Mistakes in Mobilization as a Prologue to Defeat, or Three Lessons from History
Partial mobilization revealed many problems in the defense department, but also contributed to repelling the enemy counteroffensive in the summer of 2023.
On partial mobilization, military registration and enlistment offices, and the paradoxes of time
Let's continue what we started in the article "At the Turn of the Eras, or Thoughts of a Forgotten General"A topic dedicated to the future of the Russian Armed Forces evoked a lively response in the comments, which is natural: society is changing, the army is changing, and the work of the Main Organizational and Mobilization Directorate of the General Staff must be transformed accordingly.
Hence the fundamental question that sparked the discussion in the comments: does a conscription-based army in Russia have a future, from the Milyutin reforms to the Soviet invasion of the DRA, that met the needs of the time? Time...
I think I'm not alone in feeling like it's speeding up, turning recent events into the distant past. Take COVID-19, which was suddenly "canceled" in the summer of 2022, after it had roiled society less than four years earlier. And now it's somewhere in the back of our minds, lost in the whirlwind of current events.
Or partial mobilization: just over three years have passed since its announcement. And in the context of modern military realities, it also seems like a distant memory. But the details surrounding its implementation should not be forgotten.
Then the work of the military commissariats—I'm not mistaken in putting the word "work" in quotation marks when referring to some of them—exposed a barely noticeable abscess in peacetime. It proved so painful that V. Solovyov began talking about executions, necessitating a separate presidential address.
However, the military recruitment offices aren't staffed by aliens. Their failures mirror the crisis of social institutions as a whole: from school education to import substitution and immigration policy.
It's clear that replacing one set of military commissariats with another won't solve the problem, especially since the state's security directly depends on the activities of the mobilization apparatus and the structure of the Armed Forces' manpower. Let's briefly examine this in three ways. historical examples.
I would like to emphasize that in the course of the narrative I will draw analogies with contemporary events in the world.
The main defect of Napoleon III's army
So, let's begin with the Second Empire. Proclaimed by Bonaparte's nephew, in the fateful year of 1870, it fell into the trap laid by Otto von Bismarck—the pretext for war between France and Prussia was trivial and centered on the candidacy of a Hohenzollern, Prince Leopold, for the Spanish throne. Napoleon III resisted, and Wilhelm I relented, but Paris overstepped its bounds in its demands on Berlin. As a result, the guns began to speak.
The outcome of the war is beautifully captured in A. von Werner's painting "Proclamation of the German Empire in 1871."
There were several reasons for the French army's defeat. Major General A.A. Svechin identified one of the key ones: "The French army's main defect was its inability to mobilize quickly."
Unlike Field Marshal G. von Moltke the Elder, Napoleon III apparently did not fully realize that the railway network significantly shortened the process from the declaration of war to the actual start of hostilities and made the time lag for a diplomatic settlement of the conflict insignificant.
And anyone who can, using the advances of scientific and technological progress, quickly mobilize and transfer troops to the theater of war before the enemy has every chance of victory. The Prussians first demonstrated this during the 1866 campaign against Austria.
It is impossible not to note Napoleon III’s understanding of the economic and strategic importance of railways, as evidenced by the following figures: in the decade from 1860 to 1870, their length increased from 9430 km to 17,640 km.
Unfortunately for the Second Empire, however, its mobilization structure was cumbersome and unresponsive to the needs of the time. Army units were stationed far from the mustering points where each regiment had its own depot and where reserves were supposed to report when mobilization was declared.
There they were issued uniforms and equipment. And then, these civilians, who were still only yesterday, had to travel to their regiments along the railways, which were overloaded at the beginning of the war with Prussia.
As a result, a huge number of reservists simply got lost, never reaching their understrength regiments in time. Many of them, wrote Svechin, "found themselves without any supply trains at all; the corps received their rear facilities incompletely; a significant number of reservists failed to find their regiments and wandered. France paid dearly for ignoring the painstaking art of mobilization."
And as a result:
At that time, France, noted Major General B.M. Gueroy, the creator of the levee en masse system (universal military service – I.Kh.), found itself without sufficiently deep recruitment reserves and without a sufficiently well-established mobilization system.
Accordingly, in addition to the strategic errors of command, an important reason for the defeat of the Second Empire was the flaws in the mobilization system, which did not allow for the prompt transfer of troops to the theater of military operations and, moreover, introduced confusion into the process of their management.
Why, then, during the French Revolution, was the mobilization system even less streamlined than during the Second Empire, contributing to the resolution of the military problems facing the Republic?
