Abstract
Until very recently, and particularly in the United States, the field of military geography has remained mostly stunted and neglected. Indeed, in reviewing the massive compilations of newspaper articles, magazine and journal articles (including particularly those from the specialized military journals produced by the war colleges and services), and full-length books on Third World warfare, one may only rarely obtain a detailed, vivid picture, a “feel,” for what is happening on the ground. Maps are not usually provided, and when they are, they are usually on a full-country or regional scale, “flat” maps devoid of attention to terrain or vegetation, providing little more than the location of cities, major rivers, and national boundaries. One obtains therefrom little sense of the relevant topography, particularly as pertains to the tactical or operational levels of warfare. The military implications of the weather and the seasons are noted only sporadically, cursorily. With much greater frequency, reporters and academic military analysts focus on weapons (and the arms trade by which they are acquired), in a manner almost ignoring their important relationship to the terrain and the weather. One gets technological determinism in a geographical vacuum. Or at least that was the case before the massive attention paid to the 1990–91 U.S. buildup in the Persian Gulf area and the actual war in 1991, which focused attention on the terrain and weather aspects of warfare in a manner not before seen.
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Notes
See Geography 89/90, 4th ed., ed. Gerald R. Pitzl (Guildford, CT: Dushkin, 1989).
John M. Collins, Military Geography for Professionals and the Public (Washington: Brassey’s, 1998).
United States Military Academy, A Bibliography of Military Geography, vols. 1–4 (West Point, NY: U.S. Military Academy, circa 1990).
Hugh Faringdon, Confrontation: The Strategic Geography of NATO and the Warsaw Pact (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).
Patrick O’Sullivan, Terrain and Tactics (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991);
Patrick O’Sullivan and Jesse W. Miller, The Geography of Warfare (London: Croom Helm, 1983);
and O’Sullivan, “A Geographical Analysis of Guerilla Warfare,” Political Geography Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 2 (1983), pp. 139–150.
See also earlier, Louis C. Peltier and E. Etzel Pearcy, Military Geography (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1966).
Roger E. Kasperson and Julian Minghi, eds., The Structure of Political Geography (Chicago: Aldine, 1969);
Dennis Rumley and Julian Minghi, The Geography of Border Landscapes (New York: Rout-ledge and Keegan Paul, 1991);
and Arnon Sofer and Y. Bar Gal, Geographical Changes in the Traditional Arab Villages in Northern Israel (Durham, U.K.: University of Durham, Center for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, 1981).
Anthony Cordesman and Abraham Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, vol. 3 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), pp. 1–237.
John Keegan and Andrew Wheatcroft, Zones of Conflict: An Atlas of Future Wars (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986).
Patrick O’Sullivan, “The Geography of Wars in the Third World,” in Stephanie G. Neuman and Robert E. Harkavy, The Lessons of Recent Wars in the Third World: Comparative Dimensions, vol. 2 (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1987), p. 51.
Harold M. Forde, “An Introduction to Military Geography,” Military Review, vol. 28, no. 11 (February 1949), pp. 26–36 and (March 1949), pp. 52–62.
Maj. James E. Wilson, Jr., “The Fourth Dimension of Terrain,” Military Review, vol. 26, no. 6 (September 1946), pp. 49–55 (49).
André Gimond, “Desert Warfare,” Military Review, vol. 28, no. 5 (August 1948), pp. 73–83 (73).
General D. Palit, The Lightning Campaign, p. 77. See also Shirin Tahir-Kheli, “Defense Planning in Pakistan,” in Stephanie G. Neuman, ed., Defense Planning in Less-Industrialized States (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1984), chapter 7.
The military aspects of Israel’s strategic depth problem on the Golan Heights is illustrated, in an analysis of the tank warfare in 1973, in Avigdor Kahalani, The Heights of Courage: A Tank Leader’s War on the Golan (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984).
Strategic depth in the Arab-Israeli context is discussed in Geoffrey Kemp and Robert E. Harkavy, Strategic Geography and the Changing Middle East (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1997), pp. 163–164.
For a general treatment, see Stephanie G. Neuman, Military Assistance in Recent Wars: The Dominance of the Superpowers (New York: Praeger, 1986);
and Michael Brzoska and Frederic Pearson, Arms and Warfare: Escalation, De-Escalation and Negotiation (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994).
Such natural barriers as an element of power are discussed in A. F. K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1958), pp. 126–127.
See, in particular, Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War: The Iran-Iraq War, vol. II (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), esp. pp. 70–74.
Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, vol. I (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), esp. pp. 122–125.
See Robert Harkavy, Preemption and Two-Front Conventional Warfare: A Comparison of 1967 Israeli Strategy with the Pre-World War I German Schließen Plan, Leonard Davis Institute, Hebrew University, Jerusalem Papers on Peace Problems, no. 23 (1978).
The basics of the Schlieffen Plan are rendered in Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Dell, 1962), esp. chapters 2–7;
and Gerhard Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan (London: Oswald Wolff, 1958).
See also Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).
This thesis is propounded in G. D. Sheffield, Blitzkrieg and Attrition: Land Operations in Europe, 1914–1945, in Colin McInnes and G. D. Sheffield, eds., Warfare in the Twentieth Century: Theory and Practice (London: Unwin, Hyman, 1988), chapter 3. Hence, on p. 51: “So deeply rooted is this belief that the world wars represent two distinct types of war and areas of generalship that the official biographer of Field-Marshal Montgomery regarded it as a slur upon his subject that the undeniably attritional battle of Alamein should be seen as being ‘in the mold of World War I.’ This chapter argues that this interpretation is misguided and that continuity, not change, was the hallmark of warfare at the tactical and operational levels during the period under examination, and further that it was the First World War, not the Second, that was the main period of innovation.”
Van Creveld, Military Lessons of the Yom Kippur War, and for a later interpretation, Edward Luttwak and Dan Horowitz, The Israeli Army (Harper and Row, 1975), chapter 10.
Overall, the role of U.S. airpower in the Gulf War and the question of its decisiveness is discussed in Edward Luttwak, “The Gulf War in its Purely Military Dimension,” in John O’Loughlin, Tom Mayer, and Edward S. Greenberg, eds., War and Its Consequences: Lessons from the Persian Gulf Conflict (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 33–50.
In greater, indeed massive, detail, see also che Pentagon’s Gulf War Airpower Survey, directed by Eliot A. Cohen (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), six volumes (hereinafter called GWAPS).
The Pentagon Report, p. XXIV and pp. 354–356; and James F. Dunnigan and Austin Bay, From Shield to Storm (New York: William Morrow, 1992), pp. 306 and 445.
The point is made in Robert Taber, The War of the Flea: A Study of Guerrilla Warfare (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1965), pp. 129–130.
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© 2001 Robert E. Harkavy and Stephanie G. Neuman
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Harkavy, R.E., Neuman, S.G. (2001). Military Geography. In: Warfare and the Third World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07926-8_3
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