Combined Arms

Combined arms attack on Beney, September 12, 1918
(Source)

Yesterday's post, wherein I sing the praises of the "lowly" infantryman, sparked some excellent (as always) comments. But the following excerpt from juvat got me to thinking (always a dangerous proposition).

I have underlined what I took to be the salient points -

• a war is won by a well-constructed, mutually supporting system
• a war cannot be won without infantry
• infantry is the key ingredient
• without logistics, all the combat arms are useless
• logistics
• logistics
• logistics

Yeah, I repeated that last bit three times as it's, how you say, muy importante. I actually had a post on that very topic, a post I called "Beans, Bullets, and Bandages." Now I'm not talking about unsere Bohnen*, no, I speak of actual legumes, the kind you eat. (And which are so darned good with rice.) You can read that post here.

One of the key points was this -

“Logistics...as vital to military success as daily food is to daily work.”
      -- Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, Armaments and Arbitration, 1912

The good captain being right up there with Clausewitz as a theorist and writer on des affaires militaires, that is, he was a really smart guy.

Logistics is what makes fighting a battle, a campaign, and the entire war possible. If your troops aren't getting fed, have nothing to kill the enemy with, and can't patch themselves up when wounded, you can do all the fighting you want, you can have all the infantry, tanks, artillery, aircraft, and ships you could ever want...

And you will lose. Those folks "in the rear with the gear" as the dumber operators might put it, serve a vital role, a critical role. Juvat argues that they, and not the infantry, are the "key" ingredient. He wouldn't be wrong either, but (and this is a rather big but, you in the back, stop giggling) all the beans, bullets, and bandages in the world can not win a battle. They make victory possible, sure, but they aren't doing the actual killing and breaking of things which is how you win a battle/campaign/war.

So Sarge, it's the infantry, right?

Well, yes and no. Even if they do call the chaps with the crossed rifle insignia, the Queen of Battle. Now before your mind goes places it should stay away from...

The earliest attributed quote credits Sir William Napier (1785-1860) with saying “Infantry is the Queen of Battles.” In a text by a Mr. G. Maspero, published in 1892, the army of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (7th century, B.C.) is described as follows: "There is, on an average one hundred foot soldiers to every ten cavalry and every single chariot; the infantry is really Queen of the Assyrian battles.” The expression hailing infantry as the queen of battle was widely in use at the time of Napoleon I (1769-1821).

The ascendancy of the infantryman has been dated as far back as the English victory at Crecy in 1346, and to the later Battle of Agincourt, scene of another English victory over the French, in 1415. The decisive weapon in both battles was the English longbow; at Crecy the French crossbowmen could not match the rate of fire of the bowmen, while at Agincourt the massed French cavalry fell before the waves of arrows fired against them by an outnumbered English army led by the young king, Henry V. Both battles were stunning affirmations of the power of capably led and properly armed infantrymen.

References to the queen of battle (or battles) continue to appear in doctrinal literature from the time of the First World War until today, and one of the most popular theories on the selection of the queen as symbol of our branch lies in the queen’s dominance of a chessboard, where she enjoys much more freedom of movement and mobility than any other piece. Her position as the most powerful piece on the board is indeed analogous to the role of the Infantry on the battlefield, and – like our branch – it is she who may well determine the final outcome. The king, on the other hand, is a vulnerable figure, and must rely upon others to protect him. (Source)

To continue the analogy of the chessboard, can you win with just a queen if the other player has all of his/her pieces? Well, if your opponent wasn't very good, and you were, then maybe you could pull it off. But all of those other pieces are there for a reason. They all contribute to victory, they are all components of a team, a combined arms team if you will allow me to put it that way.

In the first Gulf War airpower prepared the battlefield so thoroughly that Iraqi units were trying to surrender to helicopters for crying out loud. But still the infantry, accompanied by tanks and artillery, had to go in to finish what airpower had started.

Try to go up against an entrenched enemy with just infantry - can you say Passchendaele, the Somme, the Marne? (I knew you could.) Your infantry are going to die in their thousands, which they did. You need aircraft to find 'em, artillery to fix 'em in place, tanks to poke holes in the defenses, then your infantry has a chance of surviving. It takes a team.

Need to seize an island or assault a beach? You'll need ships to carry the combined arms teams to the beach, your ships to provide Naval Gun Fire Support (well, not so much these days) and transport supplies to that beach, your aircraft to establish air superiority so your troops can maneuver freely and theirs cannot. You use every tool in your arsenal so that the enemy can't fight effectively and yours can go in, kill the enemy and break his stuff.

Every tool in the armed forces' tool box has a role (well, except maybe for LCS, I still can't figure out what it's good for - until it gets its mine warfare module it's just a waste of parts and sailors who could be employed elsewhere). Each part has its tasks and missions, each part, to win in battle, must be used effectively and in concert with the other parts.

Combined arms, it's kinda like "scissors, rock, paper." Which (surprise, surprise) I wrote about here. (I swear a lot of my posts come from the comments you Chanters make, keep 'em coming.) While that post covered the Napoleonic era, the theory of combined arms has grown to encompass newer unit types and specialized versions of older unit types. For instance, a paratrooper is a descendant of the guys who walked to war, now they ride helos and jump out of aircraft to vertically envelop the enemy. They're in the enemy's rear before the enemy knows what the heck is going on, if you do it right. D-Day, they did it right, Arnhem, well you know how that worked out.

Improvements in technology have made war more lethal. Individual unit lethality and mobility have increased to amazing levels, levels a soldier of the 19th Century couldn't begin to imagine. But the various components need to work together.

And yeah, they need to be supplied.

Combined arms, very sexy, logistics not so much. But they go hand in hand.

Or you will lose.

Thoughts?

* Our Beans, i.e. my fellow blogger here at The Chant.