Deep Battle Tactics
Prerequisites
Requires:
- Assault Tactics
- Supersonic Flight
Statistics
Gives:
- Attack Helicopter
- Commando
Gameplay
Deep Battle, or reaching into the enemy rear to strike unprotected targets, opens the door to a whole new arena of combat. It offers new units for striking deep like the Assault Helicopter for regular attacks and the Commando for Special Operations.
Historical
Deep Battle was originally a Soviet military term. First theorized by Svechin and others in the 1920s, Tukhachevskii and Yegorov made it explicit doctrine in the PU1936 Official (Combat) Regulations: "Simultaneous assault on enemy defenses by aviation and artillery into the depths of the defense." Unfortunately, both Yegorov and Tukhachevskii were shot on Stalin’s orders in the following year, and the German blitzkrieg became the model of actual Deep Battle Tactical operations in World War Two: penetrating the defenses and striking deep to disorganize, surround, and annihilate the enemy. In the 1970s the US Army took up the idea of Deep Battle as a method of canceling their Soviet opponents huge numerical superiority in ground forces in Europe: if you destroy the enemy before he gets anywhere near you, numerical superiority is irrelevant. The US military concentrated on weapons and methods that could ’strike deep’ into the enemy rear to degrade his forces before they ever got to the battlefield: assault helicopters, air strikes, long range Special Forces infantry and long range rocket artillery. The US version of Deep Battle was field tested in Kuwait in 1991, when the Iraqi army was attacked simultaneously from its front line trenches all the way back to Baghdad. Reserves, air support, artillery support, supplies, mobility, and morale were all crushed by air, rocket, helicopter, naval, cruise missile strikes and finally, by a piledriver assault by highly trained mobile forces. Deep Battle Tactics properly applied resulted in one of the most lopsided victories ever achieved in modern war.