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Comment by crikli | Hacker News Reader

I've observed a principle that militaries build to win the last total war they fought. This is why guys like Billy Mitchell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell) were ignored about the importance of air power leading up to WWII. The status quo was to gear up for another WWI, complete with entrenched and barely mobile front lines.

But of course the German Blitzkreig, a brilliant archetype of maneuver warfare, overran these emplacements, the fixed system of defense built by the French being the best example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line).

The US military has been developed for the last 60 years to re-win World War II; even the Cold War was really just the US and Russia building to re-win WWII until Russia ran out of cash.

As one can see given the issues that the US military has had in Iraq and Afghanistan the WWII methods of battle, which have devolved back to phalanx warfare, are struggling (again) to defeat maneuver warfare.

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But it was the Siegfried Line[1] in WWII that let the Germans concentrate their whole army against the Poles and defeat them before turning west, and that let them attack where the French weren't rather than have to defend the current border. So German tactics in WWII were dependant on the same static defenses that the French used, but they took that and added a maneuver component instead of replacing it entirely.

Manuever warfare often relies on a static force to pin the enemy in place while the mobile elements do their thing. Saying "Maneuver good, static bad" is just as silly as the reverse, whats needed for success is to understand the advantages and disadvantages of the various tools available and intelligently choose the right tool or combination of tools for the task at hand.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Line

I was thinking exactly this. As I recall modern tactics call for suppressing fire to pin the enemy down while friendlies maneuver. It would seem that static and maneuver warfare are intertwined. Additionally, I believe the rule of thumb is that it takes five times as many people to capture a position as it does to defend a position. Like many things, there is probably an element of balance here.

The Siegfried Line was made enormously more effective by general malaise in the Western armies (then under French command) though; in spite of being relatively weak and unfinished it went largely untroubled. There were some small incursions into western Germany but they weren't substantial.

What makes this particularly galling is relative strengths of the two armies at the time; the Allied forces in northeastern France had significantly more tanks (for example) available there than the Germany army had in total, let alone defending the western front. It's far from impossible that a serious, concerted attack on western Germany in the 1939-1940 'phoney war' period could have had enough success to significantly alter the course of the war and turn it significantly into a land war in western Germany for much of the period.

Its very true that it wasn't yet as strong as it was designed to be nor was it as strong as the Maginot line. It only had to be enough, though. If Germany's western border had been completely unfortified there would have been no way that the Allies wouldn't have attacked. And even the unfinished wall represented a huge investment for Nazi Germany. If you haven't already I'd recommend reading "The Wages of Destruction" on the economy of Nazi Germany, its a fascinating book for a number of reasons.

I don't know how much I agree with the statement "even the Cold War was really just the US and Russia building to re-win WWII until Russia ran out of cash". Not that it matters for this discussion, because I think its clear that the U.S. military is still trying to design itself for a Cold War scenario, and encountering huge problems when faced with asymmetrical opponents.

I think the USA are doing smashingly well against their current crop asymmetrical opponents. Wikipedia has the GWOT American casualties count (military and civilian) at 8800 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_terror#Casualties). Far more American citizens than that died the last time we faced a serious asymmetrical opponent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars).

I would consider Vietnam largely asymmetrical. Wouldn't you?

The North Vietnamese had a uniformed, regimented army. Al-Qaeda and the American Indians did/do not.

Fascinating stuff - thanks for posting. :)

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