Force Ratios (the old 3-to-1 rule)

[JMA]

Well aware. Foch's "Principles of War" dates from 1903 lectures. The Fuller version however were the ones passed into UK training and doctrine.

OK, lets move on from this now shall we? We have established that Fuller did not merely pluck his 9 Principles of War out of the air then.

A book I know, along with the disastorous "Reformation of War" and "Lectures on the FSR". I could write a book on Fullers fallacies - indeed my current Thesis deals with his abysmal ideas on armour. I have little time for the man.

For better or worse nations need their own military thinkers to shake things up a bit... and this is what Fuller and Liddell-Hart certainly did... (and perhaps the status you aspire to?)

Abysmal ideas on armour? Yea I guess with 80 odd years of hindsight one could pick holes in any theory from those times.

Based on many conversations over many years with a lot of serving officers, almost all seem to accept we could do officer training better. It is thus utterly bizarre that grass roots opinion does not translate into action.

Not so difficult to understand. First rule in securing a pension is "do not make waves or rock the boat." The second aspect is that sometimes we need a period of reflection away from a situation so close to the action where we can't see the wood for the trees.

Objective as ever.

Of course. Its called reverse psychology. Let an outsider suggest something to the Brits and one can rest assured that they would rather die than accept advice.

On the training mentioned, yes, certainly even a local Outward Bound course built early into the the training will do wonders... but a similar strongly military approach in an exotic location away from mommy and daddy with no cell phone reception or Internet will be a life changing experience for 18/9 year olds.

[William F. Owen]

For better or worse nations need their own military thinkers to shake things up a bit... and this is what Fuller and Liddell-Hart certainly did... (and perhaps the status you aspire to?)

Shake things up? They had a substantially malign influence. That people still hold thier ideas to be useful and insightful essentially shows the mess military thought is in.

Abysmal ideas on armour? Yea I guess with 80 odd years of hindsight one could pick holes in any theory from those times.

You may want to actually read what Fuller in particular wrote. The result of his rather wooly thinking, was no good tanks for the UK until 1944! Not a mistake the Germans or Russians made ONCE THEY REJECTED Fullers ideas. If you want to start a separate thread on Fuller, go ahead.

I certainly do not aspire to the Fuller/Liddell-hart status. I actually aim at the opposite, based on observing them.
a.) Speak only to an informed community.
b.) Avoid taking credit.
c.) Accept responsibility.
d.) Subject ideas to rigour and avoid coming up with new ideas, where none are needed had someone actually read some books and done some work.

Not so difficult to understand. First rule in securing a pension is "do not make waves or rock the boat." The second aspect is that sometimes we need a period of reflection away from a situation so close to the action where we can't see the wood for the trees.

Concur. Understandable yes, forgivable no.

On the training mentioned, yes, certainly even a local Outward Bound course built early into the the training will do wonders... but a similar strongly military approach in an exotic location away from mommy and daddy with no cell phone reception or Internet will be a life changing experience for 18/9 year olds.

That maybe true, but "being tough" has never been a British Army problem. The problem is ideas and practice, not mental or physical robustness. The British Army got the "getting tough" bit as right as anyone, long ago. No evidence that this is the problem.

[Fuchs]

The poor tank designs of the British till the Centurion were afaik rather the result of an under-appreciation of good guns (too small turret diameter) and shoddy engineering. No other army had the same emphasis on leadership as the German one, so there's no particular British fault in regard to radio equipment and lack of three-an turrets.

Tukachevsky envisaged a division of tank tasks similar to the British and French recipes and it didn't turn out that badly simply because Russian engineers began to appreciate the value of a long 76mm gun in 1939 and were able to fit it into both new major designs.

relevant book

[William F. Owen]

The poor tank designs of the British till the Centurion were afaik rather the result of an under-appreciation of good guns (too small turret diameter) and shoddy engineering. No other army had the same emphasis on leadership as the German one, so there's no particular British fault in regard to radio equipment and lack of three-an turrets.

That is not what the research done in support of MRES Thesis suggests, though you would be right about the German emphasis on Command.

Tukachevsky envisaged a division of tank tasks similar to the British and French recipes and it didn't turn out that badly simply because Russian engineers began to appreciate the value of a long 76mm gun in 1939 and were able to fit it into both new major designs.

