2024-04-08 07:07:49
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Sir Basil Henry Liddle Hart was a British historian and military theorist born in the late 19th century. He became known for the strategy of the indirect approach that he devised, which has a decisive role in the conception of the campaign to this day. The military thinking that preceded Liddell Hart was greatly influenced by Carl von Clausewitz, one of the most important military thinkers in the 19th century, who emphasized the importance of determining the enemy’s center of gravity in battle, and according to his perception, even the soft words of diplomacy are spoken when in the background the great sprout of military decisiveness is hoisted.
On the Western Front in World War I, vast forces collided with each other in an attempt to decide the battle, resulting in millions of casualties in each battle and almost no territorial gains in bloody trench warfare. What ultimately decided the “Great War” was not an overwhelming victory on the battlefield, but rather the resistance of the Allies with the help of their naval and economic power that brought Germany to its knees in 1918.
The futility of the battlefield, along with the invention of the tank and the airplane, led military thinkers between the two wars to develop new combat doctrines that combine technology, strategy and different worldviews. Many thinkers asked themselves how the battlefield could be decided, but the liberal (or even the postmodern) Liddell Hart did not advocate a direct military decision on the battlefield that would result in economic damage and massive destruction in the end. In his approach, he tried to develop a war model in which victory can be achieved psychologically – breaking the enemy’s will to fight.
According to Liddle Hart, a direct decisive battle and putting pressure on the enemy makes him more desperate, more stubborn and geographically closer to his supply lines, actually walking round and round can actually be the shortest way to achieve victory. Instead of breaking the enemy’s center of gravity, bypassing the enemy’s center of gravity and penetrating deep into the enemy’s territory on the path of least resistance and the path of least expectation. The path of least expectation is the place where the enemy least expects an attack, the center of gravity by the way, is probably the most expected place. The path of least resistance is where his powers are weakest. If so, penetrating the heart of the enemy’s country to his rear and crushing his command, control and intelligence systems and undermining the entire formation. Ironically, it was precisely the fascist German army that made very effective use of his theory.
Unlike Clausewitz, Liddle Hart believed that the history of war had something to teach us about the war of today, so when he approached to develop a doctrine of combat for the new armored forces he linked the modern metal tools with the cavalry of the ancient period, both mobile, heavy forces that could penetrate deep into the enemy and create shock. If in the First World War armor was treated as a force that protects the infantry and accompanies it, in the Second World War armor was already known to play a decisive role in creating “Panzer-Shark” (fear of armor) and in deciding many battles.
The Battle of France in 1940 began with a German diversionary attack towards the Low Countries that was seen as a duplicate of the Schlieffen Plan of 1914. According to the defense plan, the Allied forces moved to a defensive line inside the territory of Belgium to prevent the Germans from reaching France itself, but now their right flank remains exposed in an unexpected and sparse spot – the Ardennes forest in northern France, a wooded hilly area with few roads, which is considered almost impassable. The Germans attacked through the Ardennes with large armored forces that created a shock in the French rear and reached the coast in a few days. The detachment of the best British and French forces inside Belgium led to a heroic evacuation operation from Dunkirk Beach and a red carpet rollout for the Wehrmacht all the way to the Champs Elysees and the Battle of France was decided.
There are many examples of the indirect approach in many wars in the world, whether it is the second battle of al-Alamein, the war of liberation or the civil war in Rwanda. The desire to launch an attack to the north on the fifth day of the current war was also an attempt to attack by the path of least expectation, and there is no telling where things could have developed.
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