Hendrix's Eccentric Commentary

Scott N. Hendrix,  Ph.D.

hendsn1@gmail.com

Much of the discussion about auftragstaktik seems an example of what has been described as “Wehrmacht Penis Envy,” an infectious fetishization of the German Army and a concomitant belief that its ways should be slavishly copied.  One strong indicator that this syndrome might be in operation is the constant use of the term in German as opposed to using an English equivalent such as “mission orders.”  (If auftragstaktik is being discussed, can paeans of praise to the wonders of bewegungskrieg and the importance of the schwerpunkt be far behind?)  It is always worth remembering that the German Army lostboth world wars and did so badly.

Nonetheless, the German Army, in military terms, did much that was worthy of study and even of emulation but it is not clear that auftragstaktik, as used by the German Army at least, is a technique or doctrine that can or should be exported.  At a minimum it should be noted that the concept of auftragstaktik operates at several level, and while some of these levels are useful today other are much less so.

At its most basic level auftragstaktik is simply the principle that subordinates should be kept aware of the intentions of their superiors so that if circumstances change they can adapt their conduct to them — even if that means altering, or in extreme cases ignoring, their superior’s orders, and that in the absence of orders subordinates should try to act in accordance with said superior’s intentions.  This, it seems to me, can best be described as military potty training — no military organization in the twentieth or twenty-first century would disagree with this principle, though their ability to apply it has varied greatly from time to time and army to army.

In fact it is the ability to apply this principle, rather than the principle itself, that is often what is being debated.  The main reason that most non-German armies, notably the British, American, and Red Army in World War II, did not seem flexible, did not react or respond quickly, could not operate  in accordance with this lower level of auftragstaktik, even though they certainly would have wished to do so, is most likely attributal to the fact that quite often the leaders concerned, from junior to senior, did not know what to do.  This recent publication of  Joerg Muth’s Command Culture:  Officer Education in the Us. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940 (full disclosure, this writer is was an H-WAR List Editor, Joerg Muth sat on the H-WAR Editorial Board) has refocused attention on the question of the comparative value of  German and American officer training.  Reading Command Culture, particularly in conjunction with Robert Citino’s The Path to Blitzkrieg:  Doctrine and Training in the German Army, 1920-1939, andSiegried Knappe’s Soldat:  Reflections of a Germany Soldier,  1936-1949 should convince even the most critical that the German Army simply did a better job of training and educating its soldiers, enlisted and commissioned, individually and in units, than most, probably all, other armies of its time.  In this writer’s opinion at least, they probably were doing a better job than most armies do today.  More generally these works show that the German Army as an institution was  simply much more professional in its approach to military affairs than any army in the world at that time.  In short, it is probable that this lower level of auftragstaktik worked for the German Army because its officers and men had a much better idea of what to do in any given situation.  To put this another way around, to the extent that the German Army was much more adaptable or flexible and showed more initiative and responded more quickly to a given situation, this had more to do with its  superior training and military education than some sort of doctrinal superiority related to the concept of auftragstaktik that they possessed that was unknown to other armies.  If from this we draw the conclusion that armies should place great emphasis on the training and education of their officers and men, then this is almost certainly true, but it also certainly should not come as news to anyone.

This lower level of auftragstaktik is not, however, what is usually being discussed when the subject arises.  Beyond the basic level of knowing your superior’s intentions and acting in accordance with them, there are more advanced levels, and it is these more advanced levels that are so coveted by the enthusiasts for auftragstaktik.  The best known of these more advanced levels is issuing minimalistic orders that state only intentions and leave the means (the execution) up to the subordinates — this style of order is often referred to as “mission orders.”  Beyond this, however, what most admirers of the German Army’s auftragstaktik truly want is more intangible.  This is the German Army’s attitude toward planning and command:  a sense that war is an art form that requires creativity and a belief that well crafted orders — in fact command culture in general — should attempt to release the creativity of leaders at all levels.  In the German Army this attempt to release the creativity of commanders was tied to an emphasis on the offense, a rapid tempo of operations (in less fancy language moving quickly), a willingness to take big risks in the hope of realizing big gains, and what Robert Citino described so well in  The German Way of War:  From the Thirty Years War to the Third Reich, a simple bloody-minded aggression, an attitude of “when in doubt, go beat on someone.”  It seems that it is these intangibles, as much as any method of giving orders, that admirers of auftragstaktik wish to emulate, and it is these factors that are much more problematic.

