baltuch@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU (03/27/91)
From: baltuch@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU This is a summary of answers to question about tactics of encirclement The question was: > Thru military history one reads of say army A beating army B > by encircling it. Encirclement seems to be almost taken as a > synonym of victory... > [deleted] > Is there a inherent "geometric" advantage of encirclement? > > I could see why the encircled army would have say more trouble > manoeuvering and be a more vulnerable target but on the other > hand its forces are more concentrated whereas the encircling > army has to stretch itself to cover more ground. > > Is there a well known rule of thumb saying that the proportion > of encirclers to encircled should be in a p:q ratio for encirclement > to succeed? (Just like they say 3:1 = attackers:defenders ratio is > necessary for offensive to succeed...) > > Another possibility of course is that encirclement simply cuts > lines of communications and thus sooner of later the encircled army > simply runs out of ammo, fuel and toilet paper... and there's nothing > more to it. Welsh James CPT <qj0309@westpoint-emh2.army.mil> writes: It can be either, depending on the style of warfare used by the attacker. There are two types of warfare, attrition and maneuver. Both styles employ fire and movement, but are otherwise opposites. Warfare by attrition seeks victory by superior firepower and technology. The enemy is seen as a series of targets to be engaged and destroyed in a systematic fashion. The focus is on efficiency, leading to a methodical, scientific approach to war. The tempo of operations tends to be rather slow. Progress is gauged in terms of body counts, BDA, terrain captured, etc... Victory, depending more on sheer superiority of numbers, can only be achieved if a nation is willing to accept the cost. Stalingrad is a good example of an encirclement where the attacker uses attrition methods. The goal of maneuver warfare is to put strength against weakness. You want to shatter the enemy's cohesion, organization, command, and psychological balance. Maneuver warfare depends on the ability to identify and exploit enemy weaknesses, not simply on the expenditure of ordnance. The potential for success (& failure!) is often disproportionate to the effort expended. The German campaign in France (1940), the turning movement by MacArthur at Inchon, or the allies' recent success in Iraq are good examples of the use of maneuver warfare to encircle and destroy an enemy. Most of the Iraqi army collapsed because they were in a situation where any decision they made was likely to end in crushing defeat. Maneuver warfare makes better use of combined arms, and requires a much more skilled group of soldiers to execute it. If you are interested in tactics I would recommend you start with a book by William Lind titled "Maneuver Warfare". It is short, to the point, and will provide a good start point for further study. Hanhwe N. Kim <hnkst2@unix.cis.pitt.edu> writes: note: Hanhwe Kim requested that it be made clear that the ideas in his posting are from Luttwak I don't really know what you think of Luttwak, but he mentions that in general, an army on the retreat gets stronger since its lines of communication and supply get shorter while the attacker must designate a larger portion of its troops for rear security... The great thing about encirclement for the offense is that it can ravage the rear support areas and cause the defense to try to disengage and close its bounds prematurely because of [loss of] morale and pure fear. Therefore, it seems that it is not the encirclement itself but the subsequent irrational response of the encircled defenders that cause their defeat. The best example of an encircled army that survived seems to be the US/South Korean forces in the Korean war which pulled out after successfully disengaging (retreating from) the encircling Chinese army from the port of Hamhung in North korea, around Jan. 1951. The army survived and was evacuated by sea to safer grounds in South korea and reorganized uder Matthew Ridgeway who took over after MacArthur. It went on to defeat several large scale offensives by the Chinese army. I may be wrong but it seems to me that it is not encirclement per se but the frantic and irrational reaction of the encircled army that brings its defeat. A well lead, and cool headed defense force can take advantage of the difficulties of the encircling army, probe for weaknesses and eventually break out, or be evacuated, and counter attack. Bill Seurer <seurer@rchland.vnet.ibm.com> writes: It's running out of TP. :-) I do a lot of simulations (i.e., wargames). From reading the background material on actual situations provided with the better games, encirclement has 4 ill effects: 1) Cut off from communication with higher command. Depending on the army's organization and "rigidness" this effect can vary from being annoying (loose organization or one that emphasizes lower level commanders taking initiative) to devastating (the top brass makes all the decisions and shoots junior officers who don't toe the line). 2) Cut off from supply. An army can VERY quickly be starved into submission. Running out of ammo and medical supplies isn't good either. 3) Inability to maneuver. A good army will maneuver as needed and often must retreat when attacked. If you are surrounded there's nowhere to go! 4) Drop in morale. "Oh God, we're cut off!!!" Being in a foritified position can somewhat negate the effects of some of the above. Geoff Phipps <phipps@solitary.stanford.edu> writes: Interestingly Sun Tzu in "The Art of War" specifically warns against encirclement. He says that it just makes the defenders fight to the death, inflicting many more casualties than they would have otherwise. He says that you should always leave a line of retreat for the defenders. Let them defend for a while, and then retreat along this route. Harry them the whole time they are retreating. It is easy to inflict heavy casualties on a retreating, disorganised force. Some comments: - Sun Tzu wrote in Ancient China. - I think this doesn't work so well when you have a known (and implemented) practise of taking prisoners and treating them well. Surrounded enemies may then decide to surrender rather than die. However, if they know that they cannot surrender, then they might as well fight until they die. Some people have argued that this is the whole basis of the modern European convention of Prisoners of War. If it wasn't advantageous to take prisoners, then the Geneva convention would never have been signed. Form this I suspect that prisoners weren't treated well in Sun Tzu's time. - The Chinese generals in