Dear Editors,
While reading Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen’s interesting article ‘Combined Arms and the Close Battle in Complex Terrain’ in the December 2003 edition of the AAJ, I noticed a point that needs amplification.
Lieutenant Colonel Kilcullen states, quite correctly, that British artillery pieces never entered Basra, although mortars were employed. He is right, but it should be noted that Basra lies along a waterway that is never more that about 7 km wide. Unlike infantry mortars, field guns were not required in the Basra urban area to deliver mobile firepower. The Autumn 2003 issue of the Journal of the Royal Artillery reports that the whole of Basra was a Restricted Fire Area. Every fire mission had to be cleared by the British 7th Armoured Brigade fire support command centre (although it remains unclear whether this restriction was applied to the use of medium mortars).
The Journal of the Royal Artillery also reports that the AS90 proved to be incredibly accurate, destroying bunkers and buildings with opening rounds at converge— that is, the rounds were not adjusting. The accuracy achieved has been accredited to survey, meteorology, to 1:15 000 scale maps and to MV radar. An indicator of AS90 firepower is that a round of fire from a battery delivers 90 kg of RDX/TNT and about three times that weight of metal. Three rounds of FFE (fire for effect) can be delivered in the space of 10 seconds by AS90 and by similar modern guns that both the US and Israeli militaries currently lack. Such delivery is far quicker and more assured than munitions from ‘Tac Air’ or from the use of attack helicopters. In short, artillery firepower can dominate in urban areas with an acceptable risk of collateral damage. Such a capability is likely to increase in the future with the likely introduction of precision munitions with specialised effects.
Nigel Evans
Castle Hill, NSW
To the Editors,
I am writing to express my concern about the edited version of my article published in the December 2003 Australian Army Journal. My argument was that, while there was a partial divergence between the armies of Canada and Australia during the Cold War, there has been a substantial reconvergence in the post–Cold War era. For example, both countries have contributed remarkably similar forces to a range of missions together, including Namibia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia, East Timor, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan.
I thought that my argument for reconvergence between the Canadian and Australian armies was too diluted in the published article. Today, both Australia and Canada face similar organisational, financial, equipment and procedural challenges as junior partners in US-led coalition operations in the Middle East (in Iraq and Afghanistan respectively) while their navies and air forces still work alongside one another in the same region. Furthermore, conceivably both countries could have committed forces alongside each other in Kuwait and Iraq in 1990 and again in 2003, if their respective policies had only slightly varied from actual outcomes.
The point I was trying to make was that we should seriously rethink the nature of our military-to-military relationship with the Canadians because there are so many similarities that present cooperative synergies for force structure development and prospective coalition operations. After all, both Canada and Australia remain equidistant to the north-eastern Asian trouble-spots. Both states remain seriously engaged in the Middle East and both nations have been most effective in battle when they have worked together—at Amiens in August 1918 and in Korea at the Battle of Kapyong in April 1951. While geographically distant from one another, Canada and Australia are ‘strategic cousins’, although not quite siblings. Today, more than ever, and with the significance of NATO in decline for Canada, Canadians are looking to Australia in general and to the Australian Defence Force in particular to serve as a model and partner in order to reinvigorate their own military forces.
Lieutenant Colonel John Blaxland
Canberra, ACT
The Editor's Reply
The content of each edition of the AAJ is considered and approved by the Editorial Advisory Board in consultation with the Editors. During the editing process, every effort is made to cooperate with individual contributors in order to ensure that their expectations match the requirements of the journal. The AAJ reserves the right to edit submissions in order to meet space limitations and to conform to the journal’s style, format and international standards of publication.
To the Editors,
I was much taken with Major Robert Worswick’s excellent article, ‘New Strategy for New Times: The Failings of Defence of Australia’, published in the December 2003 issue of the AAJ. Excluding the political elements of the Defence of Australia (DOA) credo, I could never understand the Defence establishment’s infatuation with the doctrine. As Major Worswick points out, DOA involved us in committing almost the totality of our military resources to dealing with our least likely strategic problem.
