Such theories would ironically see their greatest advocates in the early to mid-1980s in the U.S. Army's AirLand Battle doctrine, designed to defeat the military descendants of Tuchachevsky, the Warsaw Pact.
Few new theories advance without hindrance, and such was the case with these. There were many arguments against all of them. Indeed, the arguments particularly held back newer ideas from finding a place in the U.S. Army. In the United States, the Tank Corps of World War I was disbanded, and the National Defense Act of 1920 assigned tanks to the infantry. The doctrine that the tank 'is designed to assist the advance of the infantry and the tank service is a branch of the infantry' lasted until 1930. Even as late as 1930, the newly appointed Army Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, would continue assigning tanks to assist various existing military branches, rather than use them in ways that would be truly militarily useful. In his own words, 'The infantry will give attention to machines to increase the striking power of the infantry against strongly held positions.' Liddell Hart, always impatient with the propensity among much of the military to lock itself into the status quo, would write about such attitudes, 'The most difficult thing with a military mind is not getting a new idea in, it is getting the old idea out.'
In defense of the U.S. Army, we should point out that during the Depression, it had a strength of only a little over 100,000 men, it had little money for research and development, it thought as the nation did that another major war was not in its immediate future, and it was anyhow busy with CCC projects and assisting in maintaining federal law and order. (Today we call these last 'Operations Other Than War.') The cavalry at Fort Riley even wanted to keep its horses. In other words, the context of the times did not help leaders look much to the future.
Meanwhile, land battles in Europe and Africa saw increasing application of new tank and other mechanized technologies employed in battlefield tactics derived from the three war-fighting theories. Spectacularly, the German Wehrmacht stunned the world with their lightning 'blitzkrieg' attacks into Poland in 1939, France in 1940, and Russia in 1941. And Rommel's brilliant flanking maneuvers in North Africa in 1941-42 stunned the world yet again. The Wehrmacht's expert use of both battle in depth and all arms — including air, rapid penetration, and envelopment using mounted forces — not only came as a great surprise to the defenders, it also restored maneuver to the European battlefield lost in World War I. Later, in 1943, British and Soviet formations would apply similar methods and score successes against the same Wehrmacht in both North Africa and Russia. The U.S. Army came to adopt these new theories late, and as a consequence suffered a serious defeat against German forces at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia in February 1943. Learning and adapting swiftly, however, by 1944-45, U.S. armor forces under Patton and others in France and Germany were as expert practitioners of maneuver warfare as any in World War II.
Unlike the Germans, the U.S. Army did not form armored corps or armored armies. They relied instead on the basic division formation for armored forces. Two or more armored divisions could be found in corps during World War II, but at no time did U.S. planners form a totally armored corps for a deep thrust as envisioned by the interwar theorists, choosing short tactical thrusts instead. Even so, U.S. forces were all to a certain extent mobile, given the availability of truck transport.
The large-scale armor successes in World War II, together with the continuing influence of the leaders of armored maneuver formations, would cause maneuver theories and their application in equipment and formations to dominate thinking up through the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Swift battlefield victories by Israel, first in 1956 and then again in 1967, reinforced these ideas.
Many new maneuver war-fighting ideas and theories were advanced and tried following World War II, mostly experiments with forms of movement and organizational changes. Some methods developed in World War II continued. In Korea, for instance, maneuver played a large role, as troops came from the sea at Inchon in an amphibious assault. U.S. forces were mainly foot and truck mobile north, and tanks mainly supported infantry in up to battalion-sized formations, since the terrain did not permit major mounted maneuver.
In 1956, the U.S. Army experimented with and then adopted what was called the 'pentomic' division, a radically new organizational design to allow freedom of action and maneuver options on what was anticipated as a nuclear battlefield. This doctrine was abandoned in 1962 for a return to more evolutionary methods of combining all arms in a division, while retaining the maneuver option.
