MILITARY GEOGRAPHY
FOR PROFESSIONALS AND THE PUBLIC
PART ONE: PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY
2. SPATIAL RELATIONSHIPS
Space is the integrating factor in geography just as time is for history.
Lucille Carlson
Geography and World Politics
THE LOCATION, SIZE, AND SHAPE OF LAND MASSES AND LARGE BODIES OF WATER HAVE INFLUENCED TO great degrees the capabilities, limitations, and vulnerabilities of armed forces since the Stone Age. It seems safe to predict that the pertinence of spatial relationships will remain undiminished indefinitely.1
LOCATION
Archimedes, elaborating about the value of levers more than two millenia ago, asserted, "Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth." Favorable geographic locations confer militarily advantageous leverage, while poor positions foster insecurity.
ACCESS TO OCEANS
No nation that lacks access to any ocean has ever been able to project military power globally. The United States, blessed since 1848 with sheltered ports on ice-free coasts that open on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and on every continent, can deploy military power rapidly from one theater to another. No other world power currently enjoys comparable freedom of action. Russia, which fronts on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans, boasts the world's longest coastline, but its fleets are bottled up in ports that lack convenient outlets to blue water and are ice-bound every winter, except for bases in the Black Sea and near Norway's North Cape, where the Gulf Stream warms frigid waters (maps 1 and 2).2
Ocean front property, however, does not ipso facto indicate good prospects for sea-going commerce and mighty navies. Unobstructed approaches, sheltered harbors, and convenient
Map 1. Selected Russian Naval Bases
Map 2. Bottlenecks That Inhibit the Russian Navy
connections with the hinterland must complement maritime locales. Capabilities diminish to some degree if even one of those attributes is deficient or absent.
SECURE LOCATIONS
Secure locations physically separate friends from foes. The British Isles, only 22 miles (35 kilometers) west of continental Europe, last saw successful invaders when William the Conqueror defeated King Harold at Hastings in 1066. Hitler's cross-channel attack plan code-named Operation Sea Lion aborted in September 1940.3 Japan has never been stormed by outsiders. The continental United States has seen no hostile forces on its soil since the War of 1812, when British troops burned the White House and Capitol, bombarded Fort McHenry in Baltimore, and unsuccessfully sought to sack New Orleans. Canada and Mexico have been friends of the United States for more than a century. No nation now has sufficient amphibious assault capabilities to bridge the watery miles that isolate America from its enemies, then seize a foothold on defended U.S. shores. Spaced-based weapons, long-range aircraft, missiles, and transnational terrorists consequently pose the only potentially serious external threats by armed adversaries.
Buffer zones make admirable shields. Joseph Stalin swallowed six European countries in the mid-1940s (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria), then rang down an Iron Curtain. Those so-called "satellite states" separated forces in NATO's center sector from the nearest Soviet border by several hundred miles. Demilitarized zones (DMZs) provide variable degrees of protection, depending in large part on geographic circumstances. Incursions across the Korean DMZ, for example, have been restricted to hit-and-run raids since 1953, partly because no overland bypasses are available on that narrow peninsula, whereas enemy troops and supplies consistently circumvented the barrier between North and South Vietnam via the open flank in Laos.
