The Ground

by Captain Anthony Rose The ground has forever been the one element of warfare that commanders strive to control. Over the years, terms, such as “good ground,” “bad ground,” “worst ground,” “lost ground,” “gained ground,” and “bloody ground,” have been used to describe battle ground conditions. Technology has allowed mankind to extend the ground over which he fights, to include the sea and air. The three levels of warfare — strategic, operational, and tactical — all have to consider this 360-degree horizontal and vertical battlefield. Terrain The most important aspect of discussing terrain is defining terrain. The U.S. Army has three categories of terrain: restricted, severely restricted, and unrestricted.1 The terrain definitions below cover every type of terrain on the planet, but do not address climate or vegetation because they are not as important to military planners as movement and maneuver. Restricted terrain. Restricted terrain hinders movement in some way; little effort is needed to enhance mobility, but elements may have difficulty maintaining preferred speeds, moving in combat formations, or transitioning from one formation to another. It also slows movement by requiring zigzagging or frequent detours. Restricted terrain for armored or mechanized forces typically consists of moderate to steep slopes or moderate to densely spaced obstacles such as trees, rocks, or buildings. For example, swamps or rugged terrain may restrict dismounted infantry forces, or logistics or rear area movement may be hindered by poorly developed road systems.2 Severely restricted terrain. Severely restricted terrain will hinder or slow movement in combat formations unless some effort is made to enhance mobility. This may require committing engineer assets to improve mobility or deviating from doctrinal tactics, such as moving in columns instead of line formations or at speeds much lower than those preferred. Severely restricted terrain for mounted forces is typically characterized by steep slopes and large or densely spaced obstacles with little or no supporting roads.3 Unrestricted terrain. Unrestricted indicates terrain free of any restriction to movement. Unrestricted terrain for armored or mechanized forces is typically flat to moderately sloping terrain, with scattered or widely spaced obstacles such as trees or rocks. Unrestricted terrain allows wide maneuver and unlimited travel by forces and is supported by well-developed road networks.4 Micro- and macro-terrain. Two other terrain factors include micro- and macro-terrain. Micro-terrain describes those small folds on the Earth that are not visible on a 1:50,000 map with 10-meter contour lines — it is a rock, ditch, tree, forest, or jungle, or city block structure with windows, alleys, and walls. It is where a person or small-unit element can be concealed from long-range observation, or close observation for that matter. It is the modern domain of the infantryman. Macro-terrain is large-scale terrain that can be seen from an observation point, unobstructed, and is dominated by the tank. Most of history’s battles have been fought on macro-terrain — whether at sea to control trade or on land to control avenues of approach and trade routes on unrestricted terrain. Armies designed to fight on macro-terrain were often slaughtered by an enemy that fought on the micro-terrain of severely restricted ground. For example, the Romans learned this lesson in the Teutoberger Wald, and the British relearned it in the forests outside of Fort Duquesne.5 Gaining Global Dominance at the Three Levels of War The strategic level of war is the national level, which is defined as, “the level of war at which a nation, often as a member of a group of nations, determines national or multinational (alliance or coalition) strategic security objectives and guidance, and develops and uses national resources to accomplish these objectives. Activities at this level establish national and multinational military objectives; sequence initiatives; define limits and assess risks for the use of military and other instruments of national power; develop global plans or theater war plans to achieve these objectives; and provide military forces and other capabilities in accordance with strategic plans.”6 The strategic level is most concerned with what is collectively known as maritime mediums of transportation: air, sea, and over continents. This means that at the strategic level, the airspace and sea lanes of the entire world are in contention, and control must be gained — controlling the sea often means controlling the land.7 The Roman road system was a strategic asset that allowed Rome to control the whole of the Mediterranean and Western Europe, which has been a truism throughout history. The Greeks understood the importance of gaining the upper hand on the sea to gain and maintain control of the land. Their victory over the Persian navy at Salamis ensured their eventual land defeat.8 The Romans gained control over the western Mediterranean Sea from Carthage in the Second Punic War, which put them in position to invade North Africa, take the fight to them, and end with the Roman Victory at Zama. In the modern era, the British controlled the sea, which gave them the freedom of movement they needed to move armies to operations in India and North America. The U.S. Navy’s control of the sea strangled the Confederacy during the Civil War. The British navy starved Imperial Germany during World War I and the United States did the same to Japan during World War II. The sea is 90 percent macro-terrain and technology is the key to its domination. During World War I, the British