Theories of War
War is a complex social phenomenon, which is a continuation of the political struggle of states, nations, classes by means of armed violence. The main content of the war is organized armed struggle. At the same time, other forms of struggle are widely used in it (political, economic, ideological), which in the war conditions acquire the most drastic nature and specific features (rupture of diplomatic relations, blockade, sabotage, special methods of decomposition of the army and the rear of the enemy, etc.).
All story Humanity is basically a story of war and armed conflict. Scientists estimate that in the last 5,5 thousand years there have been about 14,5 thousand large and small wars. At the same time, wars were different, and accordingly theories of wars were also different.
HISTORICAL FLASHBACK
The war itself appeared with the emergence of the slave formation. Armed clashes were fought with the aim of seizing other people's riches, territories, slaves. One of the first theories of war is associated with the name of the ancient Chinese commander and military theorist Sun Tzu, the author of the famous treatise on the art of war, in which he examined the relationship between war and politics, victory factors, strategy and tactics.
According to Sun Tzu, the highest transubstantiation of war is to destroy the plans of the enemy; then destroy his alliances; then break his army; the most recent is to attack its fortified cities. However, to fight a hundred times and win a hundred times is not the best of the best.
The best of the best - to conquer someone else's army, not fighting. And the one who has succeeded in military affairs, subjugates other people's armies, without engaging in battle, captures other cities, not besieging them, and destroys other countries without a long battle.
In the Middle Ages, in Western Europe, during the period of feudal anarchy and the complete domination of the Church, science, including military science, was driven into monastic cells. Scholasticism and dogmatism that prevailed in medieval philosophy ruled out the possibility of a theoretical study of combat practice. Among the military theorists of medieval Western Europe can only be called the Italian political figure Niccolò Machiavelli, who outlined in the treatise On Military Art the main provisions of the organization, training and arming of the army, as well as the requirements for the commander.
Machiavelli's strategic views were inconsistent. He put forward as the main means of achieving victory that decisive battle, now the starvation of the enemy. Many of the provisions of Machiavelli borrowed from Vegetia, often mechanically transferring the experience of the army of ancient Rome to a completely different era. The immediate goal of the armed struggle, he defined as: "Anyone who wants to wage war sets one goal for himself - to be able to confront any enemy in the field and defeat him in a decisive battle."
As for the military art of the Arabs, Ottoman Turks and Mongol conquerors, it was distinguished by cunning and cunning. Wars were fought by large masses of cavalry, and strategic actions were characterized by a desire to evade general battles. The policy was aimed primarily at aggravating the internal contradictions of the enemy, disuniting the people and the government, disintegrating their troops and suppressing the opponent's will to resist.
The most important content of the strategy was the disorganization of the defense of the enemy by internal subversive activity and terror; evading the struggle against large organized forces of the enemy, bypassing them and taking a deep blow at the vital centers of the country; destruction of the government and high command of the enemy forces. In the modern world, the English military theorist and historian Liddell Harth justified such a policy as a strategy of indirect action.
NEW TIME
The development of science and technology was a necessary prerequisite for the emergence of new methods of warfare and battle. The use of gunpowder for military purposes in Europe and the invention of firearms in the 16th century weapons led to the peculiarities of the new wars, which now involved mass armies. Increased spatial scope, bitterness and duration of the battles.
At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, the wars of Napoleon I Bonaparte had a significant influence on the development of military art. The main features of his military art are an organic combination of political and military-strategic decisions, deep creativity, decisive actions with maximum concentration of troops and artillery for the main attack. Leading the war, Napoleon set his goal to decide its outcome in a general battle. From the battle, Napoleon said, "the fate of the army, the state or the possession of the throne depends." Having destroyed the enemy's army in one or several general battles, he seized his capital and dictated its own conditions to it.
In contrast to Napoleon, the Prussian military theorist Heinrich Bülow believed that a war could be won by actions on communications, while dodging a general battle. In order to counteract the enemy’s maneuvering strategy, the defending side erected powerful fortresses with important garrisons and large inventories on important communications hubs. All available forces of the defending army were located along the borders with a thin barrier (cordon), having the task of covering the most probable directions of actions of the enemy troops. The advancing army did not dare to penetrate the line of enemy fortresses, fearing to leave their communications at risk. Such a passive way of waging war was called the “cordon strategy”.
The military theorist and historian, Infantry General Heinrich Jomini, in his Discourses on the Great Military Acts ... and Essays on the Art of War, advanced the theory of the strategic crushing of the enemy by means of a decisive offensive. However, he template Napoleonic methods of strategic actions and did not take into account the new conditions for waging war that were already emerging.
The great Russian commander, Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, who defeated Napoleon’s army, raised the art of war to a new, higher level of development. Strategic goals were achieved by him by concentrating forces on the decisive direction and routing the enemy in a system of successive battles and battles instead of one general battle.
