Infiltration tactics

Based on Wikipedia: Infiltration tactics

The Death of the Human Wave

Picture the Western Front in 1916. Tens of thousands of soldiers go "over the top," advancing in neat lines across no-man's-land toward enemy trenches. Machine guns open fire. Within minutes, entire regiments cease to exist.

This wasn't warfare. It was industrialized slaughter.

The generals who ordered these attacks weren't stupid—they were trapped. For centuries, the way to win battles was simple: mass your forces, charge the enemy's main body, break through with shock and violence. Heavy infantry, heavy cavalry, sheer momentum. This had worked from ancient Rome through the Napoleonic Wars. But by 1914, defensive firepower had made the classic charge suicidal. Machine guns, barbed wire, and artillery had created a problem that no army knew how to solve.

The solution that eventually emerged—infiltration tactics—would fundamentally transform how wars are fought. Today, every modern military in the world trains its soldiers in techniques that grew directly from the desperation of those trenches. But getting there required throwing away nearly everything military commanders thought they knew about how battles were supposed to work.

Before the Stormtroopers: A Thousand Years of Charging

To understand why infiltration tactics were revolutionary, you need to understand what came before.

The basic logic of pre-modern battle was straightforward. You had your main force—your heavy infantry, your knights, your cavalry. These were your decisive arm, the troops meant to break the enemy. You also had skirmishers and light troops who harassed the enemy, screened your movements, and generally made themselves annoying. But skirmishers weren't supposed to win battles. They softened things up; the heavy troops finished the job.

The charge was everything. Alexander the Great's companion cavalry smashing into the Persian line. Roman legions grinding forward in formation. Medieval knights thundering across the field. The pattern held for millennia: concentrate your best troops, hit the enemy hard, shatter their formation.

Firearms complicated this but didn't fundamentally change it. Napoleonic tactics still emphasized massed infantry columns and cavalry charges. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 saw Prussian infantry advancing in the open against French rifles and still winning through speed, discipline, and artillery coordination. The lesson seemed clear: bold offensive action, properly coordinated, could overcome defensive firepower.

Then came the machine gun.

The Problem Nobody Could Solve

The Maxim gun could fire 600 rounds per minute. A single weapon, operated by a few men, could stop a battalion. Multiply this across a defensive line, add barbed wire to slow attackers, pre-register artillery on likely approach routes, and you had created a killing ground where traditional tactics meant mass suicide.

By late 1914, the Western Front had solidified into continuous trench lines stretching from the English Channel to Switzerland. Neither side could find a flank to turn. The only option was to go through—and going through meant feeding men into the machinery of death.

The numbers are almost incomprehensible. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, the British Army suffered nearly 60,000 casualties. Not in a week. Not in a month. In a single day. The attack had been preceded by a week-long artillery bombardment that fired over 1.5 million shells. It accomplished almost nothing.

Every major power tried variations on the same failed formula. Longer bombardments. More shells. Different formations. Gas attacks. Nothing worked. The defense always had time to bring up reserves and seal any breach. Attackers who did break through found themselves isolated, exhausted, and counterattacked before they could consolidate.

The problem wasn't courage or firepower. The problem was that the entire concept of breakthrough—massing force at a point and punching through—had become obsolete. But recognizing this meant abandoning everything armies had trained for.

Captain Rohr's Experiments

The answer began with a captain named Willy Rohr and a mountainside in Alsace.

Rohr commanded combat engineers—pioneers, in German military terminology—fighting in the prolonged Battle of Hartmannswillerkopf, a brutal struggle for a single peak in the Vosges Mountains that lasted from late 1914 into 1915. Combat engineers were accustomed to unusual work: demolitions, fortification assault, tasks requiring initiative and specialized equipment. Rohr started using them as advanced strike teams, attempting to break French trench lines for follow-up troops to exploit.

His initial efforts failed with heavy losses. But Rohr did something unusual: he analyzed why.

The problem wasn't the concept of small-unit assault. The problem was that his men lacked both the equipment and the training to make it work. Rohr lobbied for and received new gear: the recently introduced Stahlhelm (steel helmet, far superior to the old leather Pickelhaube), large supplies of hand grenades, flamethrowers, light mortars, and light machine guns. These weapons gave small groups firepower that previously required entire companies.

