Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: anoeuvre warfare has been a popular concept among Western armies for decades.It remains at the forefront of military thought.As recently as 2023, the then Chief of Staff of the British Field Army, Major General Colin Weir, asserted the need for a restoration of combat expertise in the Field Army: 'all built on the fundamentals of the manoeuvrist approach'.1 Likewise, French Army Chief of Staff General Pierre Schill claimed in 2024 that the battlefield dominance of swarms of uncrewed aerial vehicles will pass and that a manoeuvre-oriented army will remain the appropriate choice. 2 Yet even as manoeuvre has retained its intellectual and cultural dominance in Western armies, defence concepts along part of NATO's eastern front are turning towards positional defences -as seen with the Baltic Defence Line, a new project between Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to construct defensive positions on their borders with Russia and Belarus.For collective defence, there is now an inherent contradiction between how Western militaries would prefer to fight and how they might be called on to fight Russia.1.
Source: The RUSI Journal
Author: Lukas Milevski
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4403306313