Armed forces that do battle on more than one front at a time must overcome serious strategic, tactical, and logistical problems or risk defeat. Israel found satisfactory solutions during two wars with Egypt and Syria, first in 1967 and again in 1973,4 but German forces that saw combat on Eastern and Western Fronts during World War I, then on four fronts counting North Africa and Italy during World War II, were spread too thinly during both conflicts and both times they lost. Soviet leaders for that reason understandably feared the possibility of simultaneous wars with NATO and China after the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s.5
TIME-DISTANCE FACTORS
Time, distance, and modes of transportation not only determine how fast armed forces can move from one place to another but influence abilities to perform most effectively immediately upon arrival. Well-conditioned rifle companies take longer to march 20 miles (32 kilometers) at 2.5 miles per hour (4 kph) than airmobile troops in huge transport aircraft take to cross the Atlantic Ocean, yet the "grunts" may arrive more eager to fight, because jet lag accompanied by fatigue, digestive disorders, and reduced proficiency commonly afflicts flight crews and passengers who swoosh rapidly through several time zones and thereby disrupt their "metabolic clocks" (24-hour circadian rhythms).6
Great distances between home bases and operational areas reduce opportunities for timely employment of military power in emergencies. Lengthy lines of supply and communication increase requirements for long-haul transportation and, if vulnerable to enemy interdiction, make users divert combat forces to protect them. U.S. and British naval surface combatants, for example, had to escort merchant ships and troop convoys from the U.S. east coast and the Gulf of Mexico to Great Britain and the Soviet Union during World War II, while shore-based antisubmarine warfare aircraft conducted search and destroy patrols at both ends and from Iceland.7
Forward deployments on friendly territory, best typified by globally distributed U.S. bases and facilities, alleviate but cannot eliminate quick-reaction problems, because requirements may arise in locations where no concentrations exist. Most of the half million U.S. forces that helped drive Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 were stationed in the United States and Germany when that crisis erupted. Equipment and supplies prepositioned at Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean were more than 2,000 miles from transfer points in the Persian Gulf, where custodians issued them to personnel airlifted from far distant bases.8
Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was consistently well situated during the Cold War. NATO's armed forces watched impotently while Soviet troops crushed the 1956 uprising in Hungary, partly because their access routes ran through Communist Czechoslovakia and neutral Austria, whereas the Soviets were in position to generate great combat power rapidly and sustain it over short, internal lines under their control.9 Nikita Khruschchev conversely backed down during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, partly because most Soviet armed forces were remote from the Caribbean.10 Like his predecessors and successors, he furnished money, materiel, and ideological assistance to pro-Communist regimes in distant places, but avoided large-scale military involvement for similar reasons. Mutual force reductions in Europe, an arms-control goal established well before the Cold War wound down, succeeded in 1990 only after negotiators overcame critics who correctly claimed that Soviet forces could withdraw a few hundred miles overland, then return on short notice if relations soured, whereas U.S. counterparts would have to be airlifted and sealifted from remote bases.11
Distance may also discombobulate alliances. Japan concluded a security pact with Germany in November 1940, but that aggressive pair never were able to form a combined high command, seldom coordinated policies, plans, or programs, never shared bases, and never conducted mutually supporting operations in widely separated theaters that at their zenith remained more than 3,500 straight-line miles (5,630 kilometers) apart.
DOMINANT GEOGRAPHICAL POSITIONS
Dominant geographical locations anywhere on Earth or in space best enable occupants to achieve present or anticipated objectives of any kind. The most desirable positions may be as large as a country or as small as spots plotted on large-scale tactical maps. The leverage available from any given point or area usually varies with missions, situations, forces on tap, terrain, available time, and political restrictions. Attackers and defenders view each site from different perspectives. So do armies, navies, and air forces which strive to gain geographic advantage for themselves and deny it to adversaries.
Strategic, operational, and tactical positions take many forms and serve many purposes. Great Britain originally acquired Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Suez, Aden, and Socotra to help protect lifelines of empire to the Middle East and South Asia. The Soviets, with transitory success, sought influence and footholds along the Horn of Africa and in India from which they could threaten sea lines of communication that linked the United States and its allies with petroleum producers astride the Persian Gulf. The North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) in the early 1960s draped 81 Distant Early Warning (DEW) stations across the arctic from the Aleutians to the Atlantic as safeguards against a Soviet surprise air attack over the North Pole. A generous group of gap-filler radars and picket ships augmented the Mid-Canada and Pine Tree Lines farther south. Three huge Ballistic Missile Early Warning Sites ( BMEWS) located in Clear, Alaska, Thule, Greenland, and Fylingdales Moor, England kept a sharp lookout for Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) shots, with assistance from surveillance satellites that scanned for submarine-launched ballistic missiles as well as ICBMs.12
Appropriately located islands often make ideal stepping stones. Propeller-driven transport aircraft that spanned the Pacific during the Korean War hopped from Travis AFB near San Francisco to Honolulu, Midway, and Wake Island (which looked like a postage stamp from the air), then on to Tokyo. Flights over the Atlantic at that time called at Goose Bay, Labrador and Keflavik, Iceland. U.S. weapons, equipment, and supplies bound for Tel Aviv during the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict arrived rapidly only because Portugal granted refueling rights in the Azores.
