Are fires and and surveillance now dominant over maneuver on the battlefield with precision and persistence added, respectively, to the equation?
[Although the "U.S. Army continued to view maneuver forces as the decisive element on the battlefield"], with the evolution of long-range and rapid-firing artillery, rockets, missiles, and other joint fires assets, maneuver’s traditional primacy amongst Western armies may be diminishing, if not ending altogether.
When done correctly against enemies unprepared to deal with the combination, it is devastating.
I wrote about that question some years ago:
The old infantry phalanxes were rectangles of men who fought shoulder-to-shoulder in an interlocking formation that pressed into an enemy phalanx to slash at the forward edges and ultimately shove the enemy formation back until it lost cohesion and could not stand it's ground in the "push of shields."
Could we eventually see a joint force in a theater function as a giant phalanx of swarming robots with persistent surveillance and long range firepower called in to support the battle in mortal combat with an enemy theater-wide phalanx?
Lanchester's Square attrition models might rule the battles, with the winner being the last one with functioning robots surviving on the battlefield.
If so, our strategy of using quality to overcome quantity will no longer work if our enemies have qualitatively equivalent robot swarms directed with an equivalent command and control system with an equivalent surveillance network.
Will we then have wars of attrition based on robots rather than men locked in combat?
In this entry to an Army science fiction contest, I speculated about advancing on such a battlefield. When the high-speed battle of attrition finds a weak point and collapses the enemy phalanx, an advance will be possible until the enemy can rebuild the phalanx further back. And then the attacker has to shift its own phalanx forward quickly to avoid advancing into a meat grinder it can't fight.
Of course, the figurative push of shields will rely on a massive logistics effort to keep the firepower going to slowly and then decisively overwhelm the enemy phalanx pushing back. We already have problems with simpler lostistics.
On such a battlefield, how long does the stalemate of multi-domain phalanxes last? How does the winning phalanx exploit breaking the enemy phalanx? How does a retreating phalanx reset itself?
And how big do the phalanxes get? Are they brigade-sized? Divisions? Corps? Armies? Entire theaters of war? At what size is AI required? At what size does the phalanx move beyond human control once unleashed?
What is the limit of industry and logistics to support larger and larger phalanxes? Any break in the supplies of surveillance, weapons, ammunition, and men from production and logistics will cripple a phalanx. It cannot lose cohesion and survive. Does bombarding enemy production and logistics systems deep behind the lines become a war objective as it was in World War II?
And I wonder how aircraft fit in? Aircraft must sortie to fight. So they may have problems consitently contributing to the phalanx. Do aircraft represent a reserve of firepower to prevent a break in your own phalanx or to be the straw that breaks the camel's back in the enemy phalanx? Are aircraft the cavalry of the phalanx battlefield to pursue an enemy phalanx that has broken? Do they cover a retreating and reforming friendly phalanx? Or are they obsolete and get replaced my ground-based precision missiles, ammunition, and energy weapons?
But perhaps those problems get resolved. Maybe ammunition shrinks in size as precision and hyper speeds lower that logistics burden. Maybe energy weapons shift the problem from moving physical ammunition to rapidly building local energy requirements. Movable if not mobile nuclear reactors? Will space-based solar power be key? If so, can a space phalanx be controlled from Earth with the time lags?
Does that make for separate home defense phalanxes and strategic attack phalanxes separate from the combat phalanxes?
Or do the phalanxes become planetary in scale? Is this the logical end point of combined arms, AirLand Battle, joint "purple" warfare, and now multi-domain operations?
Heck, maybe cyberwar or the something else--whether an invention or a change in how militaries operate--will make building phalanxes impossible.
And how does this apply to seapower? Already cooperative engagement links ships together for defensive fire. And networking allows for the massing of firepower from separated firing assets. Will any surface ship over a certain size be a waste of resources?
But I digress.
It is certainly fascinating to think about. I really need to get back to an article I've failed to get published on this subject.
NOTE: Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
