Slide source comparison

Keeping in mind the ideas of Sun Tzu and our comments about early commanders, let’s take a look at an early tactical theme and some battle (grand tactical) situations to gain a feel for the different ways that the Cheng/Ch’i game has been (and can be) played.

Tactical theme · about 300 BC to 1400 AD

• Light troops (equipped with bows, javelins, light swords, etc.) perform reconnaissance, screening, and swirling hit-and-run actions to:
  • Unmask enemy dispositions and activities.
  • Cloud/distort own dispositions and activities.
  • Confuse, disorder enemy operations.
• Heavy troops (equipped with lances, bows, swords, etc.) protected by armor and shields:
  • Charge and smash thinned-out/scattered or disordered/bunched-up enemy formations generated by interaction with light troops; or
  • Menace enemy formations to hold them in tight, or rigid, arrays thereby make them vulnerable to missiles of swirling light troops.
• Light and heavy troops in appropriate combination pursue, envelop, and mop up isolated remnants of enemy host.

V. Ye. Savkin
The Basic Principles of Operational Art and Tactics (1972), pages 7 and 203.

Battle of Leuctra · 371 BC

At this battle Frederick Engels (according to Savkin) credited Epaminondas for having first discovered and employed an unequal or uneven distribution of forces across a front as basis to concentrate forces for the main attack at the decisive point.

Battles of Marathon, Leuctra, Arbela, and Cannae emphasize an unequal distribution as basis for local superiority and decisive leverage to collapse adversary resistance.

On the other hand

The discussion (so far) provides little insight on how these battle arrangements and follow-on maneuvers play upon moral factors such as doubt, fear, anxiety, etc.

Even though outnumbered, why were Mongols able to maneuver in widely scattered arrays without being defeated separately or in detail?

Message

By exploiting superior leadership, intelligence, communications, and mobility as well as by playing upon adversary’s fears and doubts via propaganda and terror, Mongols operated inside adversary observation-orientation-decision-action loops.

Result

Outnumbered Mongols created impressions of terrifying strength—by seeming to come out of nowhere yet be everywhere.

Hence

Subversive propaganda, clever stratagems, fast breaking maneuvers, and calculated terror not only created vulnerabilities and weaknesses but also played upon moral factors that drain away resolve, produce panic, and bring about collapse.