Document created:
Air University Review, March-April
1985
INSTITUTIONALLY and individually, the study of history is once more respectable in the U.S. Armed Services. Clausewitz has been rediscovered and applied in fields from counterinsurgency to thermonuclear war. Present-mindedness is the new cardinal sin, condemned in word and print by the most senior generals and admirals. This more comprehensive approach may be an improvement over the conviction that relevance begins with the current Chief of Staff's appointment. Yet Americans need constant reminding that military history offers more landmarks than watersheds. Its lessons, real and alleged, exist as part of a continuum; their interpretations, moreover, are usually shaped by events and attitudes long antedating the material under specific study.
This truism is reflected clearly by the evolving impact of the Russo-German War of 1941-45 on Western military thought. The process began in Germany. The eastern front dominated Wehrmacht military experience in the same way that the trenches of France and Flanders conditioned generations of French and British thinking. It was in Russia where the scale of conflict challenged imaginations. It was in Russia where entire divisions vanished, leaving barely enough survivors to reconstruct the story of their passing. It was in Russia where war was waged to the knife, with quarter a random process and death in battle a rational choice over captivity. For Landser and general alike, fighting the Russians was an ultimate test of professionalism and manhood, a test whose demands were of a different order than those posed by the British or Americans.
Although Monte Cassino and the Falaise Gap were not exactly perceived as rest cures by their German participants, most comparisons of the Wehrmacht to the allies on the western front from the victors' perspective are extremely flattering to the Germans. Trevor Dupuy, Martin van Creveld, Max Hastings, and their counterparts leave their readers in little doubt as to who were the better and more skillful soldiers.1 This evaluation has been reinforced by those Wehrmacht veterans who have made hobbies, not to say second careers, of lecturing at service schools and talking into tape recorders on the theme of how Germany almost won the war. Their American and British opponents emerge as well-intentioned, civilized amateurs dependent on massive material superiority for marginal victories against second-line German troops. Both implicit and explicit in their presentations is the conclusion that the real war was waged in Russia, and that he who has riot fought the Red Army does riot know what soldiering is.
German attitudes toward military Russia are, however, by no means the simple product of a single conflict. From the days of Frederick the Great, Prussian generals made no secret of their respect for the Russian as a fighting man––a respect inspired by the bloody battles of Zorndorf and Kunersdorf and carried once again in the wars against Napoleon. The reformed Prussian army of 1813-15 learned how to fight largely by watching the Russians. The spirit of emulation that characterized Prussian military relations with the Tsar's empire in the Age of Metternich owed at least as much to memories of Russian performance in combat as to the common conservatism of the two eastern monarchies.
This pattern began to change with the emergence of nationalism and racism in the nineteenth century. Everywhere in Europe, cultural and behavioral distinctions became elevated and ossified into inborn, ineradicable characteristics. Growing political and economic rivalry between Germany and Russia sharpened descriptions of Russia as a land of chaos held together only by despotism and of Russians as a primitive people with neither pride nor conscience, destroying themselves through vodka and syphilis.2 Yet in the years prior to World War I, the Russian army was still regarded as a formidable adversary by the German GeneralStaff. Its sheer size, combined with the hardiness and endurance of theindividual soldier, appeared to compensate well for the professional shortcomings of the officers and the corresponding lack of operational and tactical flexibility.3
Between 1914 and 1917, this position was significantly modified. The crushing victories of Tannenberg, the Masurian Lakes, and Gorlice-Tarnow established an alternate characterization of the Russian army as a vulnerable force composed of soldiers too primitive to adapt to modern conditions of war without careful and extensive preparation. The fall of the Tsar and the accompanying collapse of the old army's discipline simply reinforced images of uniformed protoplasm that could neither be driven nor led effectively.
Russia's military inferiority increasingly became a political issue. The rivalry between Hindenburg/Ludendorff and Falkenhayn, between "easterners" and "westerners," for control of German strategy and policy had begun well before 1916 to escalate into dreams of an Ostimperium of client states and colonies carved from the Russian Empire. Even such a relatively sober soldier as Max Hoffmann speculated about a German Riviera on the Black Sea––the kind of attitude best nurtured in the context of an opinion that the region's current occupants could be easily subdued or dispossessed.4
Postwar collaboration between the Reichswehr and the emerging Soviet army provided ample material for more balanced interpretations. Students and officers assigned to the aviation school at Lipetsk or the tank school at Kazan were frequently impressed by the scale and sophistication of the operations, finding that the Russians had much to teach as well as learn. In 1928, future War Minister Werner von Blomberg insisted that the Red Army was anything but the unsophisticated bodyguard of an unpopular government. It had evolved, Blomberg declared, into a people's army in the truest sense of the word. The Russian soldier's discipline was sound, his training rigorous and practical, his equipment steadily improving. An he had lost none of his traditional virtues under communism.5
Such points were not entirely lost in Germany. They were, however, usually interpreted in a context presenting Germans as teachers, providing instruction in modern ways of war to their less sophisticated, less clever eastern neighbors. This sense of a civilizing mission could be traced back as far as the myths surrounding the medieval Teutonic Knights. It reflected contemporary ideological hostility––the belief, widespread everywhere in the inter-war west, that communism was essentially parasitic, dependent on capitalist cultures for techniques and ideas of progress. German attitudes toward the Soviet military were also conditioned by perceptions of Germany's own experience. Since the Napoleonic Wars, the Prussian and German armies had been based on short-service conscription. The Weimar Republic's 100,000-man professional force was regarded as an externally imposed anomaly, a temporary substitute for a national army. This attitude led to acceptance of the point that modern armies reflected inherent national characteristics, or, in more sophisticated terms, social qualities deep-seated enough to defy eradication or modification by a year or two in uniform. The British and U.S. armies were voluntary forces, committed to making effective soldiers from whatever raw materials the recruiters might offer. German military folk wisdom, on the other hand, argued that training and discipline could only refine what was there in the first place.6
In such a context it was scarcely remarkable that a Russia undergoing the strains of the post-Lenin era, whose army for a time seemed almost to approximate a militia force, appeared hopelessly out of the running as a major military power. No matter how many tanks or planes the Soviet system might produce, the men behind them would remain military primitives, lacking the shaping and directing elements to make the best of their limited qualities. At best, the Red Army was an elemental force like a flood or an earthquake––no less dangerous than these natural phenomena, but no more so.
