The need for mobility, opportunity and decisiveness have tended to associate military art with offensive manoeuvre, cavalry, and therefore, before advent of late-19th century firearms, Asia.
The confrontation between these two forms of military art that took place as a result of the Crusades and the Mongol invasion of Europe, and the contemporaneous introduction of artillery into warfare significantly changed thinking about military art in Europe, leading to wide-ranging experiments in tactical formation of troops, use of combined arms and exercise of maneuver warfare concepts and methods not only in tactics, but on a larger scale, including in use of naval forces.
The defining application of firepower and manoeuvre in military art became expressed during the conduct of strategic operations of the Red Army in World War II that sought to combine the shock of armoured warfare with mobility, and the traditional reliance on infantry in strengthened positions to first stop the German advances and during counter-attacks to achieve breakthrough of the enemy position, and in conducting deep operations to destroy the logistic support, literally starving German troops of supplies and ammunition, and forcing them to surrender.
Aerial warfare became the ultimate solution to manoeuvre in delivery of firepower, and drastically increased the tempo of conflicts, making blitzkrieg possible during the Second World War.
While German industrial centres became just such targets for the Allied strategic bombing during World War II, on the Eastern Front the Soviet Red Army chose to adapt by developing concepts and methods suggested by theorists during the interwar period to a more offensive-based and dynamic conduct of operations coordinating ground and air offensives.