French artillerymen in position, 1870.
Gerua offered the following response:
The French Revolution brought to the theatre of war hordes of patriots, inspired by new ideals and imbued with purely religious fanaticism.
However, fanaticism, as well as any emotional upheaval, cannot be used as the basis for mobilization.
As I was writing these lines, I recalled the chant I saw back in Soviet times from the electrified crowd in front of Saddam Hussein's podium: "Saddam! Saddam, I would give my life for you!"
Who knows, maybe they did back then, sometime in the late 1980s. But in 2003, Saddam's fateful year, the army, aside from local pockets of resistance, simply vanished, not even bothering to blow up the bridges over the Euphrates before the advancing enemy, which became another factor that ensured victory for American troops and their satellites.
Or take Iran: given the unrest in the country two or three years ago, in my opinion, the secularization of the consciousness of a significant part of the population, especially the youth, it is unlikely that the ideas of sacred defense will be able to unite society, as they did almost half a century ago during the war with Iraq.
Russia in 1914: Patriotic Pogroms, Amateurs, and Roads
The educated portion of Russian society on the eve of the First World War was also steeped in religious indifference. The peasantry was more religious, but in a specific way, and would hardly have responded to the call for a holy war against the Germans, while popular posters were of little inspiration.
However, a short-lived surge of patriotism in the first autumn days of the war – sometimes taking primitive forms such as beatings of people with German surnames and the destruction of shops owned by them – allowed for a rapid mobilization.
Her results at first exceeded expectations.
In 1914, according to historian A.M. Badrutdinov, there were more reservists than were needed to replenish the regular troops, so a full-scale conscription of younger militia members, which had been envisaged when the mobilization schedule was drawn up, was not necessary.
Overall, the mobilization was successful, and the Minister of War, Adjutant General V. A. Sukhomlinov, was awarded a reward for its implementation.
However, the enthusiasm only partially offset the problems in the work of the mobilization apparatus.
Order and food at the assembly points, the author mentioned above notes, were not always ensured, which led to riots among the mobilized, which resulted in the destruction of stores, shops, warehouses, etc.
The above lines bring to mind the fall of 2022. There were no riots, but people expressed discontent. For examples, see the article: "In which regions did those mobilized for military operations riot and protest? Reasons for the reservists' outrage."
But let's return to the First World War. Providing mobilized soldiers with food and housing them at assembly points was not the only problem facing the rear services.
As in the Second Empire, mobilization efforts in Russia encountered difficulties with rail transport:
The average journey for new recruits in Russia, wrote Lieutenant General N.N. Golovin, was 900–1000 miles. For France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, this average journey did not exceed 200–300 miles.
The situation was exacerbated by the slow speed of our trains: the daily mileage of Russian trains was half that of French ones. This was compounded by the overcrowding of railway lines in the first months of the war.
A typical picture of mobilization in Russia, 1914.
Golovin draws attention to another important problem during mobilization:
Beyond the purely specific conditions created in Russia by the belated emancipation of the serfs, another problem hampered the elimination of chaos in the highest military command. The elimination of chaos is facilitated by "scientific organization" of work. But "scientific organization" requires not only individual outstanding scientists—it also requires a sufficiently high level of social environment.
As is well known, the rise of science took place in the USSR. Its visible peak was the implementation of the Energia-Buran space program, which was ahead of its time. But this rise was made possible precisely by the high level of social development mentioned by Golovin, which resulted from the abolition of class barriers, the introduction of universal free education (a small fee, though short-lived by historical standards, was introduced in high schools and a number of technical schools on the eve of the Great Patriotic War), and the development of social mobility.
By 1914, thanks to the reforms of the second half of the 19th century, they too were functioning, but with significant stagnation. Men from the lower social classes, such as Lieutenant General A.I. Denikin and Adjutant General M.V. Alekseyev, were making their way in the army. However, at the top, gentlemen like Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich the Younger and those more like clerks than military leaders, such as the chief of staff of the aforementioned Tsar's uncle, General of Infantry N.N. Yanushkevich, when he was commander-in-chief, still ruled.
I think it was about them that Gerua wrote:
A disrespectful attitude towards personnel and their role in the modern system was generally a distinctive feature of Russian military power.
In fact, this is why the First World War did not give the Russian Imperial Army, if you don’t count A.A. Brusilov and N.N. Yudenich, its G.K. Zhukov, K.K. Rokossovsky, I.Kh. Bagramyan, F.I. Tolbukhin, K.A. Meretskov, R.Ya. Malinovsky.
