I’ve read a bit about military strategy here and there and play games like Total War but I still don’t quite understand this idea of punching through an enemy line, perhaps because it’s often stated as an end in itself (at least in the Military Channel shows). I could see the point if you’re trying to break through to attack something like artillery but I don’t get the idea of punching through the center to attack the rear. It would seem to me like your giving the enemy the opportunity to envelope you. Anyone care to explain?
Off the top of my head:
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Your splitting the enemies forces, reducing their ability to concentrate fire, and coordinate defences.
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You have a chance to go after “softer” targets, as you have mentioned. Artillery, command and control personnel, supply dumps.
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Morale. It is a bit of a morale shaker to know that the enemy is “in your rear”, and maybe advancing to your supply dumps and hearth & home. This morale “hit” reduces effectiveness in fighting skills. Panic may set in.
Think of a football game. Once tou get past the big ugly linemen, you can fall upon the lightly defended quarterback. Likewise, once you get fast-moving troops through the eminy initial positions, the initiative is totally yours. You can attack a headquarters, destroy supplies, attack from the rear, etc. All of these things tend to make the troops you are behind quite nervous, and they will tend to break easily when attacked from an unexpected direction. If the enemy tries to pull troops from the front to attempt an envelopment, then they are vulnerable to attacks by your troops on the front.
But your right about the risk of getting yourself pinched off after punching through. The idea is to devote enough forces to successfully “pin” the enemy in place, while your exploitation forces get into the rear and do their work against the softer targets.
In WW2, Yugoslavia deployed it’s army against the Germans along the length of it’s borders. The Germans focused an attack on points of thier choosing. If I recall correctly, a relatively small force of armored cars got past the front lines, and made it into the capital, which was undefended. At the same time, some German Stuka’s arrived overhead and bombed to city. The government panicked, and surrendered the country. Total campaign length: 11 days.
Morale effect at work. The Germans did not need to kill the entire Yugoslav army. It just had to convince to Yugoslav governement that the Germans were unbeatable.
Yes, there is a possibility that the assault force might get swallowed up but it’s slim. The assault force doesn’t have a rear upon which it depends for logistics. They carry with them enough logistics to support them until follow-up forces can connect with them It’s similar to dropping paratroopers behind the enemy line.
Such attacks rely considerably on the confusion created in the whole area where the breakthrough happened. The assaulting force has a lot more knowledge of where the enemy is than do the defenders. In addition, the defenders logistics and communication are in disarray so its hard for them to coordinate a defense.
It doesn’t always work. Witness the Market Garden operation around Arnheim in Holland in WWII. The Follow-up force was unable to establish contact with the assault force, paratroops in that case.
Sometimes it’s only partially successful as in the case of the German attack in the Ardennes in late 1944. They achieved great initial success but were unable to exploit it by widening the breakthrough. This allowed the allies to bring troops down from north and south of the break, get in front of the lead German forces and bring them to a halt.
One additional factor: while a portion of your force gets behind the enemy lines and attacks from behind, the rest of your force is still attacking from the front.
Getting shot at from two directions at once is very hard to deal with.
The tactical utility of it in game such as MTW is to create a worse situation for one’s opponent by engaging other opposing forces from directions less well defended and/or disorganizing an opponent by shock.
From the much wider operational and strategic perspective (and looking at this mostly from a perspective of maneuver warfare), shock operations such as breakthroughs, encirclements, and the like are meant to ultimately create a situation in which the opponent cannot intelligently defend himself. These actions reduce the organization of the opposing force and so render it unable to effectively implement its plans. When one person has a say in an argument and the other doesn’t, we might assume the person with the say will win.
I’ve tried writing a great deal more but it’s difficult to discuss this because what we’re really talking about here is just warfare in general, and it’s a bit overwhelming. But I disagree with most of the other posts so far on “soft targets” and two directions and so on–the Wehrmacht did not rely on shock tactics to the extent it did in order to knock out artillery or maximize killing; rather it was to defeat an opposing army, which is after all an organization like any other, by reducing it to disorganization. Strategies such as these involve a continuous series of actions which shock and delay an opponent, allowing one to implement their own decisions while an opponent’s conception of the battlefield and thus orders become further and further separated from reality and their organization loses its ability to even implement said orders. Such shock operations attempt to kill organization and morale rather than soldiers.