POLITICAL INHIBITIONS
Manmade boundaries, which are merely lines on maps, impose political obstacles that sometimes inhibit military operations as much as physical barriers when allies or neutrals forbid the armed forces of outsiders to violate their land or territorial waters. Transgressors who nevertheless choose to do so may pay political, economic, or military prices, the nature and intensity of which are not always obvious beforehand.
High stakes coupled with low risks in relation to likely gains encourage aggressors to ignore political boundaries. Hitler clearly felt free to ride roughshod over neutral Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands on his way to France in 1940. Low stakes coupled with high risks in relation to likely gains contrariwise encourage caution. British-based U.S. bombers on April 15, 1986, made long dog-legs over the Bay of Biscay and back through Gibraltar en route to hit Tripoli and Benghazi because the French Government denied them overflight rights when President Ronald Reagan directed retaliation for a Libyan-backed terrorist attack in Berlin.13
Privileged sanctuaries behind sacrosanct boundaries, which permit adversaries to fight when they wish and then run away, also impose political inhibitions, although such asylums seem to survive only if probable penalties for disturbing them surpass potential benefits. Manchuria comprised such a shelter throughout the Korean War, first as a Chinese supply base for North Korea, then as a haven for defeated North Korean troops who fled across the Yalu River on floating footbridges and, after October, 1950, as a springboard for Chinese Communist offensives. The U.N. Command could have lanced that boil if so directed but declined to do so for fear that such action would precipitate "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." 14 Communist sanctuaries inside Cambodia fared less well after President Nixon authorized U. S. armed forces to conduct cross-border raids in 1970 and again in 1971.15 The United States maintained sanctuaries in Japan, Okinawa, Thailand, and the Philippines throughout the Vietnam War, although many observers overlooked that fact.
SIZE
The square miles or square kilometers encompassed by any operational area furnish room for armed forces to maneuver offensively or defensively and to disperse command centers, military formations, ports, airfields, logistic installations, and other static or mobile targets. Total size, however, is only one relevant criterion. Usable space is equally important.
LARGE AREA AS AN OFFENSIVE ASSET
Areas that are large in proportion to forces employed therein offer a greater range of offensive options and facilitate greater freedom of action than crowded spaces afford. Envelopments and turning movements become feasible on the ground, whereas cramped quarters commonly compel frontal assaults accompanied by increased casualties (picture assault forces trying to puncture enemy defenses from exposed positions on beachheads or bridgeheads). The U.S. 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment established a world's record for microsized regimental drop zones (DZs) in February 1945, when it leaped onto Corregidor: the larger DZ had been a parade ground that measured 325 by 250 yards (297 by 229 meters), the smaller was once a nine-hole golf course, and both were bounded on the south by a cliff. Each C-47 transport completed multiple passes that lasted 6 seconds apiece, barely long enough for jumpmasters to push eight paratroopers out the door.16
Offensive naval flotillas as well as land forces need a lot of maneuver room in this high-tech age, which renders close combat excessively risky. No modern admiral, for example, would be enthusiastic about battle in closed bodies of water such as Salamis, where Themistocles defeated the Persian Navy in 480 B.C., Aboukir Bay, where Lord Nelson blasted Napoleon Bonaparte's fleet to win the Battle of the Nile in 1798, or Lake Erie, where Captain Oliver Hazard Perry beat the British in 1813, then announced, " We have met the enemy and they are ours!"