The images may not have reflected exact reality, or even the best available information. They were, however, strong enough to underpin Hitler's decision to sever the Russian military connection after 1933. This decision generated criticism, but no significant protest, from professionals interested in coming to terms with Germany's New Order. A rapidly expanding Wehrmacht had little time or energy for institutional reflection. Both the military's will and its capacity to resist Nazi pressure were limited enough that when the regime reinforced, instead of challenged, existing perceptions in any area, common ground was likely to be gratefully accepted.7
Doubts about Soviet military efficiency were focused and legitimated by Stalin's purges. These campaigns eviscerated the professionally and technically trained cadres on which conventional German wisdom insisted the Russian soldier depended for whatever efficiency he possessed. And Soviet operational performances in the 1930s did little to counter Wehrmacht prejudices. Neither the doctrines nor the equipment demonstrated in Spain inspired more than limited respect. The Red Army's victory against the Japanese at Nomonhan in 1939 made no significant impression on a Germany preoccupied with its own successes against Poland. The fighting in Finland seemed only to confirm existing negative evaluations. Suggestions that Soviet effectiveness had been significantly affected by the theater of operations tended to be discounted as special pleading.8
Historically, the German army was reluctant to take cues from its neighbors. Contempt for Austrian performance in World War I carried over into negative evaluations of Mussolini's expeditionary force in Spain. The common response to Italian failures was not "It can't be done," but "These people can't do it." The victories of May and June 1940 did even more to turn German confidence into arrogance. For over a century, the French army had been regarded as Germany's most dangerous foe. Now it lay broken and humbled after only six weeks. Objectives fought over for months at the cost of tens of thousands of lives in World War I had fallen into German hands like beads pulled from a string. If Britain still lay unconquered across the channel, that was not the army's problem. Had the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine been able to perform their missions satisfactorily, no one from the chief of staff downward doubted that the army would have made quick work of the improvised British defenses.9
In this context, it is easier to understand the apparent lack of concern with which the German army prepared for Operation Barbarossa. It went to war with a mixture of weapons and vehicles from all over Europe; with its core, the Panzer divisions, still adjusting to a major reorganization; with a logistic system reminiscent of the Thirty Years War. This apparent lack of preparation was not simple irresponsibility. The Wehrmacht was convinced that in the blitzkrieg it had developed a means of not merely neutralizing but excluding the Red Army's strengths. The Wehrmacht proposed to fight a war in a different dimension, one in which the Soviets literally could not compete like a chess player forced into a game of blackjack. The shortcomings of this concept became plain within six weeks of the invasion.10
Well before Stalingrad, Germany's commanders in the east began altering and limiting their perceptions. Hitler's increasing assumption of command functions was a welcome escape hatch to men recognizing the collapse of Nazi grand strategy and reasonably aware of the probable consequences of that collapse. His marshals responded like short-money players in a table-stakes poker game, concentrating on winning battlefield victories to demonstrate their virtu and avert the end as long as possible. The Wehrmacht played its foe as a matador plays a bull, with energy and cunning countering bulk andferocity. For two and a half years, the Models, the Tippelskirchs, and the Balcks wrote an epic of brilliant planning and gallant fighting. The only problem was the outcome. The Russians wound up in Berlin.
Almost immediately, the Soviet Union began integrating its zone of occupation into its security system. Disarmament was never anything but a shibboleth. What was important to both the Soviet Union and the leaders of the emerging German Democratic Republic (GDR) was building an armed force that would be a reliable safeguard of the new domestic order. The National People's Army (NVA) has followed a straight-line pattern of development into an efficient force whose relatively small size enhances its role in the Warsaw Pact. Its relationship to its Soviet counterpart is deferential to the point of subservience. Organization and equipment differ only in detail from Russian patterns. The armies cooperate closely in matters of training, unit routine, and even group recreation. Joint maneuvers, displays, and parades are common. GDR military publications lose no opportunity to stress the Russo-German heritage of brotherhood in arms from the era of Peter the Great through the Wars of Liberation to the Bolshevik Revolution, the International Brigades, and the antifascist resistance of World War II.11
The dubious reward of this endeavor has been the acquisition of first-line operational responsibilities by the NVA––the only remaining Warsaw Pact force with that distinction. NVA formations, cooperating with and controlled by the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, are likely to be in the forefront of any attack against NATO. This assignment is a tribute both to the NVA's efficiency and to the level of its identification with Soviet techniques. It is a statement of confidence in the German Democratic Republic's loyalty to her Moscow connection.12 It also contributes to NATO's defense problems. The question of whether Germans would fire on Germans coming from the wrong side of an artificial frontier continues to generate anxiety in the Bundeswehr.
Given this context, it is difficult to believe that Soviet policymakers would grieve at the NVA's decimation in any conventional war. A Germany united under Soviet auspices would be easier to control if it lacked effective armed forces. The NVA's hostage status makes it correspondingly difficult to speak of an independent attitude toward either past history or current doctrine. There is some evidence that the NVA uses "socialist competition" as a means of proving that Germans can do anything Russians can––and more quickly and efficiently. However, such limited competitiveness hardly suggests the survival, much less the flourishing, of a distinctively German military tradition in the GDR.
WHILE the Soviet Union appears confident in its own methods, its Western counterparts have been increasingly willing to consider Germans as mentors in preparing for certain kinds of conventional war. This relationship has owed much at every stage of its evolution to the lack of acceptable alternatives. From its inception, massive retaliation was a hollow doctrine.13 Apart from physical and moral implications, army generals were not likely to accept constabulary and follow-up roles while the navies and the air forces did the real work. Nor were they likely to accept the status of guarantors and guardians of Western interests in the then-perceived minor leagues of Africa, Asia, or Latin America. At the same time, the Soviet army was for all practical purposes an unknown quantity. Despite obvious drawbacks, German experience on the eastern front offered some possible insights into the best way of fighting the Russians at least to a draw on the ground.