But equipment alone wasn't enough. Rohr realized that using these weapons effectively required a completely different kind of training. Soldiers needed to work in small groups, coordinate without constant orders from above, identify opportunities, and exploit them immediately. This was the opposite of how armies had functioned for centuries.

In December 1915, the German High Command—the Oberste Heeresleitung, or OHL—took notice. Rohr was promoted to major and given the task of training the entire army in what they called "modern close combat."

The Stormtrooper Method

The tactics that emerged from Rohr's training program inverted traditional military thinking.

Standard doctrine said: identify the enemy's strongpoints and destroy them. Mass your forces against their strongest positions. Break through the hard shell, and the soft interior will crumble.

Stormtrooper doctrine said the opposite: ignore the strongpoints. Flow around them like water. Find the gaps, the weak spots, the places where a handful of determined men can slip through. Let follow-up forces deal with the isolated strongpoints later.

This required a radical change in how soldiers operated. In a traditional attack, junior officers and enlisted men followed orders. They advanced when told to advance, stopped when told to stop, attacked where told to attack. The plan was everything; individual initiative was dangerous because it might disrupt coordination.

Stormtroopers operated on what the Germans called Auftragstaktik—mission-based tactics. A squad leader wasn't told exactly what to do; he was told what to accomplish. How he accomplished it was his decision. If he saw an opportunity, he exploited it. If his original path was blocked, he found another. The men on the ground, who could see what was actually happening, made the tactical decisions.

This sounds obvious today. It was heresy in 1916.

In practice, stormtrooper attacks worked like this: small groups of specially trained men, armed with grenades, light machine guns, and flamethrowers, would rush forward using whatever cover was available. When one group moved, others provided covering fire. They advanced not in neat lines but in fluid, irregular patterns, exploiting terrain and enemy blind spots. When they encountered serious resistance, they didn't stop to fight it out—they bypassed it, leaving a marker for follow-up troops, and kept pressing forward into the enemy's rear areas.

The goal wasn't to hold ground. It was to shatter the enemy's command structure, destroy artillery positions, cut communications, and create chaos deep behind the lines. By the time the defenders reorganized, the stormtroopers would be kilometers behind them, and follow-up infantry with heavier weapons would be reducing the now-isolated strongpoints from the flanks and rear.

The Artillery Revolution

Tactics on the ground were only half the innovation. The other half came from rethinking artillery.

Traditional bombardments lasted days, sometimes weeks. The logic was simple: more shells meant more dead defenders. But long bombardments had devastating drawbacks. They churned the battlefield into an impassable moonscape that slowed your own troops as much as the enemy. They warned the defenders exactly where the attack was coming, giving them time to bring up reserves. And they rarely destroyed enough defenders to prevent them from manning their positions when the infantry finally advanced.

Colonel Georg Bruchmüller, working with General Oskar von Hutier, developed a different approach. Instead of a long preparatory bombardment, he advocated what they called a "hurricane bombardment"—short, intense, and targeted.

The bombardment wouldn't try to destroy all defensive positions. Instead, it would focus on specific targets: artillery batteries, command posts, communications centers, road junctions. The goal was to blind, confuse, and paralyze the defense rather than physically destroy it. Heavy use of gas shells (both lethal and harassing) forced defenders into masks, degrading their effectiveness. Smoke shells concealed the exact points of attack until the last moment.

Crucially, the infantry attacked immediately after the bombardment lifted—so quickly that defenders had no time to emerge from shelter and man their positions. This required precise coordination between artillery and infantry, with the shells falling just ahead of the advancing troops in what's called a "creeping" or "rolling" barrage.

The combination was devastating. Defenders who had weathered multi-day bombardments found themselves completely unprepared for attacks that seemed to materialize out of nowhere.

Caporetto: The Tactics Proved

The first major test of the complete system came in October 1917, not on the Western Front but in Italy.

The Austro-Hungarian army had been fighting the Italians for over two years along the Isonzo River, a brutal series of eleven battles that had gained almost nothing at enormous cost. The Italians had strong defensive positions in mountainous terrain. Previous attacks had failed repeatedly.

