Two-front war
The opponent consequently encounters severe logistic difficulties, as they are forced to divide and disperse their troops, defend an extended front line, and is at least partly cut off from their access to trade and exterior resources.
[2][3] The term has widely been used in a metaphorical sense, for example to illustrate the dilemma of military commanders in the field, who struggle to carry out illusory strategic ideas of civilian bureaucrats, or when moderate legal motions or positions are concurrently opposed by the political Left and Right.
Aware of the dangers of a battle with the superior Spartans, Athens concentrated on the conquest of Boeotia and thus avoid a prolonged two-front war.
[8] On several occasions during the third century BCE, the Roman Republic engaged in two-front conflicts while clashing with the Gauls and Etruscans to the north and also campaigning in Magna Graecia (the coastal areas of Southern Italy).
[11] Various emperors, such as Septimius Severus and Aurelian forcibly led large armies to the opposite ends of the empire in order to deal with the various threats.
Large-scale incursions of Germanic tribes, such as the Goths and Hunnic raids in the west began during the fourth century and lasted for more than a hundred years.
In the seven year long Peninsular War (1807–1814) imperial French contingents and Spanish and Anglo-Portuguese armies wrestled for control of the Iberian Peninsula in numerous battles.
Nonetheless, in 1812 as French military presence in Iberia had begun to decline, emperor Napoleon Bonaparte personally lead an army of more than 600.000 troops to the east into Russia, seeking to decisively defeat the Russian Empire and force Tsar Alexander I to comply with the Continental System.
[29] When Italy joined the conflict in May 1915 on the Allied side and deployed in strength at the Alpine front to the south, Austria-Hungary was already critically undermanned and faced serious recruitment shortfalls, which diminished the chances to exact an early defeat on any of the opponents, instead be confined to struggle in a two-front war at the periphery of its own territory.
The greater two-front war only ended after the separate peace with Russia in March 1918, which, after all, did not forestall the collapse of the imperial army in the course of summer and autumn.
In contrast, steadily improving Allied cooperative warfare, based on an exponentially growing war industry brought about the inevitable total military defeat for Germany.
[32][33][34][35] The United States, who had, since December 1941, primarily focused on the conflict with the Japanese Empire, eventually established an Atlantic front in order to support their European allies, beginning in November 1942 with an amphibious landing in North Africa, later to continue the campaign in Sicily and on the Italian peninsula and invade France on the beaches of Normandy in 1944.
[36][37] Their colossal military strength and favorable strategic position in between two oceans without territorial borders to any of the Axis powers allowed the US forces to safely wage an offensive two-front war by maintaining the initiative in the Pacific War, contain and defeat Japan and also increase American presence in Europe that ensures Allied victory over Nazi Germany.
A major rationale for the American 600-ship Navy plan in the 1980s was to threaten the Soviet Union with a two-front war, in Europe and the Pacific Ocean, in the event of hostilities.
[47][48] India and China have, despite more than a dozen rounds of border talks and the uneasy Line of Actual Control, as yet failed to negotiate a conclusive agreement.
For decades, the Indian press and media have pointed at political tensions and deteriorating relations with China, caused, among other things, by occasional Chinese military incursions into Indian-controlled territory.