Extracting and analyzing this experience in the immediate postwar years, however, posed significant problems. The emerging Bundeswehr was in no position to evaluate and institutionalize the experiences of World War II from a detached perspective. It faced a broad spectrum of ambiguities, ambivalences, and double binds. The Federal Republic that it served was initially a second-best solution to many of its citizens. West Germany's self-definition as expressed in its Basic Law was negative: against National Socialism on one hand and against communism on the other, with democracy presented as necessary to sustain the negatives.14 The issue of rearmament was almost as hotly debated internally as among Germany's erstwhile rivals. Social Democrats feared its effect on reunification. Churches rediscovered their pacifist heritages. An emerging generation of prospective conscripts suggested "without me"––some from conviction, others from cynicism. The political and social changes of the Nazi era and World War II had diminished the military's traditional bases of support. The developing economic miracle attracted and distracted many who saw dreams and opportunities in the private sector. What remained available was a mix of technicians and warriors, anti-Communists and German patriots, vocal "good Europeans" such as Hans Speidel and Adolf Heusinger, and an increasing number of democrats who believed that the concept of citizens in uniform could be a reality.15
It is scarcely surprising that the Bundeswehr has been more closely and systematically scrutinized than any army in modern history for signs of regression to its alleged past. Its domestic critics demand commitments to democracy and internationalism, sometimes to the point of apparent indifference to questions of operational efficiency. Its allies react sharply to the vaguest hints of jackboots or the goose step. And mistrust is not confined to the Western side: since the beginning of West German rearmament, professional, official, and popular literature everywhere in the Warsaw Pact stresses the Bundeswehr as a hotbed and a seedbed of reactionary Junker militarism, an instrument of policies aimed at revising the results of World War II and reestablishing an imperialist German hegemony over central Europe.16
West German authorities have striven mightily to modify such suspicion and its impact. Yet both phenomena endure because geographic, economic, and political factors combined to shape the Bundeswehr, more than any other major armed force, to fight a specific enemy in a specific theater at a specific level of intensity. It is difficult to conceive of German troops being employed beyond their own frontiers in U. N. peacekeeping roles. At the other end of the spectrum, West Germany has no independent nuclear capability. To a significant degree, this is a self-denying ordinance. From the 1950s, any suggestion of giving the Federal Republic its own warheads has generated substantial domestic opposition front all points on the political spectrum. Nor has opposition been confined to civilians. From its inception, the Bundeswehr has been significantly critical of the nuclear option. West German politicians in the late 1960s were reluctant to accept the concept of flexible response lest it erode the credibility of the U.S. nuclear deterrent. This faith in mutual assured destruction as a guarantor of peace is not widely shared by the soldiers. General F. M. von Senger und Etterlin's recent offhand remark that the politicians simply must somehow get rid of the bomb is echoed by the Bundeswehr general who declared that he had participated in five major war games involving nuclear weapons and each time had seen his homeland destroyed.17
Paradoxically, the existence of these weapons also provided an answer to the modern German military's most fundamental planning weakness: an inability or an unwillingness to ask what happens next. From the turn-of-the-century days of Schlieffen, German strategic thinking tended toward the operational level rather than toward grand strategy. It developed plans to win campaigns rather than wars. This shortcoming played a significant role in World War II. Efforts to overcome the problem in the Bundeswehr have been hobbled by the Federal Republic's deliberately low profile in international affairs and by the absence of a separate high command with grand strategic responsibilities. Ultimately, however, it is the nuclear issue which has legitimated West German generals' concentration on the subject most comfortable for them: middle-level preparation for a conventional war––specifically, a conventional war against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact clients.
The dominant initial images of such a conflict were provided by men whose major experience had been in the glory days of 1941-42, days of slashing offensives against an opponent able to counter only with unsophisticated mass. To the Mansteins and the Guderians, the keys to victory were what they had always been against Slavic enemies: initiative and flexibility enhanced by the technical superiority made possible by Western societies and economies. On the defensive, the only accepted and the only possible NATO orientation, this approach involved trading space for time; building strong, mobile reserve forces; and putting these forces under men possessing the nerve to let an enemy push forward to the exact limits of his strength and only then slashing into his flanks to threaten his supply lines and communications networks.18
During World War II, German failure to employ these techniques properly in the east was generally ascribed to Hitler's increasing obsession with holding ground. Yet Hitler's concept was the more relevant one for NATO planners. The Wehrmacht's ideal vision was adapted to war waged on an opponent's territory. Trading space for time is a plausible concept only when the space does not matter. The geography of NATO––with no ground to share––made exchanges of the kind advocated by Manstein in 1943 unthinkable, especially given the increasing destructive capacity of conventional weapons.
Morale also demanded consideration. Given the determination of the Federal Republic and its alliance partners to make the new West German army a citizen force with deep roots in the population, could Bundeswehr soldiers reasonably be expected to behave like the hardened Landsknechts of the eastern front, particularly in the first days of a war? Could they be relied on to fight while their own homes disappeared behind the front lines, with the implication that liberation meant destruction even without the use of atomic weapons?
The beginnings of an answer emerged as an increasing number of German historical studies of the eastern front moved away from Operation Barbarossa and the drive for Stalingrad to concentrate on the "hammer and anvil" defensive battles of 1943-45. This development arguably had less to do with contemporary defense concerns than with the desire to break new research ground, combined with historians' growing ability to reconstruct events from the relatively chaotic records of defeat. But it blended with and underwrote the personal experience of the Bundeswehr officers who had led platoons, companies, or battalions in Russia during that period.
