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When Wargaming Turns from Alternate To Actual History

I feel like I also ended up in similar territory with Volume VIII of "Look to the West", where the Russians invade Poland and everyone expects it to be WW2-like tank blitz and air superiority, but due in part to anti-tank weapons and the outbreak of plague it devolves into WW1-style near-static trench warfare relying on infantry and artillery while everyone eventually also starts hitting each other with rocket missiles. When it's published, I bet nobody will believe I wrote that in 2021.
 
Thande said:
I feel like I also ended up in similar territory with Volume VIII of "Look to the West", where the Russians invade Poland and everyone expects it to be WW2-like tank blitz and air superiority, but due in part to anti-tank weapons and the outbreak of plague it devolves into WW1-style near-static trench warfare relying on infantry and artillery while everyone eventually also starts hitting each other with rocket missiles.
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I feel obligated to say this is another pop-culture vs. serious analysis mismatch. The pop culture interpretation of WW1, which the Maneuver War Pentagon Reformer Boyd-Lind crowd has amplified constantly, is of drooling firepower and manpower commanders constantly pushing forward until the Germans figured out how to break it through compound-word wundertaktik.

In actuality, artillery hasn't gotten any less lethal than in the 1910s, so entrenching when faced with it is still essential. Post-WW1 conflicts can and have had long periods where the lines didn't move very much. The real big issue on the WW1 western front was that all the technology lined up in a way that made a strategic offense hard to do. Yes, tactically you could infiltrate and batter your way forward, but what you needed to exploit it was too fragile and/or immobile to work. Whereas what the opponent could use to counter it wasn't (to oversimplify it). What really changed later on was that better motor vehicles, aircraft, and communications made the attacker better able to take advantage of tactical successes.

(Sorry this is a bugaboo of mine :p )
 
Coiler said:
I feel obligated to say this is another pop-culture vs. serious analysis mismatch. The pop culture interpretation of WW1, which the Maneuver War Pentagon Reformer Boyd-Lind crowd has amplified constantly, is of drooling firepower and manpower commanders constantly pushing forward until the Germans figured out how to break it through compound-word wundertaktik.

In actuality, artillery hasn't gotten any less lethal than in the 1910s, so entrenching when faced with it is still essential. Post-WW1 conflicts can and have had long periods where the lines didn't move very much. The real big issue on the WW1 western front was that all the technology lined up in a way that made a strategic offense hard to do. Yes, tactically you could infiltrate and batter your way forward, but what you needed to exploit it was too fragile and/or immobile to work. Whereas what the opponent could use to counter it wasn't (to oversimplify it). What really changed later on was that better motor vehicles, aircraft, and communications made the attacker better able to take advantage of tactical successes.

(Sorry this is a bugaboo of mine :p )
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I am aware of this - it's something I notice when people start learning military history, they're surprised to learn that trench warfare was not an exclusve WW1 thing but is still around. I probably didn't explain what I meant very clearly, but I was specifically referring to the impact of anti-tank weapons. I also made a tenuous comparison at the time to a thought experiment Dale Cozort did many years ago about Poland stopping the Blitz with an anti-tank weapon (which he made clear was hand-wavy, it was in response to an AH challenge question).
 
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