russia sanctions lifted

- He gets an Ukrainian government into trouble

- He withheld arms deliveries to Ukraine
- Did nothing against the threat of election fraud

I think of myself as someone who has a lot of ideas, can improvise and find ways how to unhinge seemingly stable systems. I doubt I could have made up these pro-Russia moves in a week.

I would have insisted on backdoors in network and computer hardware and software to make Western computer networks more vulnerable to Russian attack - which incidentally is something the U.S. government (and politicians in the EU) did want, too.

I don't really share the criticism about the fake Syria withdrawal a.k.a. betrayal of the Kurds. The criticism is too much in opposition (and thus in favour of having troops deployed in Syria) as a matter of principle.

It could have been done in a competent way - there was enough time. The Kurds could have negotiated autonomy with Assad under favourable conditions using the possibility of a U.S. withdrawal as one of the bargaining chips instead of being forced to plea to Assad for help. The Turkish invasion (expansion of invasion) would rather not have happened if the Syrian border guard and army were on the border.

Having troops in Syria is great power gaming nonsense in my opinion. So an actual (not fake) withdrawal would have been fine if done well. I suppose those senators who criticise it just want to continue the great power gaming nonsense. They don't care more about the Kurds than the lying moron does.

The mess was created for practically not gain (there are still U.S. troops in Syria, and expected to stay), at least concerning Western interests.
What now? The U.S. could abstain from protecting Turkey in the UNSC instead of doing childish pseudo-tough talk and embarrassing letters. The UK and France would probably not protect Turkey. Maybe Russia would, but keep in mind Syria would have to appeal to the UNSC to act against the invasion in the first place. Putin would have to choose whether to side with Turkey or Syria.

4)
I didn't write as much as usual lately because I got distracted. Stuff happens.

5)

Right wing extremism may have passed a zenith in several European countries at least for this generation. The right wing extremists in Germany suffer from several problems

- the Austrian right wing radicals' corruption scandal, which exposed the workings of right wing extremists

- it's becoming increasingly obvious that their primary party is more of an Eastern German protest party than anything else

- a court declared it legal and no libel to call one of their far-far-right members a "fascist", which clarified the matter

- their favourite target, chancellor Merkel, it slowly leaving the spotlight since she gave up party chairmanship

- the migration issue has ebbed

Personally, I wonder when and whether ever the nation will pay attention to far right wingers having no working answers to challenges and problems. They're mostly about fear and hate, only in few countries (Hungary, Poland) has the far right wing been smart enough to break from the mold and actually do something for the poor and the middle class.

I'm concerned that there's neither much of a movement for a ban on autonomous lethal drones nor a hurried development of countermeasures against them. This has a "1905" feeling of seeing horse cavalry divisions, but neither armoured motor vehicles nor anti-armoured vehicles guns in the army.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

2019/10/12

Strategy changes

Several of my blog posts were written under the (mentioned) assumption that we should have a division of labour in NATO / EU. The Baltic countries and Poland should focus on self-defence against a strategic surprise attack. Germany should be able to quickly deploy a decisive ground forces strength capable of stopping Russian ground forces, Turkey should be able to close the Bosporus even to submarines, Spain should be able to close Gibraltar Strait even to submarines and so on.

I hinted back in 2017 that such an alliance grand strategy of deterrence by frustrating even strategic surprise attack scenarios might need adjustments if the Turkey situation doesn't develop well. Strategy changes may be necessary, and this may be a terrible issue given the inertia in the armed services.

A complete change of an air war strategy may take 30...40 years, for that appears to be the life cycle length of combat aircraft and air defences from introduction to disappearance. I doubt it will become much quicker unless there's a major war wearing down the inventory.

Even unspectacular changes of a national defence strategy such as reorganisation of the army (which should be possible in little more than a year including the re-training periods) often last 5+ years nowadays.

This slowness is what seemingly almost everyone has become used to, and has become accepted as normal, if not inevitable.

It's not.

Remember, Germany built a continent-dominating military based on a 100,000 men army and 10,000 men navy in less than seven years. No computer programs were used, and we should get rid of them if computer programs were slowing down rather than accelerating things. Technology advanced, so we should be quicker, not slower. Whatever technological change made us slower should be dispensed with.