LARGE AREA AS A DEFENSIVE ASSET
Defenders on land and at sea prefer arenas that contain enough room to maneuver laterally and in depth, trade space for time if necessary, then regroup, reinforce, and redeploy for offensive action when enemy spearheads at the end of extended supply lines lose momentum. Tiny Luxembourg plays poor games of cat and mouse, whereas Tsarist Russia used defenses-in-depth to frustrate Napoleonic invaders, who briefly occupied and burned Mosow in 1812 but fell back under pressure when winter approached. Retreat, coupled with scorched earth policies, paid off for the Soviet Union after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Communist defenders ceded ground grudgingly, left communes in ruins, torched crops, and systematically shifted essential industries from war zones to interior sites--desperate workers dismantled nearly a quarter of the nation's manufacturing capacity and carted it east of the Ural Mountains before temporarily victorious Germans overran the rest.17
Evasion and escape artists in most countries envy the vast space available to Nez Percé Chief Joseph, who led 300 warriors along with 400 women and children on a 4-month trek that totaled nearly 2,000 miles (3,220 kilometers) through parts of Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana before the U.S. Army finally brought his starving tribe to bay in October, 1877.18 Mao Zedong's classic Long March (map 3), in much the same mold, departed his base camp with about 100,000 men in October 1934. Six thousand miles (9,655 kilometers) and 366 days later 20,000 survivors slipped into northern Shaanxi Province, short on provisions but long on professional pride, after leading Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang troops on a roundabout chase through half of China.19
Open water can add great depth to holdings on land, as Japan demonstrated during World War II. Its four home islands cover an area approximately equal to North and South Dakota, but outpost lines that ran from the Aleutian Islands through Pacific Trust Territories, New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands, and the Netherlands East Indies afforded several million more square miles within which to conduct delaying actions (see map 25, page 160).
Finally, it is worth emphasizing that any nation may brandish nuclear weapons for deterrent purposes, but policies that contemplate even limited use against similarly armed opponents appear excessively imprudent for all save those that possess a redundant (preferably well- protected) power base. Only a few very large countries fit that description. Most of the remainder, which concentrate likely targets in a handful of cities or in the capital, could not survive small-scale nuclear attacks.
LARGE AREA AS A MILITARY LIABILITY
Large operational areas sometimes are mixed blessings. Continent-sized Australia, which concentrates most elements of political, economic, and military power along its periphery, is fortunate that potential targets are mainly on its southern shores far from potential enemies. Canada's principal assets, which hug the United States, are safe because those two countries remain partners. The capital cities and other "crown jewels" of many medium-sized states, however, run high risks. Saudi Arabia and Syria typify largely empty lands wherein core assets are close to insecure borders, while Seoul, Korea is barely 25 straight-line miles (40 kilometers) south of the demilitarized zone that separates it from sworn enemies.
Gigantic size clearly can be a military liability rather than an asset. Territorial infinity was illusionary in the U.S.S.R., a colossus that spanned 7,000 miles (11,230 kilometers) and nine time zones between the Baltic Sea and Bering Strait. Approximately 80 percent of the population, along with a high proportion of industrial capacity, were west of the Ural Mountains when Nazi Germany invaded. Connections between European Russia and the Soviet Far East depended almost entirely on the ribbonlike Trans-Siberian Railroad, a condition that compelled Soviet Armed Forces to operate in two widely separated and only slightly synchronized theaters. Long Soviet boundaries were so hard to defend and recalcitrants so hard to control throughout the Cold War that heavily armed Border Guards and Internal Security Troops peaked in the 1980s at a combined personnel strength that approximated 600,000 (more than most national armies).20 Other huge nations, such as China and India, have experienced similar internal problems.