When considered from a German perspective, the tactical and operational evidence of the war's final years strongly suggested that conventional Western forces, properly trained, equipped, and commanded, had the capacity to check any conventional Warsaw Pact offensive in central Europe before the offensive achieved more than limited and temporary breakthroughs. Under best-case circumstances, this capacity itself became part of a successful deterrent. And if deterrence failed, the Warsaw Pact could be stopped on the ground at subnuclear levels, giving political leaders on both sides a breathing space for reflection before escalation.19
From its inception, the Bundeswehr has been shaped along the lines of the force Hitler's generals would like to have commanded in Russia. The consistent implication underlying its structure has been that it must be able to do quickly on the defensive what the numerically and materially inadequate Wehrmacht had required more time and space to do. On the eastern front it was often necessary to let the Russians exhaust and disorganize themselves before turning to strike. Now, at least at the corps and divisional levels, the Bundeswehr sees itself in a position to blunt and cut off Warsaw Pact spearheads immediately.
Specifically, the Bundeswehr stresses C3I emphatically in theory and almost as strongly in practice. Its teeth-to-tail ratio, while not up to Warsaw Pact standards, remains impressive in terms of its own alliance. Its Luftwaffe may be organizationally separate but has been allowed to entertain no nonsense about an independent mission. Interdiction, reconnaissance, and close ground support set the parameters of aircraft procurement, organization, and training. The Bundeswehr is heavily mechanized, with tanks and infantry closely integrated and trained for that mutual cooperation which was so vital in Russia. It is NATO's major advocate of the armored personnel carrier as a combat vehicle, as opposed to British and U.S. concepts of a battle taxi. Its main battle tank, the Leopard, combines speed, range, and reasonable gun power as opposed to heavy armor and an extremely long-ranged gun. Thus, to some extent, it is the spiritual descendant of Barbarossa's Mark IIIs and IVs, rather than of the Panthers and Tigers of the long retreat. At the same time, professionalism is considered more important at all levels than enthusiasm: the attitudes of 1944 are favored over those of 1941.20
The concept is coherent and convincing. However, its institutionalization owed at least as much to default as to positive analysis. Particularly during the Federal Republic's early years, intensive discussion of defense issues risked strengthening accusations of militarism. Tradition has been heavily discounted. The exact permissible degree of connection with Germany's military past remains a significant subject of debate. Many generally accepted means of inculcating morale and instilling discipline––means still used in other armies––are expressly forbidden in the Bundeswehr. A major alternative approach to developing enthusiasm in conscript forces involves presenting a tangible enemy as a target for the frustrations and hostilities engendered by compulsory military service. West Germany and the United States perform this function for the Warsaw Pact. Soviet Russia is the logical, indeed the only, candidate for the role in West Germany. Political considerations have denied the Bundeswehr this possibility, replacing it instead by the concept of Innere Führung and an accompanying set of hopes.21
In a context thus designed to give as little offense to as few people as possible, it is hardly remarkable that Bundeswehr planners tended to fall back on practical experience synthesized on an ad hoc basis. Yet beginning in the 1960s, a rising generation of soldiers and defense analysts argued that the Federal Republic was preparing itself, and encouraging its allies, to fight the last war in the wrong theater.
On one level, the Bundeswehr stood accused of neglecting its own stated role as a people's army. Increasingly complex weapon systems were combining with a sense of shrinking lead time to foster the belief that only fully trained men actually in service could be counted on in the next war. This significant departure from German military tradition was encouraged by comparisons with the professional armies stationed in the Federal Republic and by the contempt many Bundeswehr officers felt for the U.S. draftees of the Vietnam era. Youth unrest and the spread of individualistic, hedonistic attitudes in the West German population at large seemed powerful arguments against depending heavily for national security on citizens hastily recalled to uniform. And the steep decline in birth rates since the 1960s suggested that fewer of these citizens would be available in any case.
This approach was more than embryonic elitism. It assumed significant human and technical superiority, quality as opposed to numbers. Such superiority, however, also reflects the weaknesses of one's adversary––weaknesses whose correction usually lies outside the control of one's own systems. The Bundeswehr could do nothing to retard the Soviet Union's introduction of improved training methods, communications systems, and fighting vehicles. It could prevent neither the Soviet army's study of the lessons of World War II nor the institutionalization of those lessons in doctrine and tables of organization. The relevance of the Wehrmacht's experience in the east depended heavily, in other words, on conviction that the military weaknesses of the Russian character and the Soviet system were sufficiently established and sufficiently inflexible that Ivan would remain Ivan no matter whether he carried a lance or an AK-47, no matter whether he rode a Cossack pony or a BMP.
This position, critics asserted, did not fit the facts. The Soviet army had improved exponentially since 1945. No longer the heavy, blunt instrument that had hammered down the Wehrmacht, it had become a sophisticated, modern fighting force. Nor could alleged superiority in intangible areas such as leadership and initiative be relied on as a decisive equalizer. If NATO's armies were to go into combat, they would do so after a long period of routine service in barracks and on increasingly restricted maneuver grounds. Given the best will in the world, neither the troops nor their commanders could expect to match immediately the combat skills of the Wehrmacht's veterans, to replicate performances which that force had achieved only after years of experience.
Rather than moving farther in the direction of a professionalized, mechanized Bundeswehr, critics suggested an alternate approach. This proposal essentially emphasized a forward defense of the Federal Republic by infantry formations with strong local elements, depending heavily on light vehicles for transportation and antitank missiles for firepower. Such a restructuring had its own roots in German military history, harking back to the Landwehr and Landsturm of the Wars of Liberation and the militia concepts of Karl von Rotteck's liberals and August Bebel's Social Democrats in the nineteenth century. At the same time, it encouraged looking ahead, taking advantage of new developments in weapons technology that might very likely render traditional armored vehicles obsolete.
This approach also took account, in a way existing Bundeswehr doctrine did not, of the fact that Bavaria was not the Ukraine. The map of the Federal Republic had changed significantly since 1945. Urban sprawl had combined with the increasingly complex geography of the remaining rural areas to make West Germany increasingly suited to defense in place––not a static Maginot Line, but an elastic structure that offered excellent possibility for stopping an attack without massive damage to the battleground.