The German military theorist, Major General Karl Clausewitz, in his main work, On War, defined the strategy for organizing a general battle, for which he recommended concentrating all forces and means: “To win, you must meet the main forces of the enemy ... Fight is the only effective way of doing war; his goal is the destruction of enemy forces as a means of ending the conflict. ”
Prussian and German military leader and theorist, Field Marshal Moltke the Elder led ideas of the inevitability of war, a sudden attack and a lightning-quick defeat of the enemy by encirclement. French military leader and military theorist Marshal Ferdinand Foch considered battle an indispensable condition for waging war: "Modern war to achieve its ultimate goal ... recognizes only one means, namely, the destruction of the organized forces of the enemy."
At the end of the XNUMXth century, the American naval theorist, Rear Admiral Alfred Mahan, together with the English naval theorist, Vice Admiral Philip Colomb, created the so-called theory of naval power, according to which naval forces play a decisive role in armed struggle, and conquest dominance at sea - the main condition for victory in the war. In turn, the Italian military theorist, General Giulio Douai at the beginning of the twentieth century, created a theory about the leading role aviationwhich is capable of deciding the outcome of the war ("Douai doctrine"). According to Douai, aviation, having gained dominance in the air, can strike at state and economic centers of the enemy alone to achieve victory in the war. Army and the fleet an auxiliary role was assigned. The First and Second World Wars proved the complete failure of both of these theories.
Lightning war, or "blitzkrieg" - the theory of waging short-lived war, was created at the beginning of the 20th century by German General Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen. Schlieffen’s views (which received the official status of the Schlieffen Doctrine) are most fully covered in the Modern War article published by him in 1909. The doctrine is based on a plan of lightning defeat of the enemy in one big battle (operation) with the crushing blow of a powerful strike fist on one of the flanks of the strategic front. The Second World War denied this claim.
The concept of total war, developed by German military theorists at the beginning of the 20th century, was based on the point of view of modern war as a war of nations, not armies. Therefore, in order to win, it is necessary, on the one hand, to mobilize all the resources of “its” nation, and on the other, to have a full impact on the hostile nation in order to break its spirit and ensure that it demands from its government that the resistance be stopped. The experience of two world wars showed the failure of this theory.
ROCKET-NUCLEAR EPOCHA
The creation of fundamentally new types of weapons in the last century led to a radical change in the previous ideas about war and the modification of the forms, methods and methods of military operations. This was facilitated by the massive use of armored forces, aircraft and submarine forces of the fleet, the appearance in the middle of the twentieth century of nuclear missile weapons and the rapid development of information and communication technologies from the end of the twentieth century.
Back in the 20 of the last century, the outstanding Russian military theorist Major General Alexander Svechin opposed the absolutization of the theory of total war and advocated the necessity of combining various forms of war - the war of crushing and war of attrition (exhaustion), including in the latter not only defensive actions in broad military-political understanding, but also elements of “indirect action”. At the beginning of the 1930s, he wrote that only a war of attrition, with limited goals, was expedient for the USSR, and the time of the proletarian war had not yet come to crush. Then these judgments of Professor Svechin were rejected with harsh criticism of him, but the year 1941 confirmed his warnings.
In 1920, the English military theorist and historian Liddel Garth began publishing his strategy of indirect action in the popular press, which requires you to avoid a decisive clash with the enemy. According to Liddell Garth, during the war, it would be more expedient to disarm the enemy rather than destroy him in a difficult struggle. “The most reasonable strategy in any campaign,” he pointed out, “is to delay the battle, and the most rational tactic is to delay the beginning of the offensive until the enemy’s morale is undermined and favorable conditions are created delivering a decisive blow.
Immediately after the Second World War, the doctrine of nuclear war was adopted in the United States, subsequently being reflected in all official strategic concepts of the United States and NATO. The military doctrine of the USSR also envisaged the decisive role of nuclear missiles in the war. At the first stage, the possibility was considered only of a general nuclear war, characterized by the unrestricted, massive and time-concentrated use of all types of nuclear weapons for military and civilian purposes.
American naval theorist, Rear Admiral Alfred Mahan.
However, there was a possibility that the outbreak of such a war would have led to the death of human civilization, therefore in the second half of the 1950-s in the USA the concept of limited nuclear war was put forward. Later, such a conflict was considered to be an armed struggle against the use of various types of weapons, including tactical and operational-tactical nuclear weapons, the use of which is limited in scope, areas of use and types of nuclear weapons. In this case, nuclear weapons are used to destroy the most important military and military-economic targets of the enemy.