It's a rule of thumb to replace a strategy every about five years in a business. Few large businesses (such as concrete factories) can successfully operate without having and adapting a strategy. Likewise, we should expect strategy changes every five years on the national and collective defence levels. Any longer intervals are symptoms of failure by the executives involved.

An armed bureaucracy that expects to change strategy every about five years has to move to be able to change course every about five years. Such an adaptable armed bureaucracy could dare to react to its environment with more specialised adaptions than a sluggish armed bureaucracy that lives and preserves inertia and conservatism above every thing else. It's a bureaucracy's self-interest to preserve itself and to not change much, so the impetus towards adaptability has to come from the civilian leadership.

Political leadership may change as well, but ours in Germany exists in four-years legislative cycles, and this fits the five-year rule because we don't really hand over power in four-year intervals. Our governing coalitions last about 5...14 years.

We should be much more adaptable on the strategic level both as nations and as collective security organisations (alliances).

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

2019/10/05

Link dump October 2019

Watching the President of Finland begging to be rescued from this insanity was a sight to behold. #TrumpMeltdown pic.twitter.com/aRBk8JZ6Am
— BroadStBoss (@BroadStBoss) 2. Oktober 2019

https://twitter.com/BroadStBoss/status/1179464743528083456/photo/1

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/09/26/china-unveils-500-megapixel-camera-can-identify-every-face-crowd/

http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/inequality-populism-and-redistribution

[German]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J1dHNtyOLI
(You can generate automatic subtitles and get an automatic English translation for them.)

[German]
https://www.reporter-ohne-grenzen.de/pressemitteilungen/meldung/illegaler-verkauf-von-spaehsoftware-an-tuerkei/

[German]
https://augengeradeaus.net/2019/08/wir-machen-soldaten-finnlands-reservistenarmee-als-abschreckungsinstrument/

.

2019/09/21

Operational Planning Processes and Tactical Decisionmaking

I'm still not much in a creative mood, so I present you a slightly modified blog post written in 2014, but not published till today.

The Operational Planning Process (OPP) is a linear, analytic method for planning used by most NATO ground forces. The problems and inadequacies are well-known, and I'm not motivated to provide a list thereof.

I am motivated to push for an alternative approach, though:

This alternative approach is really an approach, not a method.
First, it is important to understand and value the consequences of Moltke the Elder's quote (which I assume to be largely correct based on military history):

"Kein Plan übersteht die erste Feindberührung."

("No plan survives first contact with the enemy.")

Second, it is advisable to take a look at how highly successful commanders actually led their forces tactically in mobile warfare: Many of them commanded in person on the scene - preferably at their Schwerpunkt. This is often ideal for leaders of battalion- to small brigade-sized forces.

Third, it is advisable to keep in mind that war isn't like exercises - especially if there's no front-line. There's often only one starting point (unless invasions happen) followed by campaigning till the end. Exercises have a starting point, few hours or days of action and then rinse, repeat. Many exercises are scripted to have serial phases.

Mobile continental warfare would be different. The phases would run in parallel, and the only starting points that are repeated are the insertions of refreshed reserves into the meat grinder. A staff officer might wake up, go to his folding desk and be confronted with reports of past actions, an ongoing action, a tactical plan for the day, a logistics plan for tomorrow and ongoing logistics planning for the day after - in parallel. He wouldn't be in "the" planning phase.

Fourth, there are great advantages to be found in training officers to the point where they can understand if not anticipate their peers' standard actions without much fuss.
A common doctrine that's good enough to be actually employed by the vast majority of officers is one way to support this - but only to a point, since doctrinal flexibility has its merits.
A personnel system that provides staffs and ground forces in general with enough stability to enable officers to get to know each other well long before they're transferred helps as well.

- - - - -

I'd like to push for a different attitude:

Planning should lose much of its prominence.

Planning should focus on delivering what was known as "Combat Service Support" (~support that doesn't affect the enemy directly; mostly logistics) and moving reinforcements. This is known to be a rather fruitful area of activity for planners.