Finally, restructuring the Bundeswehr along the lines suggested would remove even the state's theoretical capacity to do anything but defend itself, thereby removing once and for all any objective legitimacy that criticism of West German policies and intentions retained. Thus, in an era of détente and Ostpolitik, the concept seemed well suited to solve a spectrum of military, social, and diplomatic problems simultaneously.22
Dichotomies between the two approaches must not be exaggerated. The contest was not between advocates of an updated Volkssturm and supporters of total mechanization. Like most modern military bureaucracies, the Bundeswehr was unwilling to commit itself wholeheartedly to one alternative. Deterrence, moreover, is generally seen in terms of direct balances between force structures and weapon systems. Thus, as long as the tank was important in Warsaw Pact orders of battle, it continued to play a significant role in most proposed Bundeswehr reorganizations. At the same time, the army experimented with light formations and made increasingly sophisticated use of its reservists as individuals and in separate units.
Then the West Germans received a shock from an unexpected quarter. The United States began returning to Europe.
For over a decade, American professional military interest had been focused on counterinsurgency and conventional operations in Asia. While defense priorities officially remained unaltered, the Seventh Army became an empty husk, its human and material inventories depleted on a temporary basis that for awhile seemed likely to become permanent. The rapid U.S. recommitment to Europe in the early 1970s owed as much to psychological as to geopolitical considerations. Desire to erase the shame of defeat by a burst of productive activity was reinforced by the aim of proving that U.S. Armed Forces, particularly the army, could in fact do something right.
The detachment from the European scene occasioned by the Vietnam War proved fruitful in two ways: it helped orient army thinkers away from nuclear abstractions, and it encouraged refocusing on human, as opposed to material, aspects of warfare. As the army appraised its failures and shortcomings, an increasing chorus of internal and external criticism arose against personnel management as a substitute for fighting spirit and against computerized firepower as a substitute for tactical skill. Honor, loyalty, and group identification reappeared as military virtues. Almost as much to the point, curtailed defense budgets combined with the mushrooming human costs of a volunteer military to disabuse any dreams of establishing conventional parity with, let alone superiority to, the Warsaw Pact in any significant material category in any conceivable future.
The U.S. Army's FM 100-5, Operations, first issued in 1976, adjusted to these new realities by its focus on defensive battle and the need to fight outnumbered and win in Europe. This emphasis marked a significant psychological and emotional departure from U.S. experience. But from the beginning, critics suggested that the new manual encouraged static thinking, the pinning of NATO forces in place to be hammered by a stronger enemy. Its approach to accepting battle well forward in the Federal Republic paid too little attention to maintaining reserves, sustaining mobility, and ensuring flexibility. Talk of NATO's superior C3I and of new generations of helicopters and armored vehicles too often seemed to forget the Soviets and their probable countermeasures. And underlying these specific criticisms was an uneasy doubt whether a U.S. military conditioned to abundance could adjust to the new austerities.23
Anxieties are often best alleviated by consulting experts. The U.S. Army had at hand a significant number of prospective advisors with extensive experience in the problem of fighting Russians on a shoestring. The fact that these advisors' experience had ultimately been a losing one seemed less important to an army humbled by its own recent history. Taking military cues from ex-Nazis did offer certain public relations risks. However, World War II had been over for thirty years. National Socialism showed no serious signs of reviving. Eisenhower's refusal to receive his defeated opponent at the end of the Tunisian campaign seemed an increasingly quaint gesture in a world that could no longer afford crusades of any kind for the noblest of motives. Increasingly, Schörner's and Model's campaigns and the battles of von Senger und Etterlin and Hermann Balck were refought in war games and at cocktail parties from Carlisle to Leavenworth. The results were often impressive. Thus in May 1980, the Director of Net Assessment, Office of the Secretary of Defense, sponsored a war game in which Balck and his one-time chief of staff F. W. von Mellenthin defended a division sector of a U.S. corps against a Warsaw Pact attack. The old Wehrmacht hands made it look easy as they crippled two enemy tank divisions and then successfully counterattacked toward the German border against seemingly overwhelming odds.24
While no one was confusing a map room with a battlefield, Balck, Mellenthin, and their counterparts did much to establish a concrete case for initiative, flexibility, and mobility as vital elements of a successful forward defense of the NATO central front. Their points were reinforced by the publication of memoirs and biographies of several of the eastern front's most successful operational commanders, until now relatively unknown outside of Germany, whose careers seemed to prove the overriding importance of spirit and confidence in fighting the Russians.25
The shift away from material factors in evaluating NATO's military potential was enhanced by the Warsaw Pact's increasing orientation toward mechanized maneuver and toward tactics and organizations apparently designed not to overwhelm a continuous front but to rupture weak points and keep on going. Desant and "Operational Maneuver Group" became new buzzwords in Western circles. Historians began paying attention to Soviet operations that had been carried out during the last months of World War II, finding in them unexpected levels of flexibility and sophistication.26
The results of such evaluations were disconcerting, particularly as the 1980s generated renewed emphasis on nonnuclear deterrence. The combination of superpower nuclear parity and Warsaw Pact conventional superiority lent general credibility to a point which the Bundeswehr had been arguing for decades: NATO needed to establish convincingly the point that an attack on Western Europe at any level would fail––and fail so completely that the only alternative would be negotiation or Armageddon.27 In this context, FM 100-5 in its original version increasingly appeared as too committed to a firepower/attrition model on one hand and to penny-packet maneuvering on the other. Effective forward defense was considered to require the addition of an important adjective: flexible. Emphasis on maneuverability was rendered even more necessary by the Federal Republic's growing commitment to improved relations with the German Democratic Republic and by the related growth of nationalism and neutralism in Germany. These facts nurtured a corresponding reluctance to establish any kind of permanent or visible obstacle system. Passive nuclear barriers, comprehensive mining of the border region, or even more conventional methods of fortification remain theoretical abstractions as long as West Germany refuses to make major physical concessions to the notion of permanent partition.28
Challenge generated response. And the response has been to turn to the lessons of history as opposed to the suggestions of theory. Far from incorporating radical reconceptualizations, the West German Model IV army structure and the U.S. Division 86 represent new triumphs of the Wehrmacht legacy in their level of mechanization, their adoption of smaller tactical units, and their decentralization of command responsibilities. Doctrinally, the revised version of FM 100-5 and the current HDv 100/ 100 are similarly closely related. The Bundeswehr's emphasis on local counterattacks, leading to the separation of an enemy's spearheads from their follow-up elements by carefully timed operations against his flanks and rear, blends with the U.S. concept of the AirLand Battle as an initial dogfight leading to deep penetration of Warsaw Pact rear areas. Both owe much to concepts of the fluid battle developed on the eastern front from 1943 to 1945.29
Less tangible aspects of the German experience are also increasingly evident. The Bundeswehr never sacrificed the morale benefits of unit integration provided by territorial recruiting, whose equivalent the U.S. Army now hopes to foster by its revised regimental system. Both forces stress initiative and personal leadership, particularly at junior levels. A self-conscious Bundeswehr and a zero-defects-oriented U.S. military are even willing, at least in principle, to consider allowing their captains and lieutenants to make and learn from mistakes in peacetime training. Vietnam-era images of three or four senior officers, each with his own radio frequency and his private helicopter, stacked above a platoon-scale fire fight are giving way to awareness that in a conventional war on the NATO central front, colonels and generals will have other things to do as they did in Russia.
