This is coolbert: The organization "Defense and the National Interest" [DNI] has been mentioned before in a previous post. And it was mentioned that this organization categorizes war as being generational in nature. Third generation warfare, according to DNI, is blitzkrieg warfare. War that relies upon the tactics of the breakthrough. Punching a hole in the enemy defenses, allowing mobile follow up units to exploit the gap and get at the combat support and combat service units of your enemy. Continue to advance and pursue, not allowing your enemy respite. Create a situation that results in a total disintegration of the enemies defenses.

And DNI is of the opinion that this generation of warfare began in 1918 with the great German offenses on the western front. [My previous blogs have mentioned that this is not entirely correct. Breakthrough offenses began on both the eastern front and the Italian front in 1917. Both breakthroughs were accomplished by the Germans prior to the offenses of 1918].

Now, the Germans did develop the breakthrough concept and did execute this concept on the western front in 1918. However, this concept, while being valid, did not exactly come to fruition. Those mobile units that would exploit the hole punched in the enemies defenses were not able to continue the advance and pursuit as would have been desired. Two reasons for this. One was that the mobile units were depended upon foot power. They could advance only as fast as the troops could march. And as exhaustion would set in, the ability to continue was limited. Second, once those mobile units got beyond a certain point, they were not in contact with higher headquarters and command. They had broken contact because communications of the time was not able to keep pace. Both radio communications and a means of securing radio message traffic were still in a primitive stage. The concept of breakthrough was valid, but the means of carrying out the exploitation were still limited.

It was not until the years following World War One [WW1] that the technology that allowed for successful exploitation of breakthroughs was developed. This technology relied upon the mechanization of the battlefield and the advent of mechanized secure radio communications.

One technology was a perfection of the internal combustion engine coupled to a more highly developed form of the tank [T-34, Sherman, etc]. Reliable vehicles that the commander could count upon as being more than an experiment. The original tanks as used in WW1 were too primitive to be used in exploitations as envisioned by the Germans. Crews of WW1 tanks used to include a mechanic just to keep the engine running, those contraptions were that finicky.

The second technology that allowed for breakthroughs to become feasible was the adoption by the warring parties in World War Two [WW2] of secure communications using electro-mechanical devices such as the Enigma cryptographic machine. Radio traffic could now be sent in abundance and securely, allowing commanders to control mobile units over vast distances quickly and securely too.

These two technologies allowed for rapid movement of exploitation units. Commanders could now command securely and quickly over distances and know that flexibility and response was possible. And the exhaustion of foot soldiers trying to keep up a brutal or impossible pace was eliminated at the same time.

coolbert.