Mounted soldiers and units played a big role in U.S. tactical victories in Vietnam. The largest ground- mounted unit in that war was the 11th ACR, Blackhorse, which was skillfully employed over a large area of operations in a wide variety of typical mounted missions to inflict heavy losses on Viet Cong and North Vietnamese units. It was not only able to reposition quickly to continually gain positional advantage over North Vietnamese units, it also had a large firepower advantage when finding and fixing enemy forces in the battles that followed.
The most significant innovation in warfare of that generation was initiated in that war, with the introduction by the U.S. Army of army aviation as a maneuver element. First, with experiments at Fort Benning, then later in combat in Vietnam with the 1st Cavalry Division, the U.S. Army pioneered air assault and the use of the third dimension in ground maneuver warfare. The creation of some pioneer theorists and tacticians in the 1950s and early 1960s, air assault and attack aviation led to new thinking and new dimensions of maneuver warfare that the U.S. Army would practice with newer technology during Desert Storm.
The 1967 war in the Middle East demonstrated once again the deadly linkage of tank forces with tactical air when combined in a series of mutually supporting actions.
Yet even as all these events were playing out, and as both NATO and the Warsaw Pact fielded more powerful and capable mounted forces through the early to mid-1960s, a change was taking place that threatened the continued existence of maneuver on the battlefield.
The change most clearly made its presence felt not in Europe, but in the 1973 war in the Mideast.
On the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, 1973, Egyptian and Syrian forces made surprise attacks into Sinai and the Golan with new weapons and new combinations of forces. The introduction in a big way of the SAGGAR missile, combined with an effective air defense umbrella, allowed attacking Egyptian and Syrian forces to gain a series of initial advantages, and in the case of the Egyptians, to inflict heavy losses on some counterattacking Israeli units. For the first time, this broke the Israeli air-ground team. The Israelis fought outnumbered on defense, and after heavy losses themselves but heavier losses on the attackers, they won engagements to go on the counterattack.
The U.S. Army took a very hard look at that war. Fighting outnumbered, and winning, was easy for that Army to identify with, considering its own situation in Central Europe.
The first and hardest lesson of the two-week '73 war was the threat to hard-won battlefield maneuverability. Tanks no longer restored the mobility lost with the demise of horse cavalry. Though the Israelis managed to restore maneuver during the war's closing days, initially, the war pitted brute force against brute force. Forces of roughly equal mobility and firepower faced each other. On the war's first day, with three divisions forward and two to follow, close to 1,000 Syrian tanks attacked Israeli positions on the Golan. A comparable number of Egyptian tanks in the Sinai attacked in formations similarly echeloned, with divisions stacked one behind the other. This echelonment permitted successive waves of mounted forces to hurl themselves at defenders, and then to wear them down and fracture the integrity of the defense. The Arab forces battered themselves against Israeli defenders much as World War I infantry formations did — with the same high cost of people and material on both sides. In both the Golan and Sinai, these attrition tactics, using waves of attacking armor, came dangerously close to breaking Israeli forces. It was only late in the two-week war that Israeli formations were able to stop advancing threat forces and have sufficient combat power to maneuver to positions of advantage on the west bank of the Suez and toward Damascus, east of the Golan.
Gone was Hart's expanding torrent. Instead of the light, speedy breakthrough formations envisioned in the 1920s, attacking softer targets in the enemy rear and shattering the less mobile front lines, mounted forces were now like harvesting machines in a Kansas wheat field. Formations defending front lines in 1973 had as much mobility and firepower as the mounted attacker. Although attacking formations were still capable of sweeping deep to attack vulnerable enemy capabilities there, it was apparent they must also now be principally designed and used as the forces to close with and destroy an equally powerful defending enemy force.
Forces roughly equal in firepower and mobility had been opposing each other since the early 1940s in the deserts of North Africa and on the plains of Russia, but now this was also true on virtually every terrain suitable for large mechanized formations.
