return to power: the defeat of Austria in 1866 by Prussia and the defeat of France
in 1870–1 by a Prussian-led alliance. Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, who
directed these campaigns, sought to bring ‘the army to the right place at the right
time and in the right combination to avoid stalemate in the field to sustain the
commander’s synergistic relationship with political authority’. His ability to take
advantage of the railroad system, thereby enabling large numbers of troops to
engage in battle under favourable circumstances, and his pursuit of quick and
decisive victories by going on the offensive, meant that he in effect elevated
tactical and logistical considerations into what we now define as operational art.
Erich von Ludendorff’s operations on the Eastern Front (1914–17) notwith-
standing, it would take another seventy years before the Germans again managed
to take full advantage of operational art, in this case in the form ofBlitzkrieg. These
‘lightning wars’ forced Germany’s enemies off-balance through sophisticated
planning and creative implementation that focused on gaining and maintaining
the initiative. This was accomplished by a series of well-coordinated offensive
actions, making the most of speed, daring, and the combination of firepower and
manoeuvre to strike decisively. The German invasions of Poland, France, Norway,
Denmark, and the Low Countries in 1939 and 1940 reflected operational art at its
best, with execution now augmented by air power to support ground forces.
But Germany’s experience showed that operational art by itself cannot ensure
success; instead, it must be coupled with a reasonable strategy and policy. Opera-
tion Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia in June 1941, marked ‘imperial overreach’
and demonstrated the insufficiency of German operational art. Thus, Showalter’s
story is one in which operational art found its place and was carried out superbly,
only to fall victim to unrealistic aims. The founding of the Bundeswehr and the
downsizing of the German armed forces currently leave little scope for Germany to
practise operational art in the tradition of von Moltke’s Prussia.
In Chapter 3, Dr Jacob W. Kipp analyses the evolution of Soviet-Russian
operational art from the perspectives of both war and society, since the military
dimensions cannot be understood without recognizing the revolutionary politi-
cal and societal factors at play in the Soviet Union prior to the Second World War.
The chapter begins by examining the ideas developed by officer-scholars such as
Aleksandr A. Svechin and Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the former emphasizing a form
of attrition as an alternative to destruction of the enemy army and the latter
focusing on ‘deep operations’ and their linkage to the strategy of annihilation.
With the theoretical framework in place, Kipp next examines operational art in
various campaigns and battles during the Second World War, beginning with the
Soviet–Finnish War of 1939–40. This war exposed Soviet military weaknesses that
the Wehrmacht was able to exploit, but the Red Army proved very capable of
learning. Thus, Operation Uranus, the Soviet counter-offensive at Stalingrad that
was launched in November 1942, is often hailed as the turning point of the war;
Russian military commentators today still point to the Battle of Kursk as a classic
example of a successful ‘premeditated defence’ and the ‘point when Germany
finally lost the strategic-operational initiative’; and the author considers the
4 The Evolution of Operational Art