Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare (review)

This book, by a scholar at Eastern Michigan University who has written previously on German Army doctrine and training, examines war at the operational level since World War II. Robert Citino attempts to gain purchase on such issues as the relative importance of fire and movement, the merits of decentralized versus centralized command and control, and the advantages that well-thought out doctrine and rigorous training confer upon armies. His declared purpose is to discover whether successful campaigns share certain characteristics and to discern any long term trends in their conduct.

These are not exactly new questions. Writers on military affairs and officers at staff colleges routinely grapple with them. Further, Citino's occasional breathless rhapsodizing about what he labels "operational warfare" calls to mind the Molière character's amazement and delight at learning that he had been speaking prose for forty years without even realizing it. To the extent that operational level warfare is an intellectual construct that links the results of battles (tactical events) to national military objectives (strategy), everyone who wages war practices it, for better or worse.

What Citino really means by operational warfare is the military planner's Holy Grail of rapid, decisive victory. To illustrate how—and how not—to attain it, he adduces a number of case studies. He begins with the World War II Germans and proceeds to the Soviets, the Anglo-Americans in northwest Europe, and the fluid first six months of the Korean War. He then shifts focus to the Arab-Israeli contests, and, in the book's freshest offering, the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War and the eight year Iran-Iraq mutual abattoir. Two concluding chapters review the U.S. Army's post-Vietnam renaissance, which included the explicit "rediscovery" of operational art. Citino's account of Desert Storm, like all the campaign descriptions in the volume, is crisp and penetrating. Nevertheless, some will challenge his claim that the dispatch of two Army corps to the coalition's far left before the launch of the main ground offensive—to be sure, an impressive logistical feat akin to Patton's reorienting his divisions 90 degrees to relieve Bastogne in 1944—"was the most audacious decision in U.S. military history" (p. 290). Washington's stroke at Trenton, Winfield Scott's cutting himself free from his lines of communication in Mexico, and Lee at Chancellorsville all immediately spring to mind as better candidates. Indeed, Citino's four-page coda on the 2003 war with Iraq suggests another—the dagger-like thrust to Baghdad along two narrow axes by Army and Marine forces operating with little margin for error or regard for flank and rear security.

Citino makes many arresting observations in his tour d'horizon, but never actually finds the philosopher's stone that ensures operational level success. Perhaps that is because, as every second lieutenant knows, the answer to any military problem "depends on the situation"—the vagaries of enemy, weather and terrain, time, and assets available. Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm compellingly demonstrates its author's assertion that "military history is doctrine taught by example" (p. 35) and illustrates that victory—like history itself—is highly contingent.