Ultimately, organizations and attitudes in both the U.S. Army and the Bundeswehr are increasingly designed to institutionalize the axiom that the purpose of combat is to impose one's will on an adversary. This new vitalism does not imply complete regression to pre- 1914 modes of military thought, with their relative indifference to rational calculation and material factors. It does involve the belief, explicit or implied, that nonquantifiable factors––command style, fighting spirit, initiative, and self confidence––can counterbalance not only numbers but technology when Western troops are pitted against Slavs in general, Russians in particular. And this conviction is a direct manifestation of the German military heritage.30
Doctrines reflect political as well as military circumstances. The Wehrmacht may have done no more than buy time after 1943, but time is all that NATO asks of its conventional forces. The German legacy, moreover, makes a significant appeal to budget politics. In states increasingly uncomfortable with demanding service of any kind from their citizens and increasingly willing to accept a position of numerical and material military inferiority rather than pay the costs of parity, it offers the hope of a free military lunch. Instead of building tanks, build morale. Instead of improving strength ratios, improve quality. Against the driven hordes of the Warsaw Pact, pit the motivated individualists of NATO. And all of this can be achieved without cutting civilian entitlements. It only requires new–or restored––emphasis on the warrior's virtues on the part of men paid and expected to incorporate these virtues.
Even optimists might reasonably question whether these kinds of intangible combat multipliers, with their emphasis on risk-taking and sacrifice, can be generated or sustained to any degree in societies increasingly stressing risk avoidance and comfort as desirable norms.31 Necessarily, then, the credibility of this approach reflects and depends heavily on the revival of certain attitudes about the Russian people. The ideological visions of the cold war and the mirror images of détente are alike giving way to a stress on the continuities of Russian history and a corresponding emphasis on Russian national character. Journalists illustrate comprehensive patterns of Soviet civic decay, disillusion, and cynicism. Scholars present a Soviet political system that is a village commune written large. Military analysts describe a uniformed Potemkin village, its officer corps riddled with careerism and protection, its brutalized conscripts seeking temporary oblivion in radiator alcohol.32
These images imply, not so subtly, that the Russian army, and by extension its allies, can be checked without making extraordinary demands on the bodies of Western youth or the psyches of Western generals. They blend conveniently with the portrait, developed and nurtured for over a century in Germany, of the Russian soldier as a military primitive, unable to use his equipment as well as it deserves and unable to apply his doctrines effectively no matter how good they look on paper. This complex of attitudes has significant roots in Russo-German military interaction. But it is also the product of antagonisms and prejudices having little to do with abstract analysis. It incorporates hopes and expectations as well as logic.
There is much to learn, generally and specifically, from German interpretations of World War II. These interpretations, however, do not exist in a vacuum. The German military legacy incorporates no unique genius for war, nor does it present a book of recipes on how to fight the Russians and win. Instead, it offers a seductive blend of cultural arrogance and military vitalism that cost the Germans dearly in two world wars. The legacy also encourages minimizing a familiar point. Presented in the elegant mathematics of the Lanchester Square Law, it asserts that the combat relationship of opposing forces is governed by the expected rate of exchange between them. This rate, in turn, is determined not by respective raw numerical strengths, but by the square of those strengths; the effect of the larger available force is correspondingly multiplied. An experienced brawler will express the concept more simply: a good big man usually beats a better little man.33
The scholar and the soldier tend toward opposite intellectual poles. One deals in caveats: the other in "can do." One seeks the fourth side of any three-sided question; the other stresses the need for closure. But while historians may rejoice at the prospect of their discipline replacing business administration as the preferred subject of study for YUMMPIES (Young Upwardly Mobile Military Professionals), it would be correspondingly unfortunate to see careerists merely accept a new set of clichés. The Russo-German military relationship is a gift horse whose mouth requires careful examination.
Colorado College
Notes
1. Cf. Trevor N. Dupuy, Numbers, Prediction and War (New York, 1979); Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939-1945 (Westport, Connecticut, 1983); and Max Hastings, Overlord: D-Day, June 6, 1944 (New York, 1984).
2. The thesis of Viktor Hehn, De moribus Ruthenorum. Zur Charakteristik der russischen Volksseele, edited by T. Schiemann, reprint of 1892 edition (Osnabrück, 1966). This compendium of anti-Russian insults compiled by a Baltic German is typical of a large body of similar material.
3. See the discussion in Dennis E. Showalter, "The Eastern Front and German Military Planning, 1871-1914: Some Observations," East European Quarterly, vol. XV, 1981, pp. 163-80.
4. For the evolution of German war aims in the east, cf. Fritz Fischer, "Deutsche Kriegsziele. Revolutionierung und Separatifrieden im Osten 1914-1918," Historische Zeitschrift, no. 188, 1959, pp. 249-310; and Holger H. Herwig, "Tunes of Glory at the Twilight Stage: The Bad Homburg Crown Council and the Evolution of German Statecraft, 1917/1918," German Studies Review, Vol. VI, 1983, pp. 475-94.
