By infantry this being “guys with guns” armed with assault rifles. Surely all the artillery, missiles, drones and planes means a guy with a rifle isn’t really that relevant unless he’s really just a radio operator calling in those weapons. In which case the gun is just there to stop a bunch of civilians hitting him with a big old rock.
Is stuff we see in Call of Duty for example where guys with guns win wars a bit like the cult of the bayonet in the 19th century where it’s wrapped up in romantic notions of war that bears no relation to what’s actually doing the killing? We still give soldiers knives and bayonets as well where again they see a lot more use in popular media far beyond their actual use.
Like what stops them going the way of cavalry, bayonet charges and pike squares? Infantry aren’t vastly more protected than they were in WW1 so why hasn’t the lethality of weapons reached the point where you can’t employ them? Modern weapons are a lot more destructive than in the Great War but this hasn’t led to people dropping infantry and they remain a core part of armies.
Because when most wars are fought, they're generally being fought over something. Pounding that something into dust with artillery, air strikes, and tank brigades tends not to be very good for the thing.
Simplifying the concept of infantry to "Soldier with a rifle" is also hugely incorrect as there are also various roles and environments where infantry units excel. Engineers, scouts, snipers, infiltrators, or breachers are all vital roles that infantry units perform.
Gert wrote: Because when most wars are fought, they're generally being fought over something. Pounding that something into dust with artillery, air strikes, and tank brigades tends not to be very good for the thing.
Simplifying the concept of infantry to "Soldier with a rifle" is also hugely incorrect as there are also various roles and environments where infantry units excel. Engineers, scouts, snipers, infiltrators, or breachers are all vital roles that infantry units perform.
Engineers are logistics and aren’t front line combat troops. Same as a medic or hospital personnel. Many of those roles could be demilitarised entirely and they don’t really need guns except for self defence from civilians throwing rocks at them.
The same reason a SWAT team or police aren’t soldiers? Most of the roles you list are counter insurgency and that heavily blurs the line between a war and a police action.
Recon can be done by drones. If it’s guy operating a drone that’s not really what most would understand to be an infantry soldier.
I think the term infantry is commonly understood to be “soldiers with rifles” in fox holes and trenches or deploying as the main body of the army. Which is how it’s depicted in popular culture and in the armies own recruitment ads. Not a supporting arm. Cavalry also had their uses in recon and policing actions even after they weren’t of much use on the larger battlefield. Why wouldn’t this apply to infantry with assault rifles as well?
There's so many reasons.
One soldier with a rocket launcher can take down multiple types of vehicles and is a fraction of the cost.
Humans can manoveur areas that some or all vehicles can't access.
"Technically" CAS can cover a lot of ground, but they're a big target and still vulnerable to certain weapon systems.
It's basically given that you need boots on the ground in order to actually secure an area. Armor alone has visibility issues and is vulnerable to infantry.
Sure, you could glass an area, but the only time that would even be considered is if the goal of the war was to wipe out the opponent and nothing else...or in the case of the Pacific War, force a surrender.
The idea that infantry is just "guys with assault rifles" is false. Standard US infantry fire teams have, the last time I checked, at least 1 SMG embedded in the unit, and in the army I believe the TL carried a M203 Grenade Launcher. All four team members also carry grenades.
A US Marine company has an organic weapons platoon and they are equipped with MMGs, mortars, and SMAWs (rocket launcher).
Basically, no modern military is deploying a single infantry unit that is only "guys with assault rifles."
Bahkmut and Vuhledar point to the resilience of the infantryman with a good hole to hide in. They are cheap to create, but can be made to be very effective. So you can have lots of them and they can’t be ignored or else they will get in your back lines and do terrible things to your support troops.
Infantry spans the whole spectrum of violence from punching a guy in the face up to calling in massive artillery or air strikes. And then they sit on the ground that is yours to stop some other bugger nicking it.
Totalwar1402 wrote: Engineers are logistics and aren’t front line combat troops. Same as a medic or hospital personnel. Many of those roles could be demilitarised entirely and they don’t really need guns except for self defence from civilians throwing rocks at them.
Engineers are not just logistics. They're combat troops that perform duties such as EOD work, construction, and more. Likewise, battlefield medics are not rear echelon forces either but rather often deploy with their units and experience combat all the same.
The same reason a SWAT team or police aren’t soldiers? Most of the roles you list are counter insurgency and that heavily blurs the line between a war and a police action.
Engineers, scouts, snipers, infiltration units, and breachers are not automatically COIN forces. COIN operations don't actually use one specific class of soldier because it is not a role but rather as the name suggests, an operation. Technically you could deploy armour battalions on COIN ops it just wouldn't be very effective.
Recon can be done by drones. If it’s guy operating a drone that’s not really what most would understand to be an infantry soldier.
The type of drone you are thinking of supplies a wide range of intelligence but there are many ways to evade or confuse this technology. They also don't work in every single scenario.
I think the term infantry is commonly understood to be “soldiers with rifles” in fox holes and trenches or deploying as the main body of the army. Which is how it’s depicted in popular culture and in the armies own recruitment ads. Not a supporting arm. Cavalry also had their uses in recon and policing actions even after they weren’t of much use on the larger battlefield. Why wouldn’t this apply to infantry with assault rifles as well?
Infantry are the main body of every army in the world. That's not pop culture influence, that's a fact.
You're comparing apples and oranges when it comes to the cavalry comparison. Cavalry were used as breakthrough troops and for long-ranging recon missions. Both roles were taken over by the likes of armour, jeeps, and aircraft thereby rendering the cavalry useless outside of ceremonial duties. Nothing has even come close to supplanting the role of infantry in warfare.
Perhaps you should go and research the various roles, weapons, and equipment "basic infantry" possess.
Going back through the OP. Modern weapons in industrial warfare are collectively no more destructive than those used in WW1. Individually they are more accurate, but the collective effect is the same. Protection of your infantry comes either from a nice big sturdy hole, not being seen, or being positioned somewhere surrounded by things or people that the opposition is unwilling to turn into dust.
It’s hard to make weapons that can counter all of those defences, especially at the price point of a guy with a rifle (and a few other toys), hence the PBI continues to be a thing.
If infantry are so good why did the US roll over them in both Iraq wars? Was that an aberration and if those Iraqi infantry had magically been same as US. All the javelins, training etc etc. that the outcome would have been different?
I am just not sure why if they’re so problematic you haven’t seen more investment into ways of killing them. Man in hole in ground shouldn’t be having it that good. Surely a shell or missile is cheaper than a marine?
Totalwar1402 wrote: By infantry this being “guys with guns” armed with assault rifles. Surely all the artillery, missiles, drones and planes means a guy with a rifle isn’t really that relevant unless he’s really just a radio operator calling in those weapons. In which case the gun is just there to stop a bunch of civilians hitting him with a big old rock.
Is stuff we see in Call of Duty for example where guys with guns win wars a bit like the cult of the bayonet in the 19th century where it’s wrapped up in romantic notions of war that bears no relation to what’s actually doing the killing? We still give soldiers knives and bayonets as well where again they see a lot more use in popular media far beyond their actual use.
Like what stops them going the way of cavalry, bayonet charges and pike squares? Infantry aren’t vastly more protected than they were in WW1 so why hasn’t the lethality of weapons reached the point where you can’t employ them? Modern weapons are a lot more destructive than in the Great War but this hasn’t led to people dropping infantry and they remain a core part of armies.
