Book Review: Praxis Tacticum: The Art, Science and Practice of Military Tactics

Caption

Colonel Charles S. Oliviero
Praxis Tacticum: The Art, Science and Practice of Military Tactics
Toronto: Double Dagger Books, 2021
277 pages, diagrams

Praxis Tacticum: The Art, Science and Practice of Military Tactics is Colonel Charles Oliviero’s “personal compilation of history, experience and analysis.” His stated purpose is to fill the gap “unintentionally created” in the PME of junior leaders. Praxis Tacticum is a study guide to better understand tactics. His intent is to “teach how to think” – not teach tactics. Yet he, a retired veteran of the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps (RCAC) is convinced that the CA does not teach conventional tactics (he avoids counterinsurgency) and it is clear that he tries to do just that. One of his own tactical fundamentals, for example, is that armour squadrons should never be divided. His effort to teach tactics is welcome indeed as the Canadian Army Command and Staff College (CACSC) focuses more on the planning process.

Part I is a survey of the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the terms and ideas he explores, but as he correctly points out, the reader can skip it and “still glean useful information from the following three parts.” Part II delves into key ideas that junior officers will recognize, including combat power, Schwerpunkt and Main Effort, offensive action and several others. Part III contains twelve tactical problems ranging from combat power groupings, main effort, disruption and embracing chaos. His personal answers to the problems are unfortunately relegated to an annex. Part IV consists of his personal thoughts and reference material. The sections on the individual arms of the combined arms team likely add little to what the junior tactical leader already knows. Part IV is followed by no less than twenty-two annexes containing a laundry list of seemingly random topics including training design, leader self-care, the After Action Review process and others. To be sure, there are many interesting ideas in many of them, but much of the content could have been built into the main parts. These annexes come before the conclusion. Unfortunately, there is no index to support quick referencing.

While the structure could be improved Canadian junior tacticians will find much to stir their curiosity and make them think, and as Colonel Oliviero stresses, they can agree or disagree with his ideas. He might have discussed tactics in terms of the principles of war, but he believes that while there “may well be” universal principles of war, “we just do not know what they are yet.” It would have been valuable had he tied his ideas to current tactical fundamentals, or at the BG level discuss ‘find’, ‘fix’, ‘strike’ and ‘exploit’ and how one does that well, tactically. His section on ‘myths’ is worthy of attention, particularly his assertion that the battlefield has not/is not becoming more lethal, a belief shared by this reviewer. The reader might be confused upon reading Colonel Oliviero’s belief that armour is the ‘arm of decision’ but that all arms exist to support the infantry. What does this imply for tactics? Consider also his argument that neutral thinking on the offence or defence will enhance one’s creativity in solving tactical problems. Would this ‘no’fence approach actually work? Should Canadian junior tactical leaders consider themselves on the defence when they are planning a hasty attack? This is the type of internal argument tacticians need to have all the time. Serving officers with counterinsurgency experience may have a different take on this from conventionally trained officers.

One of the most important ideas he explores is the role of ground, asserting forcefully that the old Staff College teaching that ‘ground dictates, ground dominates’ was an “obsessive mantra”, and wrong. Unfortunately, he chose to use Cannae in 216 BC and Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s army group manoeuvres as illustrations. It would have been helpful had he zoomed right in to a modern Canadian combat team attack to prove his assertion that ground does not dominate tactical planning. The discussion of Main Effort and Schwerpunkt, intimately tied to combat power, is valuable, but he takes too long in descending from the Clausewitzian stratosphere with references to the Enlightenment to the lowly mud-covered ground where junior Canadian tacticians tread. His illustration of the concept is at corps level and he does not explain what constitutes a ‘main effort’ designation – is it a sentiment or a quantifiable thing demonstrated by the fact that the unit charged with being such has more combat power than supporting units?

There is perhaps too much discussion of the nature of war, Clausewitz, ‘Quotidian parallels’, ‘Cartesian reductionism’ and other theoretical/philosophical terms. There is nothing inherently wrong with such a theoretical grounding, of course, but it distracts somewhat from the tactical level and delays getting to the point. Nevertheless, Colonel Oliviero’s ideas embody the type of thinking we need in the CA. The fact that no one has seen fit to write such a book as this since Major John English wrote The Mechanized Battlefield: A Tactical Analysis thirty years ago may speak volumes about the general level of acceptance/dominance of Canadian Army doctrine – all the thought has already gone into B-GL-300-001 Land Operations so why bother arguing about tactics?

Although one can gain the impression that Praxis Tacticum is a generation behind, as there is no discussion of drones and their impact on tactics, no one can dispute Colonel Oliviero’s call to “constantly evaluate what we believe to be tactically true” or that too many junior leaders “look for set-piece processes towards a safe and predicable outcome.” The current Staff College DS might not accept his further declaration that these processes “all lead nowhere,” but there is surely little to challenge in his belief that since tactics is an art, junior leaders must be independent artists, growing in their skill through independent study because no one is going to study for them. Praxis Tacticum is a great place for the junior tactician to start that process. The above criticisms aside, it offers real intellectual nourishment, not pablum.