Victory via Attrition

It's not as simple as it seems

Leuthen, 1757: The big battalions didn’t win that one.

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If the book Military Strategy for Dummies ever gets written, its first chapter should cover attrition.

All else being equal, it’s probably true that God is on the side of the big battalions. If your army is three times the size of the other guy’s, you can afford to suffer twice the casualties you inflict; the enemy will run out of resources before you do. That’s victory by attrition.

But when has all else ever been equal, on or off the battlefield?

A strategy of attrition is predicated on the truism that size does matter; it seems the obvious play for the side that has a significant numerical edge. But though you may have more troops, tanks, and howitzers than the enemy, that margin of superiority is useless if you can’t exploit it. A simple example will illustrate the point. Say the enemy has fifty tanks and you have a hundred. He has enough fuel to commit all fifty to battle. You have enough fuel to commit fifty of your hundred to battle. Oops, your numerical advantage has been erased by the dismal science of logistics.

Attrition is the current buzzword among commentators on the Russo-Ukrainian War. Supposedly, Russia’s numerical superiority will tell against the Ukrainians, wearing them down gradually until they reach their breaking point. See, for example, this article by Andrew Stuttaford at National Review Online. “Russian tactics in 2023—sometimes little more than human waves—may be crude,” he writes, “but in a war of attrition against a smaller opponent (Ukrainian military casualties may stand at around 100,000), they can be enough.”

Can they really, though? Given the course of the war thus far, there’s no particular reason to think so.

As noted above, a superiority of numbers can be whittled down, even negated, by other factors: logistical problems, organizational flaws, poor planning, poor leadership, bad tactics. Russia began the present war with significant numerical advantages on paper. On the battlefield, however, they came to nothing. Two problems stood out at once: tactical incompetence and logistical deficiencies. The Russians proved unable to coordinate the action of tanks, infantry, artillery and supporting arms. Not only did Russian units suffer heavy casualties, but their drive on Kyiv faltered, stalled, then went into reverse. The much-ballyhooed 40-mile convoy that was supposed to reinforce the offensive bogged down on bad roads, plagued by maintenance problems, fuel shortages and Ukrainian attacks.

And this less-than-impressive performance was turned in by the supposedly elite cadres of the Russian Army. It seems unlikely that the reluctant reservists and sketchily trained conscripts now being fed into the mincing machine will do better.

Nor does military history validate the proposition that numerical superiority = attrition = victory. Napoleon Bonaparte was certainly a proponent of the big battalions, but one of the battlefield performances he most admired was Frederick the Great’s victory over the Austrians at Leuthen (5 December 1757). Frederick’s army of 36,000 men and 167 cannon routed the Austrians, who had 65,000 men and 210 cannon. The Emperor called it “a masterpiece of movements, maneuver, and resolution. He attacks an army twice the size of his own and gains a complete victory, without loss disproportionate to the result.”

A century and a half later, a German army of 200,000 men faced off against two Russian armies totaling 400,000 men and won a crushing victory in the Battle of Tannenberg; I wrote about that battle here.

The military history of the Great War drives home the lesson that a strategy of attrition can often be more costly to the side employing it than it is to the enemy—without delivering victory. In The Real War, his history of that conflict, B.H. Liddell Hart harped on that string. His preferred strategy, that of the indirect approach as he called it, was a counterblast against what he saw as the persistence of a military illusion: that the big battalions always win.

It’s true enough that in World War Two, Germany suffered defeat by attrition: tactically and operationally on the Russian Front, strategically on a global scale. Once the United States entered the war, Germany’s defeat became inevitable—simply a matter of time. If, however, one subtracts the United States from the Grand Alliance, things look quite different. Together, Britain and the USSR would still have enjoyed numerical superiority over Germany. But without the enormous industrial power of the United States, they would have had far less ability to exploit that advantage. See my article, “Forge of Victory,” for more on the subject.

On the modern battlefield, attrition tactics of the kind mentioned by Mr. Stuttaford would be self-defeating. You simply cannot oppose human flesh to modern weapons. Was that not made clear enough on the Somme, and in Flanders, and on every battlefield of the Great War? No, in 2023 a successful strategy of attrition would have to be based on superior firepower and tactics, mastery of the air and effective logistical support, all brought to bear at a point where the enemy would be compelled to stand and fight. Nothing we’ve seen thus far indicates that the Russian armed forces could put that kind of operation together.

Finally, a point often overlooked is that the other side always gets a vote. The speculations I’ve read about a Russian attrition strategy tend to skate past that reality of war. But it’s not as if the Ukrainians are going to sit still and let themselves be battered into submission. They have options—some obvious, some that might surprise us. The claim that the war has devolved into a static battle of attrition assumes that the way thing are today is the way it’s going to be tomorrow, and next week, and next month.

Says who?