Alot of the Russian-Ukraine war is currently being fought by infantry at relatively close quarters.
We're also not at the point Urban warfare can be done merely with drones. I also tend to stick with the official definitions of words as they've been understood for generations.
I mean politicians often talk about bombing adversaries back to the stone age to get elected, but some form of ethics in addition to good common sense still calls for the need of boots on the ground.
Totalwar1402 wrote: If infantry are so good why did the US roll over them in both Iraq wars? Was that an aberration and if those Iraqi infantry had magically been same as US. All the javelins, training etc etc. that the outcome would have been different?
I’d imagine having trained troops on the ground gives you a reactive ability remote monitoring just doesn’t. Dug in or hidden, they may overhear loose tongues. They may have opportunities to do real damage in comparatively small time windows.
Their presence I would imagine also slows down the enemy advance, particularly in urban areas. I’m far from a military expert, and novice barely does justice, but it’s a poor commander indeed who assumes any given building is clear of enemy troops. That means having to check building by building, floor by floor, room by room. That takes time. It exhausts your own soldiers - possibly more so if they know enemy units are, or at least were, in the area, as they’ll be on alert. The more you can slow an advance, the better as it lets you rally your own troops for counter pushes etc.
Fact that human organism itself is still the most versatile tool. Sure, tanks can move more quickly... but they cannot go where infantry can. A tank or aircraft can carry more weapons - but cannot adapt as well as infantry can. Not everything can be solved by blowing stuff up.
It is the same reason why we still have conventional forces despite all major powers having nukes.
I'm going to take this to a slightly different, philosophical level.
If we were to render warfare into something done completely remotely using machinery, with no people involved at all, no risk to any human life, then what's the point? Would warfare even happen? Underneath the geo politics and strategic and tactical lingo, when we really get down to brass tacks, Is warfare not simply a primal drive to destroy, subjugate or defeat a set of people who differ in some way?
It ties into the whole AI debate. Warfare is part of human nature. If we remove ourselves from it too much, it's no longer in our realm, so why bother? I may be wrong of course, but I think part of the reason people are still involved is because people need to be involved, on a spiritual level.
If we were to render warfare into something done completely remotely using machinery, with no people involved at all, no risk to any human life, then what's the point? Would warfare even happen? Underneath the geo politics and strategic and tactical lingo, when we really get down to brass tacks, Is warfare not simply a primal drive to destroy, subjugate or defeat a set of people who differ in some way?
It ties into the whole AI debate. Warfare is part of human nature. If we remove ourselves from it too much, it's no longer in our realm, so why bother? I may be wrong of course, but I think part of the reason people are still involved is because people need to be involved, on a spiritual level.
it would just become a game - and how many of us already do that
Okay those all make a lot of sense. We aren’t quite at the point where you can drop a missile or shell on ever guys head without breaking the bank. Infantry still are needed to do some tasks. Plus they can just be a sidearm for rockets launchers, grenades and more impressive weaponry.
If that’s the case, two scenarios:
- US infantry is on its own. What stops them being on the receiving end of artillery and drones? How well would US infantry do if they were in this situation? Looking back at old footage of 2003 at times you had whole mobs of them on the roads to Baghdad like something out of the Napoleonic wars. Like, zero concern that they might have artillery shot at them in some photos.
- What stops a country with, not naming names, but if they had 2 billion people, spamming infantry with modern missile launchers? Would that opponent be able to simply absorb the damage of US artillery, aircraft and drones?
Totalwar1402 wrote: Surely all the artillery, missiles, drones and planes means a guy with a rifle isn’t really that relevant unless he’s really just a radio operator calling in those weapons.
Cost.
I'll start with the low hanging fruit:
Planes - most modern planes shoot their target without seeing them (there are a lower number of close support planes, but they have their own drawbacks). Most modern planes do not have a high number of munition attached to them and have a limited mission time. Those aircraft that can loiter are usually light, recon and more frequently RPAS. Putting an attack aircraft in the air is 'ing expensive for limited return. And that's before you start on the support infrastructure for them.
So why have planes then if they are that inefficient? Simply because they give you a distinct advantage, you want air power and you want to deny air power. But it is only useful as a limited tool as part of a combined military force.
Artillery - fantastic stuff, great when it's in place with supply lines, engineering support, with an easily detectable target that prefers to be stationary. Not so great when your enemy decides they are going to move somewhere else, or your supply lines get cut.
Missiles - you serious? you have any idea what a missile costs? You can churn out NATO standard rifle rounds by the billions for the cost of one missile. This ain't call of war.
Drones - actually we're seeing in Ukraine an example of modern'ish armies using drone support. This is new stuff and it's going to take some time before existing materiel is adapted to exploit and defend from drones. Why is this an interesting development? COST! This stuff is super cheap to deploy, requires minimal training and infrastructure. We won't immediately know how existing structures will change to account for this development, but this is one to genuinely watch out for.
Infantry - why use infantry? Aside from being mostly self sufficient (people will cannibalise anything on the front line), very mobile, adaptable to different roles, and easily replaceable? COST! Even after training, kitting, transport, accommodation, wages, health support; infantry are cheap, re-useable resources that (usually) get better over time. Nothing is as versatile for the cost. It's even cheaper if you can get the plebs to do it and pay them less than a living wage, which is what we in the west do.
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Totalwar1402 wrote: If infantry are so good why did the US roll over them in both Iraq wars? Was that an aberration and if those Iraqi infantry had magically been same as US. All the javelins, training etc etc. that the outcome would have been different?
Combined arms + modern training
If the Iraqi forces had the same training as the coalition forces they would have been better, but probably still would have failed due to lower value equipment and resources.
Totalwar1402 wrote: Okay those all make a lot of sense. We aren’t quite at the point where you can drop a missile or shell on ever guys head without breaking the bank. Infantry still are needed to do some tasks. Plus they can just be a sidearm for rockets launchers, grenades and more impressive weaponry.
If that’s the case, two scenarios:
- US infantry is on its own. What stops them being on the receiving end of artillery and drones? How well would US infantry do if they were in this situation? Looking back at old footage of 2003 at times you had whole mobs of them on the roads to Baghdad like something out of the Napoleonic wars. Like, zero concern that they might have artillery shot at them in some photos.
You stop being on the end of artillery either by not being where the enemy can see you, or by stopping the artillery. In Iraq the allied forces were ‘t concerned about artillery particularly because they had total air superiority. The opposing artillery couldn’t get set up anywhere useful without getting annihilated by air power.
If the infantry is alone and unsupported then regardless of how well trained they are, they are likely dead. Modern militaries try to control that risk through intelligence and controlling the battle space’and making the that their infantry isn’t left alone out in The open with no friends.
- What stops a country with, not naming names, but if they had 2 billion people, spamming infantry with modern missile launchers? Would that opponent be able to simply absorb the damage of US artillery, aircraft and drones?
Depends on how their morale is, but yes. If they were defending then just absorbing casualties is a valid tactic until such time as either the opposition or their side runs out of munitions, or the will to fight. Attacking is a bit harder as infantry doesn’t project power very effectively, especially in the face of modern artillery and air power. Again, all of this is being laid out in Horrifying fashion in Ukraine just now.