He may have done, but Stalin had him killed and the Soviets reverted to some better proven ideas. A lot of folks have put words in Tukachevsky's mouth. The 76mm gun was one of several things that enabled largely successful tanks designs.

[Fuchs]

Wilf,
it was hardly Liddell-Hart's fault that the British Army was too dumb to issue 40mm HE shells for the 2pounder, even for infantry support tanks as the Mathilda II. Meanwhile French and Germans issued even 37mm HE shells.
The few "close support" CS versions of British tanks which carried a 76mm low velocity gun didn't compensate for this usually overlooked and disastrous hit on British tank firepower in 1939-1941.

Liddell-Hart did neither dictate that a tank needs to have a length:width ratio that made pivoting difficult and allowed only for small turret rings which didn't enable the use of recoiling long 76mm guns.

He wasn't responsible for the timetable which turned the Crusader into a tank which - despite hasty design and subsequent teething problems - didn't absorb lessons from France in time for the Desert War.

L-H didn't request the Covenanter to have a freakishly high ground pressure either, did he?

It wasn't his fault that the 2pdr AT gun was too complex and not superseded in time by a better gun, or for the fact that the British equivalent of the 8-8 was too heavy for tactical deployment in land battles for AT purposes.

L-H wasn't at fault for metallurgical problems in AP shell production which led to many AP shells breaking up on German face-hardened armour, either.

The division into infantry and cruiser tanks wasn't a major mistake either, as proved by the StuG III later on. Guderian was actually wrong on this one early on.


So how exactly did L-H mess up British tank development?

The British tank development mess of 1930s till 1943 looks to me rather like an engineering and procurement bureaucracy failure.

[JMA]

He may have done, but Stalin had him killed and the Soviets reverted to some better proven ideas. A lot of folks have put words in Tukachevsky's mouth.

Better proven ideas? At that time, what ideas were proven?

[JMA]

The British tank development mess of 1930s till 1943 looks to me rather like an engineering and procurement bureaucracy failure.

Yes it does rather, but the British being the British need a scapegoat... in this case two.

Guderian seemed to be happy with what Fuller and Liddell-Hart propoosed as can be seen from his book General Der Panzertruppen Heinz W Guderian Memories... so maybe it was more a case that the British were half asleep?

It was principally the books and articles of the Englishmen, Fuller, Liddell-Hart and Martel, that excited my interest and gave food for thought. These farsighted soldiers were even then trying to make the tank something more than just an infantry support weapon. The envisaged it in relationship to the growing motorisation of our age, and thus they became the pioneers of a new type of warfare on the largest scale.

I learned from them the concentration of armour, as employed in the Battle of Cambrai. Further, it was Liddell-Hart who emphasised the use of armoured forces for long-range strokes, operations against the opposing army’s communications, and also proposed a type of armoured division combining panzer and panzer-infantry units. Deeply impressed by these ideas I tried to develop them in a sense practicable for our own army. So I owe many suggestions of our further development to Captain Liddell-Hart.

Surely an example of the proverb; A prophet is not recognized in his own land.

[Fuchs]

Interestingly, General Willmann who attempted a kind of operational revival of the German Heer in about 1996/97 was apparently a huge fan of Liddell-Hart and the "indirect approach". That idea is mentioned many times in the (published) key document of that short reform movement.

I attempted to dig into what exactly happened at that time in the German army last year, but a Lt.Gen. hinted to me that appearance and behind the scenes facts didn't match. I made no further progress with this mini investigation.

There's a nice summary about "Freie Operationen" here:
http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cgi-bin/show...lename=650.pdf

The most important effect of this top-down one-man reform movement was probably that it served as an umbrella for many smallish and unspectacular fixes for ill-advised Cold War habits.

----------------------

Some officers/reformers who deserved recognition succeeded much less than Liddell-Hart in exercising influence;

Percy Hobart, an excellent armor formation trainer and father of armoured combat engineers

Sir Archibald Wavell dismissed Hobart into retirement in 1940, based on hostile War Office information due to his "unconventional" ideas about armoured warfare. Hobart joined the Local Defence Volunteers (precursor to the Home Guard) as a lance-corporal and was charged with the defence of his home village, Chipping Campden. "At once, Chipping Campden became a hedgehog of bristling defiance", and Hobart was promoted to become Deputy Area Organiser.[3] Liddell Hart criticised the decision to retire Hobart and wrote an article in the newspaper Sunday Pictorial. Winston Churchill was notified and he had Hobart re-enlisted into the army in 1941.

