Empty battlefield: technological evolution overcomes the risks of troop dispersion

(To Philip of the Mount)
11/10/24

The use of new offensive technologies, capable of hitting and destroying a military device before it has even reached engagement distance with the enemy, the ever-increasing interconnection between the use of physical mass/concentrated firepower and the dispersion of forces, as well as the need to reduce the potential lethality of weapons by dispersing one's forces, have brought back into fashion the tactical concept of empty battlefield (empty battlefield) in the wake of the war in Ukraine.

One of the main criticisms levelled at the situation of empty battlefield in the past years – and partly still today – is linked to the fact that the dispersion of soldiers on a large battlefield reduces the command and control capabilities of officers, not only at the battalion level – which is the highest considered by theory – but also at the company and platoon level. The dispersion of forces in the field would therefore maintain the characteristic of an eminently passive reaction of survival of the soldier with respect to the increased lethality and precision of the weapon systems employed. This is the reaction that the American theory of “Empty Battlefield XXI” he called “passive extension”.

However, technological improvements in command and control functions and equipment, firepower, navigation and mobility on land and in the air, and night vision have diametrically reduced the "perceived disconnect" between officers and soldiers in the case of extension and dispersion, instead giving a turn in favor of these factors on the battlefield. In a scenario empty, infantry forces could “actively” extend to gain a significant tactical advantage. In this regard, it is worth highlighting how, at the planning level, precisely because of these factors, we have moved from sequentiality to simultaneity of the tactical operational cycle.

This has been noted not only in urban battles (which have their own characteristics) but also in open battles, where infantry in closed formations – as used by the Russians to exploit their physical mass – have often had the worst of it against groups in “active extension” and acting as “skirmishers”. In fact, it is through controlled dispersion that light infantry has recovered its fundamental role in battles between conventional forces that, it was thought, technological progress would have compressed and not expanded.

In a certain sense, technological development has allowed us to overcome the risks associated with the "passive" dispersion of forces that writers like the Prussian Wilhelm von Scherff (1876) or the British George Francis Robert Henderson (1898) had denounced, also in the light of dramatic experiences such as the battles of Gravelotte/Saint-Privat (1870) and Abu-Klea (1885). However, episodes of the Anglo-Boer War, such as the battles of Tugela and Spioenkop, or of the Russo-Japanese War, such as the battle of Mukden, had highlighted the possibility of actively exploiting the advantages offered by a dispersion of forces on the field. Cases that, in the light of an unbalanced search for firepower through mass, had not been taken into consideration, determining the predominance of the friction in the two world wars.

Technological conquests have revolutionized the relationship between force employed and battlefield space, just as the idea of command and control by officers and/or commanders of small units in the face of an ever-increasing “active extension” of forces in battle. Technology has blurred the previously clear boundary between the “passive” pursuit of survival and operational efficiency and the “active” conquest of tactical advantage.

Photo: X (Ukraine MoD)