Frontal attack

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With frontal attack is military tactics referred to attack at which forces acting in the direction in which the defending forces are aligned. The aim is, in addition to destroying the defender's forces, to penetrate the defender's front position in order to advance into his hinterland or to gain access to the defender's flanks.

Frontal attacks are often costly for the attacking forces. A frontal attack will only be successful if the attacker manages to hold down the defender's strength until the maneuvering elements can destroy the enemy. Frontal attacks therefore presuppose a great superiority of the attacker in fire and impact power.

Historical meaning

Ancient and Middle Ages

Especially in antiquity and in the Middle Ages , the frontal attack was the most common form of attack, since military tactics were very poorly developed in most armed forces and mainly because the relative mobility of the attacker or his military organization hardly allowed any other form of attack.

The tactics of the frontal attack in 371 BC experienced the first major improvement. Through the "crooked formation" , which appears for the first time in the light of history at the battle of Leuktra . The forces in one section of the front are strengthened at the expense of other sections in order to achieve a breakthrough as quickly as possible in this section, through the great preponderance of one's own forces. The concept corresponds to today's principle of priority formation .

The tactics experienced another revolution through the increase in army strengths in ancient Rome, which made it no longer sensible to concentrate forces in one row. Through the formation of waves of attack it was now possible to maintain the pressure on the enemy for a long time.

Modern times

In modern times, the massive emergence of ranged weapons fundamentally changed tactics. Attack momentum and mass alone were no longer sufficient, since the defender was usually able to use his long-range weapons more effectively than the attacker or was better protected against those of the attacker. The advancing firepower of long-range weapons subsequently made the attacker increasingly superior and ultimately led to the stalemate of the positional war.

If attack operations were still possible, the attacker had to concentrate his forces in the smallest of spaces in order to be able to penetrate a defense. A broad front approach, as was still required in the First World War, was therefore impossible.

The development of the Blitzkrieg tactics as a synthesis of line tactics allowed such concentration, but only on the condition that the attacking forces succeed in evading the inevitable flank threat through superior mobility, deep staggering and exploiting the element of surprise.

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Wiktionary: Frontal attack  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations