Understanding Modern Warfare

Introduction

The parameters of how we commonly think about modern land warfare were established by developments in the First and Second World Wars. These developments cover the shift from a mode of warfare characterised in the early part of the twentieth century by linear battle with a focus on tactics to a kind of warfare characterised towards the end of the twentieth century by a focus on mobile, combined-arms warfare at the operational level. These developments have been identified by Stephen Biddle as constituting the emergence of a definable ‘modern system of war’. This modern system comprises ‘a tightly interrelated complex of cover, concealment, dispersion, suppression, small-unit independent maneuver, and combined arms at the tactical level, and depth, reserves, and differential concentration at the operational level of war’.

By and large, the basis of the modern tactical system of warfare was established by the end of the First World War, as the belligerents struggled to develop the means to cope with the inadequacy of existing tactical concepts in the face of the effects of modern firepower. In the wake of the First World War, this system was refined by belligerents, but the same basic precepts informed tactics and operations in the Second World War and after. Operational art emerged as a response to the demonstrated challenges of converting the tactical-level successes attainable using modern tactics into broader successes at the higher levels of war. The conscious and unconscious focus on operational-level solutions informed Soviet theories on operational art and German blitzkrieg, and formed the basis of operational techniques developed during the Cold War.

The First World War and the emergence of modern tactics

The events of 1914 cruelly exposed the limitations of pre-war concepts on the conduct of land warfare.