Attrition Warfare - History

History

It is often argued that the best-known example of attrition warfare was during World War I on the Western Front. Both military forces found themselves in static defensive positions in trenches running from Switzerland to the English Channel. For years, without any opportunity for maneuvers, the only way the commanders thought they could defeat the enemy was to repeatedly attack head on, to grind the other down.

Attritional warfare in World War I has been shown by historians such as Hew Strachan to have been used as a post hoc excuse for failed offensives. Erich von Falkenhayn later claimed that his tactics at Verdun were designed not to take the city, but rather to destroy the French Army in its defense. In practice the German Offensive was intended to go as far as possible and had no obvious design to minimize German casualties and maximize French casualties. Attrition was therefore used later in the battle to shift the focus away from Falkenhayn's tactical failure, rather than a goal of the battle itself.

Attrition to the enemy was easy to assert and difficult to refute, and thus may have been a convenient face-saving exercise in the wake of many indecisive battles. It is in many cases hard to see the logic of warfare by attrition because of the obvious uncertainty of the level of damage to the enemy, and of the damage that the attacking force may sustain to its own limited and expensive resources, while trying to achieve that damage.

That is not to say that a general will not be prepared to sustain high casualties while trying to reach an objective. An example in which one side used attrition warfare to neutralize the other side's advantage in maneuverability and unit tactics occurred during the latter part of the American Civil War, when Ulysses S. Grant pushed the Confederate Army continually, in spite of losses, confident that the Union's supplies and manpower would overwhelm the Confederacy even if the casualty ratio was unfavorable; this indeed proved to be the case.