“You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” That was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s reply to complaints from some soldiers about their equipment during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And as usually happens when someone ventures to tell the inconvenient truth, he was widely criticized on grounds of callousness, insensitivity, etc.
Rumsfeld’s inconvenient truth summarized a recurrent theme in military history: that political, diplomatic, strategic and doctrinal decisions made many years before the outbreak of a war are major factors determining its course and outcome. “The army you have” is, so to speak, the army you deserve. This was as true at the time of the Peloponnesian War as it is today—a reality that political leaders and citizens prefer to ignore, but that military leaders well understand.
Winston Churchill once quipped that “Generals are always prepared to fight the last war,” and as far as it goes this observation is quite true. Though modern armed forces exist to fight the next war, their size, organization, armament and warfighting doctrine are necessarily based on the lessons of the most recent wars. Inevitably, what happened yesterday influences all estimates of what might happen tomorrow—as demonstrated by the history of the French Army from 1919 to 1939.
Except for Serbia, no Great War belligerent suffered higher proportional casualties than France. The searing experience of combat on the Western Front, above all the Battle of Verdun (1916), had left a wound on the soul of the nation—and very naturally it commanded the attention of France’s postwar military leaders as they looked to the future. To be sure, France was victorious, Germany was disarmed and humiliated. But in peacetime the business of soldiers is to plan for future contingencies. Germany might rise again and if so—what then?
As is well known the answer arrived at by France’s political and military leadership was the Maginot Line: a system of fixed fortifications covering France’s common frontier with Germany. The decision to base the defense of France on this latter-day Great Wall has gone down in history as a colossal strategic blunder. But the full story of the strategic and doctrinal thinking that produced the Maginot Line is a subject for another article. Here it suffices to say that it underlines a key point about military planning and preparedness: the dangers of deriving the wrong lessons from military history.
All too often, such wrong lessons take the form of erroneous judgments concerning the obsolescence of this or that weapon. In the immediate aftermath of World War II it seemed, for example, that atomic weapons had rendered aircraft carriers obsolete. This was the issue at stake during the so-called Revolt of the Admirals in 1949. The leaders of the newly established US Air Force, arguing that atomic weapons delivered by long-range bombers would be the winning weapon in any future war, pressed for military spending to be diverted from the other services in favor of strategic airpower. Their specific target was the Navy’s shipbuilding program, the centerpiece of which was a new class of aircraft carriers large enough to operate long-range nuclear-capable strike aircraft.
The Air Force’s arguments were well received by the Truman Administration, which at the time was anxious to reduce defense spending. On paper, the B-36 Peacemaker strategic bomber seemed far more cost-effective than the USS United States, the first of the Navy’s supercarriers, already under construction. Thus the Administration sided with the Air Force and the carrier program was canceled. This decision touched off a major political crisis in which the leadership of the Navy was severely criticized for opposing the Administration’s decision, several senior officers being forced into retirement. It appeared that the Air Force and fiscal austerity had carried the day.
But the supposedly cost-effective B-36 strategic bomber turned out to have a fatal defect: It was an inflexible, all-or-nothing weapon. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, President Truman quickly ruled out the use of nuclear weapons for fear of provoking a wider conflict. The US would employ conventional forces only, and the aircraft carrier was given an opportunity to prove its worth anew as a highly mobile, highly flexible weapons system. The lesson thus learned led to the construction of a new class of supercarriers, the first of which, USS Forrestal, was ordered in 1951. The admirals, defeated in 1949, were vindicated only two years later.
The war now raging between Russia and Ukraine is already yielding up its lessons, and without doubt these will influence military planning around the world for years to come. The challenge, as ever, will be to identify those lessons that are valid, while discarding those that are more plausible than well founded.
One such emerging lesson centers on the continuing viability or otherwise of the tank, which since World War II has held its position as the centerpiece of any modern, high-technology army. But in the Russo-Ukrainian War, the former’s armored forces have suffered startlingly high casualties. As many as 500 Russian tanks have been destroyed or damaged and abandoned in the fighting, often by infantry antitank missiles like the US Javelin and the UK NLAW (Next Generation Light Antitank Weapon). This has led many people to conclude that such infantry-portable missiles, drones and other weapons have rendered the tank obsolete.