Totalwar1402 wrote: Like, zero concern that they might have artillery shot at them in some photos.
- What stops a country with, not naming names, but if they had 2 billion people, spamming infantry with modern missile launchers? Would that opponent be able to simply absorb the damage of US artillery, aircraft and drones?
Spamming what? Are you talking about invasion? Whole lot of questions there. But in regards to zero concern. I think that's a bit of mis-characterization by the media you took in. The media paints whatever picture it wants.
Totalwar1402 wrote: Like, zero concern that they might have artillery shot at them in some photos.
- What stops a country with, not naming names, but if they had 2 billion people, spamming infantry with modern missile launchers? Would that opponent be able to simply absorb the damage of US artillery, aircraft and drones?
Spamming what? Are you talking about invasion? Whole lot of questions there. But in regards to zero concern. I think that's a bit of mis-characterization by the media you took in. The media paints whatever picture it wants.
Infantry. China has two billion people. That’s a problem. If the US plan is they surrender once the fleet has been sank that’s a big assumption to make.
I couldn’t get the exact image. It’s where there was like five hundred guys on this dirt road and one was carrying this triangle shaped flag at the head of the column. But stuff like this where you’ve got a few hundred guys crammed like sardines in one area. Or any of those traffic jams they had. One shell and that’s more than they lost in the whole Gulf War.
You hear over and over again when discussing WW1 that soldiers didn’t appreciate the destructive power of modern weapons but…this is a thing and they get away with it.
Totalwar1402 wrote: Like, zero concern that they might have artillery shot at them in some photos.
- What stops a country with, not naming names, but if they had 2 billion people, spamming infantry with modern missile launchers? Would that opponent be able to simply absorb the damage of US artillery, aircraft and drones?
Spamming what? Are you talking about invasion? Whole lot of questions there. But in regards to zero concern. I think that's a bit of mis-characterization by the media you took in. The media paints whatever picture it wants.
Infantry. China has two billion people. That’s a problem. If the US plan is they surrender once the fleet has been sank that’s a big assumption to make.
I couldn’t get the exact image. It’s where there was like five hundred guys on this dirt road and one was carrying this triangle shaped flag at the head of the column. But stuff like this where you’ve got a few hundred guys crammed like sardines in one area. Or any of those traffic jams they had. One shell and that’s more than they lost in the whole Gulf War.
Yeah the area has been cleared, and most likely the locals at that point in time in that area were not hostile with them. That said even though a picture is worth a thousand words, we simple just don't have enough context.
I've spoken with and am related to a few veterans. This image doesn't depict door to door operations, nor movement into hostile ground of which there is most certainly great concern, as that's where people get killed and there is enough depression, and PTSD being treated to prove it.
Totalwar1402 wrote: If infantry are so good why did the US roll over them in both Iraq wars? Was that an aberration and if those Iraqi infantry had magically been same as US. All the javelins, training etc etc. that the outcome would have been different?
Ah see now you're definitely trolling. Oh well.
I don't think he's trolling, I think he's just that <redacted>.
Especially because asymmetrical infantry literally never gave up in the WoT and eventually "won" in Afghanistan.
From Heinleins Starship Troopers (and he may have also said “If you can’t stand on ground you’re claiming, you don’t own it yet.” Or similar)
There are a dozen different ways of delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale, via ships and missiles of one sort or another, catastrophes so widespread, so unselective, that the war is over because that nation or planet has ceased to exist. What we do is entirely different. We make war as personal as a punch in the nose. We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time…
We are the boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die. We're the bloody infantry, the doughboy, the duckfoot, the foot soldier who goes where the enemy is and takes him on in person. We've been doing it, with changes in weapons but very little change in our trade, at least since the time five thousand years ago when the foot sloggers of Sargon the Great forced the Sumerians to cry "Uncle!"
Maybe they'll be able to do without us someday. Maybe some mad genius with myopia, a bulging forehead, and a cybernetic mind will devise a weapon that can go down a hole, pick out the opposition, and force it to surrender or die--without killing that gang of your own people they've got imprisoned down there.
Infantry is the best thing there is at holding stuff. Usually wars tend to have material objectives that need to be conquered and hold, both as territory, populations and/or infrastructure.
Infantry does that because infantry can stand around and look pretty for 99.999% of the time (and provide suppressive fire to pin down enemy infantry in that remaining 0.001% of the time) and while that may not be a particularly glamorous role, it is a fundamental part of winning a war.
Infantry. China has two billion people. That’s a problem. If the US plan is they surrender once the fleet has been sank that’s a big assumption to make.
This is not an infantry problem though. Neither country has sufficient force projection or logistics capability to invade the other and overcome the morale of the other. So it would either come down to wearing the other down logistically, or the nukes come out and the world dies.
Totalwar1402 wrote: If infantry are so good why did the US roll over them in both Iraq wars? Was that an aberration and if those Iraqi infantry had magically been same as US. All the javelins, training etc etc. that the outcome would have been different?
Ah see now you're definitely trolling. Oh well.
I don't think he's trolling, I think he's just that <redacted>.
Especially because asymmetrical infantry literally never gave up in the WoT and eventually "won" in Afghanistan.
Gert is salty because of something I said a year ago about Halo and he lurks in stuff I post ever since then.
That and I said the Dune film was right wing conservative slop. Maybe it was that one that he started.
Totalwar1402 wrote: The guys salty because of something I said a year ago about Halo and he lurks in stuff I post ever since then.
That and I said the Dune film was right wing conservative slop. Maybe it was that one that he started.
My guy, I didn't even post in the Dune thread...
I do remember interacting in the past and being disappointed with your lack of knowledge or willingness to engage properly with someone who does have that knowledge, something that once again you have shown here.
Totalwar1402 wrote: The guys salty because of something I said a year ago about Halo and he lurks in stuff I post ever since then.
That and I said the Dune film was right wing conservative slop. Maybe it was that one that he started.
My guy, I didn't even post in the Dune thread...
I do remember interacting in the past and being disappointed with your lack of knowledge or willingness to engage properly with someone who does have that knowledge, something that once again you have shown here.
Bit difficult when people’s idea of “proper respect” is don’t talk back and don’t ask questions in the first place. Which in a forum is an odd position to take.
War, is bloody expensive. Like, ridiculously, stupidly, bloody expensive. The mention above about how air superiority mattered in Afghanistan. Not only can you reduce the impact of artillery, but each position or piece destroyed is a whole in your enemy’s pocket.
Infantry are comparatively cheap - and in theory at least, only get better and better at their job.
Sure, a man alone isn’t going to reduce a tank to burning wreckage with a fart. But he can steal it, or remove essential engine parts, sabotage it etc given the right opportunity.
See British raids in WW2. Tales of a few dudes in jeeps driving down German runways, shooting up the planes. Apparently*, the Germans assumed it was a much larger attack and fled to regroup. One Commando (might’ve been SAS**) went from plane to plane, ripping out dials and instruments by hand.
Compare that to a missile strike. First those missiles are not cheap. And again I’d assume a competent commander has to assume not all such missiles will reach the target, increasing the cost further still.
The damage done will also be inherently indiscriminate. Whereas an infantry attack can also do a Smash and Grab on command posts. Sure they may not have time to carefully sift through whatever documents, laptops, charts and what have you - but grab what you can, stuff in a pocket and bring it back is still a better opportunity to find Something Juicy than just asploding the whole place.
