Contrary to Lind and Hammes the First Generation Napoleonic era is understood by historians to be a ‘paradigm of manoeuvre warfare’. Harnessing the levee en masse of the Revolutionary period Napoleon fielded vast numbers of troops organised into semi-autonomous corps d’armée each of which was a miniature combined arms army able to manoeuvre independently and concentrate swiftly for battle. Each corps was composed of infantry and cavalry divisions supported by artillery. The Grand Armée had invested heavily in heavy and light infantry with numerous companies of voltigeurs and tirailleurs, specialised for close combat skirmishing, combined with heavier infantry battalions optimised for firepower. The cavalry was similarly divided into heavy and light formations which could be used for screening and ‘bold shock action against enemy formations weakened by infantry attacks and artillery fire’. Through ‘dexterous coordination of infantry, cavalry and artillery’ the French heavy infantry would, under cover of artillery and skirmishers, deploy ‘in flexible mixtures of lines and columns’ while the enemies fighting power was eroded through artillery and his initiative stymied through threats of or actual cavalry attacks forcing him to deploy into defensive squares rather than manoeuvre to engage. This manoeuvrability and flexibility meant that ‘immense areas of Europe would become war zones as the scattered components of his armies would manoeuvre and converge on their prey’ (an early-modern form of swarming). This system was first disrupted during the Peninsular War in Spain where Napoleon was faced with guerrillas whom the French termed insurgés. Napoleon’s forces were tied down by guerrillas as well as British and Portuguese regular forces which prevented him from concentrating on any one threat. Yet the guerrillas’ general lawlessness made negotiating untenable given that they were largely uncoordinated belonging to differing factions, clans, parties or interest groups rather than the disintegrating central government (the Suprema), and, moreover, spent as much time attacking their fellow countrymen and plundering their own country as they did fighting Napoleon.



The Second Generation of attrition is similarly more nuanced than Lind and Hammes perceive. It was not France but Germany that initiated, under the leadership of Falkenhayn, the strategy of attrition which was instigated after the giant “manoeuvre a priori” of the Schlieffen plan came to a grinding halt. Designed to ‘bleed the French Army white’ Falkenhayn hoped to draw French infantry toward the symbolic fortress of Verdun where, matching his plan to the nature of his enemy, he knew ‘they would launch counterattack after counterattack, as was their fashion, with disregard for life and limb’. Thus with one eye on the forthcoming British Somme offensive he hoped to knock France out of the war through the erosion of their national morale through the mass killing of their troops. However, it was topographical conditions that favoured such an approach in the first place where ‘French positions on the east bank of the river curved in a semicircle from Brabant, on the north, to the Cotes of the Meuse on the south. The northern arc was, therefore, not only subject to direct fire, but could be enfiladed along its whole length by German batteries’. In contrast, the Eastern front was a marked by large-scale manoeuvre given the disparity in force to space ratios which favoured movement allied to superb German signals intelligence (or, Russian incompetence) and is exemplified in the Battle of Tannenberg and the later attack on Rumania by Falkenhayn. In the latter operation Falkenhayn even used motorised (truck borne) infantry as his part of the advance strike element of his 9th Army. Similarly, the Soviet experience in Afghanistan exemplifies the use of firepower to remedy manpower deficiencies and actually came to replace manoeuvre as the preferred method of Soviet counterinsurgency operations.