With the burnt-out hulks of so many Russian tanks littering the Ukrainian landscape, it may seem hard to argue with this conclusion. But as a matter of fact it’s nothing new. Observing the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) French military experts judged that the tank was an overrated weapon: Just as infantry were stopped by the machine gun, tanks were stopped by the antitank gun. But not long afterwards, the Battle of France (May-June 1940) showed otherwise. The real lesson of history as regards the tank is that its effectiveness is dependent on its integration into a larger weapons system: the combined-arms battle group.
The tank itself combines the elements of mobility, protection, firepower and software in an integrated weapons system. In times past the software component was simply the tank’s crew; today it’s the crew plus various technologies. In turn the individual tank is a component of a larger weapons system, the armored platoon of three to five tanks. Three or four platoons plug together to form a larger weapons system still, the armored company, and so on up the organizational chart. Thus the combat effectiveness of the individual tank depends on the effectiveness of the larger weapons systems of which it is a component. At the brigade level (three or four combat battalions plus an array of support units) that weapons system is highly complex, encompassing numerous subsystems: command, battlefield intelligence, communications, logistics and so on.
So to determine why the Russian Army’s tank losses in Ukraine have been so high, it’s necessary to look well beyond the effectiveness of modern antitank weapons against individual tanks. And though the fog of war precludes definite conclusions at this early stage, the available information suggests that the Russian problem is not narrowly technological but broadly systemic.
The whole point of combined-arms organization is to provide units at all echelons of command with the capabilities necessary to carry out their combat assignments. For instance, mechanized infantry on the move in their vehicles are vulnerable to enemy tanks. Therefore they require tank support. Tanks attacking over terrain where fields of observation and fire are limited are vulnerable to infantry antitank weapons. Therefore they need close infantry support. These examples are simplified and usually other forms of support—combat engineers, artillery, air defense systems, airstrikes—are integrated into the plan. To make such close cooperation possible, two things are required: proper organization and thorough training. It appears that the Russian Army is deficient in both areas.
The basic combat unit of the Russian Army in Ukraine is the Battalion Tactical Group (BTG). This is a combined-arms formation with a troop strength of around 800 men. Its organization is somewhat variable, including one or two tank companies, two or three mechanized infantry companies, a composite artillery battalion and number of platoon-strength support units. A Russian tank company has ten tanks, so a BCT can be expected to have a maximum of twenty tanks. The two or three mech infantry companies have a total of four to six rifle platoons and two to three weapons platoons, the latter with light antitank and air defense systems. Occasionally additional units are attached.
Organizationally the BTG is too small to operate effectively, particularly on the attack. Of its 800 men, only around 200 are infantry. In military parlance, the BTG lack depth: Some 50 to 75 infantry casualties and six or seven tank casualties are sufficient to render the unit combat ineffective.
A more serious problem, however, is the apparent inability of the BTG’s sub-units, particularly tank and infantry, to operate in close cooperation. The advance on Kyiv broke down with heavy casualties because the Russians were unable to cope with a Ukrainian defense based on mutually supporting strongpoints disposed in depth on urban and semi-urban terrain. Such a defense can indeed be suppressed by a well-coordinated attack combining dismounted infantry, tanks and pinpoint artillery concentrations. But the Russian tanks were often sent ahead on their own, into areas defended by well-sited infantry antitank weapons. Inevitably, many were knocked out.
Faulty organization and insufficient training seem therefore to be the primary causes of the Russian Army’s high tank losses. This is not to discount the skilled and spirited defense put up by the Ukrainian Army, which has minimized its own deficiencies while maximizing those of the Russians. But against armored and infantry brigade combat teams of the US Army, the defenders would have fared far worse. These formations are much larger and, without doubt, much better trained than the Russian BTGs.
Thus it seems premature if not inadvisable to relegate the tank to the scrap heap of military history. It may well happen that the lessons of the Russo-Ukrainian War, properly digested, will rebalance the combined-arms equation, modifying the relationship of tanks to infantry, artillery, airpower, etc. But for now and the foreseeable future, there’s nothing else on the battlefield that combines the elements of speed, shock and firepower in one weapons system so effectively as the tank.