Auftragstaktik developed in very specific historical, technological, and geostrategical circumstances, and these circumstances are quite unlikely to reproduce themselves in the future.  To begin with, auftragstaktik developed, roughly, in the period that stretched from the Napoleonic Wars through the opening days of the Great War.  This is the period when armies had grown so big that “march separately, fight united” was an absolute imperative, while at the same time communication technology was still comparatively primitive, so these armies would often be out of contact with one another and their commander-in-chief.  Under these circumstances orders, of necessity, had to be very general with much left to the man on the spot, and control and coordination (getting feedback and providing timely guidance) was often just about impossible for the supreme commander.  Under these circumstance, some type of auftragstaktik was not a doctrinal breakthrough, rather it was a matter of simple necessity.

Beyond these general factors there were some features unique to Germany.  As others have noted, Germany faced a difficult and relatively unique military situation:  it was a continental power, surrounded by potential enemies, war could come suddenly, it could involve more than one enemy, and might well take the form of an actual or potential invasions from several different directions.  Under these circumstances strategy was simplified (run the invaders out ASAP), a rapid operational tempo was often imposed by others, quick decisions and speedy movement were required, offensive-mindedness, indeed hyper-aggression, was often appropriate, and preemptive war quite possible.  Moreover the German Army was quite likely to be faced with the need to “fight outnumbered and win,” and running big risks for big payoffs was not a choice, it was a condition imposed on the German Army.  

The point is that many of these conditions were unique to a specific time and place.  Most notably, beginning with roughly the second half of World War I vastly improved communications bridged much of the gap that cut off superiors from subordinates, and issuing timely orders, receiving information and feedback, and coordinating the action of far-flung units became much easier.  This much is obvious;  what is often forgotten is that at the same time there was a vastly increased need for coordination.  Prior to the Great War, as a rough rule of thumb, the only things that could directly affect the battlefield were those things that could see the battlefield  — yes, armies marched separately, this was the famous Grand Tactics of Napoleon, but, they actually had to appear on the battlefield to have a direct impact.  As the Great War ground on, however, more and more distant actors came to play a more and more direct role on the battlefield:  indirect machine gun and artillery fire, air power in various forms, chemical warfare, sophisticated intelligence gathering from sound ranging to signals intelligence — all this and more had an increasing influence on the battlefield;  but these influences could not easily be developed by the mission type orders of auftragstaktik;  they required a great deal of coordination, needed a sophisticated communications net, and in the real world usually required highly detailed written orders that were the direct antithesis of auftragstaktik.

Now the conventional historical account portrays an heroic German Army that, under the leadership of von Seekt and his successors, struggled against this degenerate over-centralization,and rediscovered the purity of bewegungskrieg and auftragstaktik androde these revived principle to victory between 1939 and 1942.  There is, of course, some truth to this.  (It is worth noting, however, that many of the factors listed above as requiring detailed planning to intervene effectively on the battlefield were specifically forbidden to the Weimar-Era Germany Army by terms of the Versailles Treaty.)  The problem is, however, as Dennis Showalter argued in Hitler’s Panzers:  The Lightening Attacks that Revolutionized Warfare, that when blitzkrieg was defeated it was not defeated by opponents who adopted the concepts of auftragstaktik and bewegungskrieg, armies that issued mission orders and embraced their inner LaSalle.  The Soviet Union, for instance, defeated Germany by organizing attacks that often covered huge geographic areas and aimed at, and often succeeded in, producing their doctrinal Holy Grail, the “Deep Battle;”  but they did so through careful top-down management and central direction and control.  Likewise the British began winning in North Africa when they stopped trying to imitate what they thought the Germans were doing and returned to the “Corp Coordinated Semi-Mobile Attack” (Dennis Showalter’s phrase again) they had developed during the Great War — again a carefully directed top-down battle.  “Carefully directed top down” probably best describes the American way of war in Europe in World War II as well.  While broad generalization are always dangerous, is seems plausible to argue that when auftragstaktik came up against skilled practitioners of the set-piece battle, the set-piece won — and that it was the set-piece battle that defeated the Germany in the end.

