Orders of battle, and other obsessions

The other day, when I was writing a post about urban warfare and counterinsurgency, I tripped over a classic problem in military history: the order of battle. It's a good window into many issues, from the particular concerns of military history, to the reasons why you hardly ever hear substantive news about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

First, let me rewind to yesterday, when I was trying to make a point about battles in cities. I needed a simple piece of information: when the Red Army closed the noose on the Germans trapped in Stalingrad, how badly outnumbered were the Germans? I was away from the home office, so I didn't have access to the usual references. So I searched for Internet sources...And searched...And searched.

While I'm usually a defender of Wikipedia, despite its flaws, it was irritating to read the wholly inadequate account of the Battle of Stalingrad there. If the 20th century turned on the results of World War II, and World War II turned on Stalingrad, the battle deserves a bit more detail than you'll find in the Wikipedia entry--like, for example, the actual forces deployed in the battle.

I looked for another shortcut, such as a map of the battle. If you can see a list of the units deployed, and where, you can get an approximate idea of the ratio of forces. You can extrapolate from the number of soldiers in each level of military organization--regiments, divisions, armies, etc.--based on the average size of these units at the time of the battle. If you know the order of battle, the exact units involved in the battle, you can estimate the ratio of Soviet to German troops.

Unfortunately, you also need to know how depleted these units were. Units take casualties; replacements take time to train and deploy; more soldiers die. Rarely do you find any unit fully manned, and at Stalingrad, many Soviet and Axis units had already taken heavy casualties when the Soviets launched Operation Uranus, the encirclement of the city.

At this point, I have to point out that the order of battle is a bit trickier than I've implied. For example, the German 6th Army, which was surrounded in Stalingrad, included more than just German troops. Many Rumanians also found themselves trapped in the city. Nearby, around the city, the Axis forces pushed back during Operation Uranus included Germans, Rumanians, Italians, and Hungarians.

Not every army had the same number of soldiers in each type of unit, and they often had a different mix of roles and equipment. For example, a German infantry division had more anti-tank guns, and more trucks to move them around, than a Rumanian division. Differences in the size and composition of units existed even within the same army. For example, a Soviet Guards armored division, an elite unit, was normally better staffed, equipped, and supplied than a regular armored division.

Which leads to questions about the actual combat strength of a given unit. Numbers alone don't decide battles; the training, morale, equipment, leadership, and supply level of a given platoon, company, battalion, or other type of unit can be an even better measure of fighting capability than numbers. A German division that had been fighting, block by block through Stalingrad put up far less of a fight than a fresh Soviet division. On the other hand, a batch of Soviet conscripts, fresh off the boat (in the sense of being unloaded from the Volga River bank straight into combat), would break and run faster than many fatigued, understrength, and undersupplied German veterans.

So, we have the numbers, the organization, and the current fighting effectiveness of the units involved in the battle. Have I left anything out? Oh, yeah. You also need to know where they were deployed, at each point in the battle.

The "where" part of the equation has two parts, position and terrain. Position matters a lot, since not everyone is necessarily fighting in the same part of the battle. When the Soviets launched Operation Uranus, they were attacking both the Axis units in Stalingrad as well as the ones around the city. Therefore, if you look at the number of Soviet units deployed, you might mistakenly believe that they were all focused on the Germans and Rumanians in the city. Later, once the Soviets closed the ring, a number of their forces shifted to the strangulation of the Axis defenders in Stalingrad. Therefore, troops shift around the battlefield, changing the combat ratio at different geographical points. (Therefore, a series of maps, snapshots of different points in time, are always a better guide to a battle than any single map.)

That last point--the "local" balance of forces--is always critical. Armies don't fight equally across all fronts. Instead, they concentrate their efforts at key points. When the Wehrmacht concentrated their forces in Belgium and the Low Countries, rupturing the Allied defenses in the Battle of France, they were seizing strategic territory and creating confusion behind enemy lines. In 1944, when the Soviets focused their efforts on the destruction of Army Group Center, they were trying to crush any hope that the Germans could halt the Red Army's march through Eastern Europe and Germany. In a different conflict, the First Indochina War, the Viet Minh threw their strength against the defenders of Dienbienphu to cripple French national morale.

Therefore, local superiority matters. Even armies that are outnumbered, as US forces were in the 1991 and 2003 wars against Iraq, can still go on the offensive if they can maintain local superiority in the places where it hurts the enemy. (Since this trick depends on superior battlefield intelligence, communications, and coordination, the American advantage in training and equipment was a huge "force multiplier" in both conflicts.)

However, terrain can nullify major advantages in numbers, training, and all the rest.  The Axis forces on the flanks of the 6th Army were stuck in the vulnerable steppes. Attacking troops in the wide open spaces was far easier than digging German defenders out of the buildings and rubble of Stalingrad itself.

So, what does this all have to do with Iraq? On any given day, coverage of the war uses only two perspectives: the individual soldier at the bottom of the order of battle, and the civilian and military leaders at the top. Those are two valid perspectives on any given day of combat, but they're hardly the whole story.

Which units are fighting, in what shape they are, whom they're fighting--these are far more important details, if you want to know how well the war is going. (Which is another way of saying that the press overlooks the operational level of strategy.) Of course, this picture takes a lot of work to assemble--a much bigger job than sitting through a press conference, or following an infantry squad on patrol.

Incidentally, the actual ratio of forces at Stalingrad was 1.14 million Soviet troops, versus 300,000 Axis defenders in Stalingrad. Of course, as you can see, those numbers alone don't tell you a lot.

Comments

[mc_masterchef]

Have you considered joining the Wikipedia Military History workgroup? Most of the contributors there tend to work on battles and weapons, so a lot of the articles on strategy, doctrine, and other more general military-related topics tend need work.