Book Review: Nature of the Operations of Modern Armies by Vladimir Triandafillov, Edited and with a Foreword by Jacob Kipp

I have no idea how many of even the limited number of people with a serious interest in military theory ever pick up Vladimir Triandafillov's Nature of the Operations of Modern Armies. After all, I find that few of those who gab about ideas bother to get a handle on what the authors they quote actually said, while in the West the tendency is to discount the work of Russian and Soviet theorists altogether --as seen in how in her essay from her academic days, "The Soviet View of Grand Strategy" Condoleeza Rice dismissed the existence of any Soviet thinker to compare with a Basil Liddell Hart in accomplishment or importance. (Some "Russia expert," that--and entirely characteristic of what pass for experts in the Beltway, and with the media. Not somebody who actually knows the subject better than others, but an "insider" who flatters the prejudices of the powerful in a manner that makes those of their idiot courtiers hosting the panel shows look impressed.)

Still, those who learn about the concept of the "operational" level of war, and especially the "deep operation," and want to know more, are likely to come across Triandafillov's name as one of the "big two" associated with it. Especially given that much of the English-language writing about Soviet deep operation theory and history is hazy, and translations of Soviet work into English are pretty limited, they may be likely to take an interest in Triandafillov's book when they come across the title--and then probably find themselves thrown by the book itself as Triandafillov, whose beginning with the characteristics of individual weapons can seem to echo Marx's beginning with the individual commodity may have the (generally right-wing audience taking an interest in such things) suspecting Marxist quackery, subjects them to a storm of numbers regarding everything from the ranges and payloads of weapons systems, to the equipment of divisions, to railroad capacities, plowing through which they may wonder if they are ever going to see anything they would recognize as a theoretical insight.

However, should they persist in their reading they will find a nugget here, a nugget there, with these especially becoming evident as they approach the end of this less than two hundred page text. Indeed, as the book draws toward its close the hazy explanations they encountered before about deep operations, the seeming barrage of numbers, add up to something bigger, the significance of which is the more recognizable if one knows his contemporaries and can thus make comparisons.

Unlike certain theorists of his day who envisioned the tank as making possible dashing races through and behind the enemy lines, Triandafillov understood that motorized and mechanized warfare meant new possibilities for defense as well as offense. In particular motorization and mechanization enabled armies to fall back and recohere--and do that faster than armies can move forward while in contact with the enemy (as all those figures above the rates at which armies advance show). This mattered all the more because of the voracious supply consumption of armies in action, and especially armies moving forward (as all those calculations about rail capacity show), with the gap the bigger given the defender's ability to wreck all the infrastructure enabling supply (rail lines, bridges, tunnels, etc.) as they retreat, the growth of which capacity had been recently demonstrated in World War I. Triandafillov also recognized that, again in contrast with those who pictured those dashing races making plausible cheap, swift victories via knock-out blows of the enemy, that this ability to fall back meant that an opponent of any significant size, fighting across any significant distance, would not likely be knocked out at one stroke, and still less by a penetration along a single axis because of that fallback capacity, the more in as great advances in firepower were going alongside those advances in mobility (as his discussion of all those weapons demonstrated). Where a Hart envisioned those cheap, swift, victories being won with small, high-tech, professional forces, Triandafillov had a very clear grasp of how high-intensity and costly the critical combat would be, and how much a mass-and-attrition affair a major war would be, while not shying away from the likelihood that putting a society through the wringer of another total war fought with even more powerful weapons than the last would push its social system to the breaking point.

Hence Triandafillov's mindfulness of that operational level of warfare that lay between the tactics of a single battle and the strategy of a total war, and the likelihood of a major war (certainly the wars with which he was most concerned, those waged across Eastern Europe's wide, open spaces) being affairs of multiple operations. Hence his concern not for a breakthrough followed by a dash into the enemy's rear, but breakthroughs on more than one side, across intersecting axes, to thwart the attempt of an army falling back in one dimension to recoup for its next stand. Hence his alertness to the vast logistical demands and the grinding losses of these operations, and the need to prepare for them--not least by refraining from fantasies of quick knock-out blows won with audacity, and going about the grim business of having reserves ready to be rushed forward to take the place of casualties, and what today would be called a "whole-of-nation" commitment to the war, as well as his scorn for the Western theorists who dreamed of cheap and easy victories that would "let the professionals get on with the business of war" without worrying about what people on the home front thought about it all. (Hence, too, Triandafillov's broader respect for the importance of new technologies, and the pace of their improvement, without his being carried away by visions of their "changing everything.") And it would seem that all of this was thoroughly validated by the actual Soviet experience of World War II, where Operation Barbarossa proved the hard way that single strokes were not going to win this one (especially against an enemy that, for all its faults, was not led by the incompetent-to-the-point-of-traitorousness and "Better Hitler than Blum"-minded politicians and commanders of the Third Republic), where successive operations demonstrated the value of Triandafillov's concept in the campaigns that broke the Wehrmacht, and ended the war not with the establishment of a thousand year-Grossreich, but with Soviet troops occupying Germany for a half century.

The Soviet Union never produced a theorist to equal a Hart? If it had no theorist but Triandafillov I would on the basis of this one work alone say that it had produced Hart's superior--and that tortuous as the path was to its doing so (passing as it did through the damage done by Stalin's purges, among much else), in the end the Soviets made better use of his insights than the Western Allies did of the insights of their best theorists in that war, to all their cost.