gained control of the sea through the use of superior ships. The HMS Dreadnought serves as a perfect example of gaining the upper hand in technology; the minute she was launched in 1906, all other battleships were rendered obsolete.9 Once all of the industrialized nations had their own fleet of battleships, the utilization of that technology is what counted most. By the time the British navy hunted down and sank the Kriegsmarine Ship Bismarck in 1941, British fire control was a generation ahead of the Germans and made a difference in the ability to hit a target.10 Sinking the Bismarck demonstrated the latest technology, which soon came to control the macro-terrain of the sea — the airplane. British Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers, launched from the HMS Ark Royal, were instrumental in sinking the Bismarck; aircraft sank the HMS Prince of Wales, HMS Repulse, the Italian fleet at Taranto, and the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet at Pearl Har- “Restricted terrain hinders movement in some way; little effort is needed to enhance mobility, but elements may have difficulty maintaining preferred speeds, moving in combat formations, or transitioning from one formation to another. It also slows movement by requiring zigzagging or frequent detours. Restricted terrain for armored or mechanized forces typically consists of moderate to steep slopes or moderate to densely spaced obstacles such as trees, rocks, or buildings.” January-February 2008 — 43 bor. The turning point of the Pacific War was at Midway in 1942 when three U.S. aircraft carriers ambushed and sank four Japanese aircraft carriers. Just as the Dread nought eclipsed its contemporaries, the aircraft carrier now eclipsed the battleship.11 The air is also primarily macro-terrain — the airplane is the technology that allows the warrior to exploit the complete circle. At sea, the vast openness allows aircraft to move unobstructed toward their target; the better fighters with the better pilots gain domination over an entire battlefield. Yet, lack of air dominance will completely paralyze a fleet (Truk), or an army (the German army during the Normandy Campaign). The Normandy Campaign is one of the best examples of how a military must set conditions strategically and operationally to fight tactically. The battle of the Atlantic had to be fought and won; this meant that sub-hunting strategies, such as convoys, sonar, hedgehogs, and radar-equipped aircraft, were needed to end the submarine threat and bottle up Germany’s surface fleet. The airspace over Western Europe had to be dominated. This required superior aircraft, such as the P51 Mustang and the B17 Flying Fortress. Further proof of this dominance is in the fact that only two German aircraft sorties and one group of German E-boats (torpedo) attacked the flotilla at Normandy. Only this level of air and sea dominance allowed the allies to gain a toehold on the Norman coast. Once on land, forces began to move in, only to discover why micro-terrain truly is “in the form of a hedgerow.” Normandy is crisscrossed with walls of dirt and shrubs. French farm fields are surrounded by hedges, which made perfect defensive positions. The terrain was classed as restricted and had a high percentage of micro-terrain. Every square field had to be attacked and taken with a combined-arms force at the lowest level of command, the platoon.12 Platoons required three squads of infantry and a section of tanks set in a support-by-fire position, which was a painstakingly slow process. When the British army attempted to break out at Caen, it moved three divisions of tanks into the unrestricted highspeed avenues of approach north of the city into macro-terrain. The Germans used the micro-terrain and the higher technology of their 88mm antiaircraft/antitank guns to stop the attack well short of its objective.13 The air superiority of the allies allowed them to fly interdiction missions against German reinforcements and isolated the Wehrmacht and Schutzstaffel in Normandy. Once the infantry fight in micro-terrain during the Battle of Villers-Bocage had set conditions, U.S. armored divisions were in position to break out of Normandy into unrestrictive terrain to the south that had a higher ratio of macro-terrain, surround the Germans, and destroy an entire army group. This scenario was attempted again on the Rhine with very different results. The question of technology in macro-terrain requires a look at the tanks used during the Normandy Campaign; particularly, the Sherman and Panther. The M4 Sherman was originally designed to be an infantry support vehicle and therefore was armed with a short-barreled 75mm main gun. This weapon had an excellent high-explosive round ideal for the infantry support role. Combat experience in North Africa reinforced this role as well, as the 75mm was powerful enough to destroy Pan zerkampfwagon IIIs and IVs. In the Battle of Villers-Bocage, the Sherman met a new adversary, the Panzer- “During World War I, the British gained control of the sea through the use of superior ships. The HMS Dreadnought serves as a perfect example of gaining the upper hand in technology; the minute she was launched in 1906, all other battleships were rendered obsolete.” 44 — January-February 2008 “The Normandy Campaign is one of the best examples of how a military must set conditions strategically and operationally to fight tactically. The battle of the Atlantic had to be fought and won; this meant that sub-hunting strategies, such as convoys, sonar, hedgehogs, and radar-equipped aircraft, were needed to end the submarine threat and bottle up Germany’s surface fleet.”

