Manchuria, three Russian armies had faced five Japanese armies with neither side
able to achieve decisive results in the field. Russia’s ‘advanced guard’, as he called
General Kuropatkin’s armies, had lacked an effective system of command and
control, never seized the initiative, but had never suffered annihilation. Japanese
employment of the strategy of the extended line had forced the Russian armies to
withdraw rather than face encirclement as was the case at the last major land
engagement of the war at Mukden in February–March 1905. In the end, the war
was decided by revolution at home. Russia sued for peace, while the tsarist govern-
ment sought by a combination of reform and repression to stem the tide.
Following that war, Russian military reformers, including Svechin, had sought
to understand modern war and to develop a military doctrine that would respond
to its demands. Fronts appeared as the higher headquarters to exercise command
and control of multiple armies under the overall direction of the Stavka. Svechin
was one of the reformers to call into question the strategic obligations that Russia
assumed in its alliance with France, criticizing the commitment to an initial
offensive against East Prussia before Russia could complete its mobilization and
deployment of forces, and proposing that France assume the defence against the
initial German offensive. His fears were dismissed in higher political and military
circles of the old regime. No one in St. Petersburg dared to antagonize the French
after the disaster of the Russo-Japanese War. On reviewing the Great Military
Programme of 1909, Svechin understood that, while tsarist Russia had increased
its mobilization potential by raising reserve forces from deep within the empire, it
had not fundamentally changed the pace of the deployment of those forces to the
threatened fronts. Russia’s railroad system could not make its supposed ‘steam-
roller’ move any faster.
As the leading Soviet expert on the lessons of the First World War, Svechin
appreciated the difference between the wars fought on the Western Front with its
immobile trench lines and theGummikrieg(rubber war) on the Eastern Front,
where advances were possible but decision elusive. He was well aware of the success
which General Aleksei Brusilov had achieved on the Austrian Front in the summer
of 1916 and noted operational and tactical innovations (broad-front attack,
extensive preparation of the assault troops, short and precise artillery preparation,
and small-unit infiltration of the Austro-Hungarian trenches) that contributed to
both the breakthrough and exploitation of the initial success. But he questioned
the logic of continuing such operations to support Allied efforts on the Somme,
when a German counter-offensive was imminent. The debacle in Romania, after it
entered the war, unhinged the Russian line and undercut any further major
offensive operations until the ill-starred Kerensky Offensive of 1917.
Unlike the young Red commanders, who saw class warfare as the dominant form
of future conflict, Svechin did not see the victories against the Whites as harbin-
gers of future war. Instead, wars between nation states posed the greatest threat to
the Soviet Union as an international pariah. To his eye, the case worth study and
consideration was the failed Soviet offensive against Pilsudski’s Poland. Here,
he saw multiple operational problems, from ineffective command and control
to operational overreach beyond culmination exposing the Red Army to a
68 The Evolution of Operational Art