And it’s potentially a much, much cheaper option. And if you really want the whole place to do a lovely big kaboom when you’re done? Potentially sabotage enemy munition stores etc.
*sorry to be vague. I say apparently as it needs better citation
**this is why it needs better citation than my cluttered memories.
Infantry. China has two billion people. That’s a problem. If the US plan is they surrender once the fleet has been sank that’s a big assumption to make.
Once the fleet is sunk, China gets no oil and no fertilizers. China has to import both these things just to avoid starving to death. The US doesn't have to invade, they just have to blockade. No country in the world is in a position to assist China in this scenario, there are no pipelines of oil/gas running from Russia.
You're right that China won't surrender without an invasion. But infantry isn't an issue if you don't have to invade at all.
Infantry. China has two billion people. That’s a problem. If the US plan is they surrender once the fleet has been sank that’s a big assumption to make.
Once the fleet is sunk, China gets no oil and no fertilizers. China has to import both these things just to avoid starving to death. The US doesn't have to invade, they just have to blockade. No country in the world is in a position to assist China in this scenario, there are no pipelines of oil/gas running from Russia.
You're right that China won't surrender without an invasion. But infantry isn't an issue if you don't have to invade at all.
have you looked at a map?
You realise that China is in eurasia. And you realise that the country behind is russia, which has you guessed it, Oil, Gas, Fertilisers, metals, etc. And is very willing to cooperate.
Blowing up the chinese fleet means quite literally feth all.
War, is bloody expensive. Like, ridiculously, stupidly, bloody expensive. The mention above about how air superiority mattered in Afghanistan. Not only can you reduce the impact of artillery, but each position or piece destroyed is a whole in your enemy’s pocket.
Infantry are comparatively cheap - and in theory at least, only get better and better at their job.
Sure, a man alone isn’t going to reduce a tank to burning wreckage with a fart. But he can steal it, or remove essential engine parts, sabotage it etc given the right opportunity.
See British raids in WW2. Tales of a few dudes in jeeps driving down German runways, shooting up the planes. Apparently*, the Germans assumed it was a much larger attack and fled to regroup. One Commando (might’ve been SAS**) went from plane to plane, ripping out dials and instruments by hand.
Compare that to a missile strike. First those missiles are not cheap. And again I’d assume a competent commander has to assume not all such missiles will reach the target, increasing the cost further still.
The damage done will also be inherently indiscriminate. Whereas an infantry attack can also do a Smash and Grab on command posts. Sure they may not have time to carefully sift through whatever documents, laptops, charts and what have you - but grab what you can, stuff in a pocket and bring it back is still a better opportunity to find Something Juicy than just asploding the whole place.
And it’s potentially a much, much cheaper option. And if you really want the whole place to do a lovely big kaboom when you’re done? Potentially sabotage enemy munition stores etc.
*sorry to be vague. I say apparently as it needs better citation
**this is why it needs better citation than my cluttered memories.
To add to the excellent points you made: other than cost, Infantry is also extremely flexible and can do almost anything in a pinch, including the important non-combat stuff. Need to fill potholes and re-run electricity and phone lines? A platoon of grunts will do the job! Need to erect tents for refugees, dig latrines and prepare meals for a couple hundred people? A platoon of grunts will do the job! Need to scout a safe route through terrain that's questionable, mined or compromised in other ways? Grunts will manage. From just standing around and securing an area, to gathering and interpreting intelligence, liasing with locals, doing emergency repairs on vehicles or rendering first aid to the populace, there's not much that is completely outside of the abilities of regular infantry, provided you're only looking for a 'good enough' job that gets you by till the specialists arrive. And you get all of that for little investment and only the most basic logistics and support needs - as long as you're operating in an area that qualifies as 'livable' for humans, infantry just needs a regular supply of food and water and a safe-ish place to rest and recreate to function for functionally unlimited amounts of time, and in all but the most unfriendly or unforgiving environments a lot of that can be sourced locally if the need arises. Contrary to that, tanks or planes have almost as much necessary downtime for refueling, maintainance and so on as they have operating hours, require sophisticated supply chains and tons and tons of material, and have very specific needs for their basing and maintenance areas as well as severe restrictions on the environments in which they can operate.
Tsagualsa wrote: . Contrary to that, tanks or planes have almost as much necessary downtime for refueling, maintainance and so on.
Not seeking to discount anything you've said, but you're slightly underplaying this. Picture 10 hours maint for 1 hour flying. Aircraft that carry out longer sorties, either through transit or loiter, can be more efficient. But your bomb droppers consume huge amounts of workforce hours. Now, the maint can be divided among multiple personnel, compared with the single person in the seat of the aircraft, but that's what it takes to get a machine moving. Anyone who has seen the large support staff for a motor sports team will have some appreciation of the investment.
Tsagualsa wrote: . Contrary to that, tanks or planes have almost as much necessary downtime for refueling, maintainance and so on.
Not seeking to discount anything you've said, but you're slightly underplaying this. Picture 10 hours maint for 1 hour flying. Aircraft that carry out longer sorties, either through transit or loiter, can be more efficient. But your bomb droppers consume huge amounts of workforce hours. Now, the maint can be divided among multiple personnel, compared with the single person in the seat of the aircraft, but that's what it takes to get a machine moving. Anyone who has seen the large support staff for a motor sports team will have some appreciation of the investment.
I’m guessing there’s no sense corner cutting that either. No point sending bombers up if you’re less than certain they’ll do the job.
Tsagualsa wrote: . Contrary to that, tanks or planes have almost as much necessary downtime for refueling, maintainance and so on.
Not seeking to discount anything you've said, but you're slightly underplaying this. Picture 10 hours maint for 1 hour flying. Aircraft that carry out longer sorties, either through transit or loiter, can be more efficient. But your bomb droppers consume huge amounts of workforce hours. Now, the maint can be divided among multiple personnel, compared with the single person in the seat of the aircraft, but that's what it takes to get a machine moving. Anyone who has seen the large support staff for a motor sports team will have some appreciation of the investment.
I’m guessing there’s no sense corner cutting that either. No point sending bombers up if you’re less than certain they’ll do the job.
The tech level capability and ability to maintain those airframes decides a lot.
B-52: Has the potential to be in service for 100years.
Look up the amount of younger bombers the US has retired or will retire before the '52 goes out of service.
I’m guessing there’s no sense corner cutting that either. No point sending bombers up if you’re less than certain they’ll do the job.
Well, that's open for debate. There was an incident the other day where two US Blackhawks had a mid-air, I haven't read the cause yet. Osprey were once called "marine killers" for their habit of developing fatal in-flight technical faults. We had a massive reaction from one of our own ac blowing up over Afghan leading to the current maintenance culture. Did we go too far? Are we too risk averse? What if the enemy were coming over the hill waving their weaponry at us?
Then there's the questions of the supply chain, the ludicrous expense of government contracts, underfunding for basic needs because of government cuts, and the CAA (just like every national aviation authority) being a license to print money. Air power is chuffing expensive, time consuming and, if you've never been involved, you'd be amazed at the depth of philosophy required to ensure its safe projection.