In 1961, due to an increase in the USSR’s nuclear potential and a roughly equal balance of forces, the US leadership switched to a flexible response strategy - the admissibility of using nuclear weapons not only in total, but also in limited military conflict. And in 1971, the United States proclaimed a strategy of realistic deterrence (realistic deterrence), which retained the fundamental principles of the previous strategy, but gave it greater activity and flexibility in building up and using the military power of the United States and its allies.
INFORMATION WAR
After the end of the Cold War, the danger of a world nuclear war diminished. In modern war, the thesis of the prevalence of the moral and psychological factor over the physical destruction of the enemy is becoming more common. The war, even in its traditional form, is seen by military experts not only and not so much by military clashes on the battlefield, as by complex information-technological, cognitive-psychological, virtual-real phenomenon.
According to the views of the Russian military theorist Major-General Vladimir Slipchenko: “In an armed struggle of the future, victory can be achieved mainly only by destroying the economic potential of the enemy. Moreover, if the defending enemy was not ready for the wars of the future, and he made the whole stake, as in the past, on his ground forces, then, as already paid attention, there is no need to smash such his armed forces. They, with the exception of the means of retaliation, do not pose any threat to the attacker, and in the conditions of a ruined economy are doomed, first, to lose their combat capability, and then to complete collapse. In such circumstances, the political system will inevitably collapse. ”
An analysis of the characteristics of war under modern conditions by Major General Alexander Vladimirov allowed him to draw the following conclusions: “Modern war can be viewed as a struggle of ideologies for domination in world governance, aggressively waged by nations (state) through geopolitical technologies supported by information, economic and military superiority periodic use of the actual military (armed) means of war ".
“Modern wars are fought at the level of consciousness and ideas, and only there and thus are the most complete victories achieved. The war is fought with new operational tools that have the appearance of modern geopolitical technologies that are informational. The product (the fruit of victory) of information technology is a given state of human (national) consciousness, ”says Major General Vladimirov.
In turn, the President of the Academy of Military Sciences, Army General Makhmut Gareyev regarding future wars, makes the following assumptions: “First of all, we see that global nuclear war and large-scale war in general are becoming less and less likely. And not only because of the disastrous consequences of such a war, or because someone arbitrarily canceled such wars. Other insidious and fairly effective forms of international confrontation are simply found, when it becomes possible by unleashing local wars, conflicts, the application of economic, financial sanctions, political-diplomatic and information-psychological pressure, various kinds of subversive actions, as was the case in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Georgia , consistently subordinate and lead to a general world order recalcitrant countries, without resorting to a big war. "
According to Western experts, modern war is an information war, and it is won by one whose information systems are more perfect. The term “information war” appeared in the middle of the 80-ies in connection with the new tasks of the US Armed Forces after the end of the Cold War and was formalized by the Directive of the US Department of Defense on December 21 of the 1992 of the year. And in October, 1998 of the United States Armed Forces launched the Unified Information Operations Doctrine, which is a concentrated presentation of the views of the US military leadership on the nature and organization of the impact on the enemy’s information resources and the protection of their own information resources from similar influences. As stated in the preface of the doctrine, the ability of the US armed forces to "pre-empt or prevent crises and conflicts in peacetime, as well as to win in wartime, depends crucially on the effectiveness of information operations at all levels of war and across the entire spectrum of armed hostilities."
Defining the features of the information war, US government security expert Richard Clark introduces the concept of "cyber war." According to his definition, “cyberwar is the actions of one national state from penetrating computers or networks of another national state to achieve the goal of damage or destruction.” According to one American cyber security analyst, in order to prepare a cyber attack that would disable computers and paralyze the United States, it would take two years or less 600 people, and it would cost less than $ 50 million per year.
Understanding the importance of informational confrontation, as early as June, 2009 in the United States created cyber command, which was responsible for the security of computer networks of the US Defense Department, conducting computer intelligence, preventing cyber attacks on the United States, and launching preemptive strikes against opponents preparing such actions. At present, the 24 th cybernetic army of the Air Force and the 10 th Navy cyber fleet have been formed. About 10, thousands of cybersecurity experts work at the Center for Strategic and International Studies as part of the US Cyber Challenge program. In addition to the United States, about 100 countries of the world also have units in the armed forces for conducting operations in cyberspace.
Another concept of future warfare, based on the use of information technology, was the concept of network-centric warfare, developed by US military theorists, Vice Admiral Arthur Sebrowski, Pentagon Researcher John Garstka and Admiral Jay Johnson at the end of 90.
At its core is an increase in the total combat power of military formations by connecting them into a single network, which is characterized by two main characteristics: speed of control and self-synchronization. The speed of management is achieved through information superiority through the introduction of new control systems, tracking, reconnaissance, control, computer modeling. As a result, the enemy is deprived of the opportunity to conduct effective operations, since all his actions will be delayed. Self-synchronization refers to the ability of the organizational structure of military formations, the forms and methods of their combat missions to be modified at their discretion, but in accordance with the needs of the higher command. As a result, hostilities take the form of continuous high-speed actions (operations, actions) with decisive goals.
