Blitzkrieg Was a Product, Not a Process

Six weeks was not the outcome anyone expected

Everyone in 1940 remembered World War I, when France became a bloody stalemate. So when France fell in six weeks, with the French Army collapsing and the British Army chased off the continent, Sam Cook says it was simply not the expected result. It changed the trajectory of World War II, to the point where Nazi Germany had, in his words, "some small chance of winning the war" on the strength of its victories in the west.

Cook had just written an article on how that lightning campaign happened, and he put it out alongside the Fort Leavenworth papers on the evolution of German doctrine after World War I. His reason for pairing them is the argument of this whole conversation: the two things are directly connected.

The army that lost came back and shocked the world

Cook lays out the sequence. Germany lost World War I. The army did not feel it had lost on the battlefield, but it was pushed out of France at the end of the war, disarmed, and cut down to 100,000 soldiers. Then, after the interwar period, that same army shocked the world.

His explanation is not equipment. The Germans studied and internalised the lessons they had learned in World War I, and then successfully integrated new technology into a new system of training and doctrine. The technology mattered because the system around it had been rebuilt to use it.

The lesson Cook draws for armies watching Ukraine

This is where the history turns into a warning. Any foreign military that watches the war in Ukraine and concludes, "we're just gonna order a bunch of drones and give them to our units and we're ready to fight on the modern battlefield," is going to fail. Cook says it plainly: "that's not gonna be successful."

He applies it to his own former service. The United States Army is behind right now in drone warfare, he says, and he believes his old colleagues who now command brigades understand that there is a lot to learn from what Ukrainians are doing. The task he describes is twofold: work out how to face the threat of drones, and integrate drones into operations at a much smaller level.

The point of the 1940 comparison is that buying the new thing is the easy part. Germany's advantage came from what it did with the years in between.

Numbers were never the question

General Mykhailo Zabrodskyi starts somewhere else: with a correct assessment of forces. France, Belgium and the Benelux countries, together with the British, had three or four times more tanks than Germany at the time.

"But the question is not the total number of tanks," he says. "The question is the number of tanks in right place and right time."

For Zabrodskyi, that is where military art begins. It is the ability to create conditions in which, at the right time and place, you have overwhelming numbers. The Germans succeeded at exactly this. After World War I, when everyone had adjusted to long fronts, positional trench warfare, and small assaults that moved back and forth, Germany demonstrated a new style of mechanised manoeuvre warfare. More than that, it showed that an army could concentrate all its efforts and forces on the right direction and deliver a concentrated strike, which is what happened in the first part of the French campaign under the Yellow Plan.

Blitzkrieg was a product, not a process

Zabrodskyi's central claim is a distinction worth keeping. "I strongly believe that blitzkrieg, it was not a process. It was a product."

It was the result, he says, of 25 years of developing doctrine, retraining troops, debating and comparing different points of view, all resting on a proper industrial base that allowed the army to genuinely mechanise while avoiding international sanctions.

Cook adds that Germany had a lot of help in this from the Soviet Union, specifically training in Ukraine. Zabrodskyi agrees, and adds that it was not only the Soviet Union. Cook also notes that blitzkrieg was never a term the German military used for itself; it was a propaganda label, branded as such by Goebbels. Zabrodskyi accepts that, and keeps the word anyway because it is convenient for understanding.

His instruction is to look at blitzkrieg as a finished thing, the end of a long development, and not only as a starting point.

Why it was never repeated

Zabrodskyi's supporting evidence is what came after. Following 1939 and 1940, and with the exception of 1941 in the USSR, Germany never repeated it.

Why? Not, he argues, because everybody simply adjusted. A new style and new improvements work for a limited period of time: as long as you keep a fresh vision, and as long as your enemy or potential enemy cannot create something against those tactics and that doctrine.

That makes advantage perishable. A doctrine that took a quarter of a century to build bought Germany a short window, and the window closed once opponents adapted.

He flags the question he finds most worth researching. Not how blitzkrieg appeared, but how the Soviet Union, the American Army, the British Army and the other countries fighting in World War II learned to counter it.

The two halves fit together

Read side by side, the two speakers make one argument from opposite ends. Cook says an army cannot buy its way into a new way of war; it has to build the training and doctrine around the technology. Zabrodskyi says that even when an army does build it properly, the edge lasts only as long as the enemy has no answer.

For anyone measuring a modern army's drone readiness, that is a demanding standard. The question is not how many systems a unit owns, but whether its doctrine puts them in the right place at the right time, and whether it can keep changing faster than the side across the line.

What to watch

• Whether Western armies change doctrine or only procurement. Cook's test is integration of drones at small unit level, not purchase volume. Announcements that only add drones to existing units fail it.
• How long any battlefield innovation in Ukraine keeps its edge. Zabrodskyi's claim predicts that each new tactic works for a limited period before a counter appears.
• Who studies the counter, not the breakthrough. His research question is how armies learned to defeat a new doctrine. Writing that focuses on that side of the story is following his lead.