kampf wagen V Panther. This vehicle, with superior firepower and frontal armor, was designed as an answer to the Soviet T-34 tank. On the defense, it was vastly superior to the Sherman, sometimes requiring five Shermans to destroy one Panther. The Tiger was a more formidable foe; one Tiger, commanded by Hauptman Michael Wittmann fixed an entire British brigade.14 However, there were only 93 in the Normandy Campaign; the Panzer Division had two battalions on their table of organization and equipment. The only solution was superior close-air support, numbers, and creative tactics leading up to the breakout in July and August 1944. Interestingly, by September 1944, the Sherman proved its worth during the defensive against the Panther. During the Battle of Arracourt, in the Lorraine region, the 37th Armor Battalion, 4th Armored Division, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams, was faced with the attacking 113th Panzer Brigade. The 113th and several other brigades like it were tank heavy and designed specifically to counterattack Soviet armored thrusts on the Steppes of the Ukraine — a perfect mission for an 85 percent macro-terrain environment. Unfortunately, the Lorraine is not macro-terrain; it is very dense restricted terrain. When the Panthers attacked 4th Armored (one-fourth of its force was dedicated reconnaissance), they lost contact with the Shermans, still armed with short-barreled 75mm guns. As the Germans continued to attack, they regained contact with the Americans, who were now behind them and on their flanks. The Americans had used the micro-terrain to their advantage and wrecked the German formations. By the time the allies reached the Rhineland and Huertgen Forest area, the terrain was so restricted that the fight quickly became micro-terrain. The Germans realized they were in no position to fight on macro-terrain against the American’s air, artillery, and overwhelming armor, so they moved to the restricted forest terrain, with its high ratio of micro-terrain, where they could force the battle into a squad-on-squad fight; and they still had the best squads. The Germans kept the Americans fixed in the Huertgen Forest for months until they were ready to unleash their offensive in the Ardennes. This micro-terrain fight became a common theme in armies that were beset with no air technology dominance. The micro-terrain fight can also be seen on other battlefields where one side is totally dominated by sea and air. Iwo Jima “During the Tet Offensive, the NVA [North Vietnamese Army] took over the old colonial capital of Hue. Once the NVA infiltrated into the city, U.S. and ARVN forces moved in column to dig them out, which gave the enemy an extraordinary advantage in defense. This style of defense was also similar to Iwo Jima; tank canalization, standoff fire, strongpoint matrix, and repeated ambush.”

is one of the best examples. The Japanese carved out fighting positions in volcanic rock on Iwo Jima and set up their defense in depth, arranging their machine gun positions so they could not been seen by U.S. Marines. The plan was to attack the Marines from flank and rear.15 However, the positions were overcome by the incredibly valiant effort of the Marines on the ground. The volcanic rock positions fit perfectly in the severely restricted terrain of Iwo Jima. The United States’ experience in Vietnam illustrates both situations. The Vietnamese had been fighting against foreign armies for some time; they had fought the Japanese and French before the Americans. The Vietnamese used techniques from the Chinese idea of death from one-thousand cuts (lingchi). This style of warfare was designed to fight small-squad through battalion-sized battles in heavily micro-terrain areas and wear down an opponent’s resolve, set the conditions to move an opposing army into macro-terrain, and destroy the remnants of the invaders outright. In the jungles of the Mekong Delta and along the coastal plain, the Viet Cong dug tunnels and fighting positions that were reminiscent of the Japanese on Iwo Jima. The Viet Cong often fought in squad- and platoon-sized elements to harass, demoralize, and spread U.S. and Army of Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) forces thin. They used underground positions and avenues of egress and ingress to prevent fighting to the death. The U.S. forces often assaulted through a position only to find it abandoned.16 These tactics set the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) into position to attack cities all over South Vietnam in the 1968 Tet Offensive. During the Tet Offensive, the NVA took over the old colonial capital of Hue. Once the NVA infiltrated into the city, U.S. and ARVN forces moved in column to dig them out, which gave the enemy an extraordinary advantage in defense. This style of defense was also similar to Iwo Jima, characterized by tank canalization, standoff fire, strongpoint matrix, and repeated ambush. These techniques, along with the ability to exfiltrate out of battle positions, effectively abandoning stubbornly defended positions, wreaked havoc with the attacker’s mind set, confusing and demoralizing him.17 These same tactics are presently being employed by insurgent forces in Afghanistan and Iraq against U.S. forces. Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and Operation Cobra II in 2003 are excellent examples of war in the macro-terrain. Both of these operations first gained air dominance and were supplied by U.S. dominance at sea. The land combat was mechanized with superior U.S. M1A1 Abrams tanks gaining dominance over Iraqi Soviet-made tanks.18 Supporting infantry cleared the terrain once it had been taken, but they did not need to set conditions prior to movement. The loss of the Iraqi army in the macro-terrain in 2003 toppled Iraq’s government. After the end of major combat operations in April 2003, there was a relative calm, at least until 4 April 2004, when the first Sadr insurgency began in Sadr City and Fallujah. This insurgency lead to others erupting all over Iraq, and they continue to this day. The current insurgency in Iraq has lead to the strategic, operational, and tactical overhaul of the U.S. military, most notably, its Army. These changes focus on modular combined arms brigades that can be assigned to a division headquarters. A typical division could have two heavy brigades, a Stryker infantry brigade, a light infantry brigade, and a local Iraqi brigade. In the past, a division was either heavy or light, not mixed for specific missions. The present insurgency in the micro-terrain of the cities of Iraq and Afghanistan require more infantry than armor, but still requires an armor force for true combined arms. Military organization is not the only answer to fighting an insurgency in the micro-terrain. A micro-terrain fight is one of soldier against soldier, not machine against machine. The better led, motivated, and trained squads will win the tactical fight. The better supplied force will keep the squads in the fight, which is an operational dilemma due to the asymmetric style of the combat, and the country must mobilize its economic, military, and media forces to win the hearts and minds of its own populace, as well as that of the enemy. As long as the enemy has the will to fight, it will; all it has to do is exist. Sun Tzu once said that there are two types of combat, orthodox and unorthodox; they way one mixes and matches these two fights are infinite. Today, this translates into the macro- and micro-terrain fight. The decision to take a country to war depends on several factors, but how it fights depends on terrain. A war against another nation state’s army means that it is necessary to first gain global dominance over the macro-terrain of sea and air. The operational level of war must be prepared to fight in the macro- and micro-terrains, which means the right mixture of the combined arms force and the right logistics tail to move it to the battlefield and keep it supplied. The tactical fight means maneuvering the right force to gain dominance over the microterrain and macro-terrain, with technology dominating macro and the human mind dominating the micro. A micro-terrain fight is between squads, and the men who serve in them. The fight is won in the hearts and souls of those men. A nation must be completely prepared to fight in these venues — being unprepared will result in losing to an enemy who is fully prepared to fight to the bitter end. Notes 1U.S. Army Field Manual (FM) 34-130, Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield, U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), Washington, DC, 8 July 1994, chapter 4. 2Ibid. 3Ibid. 4Ibid. 5J.F.C. Fuller, Military History of the Western World: From the Earliest Times to the Battle of Lepanto, Volume 1, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, August 1987; and John Keegan, Fields of Battle, Knopf, New York, 1995, p. 110. 6FM 1-02, Operational Terms and Graphics, GPO, Washington, DC, September 2004, pp. 1-177. 7Roots of Strategy: 4 Military Classics: The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, Command of the Air, Winged Defense, David Jablonsky, ed., Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, PA, August 1999. 8Fuller, Military History of the Western World. 9Wikipedia, “HMS Dreadnaught (Battleship, 1906-1922),” online at http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-fornv/uk/uksh-d/ drednt9.htm. 10Wikipedia, “KBismarck,” online at http://kbismarck.com. 11Tom Clancy, Carrier, Berkley Books, New York, 1999, pp. 13-16. 12Michael D. Doubler, Closing with the Enemy, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 1994, p. 37. 13Hans Von Luck, Panzer Commander, Cassell, 1989, p. 193. 14Patrick Agte, Michael Wittmann, Volume II, Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, PA, 2006. p. 33. 15H. John Poole, Phantom Soldier, Posterity Press, Emerald Isle, 2001, p. 63. 16Ibid., p. 124. 17Ibid., p. 163. 18Tom Clancy, Armor Cav, Berkley Books, New York, 1994, pp. 57-58. Captain Anthony Rose is the commander, A Company, 3d Battalion, 81st Armor, 194th Armor Brigade, Fort Knox, KY. He received a B.A. from Walsh University and is currently an M.A. student at the American Military University Land Warfare. His military education includes Officer Candidate School, Armor Officers Basic Course, and Armor Captains Career Course. He has served in various command and staff positions, to include S3, Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Squadron, 7th Cavalry, 1st Cavalry Division (1CD), Fort Hood, TX; officer in charge, civil-military operations center (OIF), 1st Squadron, 12th Cavalry (1-12 Cavalry), 1CD, Fort Hood; battle captain (OIF), 1-12 Cavalry, 1CD, Fort Hood; and platoon leader, C Troop, 1-12th Cavalry, Fort Hood. 46 — January-February 2008