You realise that China is in eurasia. And you realise that the country behind is russia, which has you guessed it, Oil, Gas, Fertilisers, metals, etc. And is very willing to cooperate.
Blowing up the chinese fleet means quite literally feth all.
How you going to get the oil and gas there? Pipelines? Don't exist. Ships? Blockade, so nope. By truck? Across Siberia? There's one highway and nobody has that number of trucks, and half the year the SIberian winter takes over. Add in that much of the russian oil/gas fields are already shut down and will take a decade or more to get back up and running (with western aid) because they drilled through permafrost and had to be kept running or they freeze solid. They've massively lost capacity already.
Sure, they could trickle in a little, but it will be a tiny fraction of what China needs and they'll funnel it all to their military to keep control. And how will China pay for all that? The yuan will be worthless at that point. They don't have natural resources to trade back and their manufacturing will be toast at that point because it needs imports. The American debt China holds will be worthless, nobody pays debts to a nation they are at war with, and pre-CCP China had massive debt to the USA that's never been called in and never forgiven either that could be used to cancel them out.
I don't see Russia taking IOUs from China in such a scenario. They'd have to cede land, and if they were willing to do that, giving up claims to Taiwan and the Nine-dash line is far easier for them.
A blockade that seriously tries to starve China ends in a nuclear exchange, aka a nice hypothetical that is never going to happen.
Hell even if it didn't it would be political suicide because trying to starve 1.4 billion people is kinda a warcrime.
This is the same nonsense as when people argued about nuking Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks. Technically possible but never going to happen.
Another thing to consider is that Infantry with front-line experience might well be required in order to have infantry with the right combat experience to then go on and operate drones and other remote weapons in an effective manner.
Experienced troops on the front line is a huge thing. There's a vast difference between training and drill and actual combat situations. It's why when armies lose major bodies of experienced soldiers it makes a big impact on their performance, potential and moral.
So even if drone warfare continues to grow and remote operations and weapons become more and more commonplace; you still have to consider that you'll need people with battle experience to be able to operate and make informed, experienced choices with those weapons to best use them.
Another thing is environment. Consider that the British army suffered in the Iraq war because a lot of the equipment they originally took over wasn't made for that environment.
Infantry are more adaptable to different environments whilst machines are often far less so (unless you spend a lot of money on them to start with). So you could end up with a mechanised approach that works great in one climate, but falls apart in another. Before you even touch on logistics and support there's the raw capacity of the machinery to operate in the first place.
Also I think a big point is that armies which work well rarely have just one element that works for them. They have multiple viable elements that work in tandem. Infantry that work with drones; remote artillery; satellite intel etc.... Effective coordination and use of all the different parts produces a single force that is far more powerful and viable than investing heavily into just one.
Tyran wrote: A blockade that seriously tries to starve China ends in a nuclear exchange, aka a nice hypothetical that is never going to happen.
This is well outside the topic area. If you want to do a thread on China, I'm game because I just wrote a book about it (Walls of Men: A Military History of China 2500 B.C. to A.D. 2020, link in my nic). For now, let's stick to infantry.
I will note that the US with all of its technology and industry keeps losing to infantry-heavy armies. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan.
All those smart bombs, all that tech, and we're 0-3.
The US has not had the political will to fight it out in the towns and villages since Korea. We'll go for the easy win, a lighting-fast campaign followed by a parade and promotions for everyone (see 1991), but a long slow grind is not something we're keen on and every country we go against knows it. Fighting an infantry war is the "easy button" against most Western armies these days, so the Queen of Battle is very much relevant.
Infantry can take up positions in complex terrain - forests, cities, etc. Said complex terrain is hard for mechanized forces in APCS/IFVs and tanks to cross, but the enemy is still there, and you have to either bypass or assault. In the 1st Chechen War, for example, Defence Minister Pavel Grachev famously said it would be foolish to run tanks into Grozny while it was held by Chechen fighters - and did it anyhow. The resulting battle, which was mostly infantry on the Chechen end of things, was famously bloody for the Russians. Dug-in infantry is notoriously hard to dislodge, especially when defending in complex terrain.
Engineers are logistics and aren’t front line combat troops.
Clearly you've never seen 12Bs (US Army combat engineer MOS) in action or have any idea what they do. Not a logistics function at all.
Combat engineers - if squaddies pretend to be SF, SF pretend they are Combat Engineers...
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Totalwar1402 wrote: Like, zero concern that they might have artillery shot at them in some photos.
- What stops a country with, not naming names, but if they had 2 billion people, spamming infantry with modern missile launchers? Would that opponent be able to simply absorb the damage of US artillery, aircraft and drones?
Well you have various bottlenecks for that. Russia is a good example. It can give basic infantry training to roughly 120-140k people at a time. Currently twice a year it seems. Reactivating reserves and the like mess with those figures somewhat, but the capacity to train a lot of people has to be created and maintained. Most countries don't have massive conscription annual events anymore as you really need that to maintain numbers. Japan is an example to do it differently with a deliberately skewed privates to other ranks with the intention that excess of NCOs and officers can train up large numbers of extras.
But lets say you get all 2 billion trained. Now you need to get them missile launchers. Now you might build 2 billion with say 4 billion warheads (two shots each). You training pipeline should ideally get everyone at least one shot, so that pushes up costs. But it also means you can steadily refresh the warheads and the occasional broken launcher. Now you have to stockpile these things all over the shop, and building the factories to build them all in say 3 months but never using said factories until invaded is expensive. You will need to guard these facilities and ensure they are climate controlled. And on and on. At this point a few tanks and artillery tubes start to look like a fair cheaper alternative that won't mean your entire workforce have to stop working and wait in trenches for the Americans, hoping they arrive before the tinned pears run out.
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Totalwar1402 wrote: If infantry are so good why did the US roll over them in both Iraq wars? Was that an aberration and if those Iraqi infantry had magically been same as US. All the javelins, training etc etc. that the outcome would have been different?
Well infantry are part of a system. Look at Russian armour loses. A lot of that is using IVFs and the like as the only fighting asset and lacking dismounts to protect it (from enemy infantry with weapons that can hurt the IFV). If you can get your fires, armour and infantry working together, you can have more successful attacks.
Infantry on their own will get steadily killed. Well disciplined, trained infantry will last longer, but still die or surrender. Support them with other arms, and have them support those other arms, and everything gets a lot tougher, with a lot of the militaries efforts going to stop that interdependent support and defeat the enemy in detail.
Well yes ish? Western infantry is expensive and sending him to war is moreso. For the brits by the end of Herrick it was costing us £500k to send one man for 6 months, but that was very much the posh end of deployments. A single shell is cheap. The gun and movingf it and looking after it? Maybe cheaper than a squaddie. But the 3-7 crew for said gun? That is pushing the price up.
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Tyran wrote: A blockade that seriously tries to starve China ends in a nuclear exchange, aka a nice hypothetical that is never going to happen.
Hell even if it didn't it would be political suicide because trying to starve 1.4 billion people is kinda a warcrime.
This is the same nonsense as when people argued about nuking Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks. Technically possible but never going to happen.
Yes you wouldn't want to starve China, but you can stop access to resources critical to the effort of fighting a war.
And China agrees - its belt and road initiative is in some ways a desperate attempt to stop it being cut off from the resources it needs by sea/island blockade. These plans aren't to invade China, but to ensure it can't prosecute an invasion of an ally. You don't need to enforce starvations to stop the cruise missiles falling every day.
