Understanding Land Warfare

Christopher Tuck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000598070
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This textbook provides a thorough grounding in the vocabulary, concepts, issues and debates associated with modern land warfare. The second edition has been updated and revised, and includes new chapters on non-western perspectives and hybrid warfare.

Drawing on a range of case studies spanning the First World War through to contemporary conflicts in Syria, Ukraine, and Nagorno-Karabakh, the book explores what is unique about the land domain and how this has shaped the theory and practice of military operations conducted upon it. It also looks at land warfare across the spectrum of its conduct, including conventional campaigning, counterinsurgency, and peace support and stabilisation operations.

Key themes and debates identified and analysed include:

• the tensions between change and continuity;
• the role of technology in land warfare;
• the relevance of culture and context;
• the difficulties in translating theory into effective military practice;
• in-depth discussions on issues of immediate contemporary significance, including hybrid warfare, emerging military technologies, and the military reform processes of the US, Russian, and Chinese land forces.

This book will be essential reading for military practitioners and for students of land warfare, military history, war studies and strategic studies.

Part IThe development of land warfare

DOI: 10.4324/9781003096252-2

The first part of this book investigates the development of modern land warfare. Despite the many ways in which land, sea and air warfare are connected, they have many important differences. Our first step is to examine the character of warfare on land, its theories and concepts. This is the task of Chapter 1. Having outlined the theoretical basis of land warfare, the remaining four chapters examine the debates and controversies surrounding how we think about the development of land warfare, the development of the fundamentals of modern land warfare at the tactical and operational level, and the factors that shape variable approaches to land warfare in the modern world.

1Land warfare in theory

DOI: 10.4324/9781003096252-3

Skill in the prosecution of land warfare matters. Whether one looks at the European armies of 1914–15, mired in tactical stalemate on the Western Front, or the Iraqi army in 1991 and 2003 locked in an unequal struggle against Coalition forces, problems in relative battlefield performance translate directly into high casualties, immense strategic difficulties and often decisive defeat. But why is land warfare so challenging? This first chapter provides the foundations for an answer to this question by examining the key concepts and ideas that underpin an understanding of land warfare. The recurrent theme throughout this discussion is complexity. It is a banal but fundamental observation that the key distinction between war on land and war in the other environments is land itself. Land, in terms of the physical ground upon which land warfare is fought, has innate attributes that make it distinct from the sea, air or electro-magnetic dimensions. These attributes shape the character of those forces required to fight on it. The importance of terrain, its nature and variability make difficult and often changing demands on the forces required to fight over it.

The ideas presented in this chapter provide a basis for understanding the debates presented in the remainder of this book. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part examines the uniqueness of land warfare based upon the distinctiveness of the land environment or domain (see Box 1.1) and the consequences that this has had for the nature of warfare on land. The second part of this chapter examines the unity of land warfare: here, the purpose is to identify the importance for the effective conduct of land warfare of thinking about how land warfare should be orchestrated at different levels and in relation to other instruments of power. Third, building on the previous two sections, the chapter explores some of the important concepts and principles that have developed as guides for the exercise of land warfare in the modern period. The ideas presented in this chapter are developed more directly in Chapters 3 and 4, which investigate how the themes explored here have influenced the development of a definably modern style of land warfare.

Box 1.1: Environment or domain?

This book uses the terms ‘environment’ and ‘domain’ interchangeably as a description of the (to varying degrees) distinct spheres in which military-related activity takes place. Physical distinctiveness is obviously one important foundation for the categorisation of the environments. It is worth noting, however, that in recent years, military doctrine has tended to privilege the term ‘domain’ to describe this. The US doctrine, for example, identifies six different domains: land, air, maritime, space, electro-magnetic and human. The term ‘environment’ is sometimes then used to describe something much narrower – the specific contexts in which a military operation takes place. For example, fighting in Syria in the city of Aleppo in 2017 and Coalition land operations in Iraq in 1991 both involved the land domain but were conducted in very different operational environments.

What are the characteristics of the land domain?

We focus first on examining what it is that is distinctive about land warfare. The effective prosecution of land warfare rests in part on understanding that it cannot be approached in exactly the same way as war in the other domains. The root of the differences lies in the nature of land itself. Land embodies attributes that shape the prosecution of warfare upon it. These attributes are what make land warfare different from war on sea or in the air, and they shape the nature of land forces (see Box 1.2). Some of these attributes are, in a quite literal sense, easy to see; but others are less obvious. In particular, it is important to consider the political significance of the land domain; its variability; its opacity; its mutability; and the pervasive friction that terrain imposes on the forces that have to fight on it.

