The Invasion of Kursk, the Schlieffen Plan, and the Significance of Prisoners

The advantages of maneuver warfare and the fear of ordinary victories

At the outbreak of war in 1914, the speed of the advance through Belgium brought jubilation to German headquarters. Finally, they were able to put the Schlieffen Plan into practice and cut the Gordian knot of the war on two fronts with their recipe for victory. Even before the “miracle” at the First Battle of the Marne stopped the German advance, there were foreboding signs, even in that heady atmosphere. Chief of the General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke the Younger (nephew of the victor of the wars of German Unification) famously asked, “Where are the prisoners? Where are the captured guns?” 

Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

While Moltke’s anxious disposition would eventually lead to his nervous breakdown and removal from office, he had been right to worry. Germany had won the Battle of Frontiers and captured vast swathes of territory, but the French army remained in the fight. They were neither encircled nor disorganized enough to surrender en masse. The French (and English) retreated in good order until the Germans were dangerously exhausted and the balance of force reached equilibrium. By the Battle of the Marne, the Germans were themselves in danger of annihilation. Schlieffen’s great fear of a mere “ordinary victory” had come to pass and Germany would bleed itself white over the next four years of attritional warfare against the armies it had failed to destroy in 1914. 

Wikipedia map of the extent of German advance in 1914

“Ordinary victory” as a phrase, seems none too bad, so it bears some examining as to why it held a special terror for the German General Staff. An ordinary victory in essence means any victory in battle that does not have grossly disproportionate losses on the losing side. This is in contrast to a decisive victory where the losing side is completely destroyed (such as at the Battle of Cannae, which heavily influenced Schlieffen’s thought). 

If you are equivalent in strength to your enemy, ordinary victories will usually be sufficient. If you are superior in strength, even narrow defeats may be advantageous overall (I am not aware of a standard term for the other side of a Pyrrhic victory). If you are weaker than your enemy, decisive victories are necessary to redress the balance. The Germans, facing war on two fronts, considered themselves the weaker party.

Decisive victories are doubly necessary in maneuver warfare. Maneuver relies on speed and surprise, which requires stretching the limits of supply systems. The key to understanding the terror of an “ordinary victory” is that it does not take a defeat to return to positional war; the defender just needs to maintain cohesion to avoid a decisive defeat. Failure to win decisively means the next battle will be fought with all the disadvantages stretched logistics bring but against a prepared enemy. Maneuver is therefore a high-risk/high-reward prospect. Failure means forgoing the advantages of deliberate, methodical positional war and instead fighting one ad-hoc, as the Germans were forced to in WWI. This explains fully Schlieffen’s fear of a mere ordinary victory and goes some way to explaining the Younger Moltke’s nervous breakdown. The German General Staff understood well that merely capturing territory was no substitute for annihilating an army. 

This is itself based on an insight of Clausewitz (and many of his contemporaries) that the army itself is the center of a gravity of a state in war, more so than any city or fortification. For instance, it would have been far better for Kyiv to have been occupied in 2022 than for Russia to succeed in encircling Ukraine’s forces in Donbas. In Clausewitz’s time, this was made clear by Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia. Napoleon captured Moscow but failed to destroy the Russian army at Borodino.

It would therefore be a mistake to judge the situation in Kursk purely from the standpoint of area captured. As Ukraine presses into Russia it distances itself from its base of supply. Decisive victories are needed to keep the advantage in these circumstances. Given Ukraine’s manpower difficulties, that may well be more a hindrance than an asset. Rather, the relevant metric is the destruction of Russian formations. Control over territory may play a role in this, particularly in terms of supply lines, but it is not an end in itself. Images and videos of captured prisoners show that this is happening at least to some extent. 

Russian prisoners of war captured in the Kursk Oblast

The great danger for Ukraine is that it persists in attacking after the Russians have reconstituted and end up in positional warfare with extended lines of communication. With the manpower advantage Russia currently enjoys, an extended frontline is not to Ukraine’s benefit. Nevertheless, maneuver warfare offers the opportunity to seek decisive victories from a position of material inferiority and so redress the balance. 

This may explain the decision to redeploy forces from the Donetsk axis. The decisive victories offered by maneuver warfare (even if small scale) are likely more favorable than loss ratios of positional defense given Russian artillery superiority. Ukraine is afforded an opportunity to inflict disproportionate losses and divert Russian forces from Donetsk. A best case scenario for Ukraine would be to actually encircle and capture enough Russian forces that a significant redeployment is necessary. If that event, if Russia makes mistakes such as counterattacking piecemeal Ukraine can inflict further losses on the redeployed forces. If Russia does not oblige to offer that opportunity or Ukraine lacks the reserves to maintain the initiative, Ukraine can dig in and seek to interdict Russian lines of communication. While this cannot promise any great results, it does split Russian efforts across axes to provide Ukraine with more breathing room to address its manpower problem.  

As well, I would be remiss to not (briefly) mention the political aspects of the operation. That Ukraine can take territory and conduct mobile warfare is important in bolstering Western faith in the possibility of restoring Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders. Unfortunately, Western fears regarding escalation are likely to have been stoked by an invasion of Russia proper. The Western reaction (or lack thereof) to this development will be telling, as will eventual revelations as to whether there was American approval of this operation. 

Ukraine has been disciplined in terms of information and so there is little certainty about developments in Kursk. However, history gives us some metrics by which to judge what we do see. Ukraine is pursuing maneuver warfare, which requires a particular kind of success. Given constraints on Ukraine’s manpower, this cannot be pursued indefinitely, and so the success of the operation will also be determined by the successful transition to defense.