5. Blomberg's report of 17 November 1928, is printed in F. L. Carsten, "Reports by Two German Officers on the Red Army," The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. XLI, 1961, pp. 218-41.
6. For background, cf. Bruno Thoss, "Menschenführung im Ersten Weltkrieg und im Reichswehr," Menschenführung im Heer, edited by Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Herford, 1982); and Manfred Messerschmitt, "The Wehrmacht and the Volksgemeinschaft," Journal of Contemporary History, vol. XIII, 1983, pp. 719-44.
7. George H. Stein, "Russo-German Military Collaboration: The Last Phase, 1933," Political Science Quarterly, vol. LXXVII, 1962, pp. 54-71.
8. Cf. Andreas Hillgruber, "Das Russland-Bild der führenden deutschen Militärs vor Beginn des Angriffs auf die Sowjetunion," in Russland-Deutschland-Amerika . . . Festschrift für Fritz Epstein zum 80. Geburtstag, edited by A. Fischer et al. (Weisbaden, 1978), pp. 296-310; and Ernst Klink, "Die Rote Armee im Urteil des Oberkommandos des Heeres seit September 1939," in Horst Boog et al., Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion, vol. IV of Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg (Stuttgart, 1983), pp. 191-202.
9. The latter point is well established in Karl Klee, Das Unternehmen "Seelöwe," Die geplante deutsche Landung in England 1940 (Göttingen, 1958).
10. The best recent analysis of Wehrmacht preparations for Barbarossa is Ernst Klink and Horst Boog, "Die militärische Konzeption des Krieges gegen die Sowjetunion," in Der Angriff aug die Sowjetunion, pp. 190-326. The improvisational, ad hoc nature of the blitzkrieg in general has been heavily stressed, and arguably exaggerated, in some recent works, such as Wilhelm Deist, The Wehrmacht and German Rearmament (Toronto, 1981); and Matthew Cooper, The German Army 1933-1945; Its Political and Military Failure (London, 1978).
11. Among examples chosen almost at random from issues of the leading GDR journal of military history, Militärgeschichte, cf. Paul Heider, "Internationalistiche Militärpolitik der KPD zur Verteidigung der Sowjetunion gegen imperialistiche Aggressionen," vol. XXI, 1982, pp. 541-46; Klaus-Ulrich Keubke and Toni Nelles "Unter dem Kampfbanner von Karl Marx––Die NVA in sozialistischen Waffenbündnis," vol. XXII, 1983, pp. 604-13.
12. A useful overview is T. M. Forster, The East German Army: The Second Power in the Warsaw Pact, translated by D. Viney, introduction by General Sir Harry Tuzo (London, 1980). For an examination of operational factors, see William C. Martel, "East Germany," in Fighting Armies: NATO and the Warsaw Pact, A Combat Assessment, edited by R. A. Gabriel (Westport, Connecticut, 1983), pp. 204-28.
13. Cf. Harry Borowski, A Hollow Threat: Strategic Air Power and Containment before Korea (Westport, Connecticut, 1982).
14. Alfred Grosser, Germany in Our Time, translated by Paul Stephenson (New York, 1971), pp. 80-81.
15. The most comprehensive treatment of the genesis of the Bundeswehr is Roland G. Foerster et al., Anfänge westdeutscher Sicherheitspolitik 1945-1956, vol. I, Von der Kapitulation bis zum Pleven-Plan (Munich, 1982). Cf. also Klaus von Schubert, Weiderbewaffnung and Westintegration. Die innere Auseinandersetzungen um die militärische und Aussenpolitische Orientierung der Bundesrepublik 1950-1952 (Stuttgart, 1970); and Hans Speidel, Aus unserer Zeit. Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1977).
16. For a recent overview of developments in this area in a journal that can never be remotely accused of Red-baiting, see "'Pangermanisches Fieber'––bis in die DDR," Der Spiegel, 13 August 1984, pp. 19-27.
17. Interview in London Evening Standard, 28 March 1983; private communication. On the Federal Republic's nuclear policy generally, see R. F. Driscoll, "West German Nuclear Politics: A Study of International Cooperative Behavior" (Ph.D. dissertation, American University, 1983); older but still sound is Catherine M. Kelleher, Germany and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons (New York, 1975).
18. This interpretation began with B. H. Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk (New York, 1948) and was a continued in such works as Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories, reprint edition, translated and edited by A. G. Powell, foreword by B. H. Liddell Hart, introduction by Martin Blumenson (Novato, California, 1982), pp. 371 passim; and Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, foreword by B. H. Liddell Hart, translated by C. Fitzgibbon (New York, 1952), pp. 296-97, 314 ff. Typical of more specialized works with a similar approach are Hermann Hoth, Panzeroperationen (Heidelberg, 1956); and Walther Chales de Beauliu, Der Vorstoss der panzergruppe 4 auf Leningrad (Neckargemünd, 1961).
19. See F. M. von Senger und Etterlin, Der Gegenschlag; Kampfbeispiele und Fuhrüngsgrundsätze der beweglichen Abwehr (Neckargemünd, 1959); Hans Kessel, Die Panzerschlachten in der Puszta (Neckargemünd, 1967). More familiar to U.S. readers is F. W. von Mellenthin, Panzer Battles (Norman, Oklahoma, 1956). Cf. also Helmut Schmidt, Verteidigung oder Vergeltung, Ein deutscher Beitrag zum strategischen Problem der NATO, fourth edition (Tübingen, 1965).
20. A good recent overview of the Bundeswehr's capacities and doctrines is William C. Remagel, "West Germany," in Fighting Armies: NATO and the Warsaw Pact, pp. 104-28. An East German perspective is given in Wolfgang Roschlau, "Grundzüge der strukturellen Entwicklung der BRD-Landstreitkräfte in den letzten 30 Jahren," Militärgeschichte, vol. XXII, 1983, pp. 397-412.