In short, the German style of command that English speakers usually shorthand as auftragstaktik was obsolescent by the beginning of the Second World War and well on its way to being obsolete by its end.  Moreover, changes since then have only increased the need for top-down control and management:  essentially these are the need to incorporate more and more elements into the battlefield itself — from drones and space power to the dramatic increase in information available at all levels of command, the need to manage and coordinate is only increasing.  Rather paradoxically it seems that the need for initiative and low-level decision-making has not decreased, but the need for top-down management, coordination, and command, have dramatically increased.

Finally it is worth considering why the German Army embraced not just the notion of auftragstaktik but combined this with an obsession with the offense at the expense of defense, hyper-aggression, and a willingness to run great risks in the hope of gaining great rewards?  The answer is obvious, they had to because historically they were usually either considering or facing the actually of a multi-front war.  But the risks they ran strategically, tactically, and in terms of their command culture were immense and they often did not pay off.  Probably the most famous example of the dangers of auftragstaktik for the German Army occurred at the opening of the First World War, when German General von Kluck made the decision to decision to move his First Army southeast of Paris, rather than southwest as had been planned.  This decision was in line with the ideal of auftragstaktik, communications with his superior commanders were unreliable and von Kluck’s move was an attempt to envelope the retreating French armies.  This triggered the Battle of the Marne and arguably ended Germany’s best hope of a quick defeat of France.  In doing so von Kluck conceivably lost Germany the war.  One way to look at this was as a piece of failed initiative, the other way is to see this a failure of command, control, and management.  However you look at it, it was an auftragstaktik-assisted disaster.

The larger point is that the German command culture that led to auftragstaktik, aggression, rapid tempo of operations, offensive-mindedness, risk-taking — all the elements of the German military system that are so admired today and that continue to fascinate military historian and military leaders were the product of weakness not strength.  They were the results of a military system that wrestled with problems that were ultimately unsolvable — how to fight a two-front war outnumbered and win.  Auftragstaktik, and all that accompanied it are risky and broadly speaking risks are things that you run when you have to and don’t when you don’t.  It can be argued that the allies beat the German Army in World War II by slowing down the operational tempo, not by learning to act more quickly that the Germans.  In World War II, the British, Americans, and the Soviet Union adopted a more deliberate style of warfare than the German Army because they had the means to do so and didn’t have to run the sort of risks the German Army did — and this had the added bonus of forcing the German Army to play their game instead of the Allies playing the German Army’s game.

In fact, though it is the worst sort of military-historical heresy to say so, maybe the French, before World War II were righter than they are given credit for with the notion of  the “managed” or the “methodical” battle.  In popular military history at least, Auftragstaktik and bewegungskrieg have acquired such a reputation as the best or the right way to make war (nor, it should be said, has more serious military history succeeded in avoiding this trope) that somehow it seems like the Red Army and the British and American armies cheated — the Russian deployed their “hordes,” or the British and the Americans only won when they had overwhelming material superiority.  There are several problems with this, beginning with the fact that by 1943 and 44 the Russians were running out of hordes, and the Allied material superiority wasn’t always that superior.  In fact, though it might be more dramatic to roar up in a tank and rattle off a couple of mission orders on the fly, it might well take much more skill to organize the movement of huge armies across the ocean or a coordinated attack that spans over a thousand miles in length and hundreds in depth, and that certainly seems closer to what the American Army needs to do today.  Perhaps we need to stop looking at the battlefields of the past to find out what the Germans did right and the British, Americans and the Red Army did wrong and start considering what the British, Americans, and the Red Army did right, and the Germans did wrong.  Perhaps we need to face fact that auftragstaktik and bewegungskrieg are the methods that lost the Germans two world wars, and that a more deliberate style of battle was what won them for the allies.  

And, instead of teaching our military leaders to run around chanting l’audace, l’audace, encore l’audace, toujours l’audace, we might consider encouraging them to sit down, open their laptops and begin to sing:  “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start . . . .