Burma in late WW2 followed that philosphy. The US general working with them (Slim?) was constantly amazed at how he would work hard to set up an encirclement of the Japanese, and then the Chinese would deliberately let them out. The claim was that the Chinese generals were following Sun Tzu's ideas. Given that the Japanese weren't likely to surrender en masse, it could be argued that they were correct. I don't know. denbeste@ursa-major.spdcc.com writes: The issue isn't any geometrical advantage of circling as such, but rather the advantage of having the front of your unit on your enemy's flank. Any military unit which is composed of a large number of small units (men?) has to trade off concentration of power on one face versus strengthening all faces. The problem is that if all faces are equally powerful, then none of them represents more than a quarter of the power of the unit; and if most of the power of the unit is facing one side, then the flanks and rear have very little strength. In warfare from about the 30 years war up until the American Civil War, it was recognized that units needed both capabilities at different times, so they developed different formations for their infantry and drilled their men so they could switch from one to the other rapidly. The formation with equal strength is known as "square" and resembles one, though sometimes they had five sides and sometimes three. Squares, however, tend to be somewhat vulnerable to artillery fire and don't move easily. To concentrate power on one face only, they used a long thin line if they expected primarily to be firing their muskets, and a compact column if they expected melee such as a bayonette charge. A square was rarely more than 40 or 50 yards wide, and a really long line might have been 100 yards. This fundamental problem of being somewhat strong everywhere or being very strong only in one place but extremely weak everywhere else hasn't gone away with modern weapons, but with armies as large as we have had in the 20th century it has often been possible to form immense lines extending hundreds of miles, with flanks lying on terrain features such as mountains or coastline. In such a formation one can largely ignore the weakness of one's flanks, since there's friends on both sides. However, if a hole is punched in your line, it is possible to "roll up" the line in both directions; The Germans tried to do this at the Battle of the Bulge, and the Americans succeeded somewhat before that in Patton's breakout from Normandy. However, there is a special case in modern warfare. What happens when one side of the line has nothing to lie on? This came up in spades in North Africa in WWII, where both forces could anchor their northern flanks on the Med, but had nothing but empty desert for hundreds of miles to their south. Time and again the attacking side would make a deep envelopment maneuver and really screw up the other side. We did much the same thing in Iraq, where the desert on the Iraqi right flank extends unbroken all the way to Jerusalem. VII corps and XVIII corps were able to get around most of the Iraqi units, with predictable results. (The results would have been much the same if they hadn't been softened up with 6 weeks of air attack, but *our* casualties would have been much higher.) This is a universal problem when your units are made up of many small pieces. It plays an almost insignificant role if your units are made up of a very small number of very large units, like ships, which is why encirclement and flanking maneuvers are rarely very important in naval battles. Much more important is achieving local concentration of force - this is also important in land battles and is known as "defeat in detail". (As an example: Suppose you have 16 tanks and I have only 10, but I manage it so that whenever my units are within shooting range of yours, there are always 8 of mine and only 2 of yours. Result is that your tanks tend to die rapidly and mine often are untouched.) Attempts at encirclement can backfire. In 1973 the Egyptians and Israelis faced each other on opposite sides of the Suez canal. The Egyptians attempted to turn both flanks - and got caught at it. The Israelies withdrew on both flanks but attacked hard in the middle, crossed the Suez, and then turned both ways. They trapped one of the Egyptian forces, and were within about 12 hours of trapping the other when the Egyptians cried "uncle" and agreed to a cease fire. Note please that the Israelies did NOT have floating flanks: one flank lay on the Med and the other on the Red sea. Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu> writes: > Now my question: Is there a inherent "geometric" advantage > of encirclement? No; in fact, as you suggest, there is a disadvantage, because the encircled force's lines of communications are shorter. > Another possibility of course is that encirclement simply cuts > lines of communications and thus sooner of later the encircled army > simply runs out of ammo, fuel and toilet paper... and there's nothing > more to it. Basically correct. Modern armies need *lots* of supplies. Being cut off from higher command is also significant, as is the inability to decide whether to fight and where. Dave Grosvenor <dag@hplb.hpl.hp.com> writes: This is my thoughts on your questions about encirclement. Encirclement is a useful tactic if it disrupts the line of communication. There are definite disadvantages to the encircling forces if disruption of communications is not decisive. Since the encircled forces can exploit interior lines. Further the encircled forces disrupt the line of communications of the encircling troops. For examples of both encirclement and use of interior lines you might examine Napoleons campaigns in Italy. I have a good reference if you are interested. The French forces of the period were more mobile and less dependent on line of communications than the opposing Austrian troops. This was because they travelled light and lived off the land. Similarly the Germans in the second world war were much less dependent on supplies that the US/UK forces. Interior line was used by Napoleon in Italy to fight a defensive battle against superior numbers of Austrians. They would attack from several directions and Napoleon would obtain superiority or parity against each in turn whilst holding off the other forces. It did not always work e.g. Waterloo. In the end Napoleons enemies got wise to his tectics. Encirclement was Napoleons preferred mode of battle, Probably because it explioted French strengths. Interior lines are more often appreciated for their strategical rather than tactical effect. For example in the first (and second) the Germans fought a two front war and could switch forces from one front to another.