SHAPE
Favorable configurations generally confer military advantages, whereas awkward shapes do not. A circle with prized possessions dispersed well back from its rim would be perfect. Some countries or operational areas approach that ideal, but a good many are elongated, discontinuous, or fragmented.21
ELONGATED SHAPES
Spindly Chile, 2,650 miles long and nowhere more than 250 miles wide (4,265 by 400 kilometers), is lucky, because the towering Andes Mountains guard most of its land borders. Israel, in contrast, had a waistline only 8 miles wide (<13 kilometers) before it seized and retained West Bank territories during the 1967 war--the Mediterranean was a 3-hour march for Jordanian foot troops, 15 minutes in medium tanks, and less than artillery range from the nearest enemy positions. Opportunities to trade space for time were nil. President Charles de Gaulle greatly increased NATO's military vulnerability when he evicted its armed forces from France in 1967; his action crammed U.S. combat and support formations into the narrowest part of West Germany where that nation is barely 150 miles wide (240 kilometers).22
Military salients, a less exaggerated form of elongation, extend into enemy territory. Problems accompany those that penetrate deeply whenever hostile armed forces remain strong enough to hit one or both flanks. Iraqi divisions that captured Kuwait in 1990, for example, were dangerously exposed. General Colin L. Powell publicly announced, "Our strategy in going after this army is very simple. First we are going to cut it off, and then we are going to kill it."23 Allied counteroffensives during the Battle of the Bulge (December 16, 1944 to mid-January 1945) similarly pinched a German salient that, at its zenith, drove a wedge almost 50 miles (80 kilometers) into Belgium, as map 4 depicts.24
Peninsulas, unlike salients, tend to isolate conflicts. Allied campaigners obtained positive results in Italy, a "sideshow" theater, where economy of force operations in 1943-1945 pinned down many German divisions that otherwise might have bolstered the Atlantic Wall or have reinforced German defensive capabilities in Normandy after Anglo-American armed forces landed. Armed combat lasted three years in Korea (1950-1953) without spreading to the mainland. Defensive actions against superior foes on peninsulas from which there is no escape, however, seldom have happy endings, as U.S. forces in the Philippines found after Japanese invaders backed them onto minuscule Bataan Peninsula hard by Manila Bay. A 90-mile "Death March" followed their surrender on April 9, 1942.25
DISCONTINUOUS SHAPES
Discontinuous shapes of military significance come in assorted sizes and degrees of permanence. The smallest are parachute drop zones and helicopter landing zones in enemy territory. None can survive long unless it is reinforced rapidly, friendly forces advancing overland link up expeditiously, or surrounded units withdraw. Operation Market Garden decisively demonstrated that point in September 1944, when two U.S. and one British airborne divisions strove to secure five bridges over large rivers and canals in Holland so armored columns could scoot 64 miles (103 kilometers) up a narrow corridor, cross the Rhine at Arnhem, outflank the Siegfried Line, then head for the Ruhr, which was Nazi Germany's industrial heartland (map 5). British Lieutenant General Frederick (Boy) Browning, who feared that the plan was overly ambitious, said to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, its architect, "I think we might be going a bridge too far." He was right. The British 1st Airborne Division held out heroically at Arnhem for 10 days waiting in vain for a linkup, then disintegrated. Fewer than one-fourth of its 10,000 men made it safely back across the Rhine; the rest were killed, captured, or missing.26
Map 4. The
Battle of the Bulge
Forward bases and facilities, which are semipermanent enclaves on foreign soil, constitute a second subcategory under the rubric of disconnected shapes. Those in enemy territory, such as the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo, Cuba, and (from time to time) the Panama Canal Zone, are noteworthy because they demand stringent security. Exclaves on a grander scale primarily are political entities that frequently become flash points. Adolf Hitler, who hungered for East Prussia, which the Treaty of Versailles had separated from Germany proper in 1920, first requested from Poland (but never received) a connecting corridor through the free city of Danzig, then reclaimed those lands and much more by force of arms in September, 1939. Pakistan comprised east and west sectors 1,000 land miles apart (1,610 kilometers) from 1947 until 1971 when East Pakistan, with Indian assistance, gained independence as Bangladesh after a bloody civil war. Beleaguered Berlin (map 6), a Free World exclave and potential powder keg 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of the Iron Curtain, had huge symbolic as well as practical importance. Its position was tactically untenable, because Soviet and East German forces could seal off or swallow the city at their pleasure if willing to risk a nuclear war. Only the massive Berlin Airlift kept the population alive during a prolonged blockade that lasted from June 1948 until May 1949.27
Map 5. Operation Market Garden
Fragmented Shapes
Fragmented shapes mainly pertain to island nations such as Japan and the Philippines, which are open to defeat in detail. Indonesia, the most noteworthy, consists of several thousand islands, many uninhabited, that festoon off the coast of Southeast Asia for 3,000 miles (4,825 kilometers), a distance comparable to that between the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Isolation discourages coordinated offensive or defensive military campaigns in widely separated places and, in some cases (such as Timor), encourages separatist movements.
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