Strategic depth

Strategic depth is a term in military literature that broadly refers to the distances between the front lines or battle sectors and the combatants' industrial core areas, capital cities, heartlands, and other key centers of population or military production. The key precepts any military commander must consider when dealing with strategic depth are how vulnerable these assets are to a quick, preemptive attack or to a methodical offensive and whether a country can withdraw into its own territory, absorb an initial thrust, and allow the subsequent offensive to culminate short of its goal and far from its source of power.

Commanders must be able to plan for both eventualities, and have measures and resources in place on both tactical and strategic levels to counter any and all stages of a minor or major enemy attack. These measures do not need to be limited to purely military assets, either—the ability to reinforce civilian infrastructure or make it flexible enough to withstand or evade assault is very valuable in times of war. The issue was the trade-off between space and time as witnessed by Germany’s failure to defeat the Soviet Union in 1942. In the face of a German invasion, the Soviet military retreating from occupied Poland in June 1941 to the outskirts of Moscow in December 1941 allowed the Soviet Union to move its industrial base to the east of the Ural Mountains. Thus the industries that had been moved could build the resources needed for the Soviet counter-attack.

In Pakistan, the idea of strategic depth was perceived in 1980s by the NDU professor General Mirza Aslam Beg (later Chief of Army Staff working under Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1980s). Since then, the Pakistan military establishment has been repeatedly accused of forming a policy that seeks to control Afghanistan, a policy often referred to by the media as "strategic depth". This is given as the reason why Pakistan has supported certain factions of the Taliban in Afghanistan. In the years 2014-2015, with Pakistan's domestic operation against militants in full swing, Pakistani military leaders said that they adhered to no such policy.

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