This entry is a subentry of Tactics.
Tactics are the specific techniques used by military forces to win battles and engagements. Though the term is sometimes associated with the entire art of fighting, military theorists usually associate land warfare tactics with the organization and disposition of troops, use of weapons and equipment, and execution of movements in offense or defense. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, theorists distinguished between minor and grand tactics, and today they continue that distinction by associating grand tactics (or strategy) with the operational art of war and minor tactics with the tactical level. Such a distinction leaves the tactician concerned primarily with the employment of small units in combat and focused on leading soldiers and solving problems amid the uncertainty and unpredictability of battle.
The first conclusive evidence of the use of ground warfare tactics comes from the Neolithic Age. Primitive warfare consisted of ambushes, raids, and skirmishes and relied on techniques and weapons closely associated with hunting. Although primitive warriors understood the importance of numbers, they knew little about tactical formations and less about command and control. These warriors nonetheless adopted the bow, sling, dagger, and mace between 12,000 and 8,000 B.C. and began deploying troops in column and line, firing arrows in volleys, and enveloping the flanks of an enemy line. Rough paintings of such actions from the Neolithic Age clearly indicate the existence of tactics in this early period.
By the fourth millennium B.C., tactics had advanced considerably. As the extraction and smelting of metals improved, bronze weapons became common, and battleaxes and metal arrowheads influenced many battles. The introduction of the wheel also permitted the invention of the war chariot, a vehicle that improved considerably in succeeding centuries. In the third millennium B.C., the Sumerians in the Euphrates Valley left written evidence of formally organized troop formations, with infantry equipped with body armor, spears, and shields and chariots occupied by soldiers carrying javelins. By 1468 B.C., the Egyptians had mastered the weapons of the Bronze Age and demonstrated the value of superior tactics in the Battle of Megiddo against the armies of Syria and Palestine.
The Greeks and Romans brought tactics to new levels of sophistication. The Greeks relied on the phalanx, which consisted of infantrymen carrying long spears, short swords, and heavy shields. By advancing shoulder to shoulder and presenting a massive array of overlapping shields and spear points, the Greeks could rupture an opponent's front and crush him. Philip of Macedonia and Alexander the Great achieved great success by skillfully employing the phalanx with cavalry, archers, and other lightly armed troops. To obtain greater flexibility, the Romans modified the phalanx and used the maniple and the cohort in their legions; but they did not abandon the idea of placing highly trained troops in carefully organized and equipped formations. Superior tactical methods and organizations proved essential for the establishment of the Greek and Roman empires.
Numerous changes occurred in tactics during the next 1,000 years, but none had a greater effect than the introduction of gunpowder. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, commanders adapted their tactics and made significant advances with formations such as the tercio, which combined hand‐powered weapons with chemically powered ones. During the Thirty Years' War (1618–48), the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus armed his infantry with muskets and pikes, his cavalry with wheellock pistols and sabers, and his artillery with mobile guns. Gustavus then created innovative tactics that relied on close cooperation between infantry, artillery, and cavalry, exploited firepower and shock, and performed well on the offense or defense. His methods demonstrated how the flexible adaptation of technology could profoundly affect battlefield tactics.
In the era of the French Revolution at the turn of the eighteenth century, the French developed tactics that enabled them to capitalize on the initiative and commitment of their highly motivated soldiers. Though some historians have dismissed these as “horde tactics,” French commanders learned through trial and error how to change their formations quickly from column to line and from line to column; they also learned to precede their infantry with swarms of skirmishers and support their advance with concentrated artillery. The result was not an army prepared for the parade ground but one prepared to fight against Europe's best professional armies and defeat them. When Napoleon came to power, he made few changes in French tactics and relied on many of the innovations achieved in previous years, although he received credit for so‐called Napoleonic warfare. His eventual defeat came from his failed strategy and his inflated ego, not from the aggressive tactics he inherited from his predecessors.