But beware! A counter-tactic is to deliberately weaken the centre. Then your opponent breaks through, concentrates his strength, you bring up your reserves to hit him head on while the wings of your army wrap around and attack him from the rear.
There are two main results: disorganized, virtually unopposed advancement as long as you can maintain your supply lines through the breach, and encriclement. In either case it is not necessary to achieve total destruction of the opposing force to achieve your political goals.
That is pretty much what the Russians did at Stalingrad (tho the initial German
breakthrough happened several months before the Russian counterstroke).
And yes I know that the battle was much more complex than that…
Indeed, it’s been pretty well described here.
When I’ve played the fairly reliable tabletop game “Russian Front” with my dad, once I can punch through the thin layer of defenses the Soviet Union had on the front at the beginning of Op:Barbarosa, the key is not to attack units, but to break lines of supply. Nothing is quite as nice (gamewise) as using a handful of armor to punch through, and the following month see whole defensive lines get taken off the board due to “out of supply” for to long.
Once you are in the enemies rear, they cannot eat, and can’t attack. They have to try to stop you from cutting off supplies for the whole army.
In Napoleonic warfare (which was the mode of fighting up through the American Civil War) punching through the lines primarily allowed you to turn and “outflank” the enemy. Because troops were arrayed in long rectangular formations which had a very definite front (strong) and sides (weak), you could deliver relatively unopposed fire. If you could coordinate enough pressure on your flanking maneuver, you would begin to “roll up” the enemy lines with incredibly small losses. If you were very fast you might even capture their cannons. And of course, as you roll up their lines, your units which are opposing their units are no longer taking direct fire, so they can either rest, or you can commit them to the attack. It was a very effective technique because the military doctrine of the day placed infantry in rectangular formations and did not train men in squad-level semi-chaotic fighting. Only cavalry really trained for that sort of thing; they were often used to hit the flank of an enemy infantry unit that was engaged with a friendly infantry unit.
Pickett’s Charge (at Gettysburg) was a failed attempt to use the basic “punch through then roll up” tactic. The Southern armies were not numerous enough, the center had been reinforced overnight, and the North had the advantage of a low stone wall from behind which to fire.
One last nitpick regarding the title of the OP: punching through lines is a tactic that is used when your strategy is to defeat the enemy militarily on the field of combat. The computer games called “real-time strategy” games are usually pretty thin on actual strategy, and are usually focused on economics and small-unit tactics. I’m hoping that Supreme Commander will change this trend.
Can anyone recommend a good computer game that deals with supply–one that isn’t TOO overwhelming?
The WWII operational level game Hearts of Iron II is one example.
A key tactic is to encircle enemy units and cut their supply. Units that aren’t in supply lose combat effectiveness quickly. A few months with no supply and those divisions are essentially useless and can be brushed aside. But driving deep into the enemy rear to encircle is a very dangerous tactic, because your encircling units are in danger of having their supply lines cut, the salient pinched off, and your attackers destroyed.
But HoI is one of those “really complicated” games…
Here is a really simple, free one, called Dicewars. If your units are cut off for too long, you’ll be in serious trouble.
The Operational Art of War is one of the finest and I think easiest games in the genre which deals with supply and such. The third is out recently from Matrix Games.
Really? I thought this was one of the things that gave attacking generals the cold sweats. When attempting a breakthrough manouever, there is a big risk that the defences are denser or deeper than anticipated, and the attack just bogs down and goes nowhere. The other is that the breach is too narrow and the enemy shifts some of their forces sideways to pinch off the corridor of advance and leave the attacking spearhead stranded in enemy territory with no supply of reinforcements, munitions and so on. Either is a bit of a recipe for disaster.
And it can certainly be a strategy - the whole of Case Yellow was focused on creating and then breaking through a weak point in the allied lines, prior to launching a deep exploitation into the rear areas before the superior allied forces could reorganise.
Inside Soviet Military Intelligence asserts that no matter the cost in men the area advancing the most would get all the reinforcements, even at the cost of areas that were retreating.
Most highly recommend reading about the Air Force pilot who devised the strategy for Gulf War I.
Hmmm. That sounds like a typically soviet way to look good in front of the politburo while getting a shitload of your troops killed unnecessarily.