The weakness of the Russian army was due, among other things, to the "lack of culture among the masses." In this case, lack of culture is synonymous with illiteracy.
Plus, referring to G. Le Bon, Gueroy wrote:
The mass of the population of even a civilized country lags behind its advanced strata by several centuries.
The consequence of such backwardness was, not least of all, the uprising of foreigners, which was discussed in the article “The Uprising in Turkestan in 1916: Awakening or Fall?”
The very next year, the masses, clad in soldiers' greatcoats, were more concerned with dividing up the landowners' land than with defeating the enemy. They cannot be blamed: reforms need to be implemented in a timely manner, not allowed to reach a boiling point. In this sense, 1861 was clearly overdue.
Using the example of the Russian Empire, we should speak not so much about failures in mobilization, but rather about the problems that a mass army can cause for the ruling elite during periods of overstretched forces at the front, military defeat, or social crisis.
Poland: On Strategic Reserves and Mobilization Failures
Finally, Poland is on the eve of the tragic year 1939. As early as March 22 of that year, a hidden mobilization began, which allowed the corresponding plan to be fulfilled by 60%.
However, German airstrikes in the first days of the war, if not paralysing, then at least complicating the work of rail transport and preventing a full mobilisation.
In general, it should be noted: the relative underdevelopment of the railway network is a significant problem for agrarian-industrial European powers, which both the Russian Empire and Poland, born on its ruins, were.
As a result of the incomplete and partially disrupted mobilization, the Polish command, like Napoleon III in 1870, found itself without the strategic reserves it needed in the second stage of the campaign, which began on September 5, to organize defense on the Vistula, Narew and San.
Polish prisoners of war in 1939; I suppose there were also plenty of mobilized soldiers among them
But it wasn't just the Luftwaffe's attacks that disrupted the mobilization. Its organization itself left much to be desired.
The future adjutant of divisional general V. Andreas, captain E. Klimovsky, recalled:
On August 30, 1939, I arrived at command headquarters in Lviv by military transport. From the very first minutes at the station, I realized that although military trains were running smoothly, there was a catastrophic shortage of carriages. Hundreds of soldiers from the Lviv Division and other military units fighting near Lviv were gathered at the station, awaiting departure. Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian were spoken. The troops kept arriving, adding to the sense of chaos.
The shortage of trains and the generally unsatisfactory performance of rail transport, which led to disruptions in the train schedule even before the Luftwaffe raids, became one of the factors that contributed to the defeat of the Polish army in September 1939.
Incidentally, in all three campaigns, strategic miscalculations by the high command significantly undermined the bravery and tactical competence of commanders down to the divisional level – something the Poles demonstrated in the Battle of the Bzura River.
And again about the principle of competence
In conclusion, I would like to note that the reasons for the failures in mobilization, as exemplified by the three states that lost the war, I would venture to suggest, are rooted in personnel policy, where the principle of competence in appointments to positions of responsibility, especially those related to ensuring the country's security, was not always predominant.
This was partly due to the social stratification of French, Russian and Polish societies, which hindered the work of social mobility, especially in the army – the most conservative social institution.
In Russia, social stratification with all the ensuing consequences has long been a reality.
And this is despite the fact that, in terms of experience in waging modern warfare, we are ahead of the rest of the world.
The main thing is that experience isn't negated by personnel policies, including those of the mobilization apparatus. In my view, there's only one solution: universal, free higher and secondary vocational education. Knowledge alone should be the sole criterion for university admission, not money from one's parents.
Yes, this won't eliminate the social stratification generated by capitalism, but it will nonetheless consolidate the social mobility and bring talented officers into the leadership structures. Then, the experience of the SVO will be in demand, rather than being wasted.
Использованная литература:
Badrutdinov A.M. The mobilization issue in Russia during the First World War
Gerua A.V. Polchisha. – Sofia: Russian-Bulgarian Publishing House, 1923
Golovin, N.N. Russia in the First World War. Moscow, Veche, 2021
Klimkovsky E. I was an adjutant to General Anders. – M.: MEI Publishing House, 1991
Meltyukhov M.I. Soviet-Polish wars. Military-political confrontation. 1918–1939. Moscow, "Veche", 2001
Svechin A. A. Evolution of Military Art. Volume II. – M. – L.: Voengiz, 1928
Temezhnikov E.A. Armed forces of the world
In which regions did those mobilized for military operations rebel and protest? The reasons for the reservists' outrage
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