Updates of (not very specific) missions given to manoeuvre forces on the other hand would be directed in a more "naturalistic" or "artistic" way. The corps or theatre commander or his deputies could make such adjustments right away, in reaction to a change of mind or a change of the situation that happened only minutes ago.

The tactical actions - both preservative and aggressive ones - should be led by commanding officers on the scene, leading from their position among their troops.

This should not sound very unusual, for it happened in many conflicts. My claim is that the way to go is to develop a system of command and control, leadership, coordination, planning et cetera based on the expectation that this is how things could be, should be and will be.

- - - - -

Let's see how this could look in a simple example:

Traditionally, HQ would draw up and consider some plans and finally issue orders to subordinate forces: Team A engages and fixes the enemy, Team B flanks.

The whole process takes a lot of time and the enemies don't play along. A and B often need to adapt themselves on their own on the spot, since HQ issued new orders with too much delay.

Now instead, HQ would tell Teams A and B to deploy into respective mission areas, with respective levels of ambition regarding tolerance for hostiles' presence there.

Hostile forces close with A, but A is not meant to fight decisively yet (dictated through the set level of ambition) - A ambushes and delays if the hostiles come really close.

The deputy commander (commander is sleeping) at the HQ re-appraises the situation and tells A and B to cooperate with an increased level of ambition for their combined areas. A and B become authorised to update their common area border bilaterally without specific HQ orders.
A and B manoeuvre, and after a series of skirmishes their leaders sense an opportunity to strike, agree and execute a pincer attack.

Pay attention to the choice of words here; "level of ambition" and "mission area". The deviation from conventional doctrines here is to not give a mission about what to achieve, but to order an area to be (similar to the positions assigned to a patrol line of wolfpack submarines) AND to set a level of ambition. Level of ambition could range (in steps) from "do not engage under any circumstances" to "find opposing forces and inflict maximum casualties". The extreme levels of ambition would be suitable in a guerilla war only, of course. Typical continental warfare in Europe would rather have levels of ambition ranging from "deploy to detect and report movements of hostile units, but avoid losses" to "destroy hostile forces when conditions aren't disadvantageous".

- - - - -

I mixed a good dose of horizontal cooperation into this scenario. The same is true for area-centric missions and ambition levels. These favourite topics of mine are parts of the tool bag that could replace planning where the latter doesn't work anyway.

So in the end, there are ways to avoid the well-known inadequacies of the very bureaucratic processes. Such processes have their times and places, but I am in the mainstream when I assert that they're being used for too many purposes. The decision-making on the scene by leaders among their men - an almost alien thought in a computerised staff exercise - deserves to destroy many planners' claims relevance in regard to manoeuvres and combat.
We should also get away from trying to predict things. This does not work, period. Missions given by higher commands should be limited in detail by even higher command's orders. Any too detailed corps HQ orders should be outlawed and thus ineffective, period. A corps commander who pinpoints the timing of an action down to the minute shall go to prison as a private, period. "When you're ready, preferably before 1230" is accurate enough.

S O
defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

Written by someone who is really into improvisation and never liked planning much for activities where plans don't last anyway.

2019/09/14

Business as usual

Germany got a new minister of defence, said minister has no background in military, military policy, security policy, or even only good experience in foreign policy.

A few weeks into the term, said minister publicly claims that the budget is inadequate.

A budget that grew extraordinarily over the past couple years.

The real problems are different ones, but the minister has already 100% failed on the job by doing the usual thing. Minister and bureaucracy now share interests. The minister is pursuing the bureaucracy's self-interest. There's no hope that this minister (or any, really) will steer the bureaucracy off the course towards self-interest and onto the course towards public interest.

The German armed bureaucracy will NEVER have enough money, and will NEVER become swift enough to do its job properly unless it gets yanked off its course by a proper reformer. There's no reason to expect a conservative minister to do meaningful reform, of course.*

It's depressing.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: Conscription was deactivated under a CDU (conservative party) minister, but a very strong case can be made that he was no conservative, but a person with 80% show, 20% thirst for power and 0% substance.