Infantry. China has two billion people. That’s a problem. If the US plan is they surrender once the fleet has been sank that’s a big assumption to make.
Once the fleet is sunk, China gets no oil and no fertilizers. China has to import both these things just to avoid starving to death. The US doesn't have to invade, they just have to blockade. No country in the world is in a position to assist China in this scenario, there are no pipelines of oil/gas running from Russia.
You're right that China won't surrender without an invasion. But infantry isn't an issue if you don't have to invade at all.
I think in a war of US vs China the economies of both countries imploding would force negotiations long before military action...
That is a dangerous assumption. While more resilient than most, the US economy is far from invulnerable. Plus the American population pretty much cannot stomach any shape or form of economic pressure.
I think you would be surprised. Remember from a European point of view your economy already has a lot of pressure. The FT characterised the US (and UK) as poor countries with a lot of rich people. The infrastructure, social safety nets, health outcomes etc. are already below what many European societies would tolerate. The US can clearly take a lot more than most other western countries.
Tyran wrote: That is a dangerous assumption. While more resilient than most, the US economy is far from invulnerable. Plus the American population pretty much cannot stomach any shape or form of economic pressure.
There is a difference between a "war of choice," which is how many Americans view the entanglements of the last 40 years, and an existential struggle for survival.
The US political system is under considerable strain, but it has remarkable cellular resiliency (through sovereign state governments).
China's system is still Imperial, and while that projects strength, it also carries severe (and fatal) weaknesses.
The PLA is plagued by a politically necessary division of command and duplicative recruiting. There is also the traditional conformity required by both Communism and traditional Imperial government. Finally, there is problem that China does not now and never has had a martial culture.
Consider that the United States was able to sustain a 2.1 million member all-volunteer force for two decades of combat operations despite considerable domestic opposition.
By contrast, the PLA (all branches) has 2.2 million members. After the debacle of Tienanmen Square (where units refused orders), China created a separate national police force (the Peoples Armed Police) to handle internal security. This has 1.1 million members. While China hypes the use of volunteers and recruits them, an unknown amount of their end strength is sustained by conscription.
What this means is that China - with four times the US population - is unable to sustain even a slightly larger force in peacetime than the US could sustain with volunteers in wartime. China also still uses the Mandate of Heaven framework. They've already suffered through a brutal pandemic and lockdown. Military defeat might bring about internal unrest. In all its history, the only part of China that has seen a peaceful transfer of power is Taiwan.
There is a difference between a "war of choice," which is how many Americans view the entanglements of the last 40 years, and an existential struggle for survival.
I do agree that a very important factor is how the war is seen domestically, which in turn is very dependent on who is seen as the attacker and who is seen as the defendant.
Which ironically means whoever is more aggressive likely loses the domestic narrative.
I think another thing that's very important is information.
One massive change is war is when every single person involved can upload live photos, videos and details to the internet for anyone to access. This changes the nature of war in a massive number of ways.
Both on the aspects of intelligence and information on the battlefield; through to how the domestic population accepts and interprets the information and what comes to the fore and what doesn't.
Even in nations with strong control you still get a lot of information that leaks out unless you hit N Korea levels of control (and it likely only works in part because so many of the population are dirt poor and poorly educated).
Unless we get to the stage of total drone warfare infantry will probably always have a place in war.
As people have said, holding ground and objectives, enforcing the will of the occupying force in the case of an invasion. If you want to take a city, assault the place then wander off the defenders will return. And considering most invasions/assaults tend to be more expensive for the aggressors? Well that cycle will lead to attrition sooner or later.
But, massed infantry assault across an open field is unlikely to ever work again. High rate of fire weapons, especially those mounted on mobile platforms prevent that.
It also depends on the doctrine of the military in question.
Artillery was found ineffective at displacing or even killing infantry in modern warfare from WWI onward. Studies conducted during and after WWI and before WWII determined infantry is actually incredibly resilient to artillery fire. Some soldiers will die under barrage sure, but the modern barrage is also so fierce it just results in infantry holding position as opposed to the century prior where it often scared infantry into retreat. Once we stopped lining up to take turns, artillery superiority ceased to be the determinative factor in ground warfare. Whereas in the 19th century, you'll find that many battles and tactics revolved completely around positioning/displacing of artillery.
Then we started improving field fortifications.
Is a shell cheaper than a marine? Probably. But a shell can't hold ground and on its own isn't very capable of dislodging someone who is. Just look at the sheer amount of ordnance Russia has thrown around in Ukraine and how it has been insufficient to dislodge determined Ukrainian defenders (the reverse has also been true).
Artillery isn't just for killing people (equating the entire process of warfare to just 'killing' is kind of dumb). Artillery is for pinning targets. Softening them up. Creating disruptions. Artillery keeps an entrenched foe pinned with his head down, wrecks his terrain, and provides cover for advancing troops.
At the end of the day you still need to march boots on the ground and take a position and for that you need infantry.
Even at the stage of total drone warfare, you'll still need infantry. They'll just be robot infantry instead of human infantry.
Easy E wrote: I think the power of economic warfare, in the short term anyway; can be called into question based on what we are seeing in Russia right now.
Therefore, the Infantry still have a critical job. Hold onto land.
There's a lot to be said that modern weapons are too expensive to 'industrialize.'
Even after adjusting for inflation, modern fighter planes are magnitudes more expensive than the air superiority fighters of the Second World War. Tanks too. The idea that you can fully engage your entire industrial base behind a warfare exercise has arguably gone out the window due to the costs of modern weaponry and training.
Artillery has had some improvements over the years. I believe America is supplying shells that have some guided capabilities, they're way, way more expensive than standard rounds but are more likley to hit critical objectives when used in tandem with spotting. You can see those top down photos where fields have been dotted with missed shots, I think we're also hearing about the artillery being allocated only 2 shells or something similar.
The Ukraine war is for sure non-standard, but it's bloody interesting.
Overread wrote: I think another thing that's very important is information.
One massive change is war is when every single person involved can upload live photos, videos and details to the internet for anyone to access. This changes the nature of war in a massive number of ways.
In a true peer-to-peer conflict, the satellites are coming down. The submarine cables will likely survive, but I expect much of the internet will be compromised on a more or less permanent basis.
Look to history. You mention the Iraq war, and certainly there you did see ineffectual infantry- but look at Vietnam. All the bombs, napalm, minefields, and defoliants America could toss at them.... and we still had to send infantry into the jungle, and often under the jungle to clear it. Every weapon system out there, from the bombs to the drones has a human behind it. Humans are just durable beyond belief, and able to be deployed, and combat effective for times none of our other elements can match (with the exception of naval vessels, which don't really compare- infantry are notorious ineffective at assaulting the ocean, and ships don't work well on land).
An infantryman can clear a house, cave tunnel, climb or demolish a wall, secure supplies and carry them back to base, operate under complete ECM jamming, and more or less handle any threat if they're given the right tools. Their flexibility is also unmatched. They're not as good at it as specialists- a howitzer beats a man portable mortar any day- but the howitzers also not doing antiaircraft duty, or area denial, or building entrenchments and fighting positions.