Box 1.2: Land forces, land capabilities and land power

For convenience, this book uses terms such as ‘land forces’, ‘armies’ and ‘land capabilities’ interchangeably. Strictly speaking, however, they are different:

Land forces comprise ground-oriented military organisations including armies, marines, paramilitary forces and militias. So, whilst all armies are land forces, not all land forces are armies. Land forces will often include capabilities from the other environments: army aviation, for example.

Land capabilities are categories of tasks or abilities used typically to analyse the skills and equipment of particular land forces. These capabilities might include long-range fire, short-range air defence, protected mobility, communications and combined arms manoeuvre.

Land power is a much wider concept. Land power, like other forms of power, is an outcome: one has land power to the extent to which one can get what one wants from the application of one’s land forces and capabilities. For this reason, definitions of land power tend to embody ideas such as ‘influence’ and ‘control’. For example, the US Army defines land power as ‘the ability – by threat, force, or occupation – to gain, sustain, and exploit control over land, resources, and people’.¹ The British military defines land power as ‘the ability of land forces to exert decisive control and influence on actors and the course of events’.² Land power is contextual – the same forces may generate different amounts of land power depending upon the given circumstances. Non-land environments are also likely to have an important role in generating land power. For example, maritime capabilities may be required to transport and supply land forces, and air forces make a critical contribution to land power by providing capabilities including air defence, close air support, interdiction, air mobility and reconnaissance. Space and cyber capabilities will, for some armies, make a ubiquitous contribution to land power, given their importance in aiding communications, sensors, targeting and command and control.

Political importance

Land has enormous political significance. This is because people live on land and not on the sea, or in the air, or in space, or in the electro-magnetic spectrum. In war, belligerents are territorially defined, and so it is land that, of all the environments, has the highest symbolic and physical value.³ Control over land enables a belligerent to protect or threaten vital interests, including populations, economies and political centres. Control over land is also control over the important psychological, symbolic, cultural and ideational resources that land can provide, and which are bound up with notions such as a ‘Motherland’ or a ‘historical heartland’. Because of this, in the end, the highest order security interests of political actors tend to be associated inextricably with the control of territory (see Box 1.3). Even where the principal focus of a war is in another environment, the political objective of a war will still remain the exercise of power over an adversary that is territorially constituted. Even navies and air forces themselves rely on territorial bases for their continued functioning.

Box 1.3: The importance of land warfare

Since men live upon the land and not upon the sea, great issues between nations at war have always been decided – except in the rarest of cases – either by what your army can do against your enemy’s territory and national life, or else by the fear of what the fleet makes it possible for your army to do.

(Sir Julian Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, 1911)⁴

Therefore, whether it is the surrender of France to Germany in 1940, the taking of Saigon by North Vietnam in 1975, Islamic State’s loss of their capital, Raqqa, in 2017 to the Syrian Democratic Forces, or the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021, the ability to take and hold an opponent’s territory, or to threaten credibly to do so, remains a core metric of success in war.

Variability

One of the most mundane observations regarding terrain is also one of the most important militarily: it is highly variable. Land is not a consistent medium. Unlike the sea or air, land embodies great variety in geography, vegetation and population density, different combinations of which can create difficult challenges for land forces. Operations in urban areas, for example, require very different methods to those required to fight in open terrain (see Box 1.4). For example, mountains, jungles, urban areas and forests are problematic operating environments for vehicles; communication and visibility are difficult; movement is often channelled. Deserts can pose fewer problems in relation to visibility and manoeuvre, especially for tracked vehicles, but desert sand poses problems for the reliability of equipment and the stamina of personnel; navigation can also be problematic. Land’s variability is magnified by the effects of climate and weather: excessive heat, snow, rain or mud can transform the characteristics of even flat terrain, constraining manoeuvre, limiting visibility and/or depressing morale. Moreover, this diversity can be heavily concentrated: the same battlefield can exhibit widely...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface to the second edition
• Glossary
• Introduction
• Part I The development of land warfare
• Part II What is victory?
• Part III The future
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index