WORLD WAR 1 AND 2 SHIFTS IN MILITARY STRATEGIES

1.1     INTRODUCTION

The purpose of military strategy is to win wars; the scholarship over the last thirty years has shown that the period from 1914 through 1918 introduced the biggest changes in war fighting strategies, tactics and technologies in all human history. With a few significant exceptions, almost everything about how large-scale combat operations are conducted today traces its origins to World War I. If an infantry battalion commander of August 1914 were to jump ahead a scant four years to August 1918, he would be totally bewildered by what he saw happening on the battlefield around him. Almost nothing that he knew in 1914 about how to fight a battle would be of much use in 1918. On the other hand, if a battalion commander from 1918 were to jump forward to a World War II battlefield of 1940 or 1941, he would be able to understand the broad outlines of what was happening. To be sure, some military technologies would have advanced considerably in the more than twenty years, but they nonetheless would be recognizable. The battlefield problems prior to 1914 bore very little relation to those of 1918. Those of World War II were essentially the same as those of 1918 and those of 2014 remain quite similar.

With so much change in so short a time, it was exceptionally difficult for even the most talented and intelligent of the Great War’s military commanders to come to grips with the changes that seemed to come at “future shock” speed. By 1918, however, the military strategies and technical solutions to the problems of the modern battlefield were starting to emerge. World War I ended in exhaustion before the new concepts could be developed fully, but the firm foundations were there for the mobile tactics and operations of World War II, and ever since.