De Gaulle, to some extent...

[Infanteer]

Guderian seemed to be happy with what Fuller and Liddell-Hart propoosed as can be seen from his book General Der Panzertruppen Heinz W Guderian Memories... so maybe it was more a case that the British were half asleep?

From what I can tell, interwar German facination with Liddell-Hart's writings have pretty much been debunked as a post-war sleight of hand by Sir Basil while working with the German generals on their memoirs.

[JMA]

[snip]
That maybe true, but "being tough" has never been a British Army problem. The problem is ideas and practice, not mental or physical robustness. The British Army got the "getting tough" bit as right as anyone, long ago. No evidence that this is the problem.

This was the reply in response to my:

On the training mentioned, yes, certainly even a local Outward Bound course built early into the the training will do wonders... but a similar strongly military approach in an exotic location away from mommy and daddy with no cell phone reception or Internet will be a life changing experience for 18/9 year olds.

I assume you are the same William F. Owen who wrote Patrol-based infantry doctrine?

If that is so then we are closer to agreement than it appears (unless you just like a good argument

I maintain that the infantryman can no longer just be a bayonet... no matter how tough.

As William F. Owen said:

The PB Soldier must be a robust and determined individual, with a useable level of common sense, and arguably some modern armies do contain a significant percentage of such men, and even women...

...A PB Soldier is taught to navigate and live in the field as an individual. He is required to accomplish tests of navigation in both urban and rural terrain, possibly utilizing not just conventional maps but also aerial photographs and sketches. He must prove himself reliant when isolated and he must achieve a useable basic level of first aid and NBC skills. He is taught individual field craft and stalking in much the same way snipers are traditionally trained, and ultimately, he is taught to shoot under field rather than range conditions.

And yes I agree with that too.

That is why I advocate the kind of individual training I outlined above. See it like a rising tide needing to lift all the ships rather than just cherry-picking the best of the rest and probably underutilising them.

Take your average citizen and mold him to the best of his potential into the kind of individually skilled soldier needed on the modern battlefield. Get them young. Go to your traditional recruiting areas and fund/subsidize their attendance on a normal commercial Outward Bound course while still at school. Threat them like Premiership football clubs academies do their young and promising. Invite them to your Regimental days. Train them up in various proficiencies (like the Boy Scouts) etc etc

Now why Kenya is a good option is that what I would propose for the training at the various levels is because it would probably be problematic in the UK given the lunatic Health and Safety gestapo that exist.

(BTW have you updated that 2006 piece? If so where.)

[JMA]

From what I can tell, interwar German facination with Liddell-Hart's writings have pretty much been debunked as a post-war sleight of hand by Sir Basil while working with the German generals on their memoirs.

Difficult to accept the obvious?

Stick with what Guderian wrote. That is enough. Fuller and Liddell-Hart provided the spark... no more... no less.

[Granite_State]

From what I can tell, interwar German facination with Liddell-Hart's writings have pretty much been debunked as a post-war sleight of hand by Sir Basil while working with the German generals on their memoirs.

Yes, John Mearsheimer wrote the book on that, I think it was called Liddell Hart and the Weight of History.

Liddell Hart wrote and said some interesting things, but he was also all over the map. He, along with many others, drew the wrong lessons from the Spanish Civil War, and was opposed to a continental commitment until pretty late in the game.

[Granite_State]

Some officers/reformers who deserved recognition succeeded much less than Liddell-Hart in exercising influence;

Percy Hobart, an excellent armor formation trainer and father of armoured combat engineers

On the contrary. Hobart exercised entirely too much influence in the Thirties, and was a major factor in faulty British armor tactics (the lack of combined arms) that got them kicked around the desert for two years. Auchinleck and others had to rebuild an army that he had set up for failure.

[JMA]

On the contrary. Hobart exercised entirely too much influence in the Thirties, and was a major factor in faulty British armor tactics (the lack of combined arms) that got them kicked around the desert for two years. Auchinleck and others had to rebuild an army that he had set up for failure.

Can you provide some sources to substantiate this please?

[JMA]

Yes, John Mearsheimer wrote the book on that, I think it was called Liddell Hart and the Weight of History.