Germany sent reinforcements and, more importantly, stormtrooper units and their new methods. The attack at Caporetto (now Kobarid, in Slovenia) began with a hurricane bombardment including massive gas attacks. Stormtrooper units then infiltrated through gaps in the Italian line, particularly where valleys offered routes through the mountains.

The result was catastrophic for Italy. Within two weeks, the Italians had lost 300,000 men captured and another 300,000 as casualties or deserters. They retreated over 100 kilometers, losing nearly all the ground gained in two years of fighting. Only the arrival of British and French reinforcements and the overstretching of German and Austrian supply lines stopped the advance.

Caporetto demonstrated that infiltration tactics could achieve operational, not just tactical, success. The question was whether they could deliver a war-winning decision on the Western Front.

The Spring Offensive: Success and Failure

By early 1918, Germany faced a strategic crisis. The Russian Revolution had ended the war in the East, freeing German troops for transfer to France. But American forces were arriving in ever-increasing numbers. Germany had a narrow window—perhaps a few months—to win the war before American reinforcements tipped the balance irreversibly.

The German High Command launched Operation Michael on March 21, 1918, the first of a series of offensives collectively known as the Spring Offensive or Kaiserschlacht (Kaiser's Battle). It was the largest German attack of the war, employing stormtrooper tactics on a massive scale.

The initial results were stunning. Hutier's 18th Army advanced over 50 kilometers in less than a week—the greatest territorial gain on the Western Front since the trenches had first formed in 1914. British Fifth Army essentially ceased to exist as a fighting force. For the first time in years, it seemed the stalemate might break.

But then the advance stalled.

The tactical success exposed a fundamental limitation: infiltration tactics could achieve breakthrough, but they couldn't exploit it. The stormtroopers, by definition, were light troops. They could seize objectives but couldn't hold them against determined counterattacks with heavy weapons. They outran their artillery support. They outran their supplies. The very terrain they crossed—shell-torn wasteland from previous battles—made it impossible for reinforcements and logistics to keep up.

The elite stormtroopers took heavy casualties that couldn't be replaced. Germany had trained these men for years; losing them in a few weeks was irreplaceable. Meanwhile, the Allies, falling back on their supply lines, could reinforce faster than Germany could advance.

The offensives continued through the spring and early summer, each achieving initial success that eventually bogged down. By July, the German army was exhausted, its best troops dead, its reserves depleted. The Allied Hundred Days Offensive began in August, and by November, Germany had surrendered.

The French Parallel: Similar Ideas, Different Conclusions

The Germans weren't alone in recognizing that something had to change. French tactical thinking evolved too, though in a different direction.

In April 1915, the French High Command—the Grand Quartier Général—published Note 5779, outlining new attack tactics. Like the German approach, it called for leading waves to penetrate as deeply as possible, bypassing strongpoints for follow-up troops to eliminate. The French even had specialized teams called "nettoyeurs de tranchée"—trench cleaners—equipped for close combat in confined spaces.

But the French approach differed fundamentally in philosophy. Where German doctrine emphasized individual initiative and adaptation, French doctrine remained committed to centralized planning. The grand plan, devised at headquarters, was still everything. Local commanders were expected to follow the plan, not adapt to circumstances.

The French tactics were employed at the Second Battle of Artois in May 1915. XXXIII Corps advanced an impressive 4.5 kilometers in the first ninety minutes—a remarkable achievement by Western Front standards. But they couldn't consolidate their gains. German counterattacks drove them back. Without the flexibility to adapt to local success and failure, the advantages of initial penetration evaporated.

A young French captain named André Laffargue, wounded in that battle, wrote a pamphlet analyzing what had gone wrong. He argued for mobile firepower to deal with local resistance, coordinated at the small-unit level. His ideas—published in 1915 and widely translated—came remarkably close to what the Germans were developing independently.

But the French Army never fully adopted Laffargue's recommendations. The psychological commitment to attacking in waves, shoulder to shoulder, proved too strong. Commanders believed troops needed the moral support of seeing comrades beside them to advance against fire. The French continued to suffer horrific casualties in attacks that German units, by 1918, would have executed very differently.

