Ukraine and the "Non-Battle"

One of the more intriguing aspects of the Ukraine war at least in its first month is that country’s success at winning the “non-battle.”

By “non-battle,” I’m referring to a term coined in 1975 by a French officer, Guy Brossollet, in his Essai sur la non-bataille (Essay on the Non-Battle). The basic idea is to avoid the kind of decisive battle the likes of Napoleon, Clausewitz, and Foch trumpeted, and which called for maneuvers by massed armored forces of a kind epitomized by the German Blitzkrieg or the Israel Defense Forces in 1967. Instead, the idea was to use dispersed, mobile, and largely autonomous small units armed most notably with anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) to swarm the adversary’s formations from all sides, break them apart, and destroy them piecemeal, reserving one’s own armor for select rapid hammer blows when and where the opportunity arose.

This is not to say Ukrainians have read or even heard of Brossollet. Rather, they, either independently or with the aid of their NATO tutors, have developed doctrine that resembles Brossollet’s. Indeed, they are concerned with comparable challenges: Brossollet was worried about how the French army might fight the Warsaw Pact, the numerical superiority of which made the very idea of battlefield victory seem implausible. Ukraine faces a foe that outclassed it in size and firepower (even if, we have learned, not in skill). The similarities between Brossellet’s theory and Ukraine’s requirements and practices indicate that there is merit in revisiting his Essay when considering lessons to be learned from the Ukraine war.

Brossellet (1933-2015) was a career French army officer who retired as a Lieutenant Colonel and wrote Essay on the Non-Battle while attending France’s equivalent of the Command and General Staff College. The book is out of print, unfortunately, and was never translated into English, though it has remained a favorite among students of modern French military strategy. It begins with two observations. The first is that, thanks to nuclear weapons, the purpose of militaries is to ensure that they are never used. They win by not fighting.

Guy Brossollet

This places armies wielded by nuclear powers in opposition to a prominent historical strand of modern Western military thinking according to which the whole point of military operations was the decisive battle, and that armies needed to be organized and run accordingly. Brossollet’s second observation was that even though nuclear weapons existed, and even though the French army frankly could not hope to achieve anything like a decisive battle against its primary adversary at the time, the Warsaw Pact, it nonetheless was organized as if nuclear weapons did not exist and decisive battles remained its objective. That meant the French army maintained large armored divisions designed for the form of warfare generally understood to be the most conducive to forcing and winning decisive battles, large-scale offensive maneuvers.

According to Brossollet, the French army’s persistence in organizing itself to fight decisive battles was pointless because of nuclear weapons, and because France could never sustain forces of that type in numbers adequate to stop the Warsaw Pact. It was also fantastically expensive, given the enormous cost of building and sustaining the kind of heavy forces capable of offensive maneuver warfare. Brossellet challenged the very idea of having an army, questioned its purpose, and then suggested that--in light of the fact that its real purpose was no longer the decisive battle but rather to make sure there never were battles, armies perhaps should be designed and operated in an entirely different way.

Brossellet of course believed armies should exist if for no other reason than that sometimes force was required to defend interests that were not vital. In other words, not all conflicts approached the threshold beyond which nuclear weapons were appropriate. That, however, did not justify the large battle groups France built for battle against the Warsaw Pact, their size, their structure, their equipment, or their doctrine. But how should one fight the Warsaw Pact? Brossellet noted that, per French doctrine, the French army in that case was meant really to perform two functions, neither of which was forcing a decisive battle upon the enemy. The first was to “test” the enemy to see how serious it was and reveal its intentions, basically to inform civilian policymakers about whether the nation’s vital interests were at stake. In other words, was this a serious enough aggression to justify recourse to nuclear weapons? The second was to signal through the use of tactical nuclear weapons--which the French army at the time possessed in the form of Pluton short-range ballistic missiles--France’s willingness to cross the nuclear threshold.

The French Army’s Pluton missile

As Brossellet pointed out, this was a political function and not at all a military one. He went so far as to discount the military value of tactical nuclear weapons altogether especially given the limited targeting capabilities of the day, and he thought the army should give up its Plutons in favor of either a “super-Pluton” with a much greater range or air-launched cruise missiles. (Air-launched cruise missiles are in fact the direction the French military took.)

If the army’s real purpose was to “test” the adversary, and not defeat it, and if its signaling function really was (or should be) the province of the air force or a few rocket batteries, what kind of army did France really need? What sort of army does one need to fight a non-battle rather than a decisive battle? This is where things get interesting.