More importantly, no-one with any knowledge of Australia’s strategic history could have believed in DOA as a credible security strategy. In every war and crisis, Australian forces have deployed away from home because it has always been the case that our interests rather than our territory have been at stake. It was our persistent failure over a century or more to define, or even discuss in public, those interests that led us down the dead end of DOA doctrine. Of course, DOA has always had its protagonists. Indeed, the Army’s enthusiasm for DOA long predated Paul Dibb in the 1980s and had an important underpinning in the 1920 Senior Officers’ Conference.
The doctrine of DOA was given new life by the loss of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and as it was formalised during the 1980s, its principles came close to disrupting the ANZUS alliance. From my personal knowledge, I am aware that the Reagan Administration in 1986 was in two minds about DOA, given what the Americans at the time considered to be its apparent abandonment of alliance obligations. The State Department tolerated DOA; the Pentagon, on the other hand, argued that the alliance and DOA could not comfortably coexist. In the event, the AUSMIN Conference of August 1986 in Washington saw the visiting Australian ministers commit themselves—probably under some pressure—to maintaining all Australian obligations under ANZUS. The only real puzzle in the dead end of DOA is why so many Australian policy-makers took the better part of two decades to look upon the world as it is, rather than as they would like it to be.
Michael O’Connor
Victoria
To the Editors,
In the December issue of the 2003 AAJ, Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen presented an interesting and valuable essay on infantry combat in complex terrain as fought by a company down to section level. The article highlights the Australian Army’s need for an improved combined-arms capability.
There are, however, several issues raised in the article that are open to differing interpretations. The difference between manoeuvre and movement is one of these issues. Manoeuvre involves the positioning of forces by a commander in order that they can effectively conduct a battle, campaign or war. In battle, we sometimes conduct fire in movement in order to allow us to manoeuvre subsequently. Similarly, we sometimes manoeuvre in order to be able to conduct fire in movement. The important point to note here is that it is the forces in contact that conduct fire in movement while the forces not in contact carry out manoeuvre.
Lieutenant Colonel Kilcullen states that, when fighting in complex terrain, points rather than lines seem to be of more tactical importance. He also argues that ‘in the close fight, soldiers tend to operate in small semi-autonomous teams that flock or swarm’. Yet, it appears to me that, at the section level, close battle is nearly always point-suppressive and that, mathematically speaking, a line is nothing more than a number of connected points. The article appears to suggest that, under point or nodal attack, manoeuvre supports fire, with soldiers manoeuvring in order to generate effective fire. Is it not perhaps more accurate to state that troops in contact always move to a position where they can generate the most effective fire? After all, movement and fire have a reciprocal relationship.
Finally, in his hypothetical infantry company attack on a village defended by a platoon, Lieutenant Colonel Kilcullen suggests that the tactical sequence should be one of investment [cordon off at a distance], followed by a break-in, infiltration, assault and exploitation. I would have thought that, given this situation, investment, in this sense, is manoeuvre, while break-in, infiltration, firefight and assault are all part of fire and movement?
Brigadier Brian Cooper (Retd)
Qld
The Author Replies
For a whole generation of Australian Army officers, the ideas of manoeuvre, movement, speed and fluidity have positive connotations. Conversely, ‘firepower’, ‘attrition’ and ‘suppression’ have negative connotations. Army officers often see attrition as the evil twin of manoeuvre. Under this paradigm, a good commander is one that applies fire to enable manoeuvre (out of contact) or movement (in contact).
In complex terrain, however, manoeuvre often supports fire. We manoeuvre (out of contact) to commence combat under the most favourable circumstances—hence the relevance of the investment described in the hypothetical company attack in my article. We move (in contact) in order to position ourselves better for the successful delivery of fires. As precision weapons and situational awareness improve, combat in complex terrain is increasingly about the application of highly accurate firepower that is delivered from relatively static positions. For instance, in the battle of Basra, there were no riflemen at all in the British section organisation, yet every soldier carried what would (in Australian doctrine) be considered a ‘fire support’ weapon. The fighting by the British in Basra, using small semi-autonomous teams is rated by many observers as being among the most successful actions of the Iraq War.