Another factor is just length of operation. A soldier "can" (disregarding direct combat ops, where it's a lot less) be self sufficient for 3-7 days. They'll be hating life carrying a week of rations and water, but if you want say, surveillance? There's not a drone or anything on the market that can get itself to position, sit there 5 days and get out. Its battery won't last. In addition to being far less flexible than a patrol of soldiers.
Farseer Anath'lan wrote: Another factor is just length of operation. A soldier "can" (disregarding direct combat ops, where it's a lot less) be self sufficient for 3-7 days. They'll be hating life carrying a week of rations and water, but if you want say, surveillance? There's not a drone or anything on the market that can get itself to position, sit there 5 days and get out. Its battery won't last. In addition to being far less flexible than a patrol of soldiers.
Infantry units stationed on their home turf, literally on their own supply lines have limitless staying power for minimal cost.
What's the cost of a single RPA orbit? How about a CAS sortie? I'm not even talking about expending munitions, just fuel and maintenance.
The reason the Iraqi infantry failed was due to morale issues, not equipment or organizational issues. Though having poor equipment or bad organization can contribute to crumbling morale.
The Iraqi's were mostly made up of already demoralized conscripts who had zero desire to fight. Then they were on the receiving end of an essentially flawless air superiority campaign which further demoralized them. If, in the end, they had chosen to stand and fight anyway the Iraq and Gulf wars would have gone very differently as the actual damage the air campaign caused was not sufficient to destroy them completely. Instead, they chose to surrender or flee.
The Republican Guard units which did stand and fight put up fierce resistance, but if it only happens in a few pockets it won't make a difference. You can concentrate truly overwhelming force on the areas where there is resistance and destroy it. That isn't possible if the entire line holds.
Vietnam is the poster child of what can happen when you have infantry who won't break morale. They are essentially immovable outside of brute force which is exceedingly costly for an attacker. If you are stuck in trench/urban warfare there are only 2 ways to win. Hope the enemy runs of morale or runs out of bodies before you do.
And honestly this isn't a modern phenomenon. Through all of history most fights only get decided by one side losing their last bit of hope and surrendering. In the few cases where they did fight to the bitter end it was always extremely costly for an attacker. And as technology improved through the late middle ages and into the modern era it has become much easier for people to be willing and able to fight to the bitter end.
It doesn't help that frankly most weapons kinda suck at killing infantry that are hiding in trenches, buildings, etc... You can pound a series of trenches for weeks with artillery with truly awful attritional ratios. Ratios which suggest that continuing with the bombardment might take years to destroy all the infantry, and that is assuming no reinforcement occurs. But of course reinforcement will occur, so you can end up with stalemates where realistically nothing will be accomplished for years on end.
WW1 ended because the Central Power's economies all collapsed, not because of anything that happened on the battlefield. Which is really how all wars between peers will be fought in the future. A grinding stalemate till one side's economy can no longer support it.
Totalwar1402 wrote: If infantry are so good why did the US roll over them in both Iraq wars? Was that an aberration and if those Iraqi infantry had magically been same as US. All the javelins, training etc etc. that the outcome would have been different?
Ah see now you're definitely trolling. Oh well.
I don't think he's trolling, I think he's just that <redacted>.
Especially because asymmetrical infantry literally never gave up in the WoT and eventually "won" in Afghanistan.
As an infantryman of 17 years myself it always entertains me when I see armchair generals like that dude who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. He also failed to understand that if you're seeing a picture of calm infantry formations or crowds in the warzone, then you are seeing them AFTER opposition has been completely destroyed or routed.
I was thinking more from a morale perspective. Vietnam is the classic example again; the US didn’t run out of money, troops or weapons, but the US population ran out of patience, which forced the politicians to abandon the war.
Jadenim wrote: I was thinking more from a morale perspective. Vietnam is the classic example again; the US didn’t run out of money, troops or weapons, but the US population ran out of patience, which forced the politicians to abandon the war.
To be fair, the same issue plagued Carthage.
An entire political faction was dedicated to just ending the Second Punic War mostly to spite the Barca family. They got a victory lap until the Third when Rome just enacted ye olden genocide because they hated Carthage a lot more than they hated Hannibal (though they hated Hannibal too).
In comparison, Hannibal's strategy of breaking Rome's Italian allies failed utterly. The other Italian states remained loyal to Rome and kept refilling Roman armies faster than Hannibal's tactical brilliance could crush them until Hannibal finally lost and Carthage itself refused to do anything about it.
cody.d. wrote: Now you're making me wonder if there's ever been a country who Mr Magoo'ed their way through a conflict.
Any answer would be profoundly subjective.
People who win wars tend to want to pat themselves on the back, not admit after the fact they had no idea what they were doing and people rarely happenstantially find themselves stumbling into a war they subsequently win.
EDIT: And hold up, I'm being dumb.
There is a perfect example of this. In 1485 was born the son of a lesser noble family who would, more or less, flunk out of life. Rather than giving up, he said feth it, went to Cuba where his career met a very sudden end. Except he said feth that gak, went completely rogue, went to Mexico, met the natives, went on the run from the law, stayed with some kings, killed some kings, recruited the army sent to apprehend him by burning their boats down and saying 'Let's go boys' and then overthrew an Empire.
He did basically all of this on his own initiative, without permission from literally anyone.
Except by the time the Spanish finally caught up to Hernan Cortes, he'd already toppled the Aztec Empire and laid the groundwork for Colonial Mexico so the Spanish crown shrugged, stamp of approval'd his actions after the fact, and gave him that 'good job son' moment Hernan never got from daddy Cortez.
To be fair, Spain wanted to conquer Mexico anyway. It just wasn't exactly the plan that this one guy basically gallivanting into the sun would be the one to do it, let alone so quickly. But then the flip side is no one had a rock solid understanding of germs back then so they probably didn't expect disease to do so much damned heavy lifting for them along the way. Reading between the lines of the memoirs some of Cortez' men published later on, you can see parts where Cortez was literally making gak up as he went because he figured his career was over if he didn't succeed so he just started throwing gak at the wall and managed to stick a shocking amount of it to the effect of empire toppling, some genocide, a whole lot of enslavement, and founded New Spain a lot faster than anyone in Spain probably thought was possible.
EDIT EDIT: Another example is the First Crusade, started to help restore lost lands to the Byzantines from the Caliphate, and somehow spiralled into a bunch of rogue nobility conquering the Holy Lands.
NinthMusketeer wrote: Worth noting the Azecs were deeply unpopular with their neighbors at the time, a huge factor that often gets overlooked.
Turns out ritually sacrificing another country's soldiers doesn't tend to go over well.
Also worth noting that the frequency of Aztec sacrifices is probably exaggerated.
We know how many temples there were in the city and how many altars from the Conquistadors themselves. It's mathematically impossible for as many people to have been sacrificed as was claimed. A good thing to keep in mind is that Cortez and his men essentially were fugitives for a while. In all likelihood, they exaggerated the brutality of the natives in letters to the Spanish crown in their search for legal legitimacy. Not that sacrifices didn't happen, but literally everyone in Mesoamerica practiced it so it seems unlike that specifically upset the Aztec's subjects in particular. More likely, they aligned with Cortez because no one wants to be under someone else's thumb and they didn't fully appreciate that they couldn't oust Cortez when the time came. He only had a few hundred men. Most of his Indian allies would rationally presume they could get rid of him themselves and saw Cortez as their ally against the Aztecs rather than his allies in establishing Spanish colonialism.
