Outnumbered and outgunned by the Red Army, the Germans pinned their hopes on a mobile, aggressive defense to stop a relentless series of Soviet offensives in Ukraine and southern Russia.
The US Army’s field manual of operational terms defines active defense as “the employment of limited offensive action and counterattacks to deny a contested area or position to the enemy.”
But that isn’t what Ukraine is doing, Douglas Nash, a retired US Army colonel and author of several books on German military operations in World War II, told Business Insider.
The classic example is the Third Battle of Kharkov in February 1943, when von Manstein’s unleashed a planned counterblow that annihilated Soviet armor pursuing the retreating Germans after Stalingrad.
NATO embraced the concept as a response to the USSR’s numerically superior Warsaw Pact forces, and the devastating effect of modern weapons seen in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
“Yet with overwhelming Soviet military power arrayed against it, NATO — led primarily by the US — felt it had no other choice.” By the 1980s, the US Army had switched to the AirLand Battle concept, which envisaged taking the initiative in offensive operations to defeat an enemy attack.
The original article contains 1,456 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Outnumbered and outgunned by the Red Army, the Germans pinned their hopes on a mobile, aggressive defense to stop a relentless series of Soviet offensives in Ukraine and southern Russia.
The US Army’s field manual of operational terms defines active defense as “the employment of limited offensive action and counterattacks to deny a contested area or position to the enemy.”
But that isn’t what Ukraine is doing, Douglas Nash, a retired US Army colonel and author of several books on German military operations in World War II, told Business Insider.
The classic example is the Third Battle of Kharkov in February 1943, when von Manstein’s unleashed a planned counterblow that annihilated Soviet armor pursuing the retreating Germans after Stalingrad.
NATO embraced the concept as a response to the USSR’s numerically superior Warsaw Pact forces, and the devastating effect of modern weapons seen in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
“Yet with overwhelming Soviet military power arrayed against it, NATO — led primarily by the US — felt it had no other choice.” By the 1980s, the US Army had switched to the AirLand Battle concept, which envisaged taking the initiative in offensive operations to defeat an enemy attack.
The original article contains 1,456 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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