21. Georg Meyer, "Menschenführung im Heer der Bundeswehr, 1955-1969," Menschenführung im Heer, pp. 204-51. Additional useful sources on this topic are K. M. Kodalle, Tradition als Last? Legitimationsprobleme der Bundeswehr (Köln, 1981); and Peter Wullich Die Konzeption der "Inneren Führung" der Bundeswehr als Grundlage einer allgemeinen Wehrpädagogik (Regensburg, 1981).
22. These interlocking debates, each of which generated its own voluminous bibliography, can be followed summarily in the FRG's annual white papers on security and military development. Early works include F. O. Miksche, Die Zukunft der Bundeswehr, Gedanken über den Umbau der Westdeutschen Verteidigung (Stuttgart, 1967); and Horst Ahlfeldt, Verteidigung und Frieden: Politik mit militärischen Mitteln (Munich, 1976). Major recent contributions are F. Uhle-Wettler, Gefechtsfeld Mitteleuropa––Gefahr der übertechnisterung von Streitkräften (Munich, 1980); and Weder Rot noch Tot––uberleben ohne Atomkrieg-Eine Sicherheitspolitische Alternative, edited by J. Löser (Munich, 1981).
23. The background of the new manual is discussed in Robert A. Doughty, "The Evolution of U.S. Tactical Doctrine, 1946-76," Leavenworth Papers, no. 1 (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, 1979). Modification of this manual is described in John L. Romjue, From Active Defense to AirLand Battle: The Development of Army Doctrine 1973-1982 (Fort Monroe, Virginia, 1984).
24. BDM Corporation, Generals Balck and von Mellenthin on Tactics: Implications for NATO Military Doctrine (McLean, Virginia, 1980).
25. Cf. inter alia F. W. von Mellenthin and R. H. S. Stolfi with E. Sobik, NATO under Attack: Why the Western Alliance Can Fight Outnumbered and Win in Central Europe without Nuclear Weapons (Durham, North Carolina, 1984); Michael A. Phipps, "A Forgotten War," Infantry, November-December 1984, pp. 38-40; and Richard F. Timmons, "Lessons from the Past for NATO," Parameters, Autumn 1984, pp. 3-11. Timmon's essay is based on a March 1984 symposium on operations on the eastern front held at the U.S. Army War College. Biographies and autobiographies include Walter Görlitz, Model, Stratege der Defensive (Wiesbaden, 1975); Hermann Balck, Ordnung im Chaos (Osnabrück, 1981); and Dermot Bradley, Walther Wench, General der Panzertruppe (Osnabrück, 1982).
26. A useful and up-to-date bibliography can be found in Richard Simpkin, Red Armour: An Examination of the Soviet Mobile Force Concept (McLean, Virginia, 1984). Two excellent works on Soviet military thought are Peter Vigor, Soviet Blitzkrieg Theory (London, 1983); and David Isby, Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army (London, 1981).
27. For a brief and clearly written article on the growing dichotomy between nuclear weapons and actual, relevant war-fighting capacity, see Michael Howard, "On Fighting a Nuclear War," International Security, Spring 1981, pp. 3-17. James M. Garrett, "Conventional Force Deterrence in the Presence of Theater Nuclear Weapons," Armed Forces and Society, XI (1984), pp. 59-83, is an up-to-date survey of the issue. Technological multipliers are the focus of the report of the European Security Study, Strengthening Conventional Deterrence in Europe: Proposals for the 1980s (New York, 1983). The historical perspective is covered by John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, New York, 1983).
28. Cf. John Keegan, "Soviet Blitzkrieg: Who Wins?" Harper's, May 1982, pp. 46-53.
29. Cf. General D. A. Starry, "Extending the Battlefield," Military Review, March 1981, pp. 32-50; and Lieutenant Colonel L. D. Holder, "Maneuver in the Deep Battle," Military Review, May 1982, pp. 54-61. See also Samuel P. Huntington, "Conventional Deterrence and Conventional Retaliation in Europe," International Security, Winter 1983/84, pp. 32-56. Huntington is among those defense analysts arguing that conventional retaliation, the ability to occupy Warsaw Pact territory, significantly enhances the conventional deterrent's credibility. An interesting work that puts "dynamic forward defense" in a future-war scenario is Elmar Dinter and Paddy Griffith, Not Over by Christmas: NATO's Central Front in World War II (New York, 1983). For an operationally conservative critique of this vision, see Arie van der Vjils, "Airland Battle in NATO, a European View," Parameters, Summer 1984, pp. 10-14.
30. See Martin van Creveld, "Bundeswehr Manpower Management," RUSI and Brassey's Defense Yearbook 1983 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 47-72. This work is an especially perceptive evaluation in a West German context of the continuing gaps between doctrine and behavior in questions of initiative.
31. For a useful collection of essays on the problems of legitimating armed forces in the contemporary Atlantic world, see Armed Forces and the Welfare Societies: Challenges in the 1980s, edited by Gwyn Harries-Jenkins (New York, 1983). It is worth stressing in this context that the attitudes of risk avoidance and comfort can permeate high commands as well as barracks.
32. For up-to-date general statements of the new conventional wisdom on the nature of Soviet Russia, see Dimitri K. Simes, "The New Soviet Challenge," and John M. Joyce, "The Old Russian Legacy" in Foreign Policy, vol. LV, 1984, pp. 113-31, 132-53. Familiar from a military standpoint are the works of "Viktor Suvorov," such as Inside the Soviet Army (New York, 1983); as well as Andrew Cockborn, The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine (New York, 1983).
33. For details of the model and its origins in the work of F. W. Lanchester, see Shelford Bidwell, Modern Warfare: A Study of Men, Weapons and Theories (London, 1973), p. 65 ff. Barry R. Posen, "Measuring the European Conventional Balance: Coping with Complexity in Threat Assessment," International Security, Winter 1984-85, pp. 47-88, is a more optimistic assessment of the exchange-rate issue.
Dennis E. Showalter (B.A., St. John's University; M.A., Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is Associate Professor of History, Colorado College. He is editorial consultant to Archon Books and has been a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Military Affairs. Dr. Showalter is author of German Military History since 1648: A Critical Bibliography (1983), Little Man What Now? Der Stürmer in the Weimar Republic (1982), and Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology, and the Unification of Germany (1975).
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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