The Eastern Exception

While the Western Front calcified into trenches, the Eastern Front remained more fluid. The vast distances meant continuous trench lines were impossible. Cavalry—obsolete in France—remained relevant. The war of maneuver that had died in the West continued, fitfully, in the East.

Russia's General Aleksei Brusilov developed his own innovations. Where German infiltration tactics worked at the small-unit level, Brusilov thought operationally. For his 1916 offensive, he planned simultaneous attacks along a 400-kilometer front, preventing the defenders from concentrating reserves against any single penetration.

The Brusilov Offensive achieved stunning initial success, advancing deep into Austrian territory and capturing hundreds of thousands of prisoners. But it too eventually stalled as logistics failed to keep pace with the advance—the same problem that would plague every major offensive of the war.

The Legacy: How We Fight Today

After the war, different armies drew different lessons.

France, Britain, and the United States largely dismissed "Hutier tactics" because Germany had lost. This was a profound misreading: Germany lost for strategic and economic reasons, not because its tactics failed. The tactical innovations were revolutionary; the strategic situation was hopeless.

Germany itself incorporated infiltration tactics into the DNA of its rebuilt military. The Reichswehr—the small professional army permitted by the Treaty of Versailles—made infiltration tactics standard doctrine. When Germany rearmed in the 1930s, these tactics combined with tanks and aircraft to create what the world would call Blitzkrieg.

The basic concept—combined arms teams, individual initiative, bypassing resistance, exploiting weakness—would prove as effective in 1940 as it had been in 1918. France fell in six weeks not because French soldiers were cowards but because French doctrine was still fundamentally oriented around the ideas that had produced the murderous stalemates of 1914-1918.

Today, infiltration tactics aren't even called that anymore. They're simply how modern infantry operates. Fire and movement at the squad level, small-unit initiative, bypassing strongpoints for follow-up forces—these are basic skills taught to every professional soldier. The revolutionary ideas of Rohr and Bruchmüller have become so universal that they've lost their distinct identity.

What Actually Changed

The deeper transformation was about trust and initiative.

Traditional military organizations were hierarchical because that was the only way to coordinate thousands of men with the communication technology of the time. A commander at headquarters could see the whole battlefield; a sergeant in a trench could not. It made sense for decisions to flow from the top down.

But the modern battlefield moved faster than messages could travel. By the time a headquarters learned of an opportunity, it had often disappeared. The defense could react faster than the offense could adapt.

Infiltration tactics solved this by pushing decision-making down to the lowest possible level. The squad leader who saw a gap in the wire didn't wait for orders to exploit it. He acted. This required an extraordinary level of training—troops had to understand not just what to do but why, so they could improvise intelligently. It required trust that junior leaders would make good decisions. It required accepting that some decisions would be wrong.

This was a fundamental shift in how military organizations thought about human beings. The soldier wasn't a cog in a machine, to be moved and pointed by his superiors. He was an intelligent agent capable of recognizing and exploiting opportunities that no distant commander could see.

The irony is that this doctrine—Auftragstaktik, mission command, decentralized decision-making—is now considered the hallmark of professional military organizations worldwide. The revolution that began in the desperate search for a way out of the trenches became the foundation of modern military operations.

The Relevance Today

Understanding infiltration tactics matters beyond military history because the same dynamics appear whenever technology changes faster than institutions.

The armies of 1914 had institutions, doctrines, and training programs built for the wars of 1870. When technology—machine guns, barbed wire, modern artillery—made those institutions obsolete, most armies couldn't adapt. They kept doing what they knew how to do, even when it produced catastrophic results.

The German army adapted not because Germans were smarter but because they faced necessity. Outnumbered on two fronts, they couldn't afford to waste men in futile attacks. Necessity forced innovation; innovation required questioning fundamental assumptions.

The lesson isn't about tactics. It's about institutional adaptation. When the environment changes, organizations that can push decision-making to the level where information actually exists will outperform those that cling to hierarchical control. This applies to businesses, governments, and any large organization facing rapid change.

The trenches of World War I were an extreme example of technology outpacing doctrine. But the gap between what institutions are designed for and what reality requires exists in every era. The question is always the same: can you adapt before the casualties become unbearable?