The network allows geographically dispersed forces belonging to different types and types of troops to combine operations into a single plan and use information superiority to use them more efficiently by ensuring the unity of views of the commanders (commanders) of diverse forces (forces) on operations, as well as by self-synchronization of their actions in the interests of achieving the overall goal of the operation.
Criticism of the theory of network-centric warfare concerns, first of all, a bias towards technology, and the authors of the critics quite rightly noted that a person remains at the center of the war, his will and the war are not "network-centric." She is either “human-centered,” or she has no center at all. ”
An analysis of the fighting that the United States conducted during the past 15 years shows that the concept of network-centric warfare is good in low and medium intensity military conflicts against a deliberately weak adversary. And it remains to be seen how the concept of a network-centric war will behave when powerful armies clash with rich historical experience of major wars with space reconnaissance systems, electronic warfare, high-precision weapons, including long-range weapons, as well as various combat platforms of different generations.
SUN-CHA ON THE NEW LAD
Does the appearance of the latest theories of war in modern times mean that we should abandon the classical theories developed by Sun Tzu, Clausewitz and other military theorists? Certainly not. Michael Handel - one of the modern followers of Sun Tzu, Clausewitz - believes that, although the classical theories of war require adaptation to the changed environment of the information age, they remain fundamentally fair. The logic of war and strategic thinking is as universal and infinite as human nature itself.
The fact that among the Western military establishment there is a strong belief that technologies, especially information, will allow their party to more effectively solve the problem of reducing or completely eliminating the “fog of war”, speaks of the immaturity of Western military theory, especially in the United States. The intellectual challenge faced by military theory, military theorists and professionals at the beginning of the XXI century is not to “send Clausewitz to the dustbin of history. Rather, the challenge is to learn how to effectively deal with the entire spectrum of the conflict. ”
Nevertheless, the American military leadership is actively introducing the proposition that future wars will, as a rule, be network-centric and non-contact, using mainly high-precision weapons. The goal of such a policy is to instil in the world the thoughts of the rejection and senselessness of military competition with the United States. Therefore, Western theories of war can not be regarded as the only true and correct. Otherwise, we will prepare for a war in which we simply have no chance of winning (the so-called programmed defeat).
It should be borne in mind that “the tasks of the US Armed Forces and our army do not radically coincide. For decades, the United States and its NATO allies have led offensive military operations outside their territory, always have the initiative to start a war, and are at war with a weak adversary. Therefore, their experience is atypical for us. We first need to ensure the protection of our territory, so at the beginning of the war we will have to conduct defensive actions against a stronger, fundamentally different on each theater of the enemy. "
It is necessary to develop and promote our own theories, forms and methods of using groups of troops (forces) - in particular, the theory of interaction of troops, developed by the author from the 90-s of the last century.
The theory of interaction of troops is an emerging theory of war, as it defines:
- new sources of military power associated with synergistic, multiplicative and cumulative use of the entire spectrum of capabilities of the troops (forces) at all levels;
- how to integrate the use of forces and means of various types of the Armed Forces and the armed forces with respect to the opposing side;
- How to destroy the coalition of the opposing side, thwart its plans and neutralize its potential allies;
- how the robust interaction of troops increases the stability and speed of command;
- how cooperation ensures the flexibility of command and control of troops (forces);
- how joint awareness of troops reduces decision-making time, providing decisive effects in the operation (battle, battle);
- how to ensure the ability of units, units and formations to operate almost autonomously, but in the interests of accomplishing common combat missions;
- how to adapt to the dynamics of hostilities;
- How to achieve the required density of combat forces and assets at the right time and in the right place;
- how by dispersed forces to gain an advantage over the massed forces of the enemy;
- How to complicate the enemy task of setting goals.
In fact, the theory of the interaction of troops adapts the classical theories of war to the modern conditions of the conduct of hostilities. Its main provisions were set forth in the author’s work The Theory of Interaction of Forces, published in 2002 and reprinted in 2006. However, despite the positive feedback and the received acts of implementation from the implementation of individual research results, the theory of interaction of the troops has not yet found understanding in the Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation.
Until now, many military leaders have considered the interaction of troops as one of the basic principles of the art of war, but not as a theory. However, in modern conditions it is necessary to form a new strategic, operational and tactical thinking for military personnel. "You can not stay with the old templates, - said Alexander Svechin. - If our concepts do not change according to the progress of military affairs, if we stop at the freezing point, then, adhering to the immutable laws, we will gradually lose sight of the whole essence of the phenomena. Deep ideas will turn into harmful prejudices: our characters will lose their inner content; there will be an external empty shell, a lifeless idol. ”
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