Military Matters: Armor lessons -- Part 1

WASHINGTON, May 7 (UPI) -- Bruce Gudmundsson, author of the best book on the development of modern tactics by the German army in World War I, "Stormtroop Tactics," has a new book out. Its title is "On Armor," but thankfully it is not another book about tanks. Most books about tanks, like most books about fighting ships and combat aircraft, fall in the category of children's literature. Their invariable theme is "Look at the big tank/cruiser/fighter go bang/boom/splat."

In contrast, what "On Armor" offers is tanks and other armored fighting vehicles in multiple contexts. The contexts, not the tanks, make this book valuable and important.

One context is combined arms. That tanks fight as one element of combined arms may seem obvious today, but as Gudmundsson notes, it was not obvious to many early tank theorists.

Much of "On Armor" is devoted to discussing the evolution of armored units and the many types of vehicles other arms required if they were to work with tanks. Armored personnel carriers, mechanized Sturm and anti-tank artillery, and armored cars all share the limelight here with tanks.

More important than the vehicles are the functions other arms performed when working with tanks. Gudmundsson correctly writes that in World War II, the Germans always made an initial breakthrough with infantry, saving the tanks for exploitation. Furthermore, when they tried breaking through with tanks, they failed.

Particularly good is the book's discussion of the evolution of the Sturmeschutz and Panzerjager in World War II. In the 1970s, in a small group discussion with Gen. Hermann Balck, someone asked him how, on the Eastern Front, he had used these two vehicle types compared with the way he used tanks. He replied, "I used them all the same way."

Balck is widely regarded as the finest divisional armor commander of World War II in any army, especially for his exploits on the Eastern Front in trapping and destroying three Soviet armies in the early 1943 fighting in southern Russia after the Battle of Stalingrad. When Balck was asked about the utility of motorcycles, another vehicle type covered by "On Armor," he said, "Their only problem was that I could never get enough of them."

Another context that runs through "On Armor" is the tension between two characteristics armored vehicles require if they are to be effective: operational mobility and tactical combat power. Gudmundsson establishes this context at the outset, on the book's first page.

"On Armor" is not just another book about tanks. Rather, it is an attempt to make sense of nearly a hundred years of interplay between the two definitive characteristics of armored fighting vehicles -- tactical utility and operational mobility. The former is the ability to fight. The latter is the ability to rapidly travel over long distances in the absence of significant enemy forces.

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Next: Designing armored vehicles for operational mobility and not just for tactical utility.

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(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.)