Tactics continued to change in the nineteenth century. In the United States, Gen. Emory Upton emerged as the most notable American thinker on the subject. A much decorated and wounded veteran of the Civil War, Upton searched during that war for an alternative to the close order, linear tactics practiced by most units with resulting high casualties. In 1867, the U.S. Army adopted Upton's system of tactics, which included commands and formations enabling infantry, artillery, and cavalry to work together more closely. Recognizing the accuracy of the rifled musket and the rapid fire of the breechloader, Upton proposed organizing the infantry in a single line, rather than two or three lines, and taking advantage of their breechloader's greater firepower. He also proposed making groups of four soldiers the basis of all infantry formations and training infantry to march in columns composed of “fours” and move quickly into line. Such an organization could face in any direction after receiving simple orders. Additionally, Upton emphasized the use of skirmishers to precede and protect the main body of the infantry. These tactics placed a premium on the initiative of individual soldiers and made infantry formations more flexible, but they were only a small step forward in the effort to develop new tactics for a battlefield increasingly dominated by firepower.
Numerous important innovations in tactics occurred during World War I. Many of these changes came from the changing relationship between artillery and infantry. As the artillery changed from a direct‐fire to an indirect‐fire role, and as the volume of fire increased dramatically, the coordination of infantry and artillery proved to be one of the most complex and enduring problems of the war. In essence, artillery support dictated the movement of the infantry and created conditions that made maneuver extremely difficult. The Germans became the most tactically innovative of the belligerents and eventually devised an elastic defense‐in‐depth and infiltration tactics. In both the offensive and defense, the Germans achieved excellent coordination of infantry and artillery, and relied on the maneuver of small units and the initiative of lower‐level commanders. When the Americans entered the war in 1917, Gen. John J. Pershing resolved to abandon trench warfare and restore mobility to the battlefield; but the exhaustion of the belligerents and the tactical innovations of the Germans did more to restore mobility than the vast resources and new energy of the Americans in the brief period of major U.S. involvement.
Tactics continued to evolve prior to and during World War II. The most notable advances again came from the Germans, this time with the integration of tanks and aircraft into the battle. During the May–June 1940 campaign against the French, the Germans combined their infantry, artillery, tanks, and aircraft into a highly mobile, combined‐arms team and drove quickly through Poland's and France's linear defenses. Ironically, the tanks and aircraft received most of the publicity, particularly after the invention of the term Blitzkrieg (lightning war) to describe the operation; but infantry and artillery proved vital to the Germans' success in many of the campaigns' key encounters. The 1940 defeat of France nonetheless marked the flourishing of mechanized tactics and provided a long‐lived model of three‐dimensional mobile warfare. Other innovations during World War II came with the development of airborne warfare and amphibious warfare; but once landed, the forces involved in such operations used tactics similar to those employed by standard infantry units.
In the decades following 1945, commanders faced many new questions about tactics. With the introduction of nuclear weapons, the superpowers developed new methods for fighting on nuclear battlefields. In the United States, the army developed the “Pentomic” division and “checkerboard tactics,” which permitted the dispersal and rapid concentration of units on a nuclear battlefield, but the transition from the doctrine of massive retaliation to that of flexible response eventually resulted in the abandonment of methods appropriate only for a nuclear environment. The outbreak of revolutionary wars around the globe resulted in the development of tactics for guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency, both of which relied on the initiative of small‐unit commanders and the mobility of all units. In this environment, air–mobile operations proved useful, but neither the Americans in Vietnam nor the Russians in Afghanistan achieved strategic success, even though they won numerous tactical victories. By the end of the Cold War, advances in technology had produced sophisticated weapons and equipment that promised many future modifications in tactics.
Through thousands of years, land warfare tactics have evolved as commanders have modified their methods, developed different organizations, and adopted new weapons. Though tactics remained subservient to strategy, the greatest tacticians have been those who recognized the constantly changing nature of tactics—and the unpredictability of battle.
[See also Strategy: Land Warfare Strategy.]
Bibliography
- Mao Tse‐tung, Guerrilla Warfare, 1962.
- John R. Galvin, Air Assault: The Development of Airmobile Warfare, 1969.
- Robert A. Doughty, The Evolution of U.S. Army Tactical Doctrine, 1946–1976, 1979.
- Steven T. Ross, From Flintlock to Rifle: Infantry Tactics, 1740–1866, 1979.
- Timothy T. Lupfer, The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During the First World War, 1981.
- Paul H. Herbert, Deciding What Has to be Done: General William E. DePuy and the 1976 Edition of FM 100‐5, Operations, 1988.
- James S. Corum, The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and Germany Military Reform, 1992.
- Perry D. Jamieson, Crossing the Deadly Ground: United States Army Tactics, 1865–1899, 1994