Brossellet proposed eschewing large-scale defensive operations in favor of defense in depth using small and autonomous units organized like rings in chainmail, with each modular unit or  “module” responsible for a predetermined geographic area. In that area, a module would wait and watch, and when the opportunity presented itself, it would strike at the enemy’s weak points and harass and attrit it. “For a battle conceived as a major event, organized around a decider and his idea of maneuver,” Brossellet wrote, “this project seeks to substitute a series of decentralized elementary actions that nonetheless are integrated in advance in an adequate tactical model.” Each module “would have an autonomous combat capacity.” All of this was made possible, he believed, by the advent of ATGMs, which he sensed meant that one no longer required massed armor to defeat massed armor. These weapons, along with recoilless rockets and 81mm mortars, gave teams on foot or employing light vehicles the ability to wreak havoc upon invading armies while also providing their political masters back home with comprehensive intelligence. They would make full use of the terrain, which they would have studied in advance, and conduct ambushes. They also would benefit from air support, most particularly from helicopters armed with ATGMs, and helicopter forces themselves would be organized into autonomous cells.

Interestingly, Brossellet insisted that despite his hostility to massed armor, he believed main battle tanks “could still be useful combat tools.” He thought entire tank regiments might be useful, but only provided that they no longer be integrated into larger formations and be given sufficient organic enablers to be able to act autonomously. He envisioned them striking the sides of enemy formations with the purpose of causing “grave perturbations,” and forcing them to rearrange themselves, reorganize their logistics, etc. Brossellet’s tank units would circulate in pre-arranged corridors, basically looking for opportunities to strike.

Brossellet acknowledged that the forces he described appeared too light to be of any use, but he insisted that this was only because they were seen in light of what one expected of a force capable of a “classic engagement, battle.” In contrast, Brossellet envisioned a “fractured form of combat founded on the existence of independent cells, given specific tasks defined in advance, and detached from the paralyzing rules related to the unity of time, place, and action that define classic maneuver.” Rather than seek a “global victory” that was “impossible to obtain,” the “non-battle” embraced the possibility that each module might win a “partial victory in the accomplishment of a simple task, within its abilities.” Brossellet wanted this future force to shed hierarchical command and control, which relied on the vertical flow of information back and forth. He imagined replacing middle layers of transmission with automatic relays and using computers at the highest level to speed up the processing of the information.

All of this should sound familiar to today’s ideas of networked warfare and dispersed and decentralized operations. It also matches modern conceptions of “mission command,” which the French school speaks of in terms of “command by intent” and “subsidiarity.” Interestingly, it is not altogether different from the defense in depth concept developed during the First World War, which also reflected concern that the concentration of forces implied by attempting to stop the enemy at the front and not give ground spelled their destruction by some combination of massed fires and the shock of the opening assault. In the current conflict in Ukraine, that danger remains, only instead of massed fires on the epic scale of the Great War, the danger comes from the kind of precision fires made possible today with guided weapons or with non-guided indirect weapons assisted by surveillance drones. The general consensus is that had Ukraine attempted to counter Russian mass with mass, it would not have lasted long against Russia’s vastly greater firepower. It instead has been fighting in a manner envisioned by Brossollet, and winning by fighting numerous small battles rather than big potentially decisive ones.

The subject of winning brings us to the most meaningful difference between Brossollet’s model and Ukrainian strategy: For Brossollet, winning meant providing policymakers what they needed, which was a measure of liberty of action and the information required to make the decision to go nuclear. For Ukraine, the gamble is that the army might bleed Russia enough to save the country, even if it might have to accept a deal it would prefer not to. But at least that deal would be better than whatever dispensation might have followed a rapid collapse of Ukrainian resistance when the war began.

The purely defensive nature of both Brossollet’s vision and Ukrainian strategy raises the question of how it might apply to offensive operations, especially offensive operations beyond one’s own borders. There it seems that older style armored battle groups might have more value, though they will need to be made resilient if they find themselves entangled by Brossolletesque defenders. That suggests a greater degree of autonomy at lower echelons, significant amounts of organic capabilities, and somehow the ability to sustain such units in the field without generating long and vulnerable supply lines. Here we are getting more into the domain of Brossellet’s successor in terms of French military thinking, the General Guy Hubin. The need for offensive operations also underscores the enduring value of armor notwithstanding their vulnerability to ATGMs, for there remains a need for protected mobility provided that armored vehicles enjoy the full benefits of an infantry escort and the combined and joint arms. The evident incompetence of the Russian army in regards to its failure to protect its vehicles should slow us from making quick judgments. If there is one thing the war has demonstrated, however, it is the need for counter-drone defenses, a requirement Brossollet never imagined.

Update: Brossellet’s book has been republished: https://amzn.to/4cKPg24