By Paul Weiser
A major military innovations of the First World War - perhaps the greatest - was neither massed machine-gun fire, trench warfare, nor aviation. It was, rather, a spectacularly successful operational concept so productive that every army on earth has adopted it (at least in theory) - despite its fatal flaw.
The concept - more than tactic, less than strategy - is infiltration. This is the practice of sending small units through the enemy's forward position by using smoke screens and terrain cover, then either bypassing those positions to attack rear areas or attacking his forward positions from their flanks and rear. It's the opposite of frontal assault. Originally developed by Austro-Hungarian mountain troops, infiltration tactics nearly defeated the Entente in 1918 and did knock Italy out of the war at Caporetto.
Infiltration tactics require a particular type of soldier: one who presses on even when his small unit is safely unobserved by senior officers. He's a "front fighter," thriving on chaos and surprise, death and ruin. This is the fatal flaw.
For when the front fighter's small units emerge from the last of the enemy's defenses, having defeated them all, they arrive in a foreign landscape, serene and well-ordered, the antithesis of the front's moonscape drenched in yellow fluid. When German storm-troops (the term's original meaning, before Nazi politics) broke through into the green French countryside, they disintegrated into looting, wine-swilling mobs instead of re-forming conventional regiments and divisions.
In a way, this happened to allied forces in Iraq: the press through (mechanized war is infiltration at speed) followed by confusion when overt resistance ceased. American disintegration has been political rather than military, for the most part, but the problem remains: the green fields beyond (in the words of the Royal Tank Regiment's motto) are a trap for the victor, preventing his victory's consolidation.
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