Brigadier Cooper’s comment about points and lines perhaps reflects an era in the 1960s and early 1970s when combat experience was widespread in the Australian Army. Today, actual combat experience (as distinct from operational experience) is extremely rare. The point made by Brigadier Cooper in his letter that ‘troops in contact always move to a position where they can generate the most effective fire’ is a reflection of how matters should be, and perhaps were, during and after the Vietnam War. In contemporary conditions, inexperienced troops in contact, unless they are trained otherwise, tend to move in straight lines, maintaining alignment and applying linear control measures. The data on the performance of units in the field at various Combat Training Centres supports this conclusion.
My argument is that manoeuvre primarily happens around the flanks of the close combat battle. In the close fight itself, movement—and limited nonlinear movement at that—supports fire, and it is the precise application of direct fire that wins an encounter. Contemporary operations increasingly occur in complex, urbanised environments and our tactical commanders must grasp this reality and learn to apply the appropriate tactics.
Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen
Army Headquarters
Canberra
To the Editors,
Congratulations to the AAJ (December 2003 issue) for publishing Michael Evans’s excellent review essay on Richard Cohen’s fascinating book, By the Sword. There is one aspect of both book and review, however, that requires clarification. Both Cohen’s book and, by extension, Evans’s review attribute the destruction of the Roman infantry at the battle of Adrianople in 378 AD to Visigothic cavalry using the stirrup, which enabled mounted troops to wield long swords with previously unknown efficiency. From a historical perspective, this assumption is open to question.
First, at the time of Adrianople, the cavalry stirrup was not a new invention. On the contrary, the device had been used by the Sarmatians and Alans for some four centuries before the battle of Adrianople, and was, in fact, well known to the Romans through their long frontier struggles against these nomadic horsemen.
Indeed, 8000 stirrup-equipped Sarmatian heavy cavalry were used by the Roman army as auxilia in 175 AD. Furthermore, documentary evidence suggests that Sarmatian cavalry were stationed in Egypt and Britain probably until the early 5th century.
The Romans appear to have made a deliberate choice not to use the stirrup in their approach to warfare. Evidence suggests that the later Roman military found the Celtic horned saddle (adopted from another barbarian enemy) to be adequate for their cavalry and mounted infantry operations. The effectiveness of the four-horned saddle in cavalry operations has only been realised by modern scholars during the past two decades following the discovery of bronze and leather saddle remains at archaeological sites in Britain, Germany and the Netherlands.
Moreover, Adrianople was not simply a clash between Roman short sword and babarian long sword. The Roman Army destroyed at Adrianople was no longer generally employing the short, thrusting blade introduced into the Roman military during the Republican period as the gladius hispaniensis (Spanish short sword). Archaeological evidence suggests that, after about 150 AD, the longer spatha, a Celtic slashing sword originally employed by the Roman cavalry, began gradually to replace the thrusting gladius. By the time of Adrianople, the employment of physically larger Gallo-Roman and Germanic troops had led to the use of longer and heavier swords throughout the Roman Army.
The outcome of the battle of Adrianople is not so much a case of the triumph of stirrup and long sword as a case of poor Roman generalship. The Emperor, Valens, foolishly allowed the Roman legions to be defeated in detail. His pre-battle reconnaissance was poor, failing to locate a large enemy cavalry force; he selected a poor site for the battle and did not consolidate his forces before hostilities commenced. Finally, Valens allowed his infantry to be hemmed in by the enemy, thus preventing the Roman infantry from deploying in formation to defend themselves against the Visigothic cavalry. These basic tactical errors allowed the mounted Visigoths to attack Valens’s left flank before it had fully extended and after the Roman cavalry on the right flank had been routed. Moreover, had Valens waited for his ally, Gratian, to arrive with his Gallic reinforcements, the Visigoths would have been outnumbered and perhaps outfought. Victory may have gone the other way and the stirrup would not have been ‘invented’ at the battle of Adrianople.
Lieutenant Commander Glenn Kerr
Sea Power Centre
Royal Australian Navy
