(7) MECHANIZED & ARMORED WAR

 

Where the steam engine transformed naval warfare, the internal combustion engine transformed warfare on land – as well as the balance between land and sea in warfare.

Let me elaborate.

Sure, the steam engine, used for trains and railways, also transformed warfare on land but more in logistics and mobilization than actual combat.

However, to transform combat on land – and replace cavalry for mobile warfare – it took the advent of the internal combustion engine for vehicles used in war from the twentieth century onwards.

What is often overlooked is that the advent of the internal combustion engine in war also reversed the balance between a seaborne invading force and the land-based defending force. Prior to the internal combustion engine, a seaborne force had the advantage of greater mobility and speed bringing troops and supplies to a beachhead over the land-based force defending it. After the internal combustion engine, the land-based force had that advantage.

Mechanized warfare, often interchangeably used with armored warfare given how much both are represented tanks, “is the operational use of armored fighting vehicles—such as tanks, armored personnel carriers, and self-propelled artillery—combined with motorized infantry to achieve rapid movement, high firepower, and protection on the battlefield. It represents a shift from infantry-centric fighting to machine-driven combat, originating in WWI”.

While the tank is definitive of mechanized warfare (and obviously of armored warfare), it is not the war-breaking weapon in isolation as it is often seen to be in popular imagination. Indeed, tanks in isolation without support are dangerously vulnerable to counterattack, particularly with the advent of artillery and infantry anti-tank weaponry in the Second World War. I’ve read that tanks aren’t even the best weapon to use against other tanks.

Instead, tanks are used as part of combined arms strategy or tactics – “much of the application of armoured warfare depends on the use of tanks and related vehicles used by other supporting arms such as infantry fighting vehicles, self-propelled artillery, and other combat vehicles, as well as mounted combat engineers and other support units”.

The use of tanks has been inflated in popular imagination by their identification as the instrument of German blitzkrieg in the Second World War. Setting aside that blitzkrieg itself was a propaganda term applied to traditional German maneuver warfare (Bewegungskrieg), tanks were obviously important but as a component of combined arms – H.P. Willmott argued that the use of radio (to coordinate combined arms) was the more decisive component. Even then, the success of German “blitzkrieg” reflected a brief window where the balance swung in favor of mobile offensive firepower over defence, but the balance swang back towards defensive firepower during the Second World War – hence the strength of German defence in the latter part of the war and the relatively greater force the Allies required to overcome it.