Liddell Hart wrote and said some interesting things, but he was also all over the map. He, along with many others, drew the wrong lessons from the Spanish Civil War, and was opposed to a continental commitment until pretty late in the game.

There were no positives in Liddell-Hart's contribution?

[William F. Owen]

Wilf,
it was hardly Liddell-Hart's fault that the British Army was too dumb to issue 40mm HE shells for the 2pounder, .....

Liddell-Hart never really said much about AFV per se. The guilty party is Fuller. Liddell-Hart was more imprecise about his ideas, and really majored on his supposed "Indirect Approach."

Dumb was not the problem. It wasn't ignorance. It was well-sold ideas put forth by supposedly smart men.

The division into infantry and cruiser tanks wasn't a major mistake either, as proved by the StuG III later on. Guderian was actually wrong on this one early on.

I beg to differ. If you mean the StuG III/IV were excellent at infantry support, I would agree. The creation of "Cruiser/Cavalry" tanks was a disaster. Correct me if I am wrong, but were not StuGs manned by the artillery and attached to the infantry?

The British tank development mess of 1930s till 1943 looks to me rather like an engineering and procurement bureaucracy failure.

Their were engineering and bureaucracy problems, and all was made far worse by the "Tank Avant Garde" who really screwed it up. Had they know what they had wanted, - and been right, they rest would have followed.

[William F. Owen]

I assume you are the same William F. Owen who wrote Patrol-based infantry doctrine?

If that is so then we are closer to agreement than it appears (unless you just like a good argument

I am.... and all the ideas contained in that article are actually a plea to recover to the basics, and raise the bar. In point of fact, there is little wrong with the actual practice of UK infantry training. The fault lies with the ideas that underpin it. UK infantry tends to be very well built, but just poorly designed, if that makes sense.

See it like a rising tide needing to lift all the ships rather than just cherry-picking the best of the rest and probably underutilising them.

Concur. Good analogy.

Now why Kenya is a good option is that what I would propose for the training at the various levels is because it would probably be problematic in the UK given the lunatic Health and Safety gestapo that exist.

Lunatic Health and Safety exist anywhere that UK troops do. Kenya makes not odds. There is also Cyprus, which is probably one of the best Coy and Platoon training areas anywhere in the world. - BUT, I also believe that some infantry training in the cold and wet is very essential, as that sort of environment really tests determination and personal administration.

(BTW have you updated that 2006 piece? If so where.)

No, but watch this space.

[William F. Owen]

There were no positives in Liddell-Hart's contribution?

Some. His work on Infantry Doctrine in the early 1920's was good. Some was a bit blue sky and stating the obvious, but never really wholly misleading. Having said that he copied and plagiarised Foch's ideas and then sort to destroy Foch's reputation.

After 1945, Liddell-Hart allied himself with the "blitzkrieg" and basically re-invented himself. - BUT, if you read his work, little he says is either insightful, original (not required) or really useful.

There is a far larger issue, that men such as Liddell-Hart, Fuller, and I would also include T.E. Lawrence and Boyd, were masters of gently walking the limelight path, in a way to ensures the actual content of their ideas is never really subject to investigation. MOST Military Theory is rubbish, and that includes the stuff that has come out in the last 10 years.

[Fuchs]

I beg to differ. If you mean the StuG III/IV were excellent at infantry support, I would agree. The creation of "Cruiser/Cavalry" tanks was a disaster. Correct me if I am wrong, but were not StuGs manned by the artillery and attached to the infantry?

That's correct, but the key here is that a division between infantry-supporting tanks for solving tactical problems of infantry-centric forces (infantry divisions) were necessary next to more mobile tanks in motorized forces (armour/mech. infantry divisions or brigades) for solving operational problems.
History showed that the former had the potential of being more cost-efficient tank destroyers as well.


The British infantry tank/cruiser tank and especially the French dispersion of tanks has been bashed in military history and doctrine-related writings a lot, but unfairly. Guderian was wrong in the 30's on this, the British, French, Russians and Manstein were right: At that time the armies needed both infantry and cruiser tanks.
The exact designs (infantry tank with small gun in turret or assault gun with casemate gun with decent HE effect) was only a(n important) detail.

http://defense-and-freedom.blogspot....nd-future.html

[William F. Owen]

At that time the armies needed both infantry and cruiser tanks.

I do not agree, but as to why, wait for my thesis.