Cortez of course had no way of knowing the political situation in central Mexico when he arrived.
The expedition he was originally contracted to lead (before being fired) was to the Yucatan. The dude ended up in Mexico because he said 'feth it let's go!" If he'd actually gone to Yucatan, I wonder if he'd have met the same success. Gonzalo Guerrero would go on to out wit and magnificent bastard his way around men with much greater military credentials than Cortez when the Spanish actually went after the Yucatec Maya.
LordofHats wrote: Also worth noting that the frequency of Aztec sacrifices is probably exaggerated.
I'm going to say that there isn't really an ideal number for that sort of thing other than "zero," especially if it's your friends, family and extended kin who are bleeding out on the altar.
I will again point people to the British Empire, which managed to subjugate the Ch'ing Dynasty with a handful of warships simply by figuring out how to blockade the Grand Canal. Cortes had nothing on those guys.
Also fear of the outsider and the upstarts. By all accounts the Mexica people were not native to Mexico (though the region now bears their name, funny how history works) and the other people in the central valley and outlying areas resented being subjugated to outsiders.
Which is just another irony that plays out when they ended up overthrowing one ruling power to get themselves stuck with another.
To round back to the thread topic on infantry;
The Mesoamericans were not very impressed with guns. Loud yes and armor piercing, but slow to relod. They much preferred their own bows and spears, especially given the terrain.
What freaked them out were horses and Cortez's cannons. This is the area where the cannon was a direct fire support weapon, but one where mass infantry blocs were the norm. Aztec troops would form lines to fight only to have cannon balls shred them.
The horse apparently just freaked them the feth out.
There was zero context pre-Columbian contract for cavalry in American native warfare.When the plains tribes got their hands on horses from the Spanish groups like the Comanche and Souix would rapidly conquered anyone who didn't adapt the same battlefield tactics. The horse was an overwhelming psychological weapon as well as offering all the advantages of a horse.
So you know.
History can always repeat itself and there could be a phase of warfare that puts infantry down through the advent of weapons that are inconceivable to fight against. But such things are inconceivable so it's hard to guess what such a weapon could look like.
What freaked them out were horses and Cortez's cannons.
Fighting on narrow causeways, cannon were absolutely devastating. Cavalry in the open was pretty darn effective - especially if you haven't seen it before.
Of course, the technology to get infantry out of entrenched positions does exist. And it's not very expensive. The issue is it is a taboo thing in the current climate.
I am of course talking about chemical and biological weapons. And I guess mass deployment of flamethrowers.
Grey Templar wrote: Of course, the technology to get infantry out of entrenched positions does exist. And it's not very expensive. The issue is it is a taboo thing in the current climate.
I am of course talking about chemical and biological weapons. And I guess mass deployment of flamethrowers.
Yeah, this came to my mind.
But chemical weapons and flamethrowers have come to be seen as so abhorrent basically everyone with the capacity to actually deploy them generally doesn't. Until they change their minds, anyway.
It's not really trivial. NBC gear severely impedes your combat abilities and it is high intensity to maintain as it basically needs to be replaced every day. You can't just camp out in a hazmat suit and get away with just replacing the filters every now and again.
If there was a mass deployment of chemical or biological weaponry in a large trench war scenario both sides would find it difficult to keep their troops in positions for long. I'm sure we have large stockpiles, but if Ukraine has taught us anything its that whatever size stockpile of gear you have it isn't anywhere close to big enough.
NBC gear is also the kind of stuff that really doesn't store for long periods well. Masks and filters are fine, but the suits themselves will stiffen and crack with long term storage so having large stockpiles is troublesome.
Tyran wrote: World War 1 saw a massive use of chemical weaponry in large trench warfare, yet utterly failed to change the extremely static nature of the conflict.
I would think 100 years of advances in chemistry, logistics, and delivery mechanisms would probably make things a bit more effective.
I mean, 100 years of technological advance cannot change the issue that wind can simply scatter any chemical weapon making them extremely unreliable to the point you can easily poison yourself.
And of course protective equipment hasn't exactly been static for those 100 years either.
I'm not sure where the idea that Iraq demonstrated wholly ineffectual infantry comes from. Fallujah is a perfect example of total air superiority and unimpeded mobility still not eliminating the need to go door-to-door to secure territory- a Predator can't patrol a city street and an Abrams can't clear rooms.
Polonius wrote: I would think 100 years of advances in chemistry, logistics, and delivery mechanisms would probably make things a bit more effective.
Not particularly- I'm with Tyran and Commissar on this one. We've got nastier agents like sarin, anthrax, and VX, but CBRN protection is more widespread and dramatically more effective. It's an impediment to operate in, but it shuts down chemical and biological weapons completely, and it's far cheaper to supply or stockpile CBRN gear than to supply or stockpile chemical weapons.
Here's a pretty good essay on the modern use of chemical weapons. The tl;dr is that modern militaries don't use them because they impede maneuver warfare, and less-modern militaries don't use them because they're not nearly as effective (or difficult to protect against) as the same tonnage in conventional explosives.
We don't avoid flamethrowers and chemical weapons because of moral qualms about their use. We avoid them because they're ineffective.
Oh, I don't think chemical weapons, or any other weapon, would suddenly make entrenched infantry obsolete, but I do think that if there wasn't a taboo on their use we would use them at least in niche applications. Situations like Iwo Jima or Vietnamese tunnels seem like circumstances were some sort of chemical agent could have been effective.
OTOH, that article does make a compelling case that maybe they're just surprisingly ineffective. The example of the Sarin attack on the Tokyo subway might be the most persuasive: an attack in ideal circumstances against unprepared civilians still only killed 12 people.
We don't avoid flamethrowers and chemical weapons because of moral qualms about their use. We avoid them because they're ineffective.
Chemical weapons have in the past proven ineffective, but I personal chalk that down to that avenue of warfare being largely untested. Nobody has really committed to saying "screw it, we're all in on chemical warfare".
Flamethrowers on the other hand are absolutely effective. They are very good for burning out infantry. Just see their use in the Pacific theatre. Yeah, dangerous for the guy carrying it, but very effective against the Japanese foxholes and tunnels. If it was ineffective, we would have stopped using them very fast at that time.
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catbarf wrote: I'm not sure where the idea that Iraq demonstrated wholly ineffectual infantry comes from. Fallujah is a perfect example of total air superiority and unimpeded mobility still not eliminating the need to go door-to-door to secure territory- a Predator can't patrol a city street and an Abrams can't clear rooms.
The ineffective infantry were the Iraqi conscripts, not the US.
The Iraqi army, in both the Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom, was totally ineffective at putting up resistance precisely because the bulk of their infantry surrendered or ran away. Pretty much only the Republican Guard gave any resistance. It is a good demonstrator of morale being what breaks armies, not necessarily weaponry.
On the flipside, you have the Japanese in WW2 where they pretty much wouldn't break at all and we had to resort to Flamethrowers and brute force to dig them out of holes. Or we could just sail past a particular island that wasn't worth it and let them starve.
But where we had to dig them out, Flamethrowers were very effective. And chemical would probably have been too. Though the flamethrower was definitely the better option, less danger of hurting friendlies with a flamethrower.
As long as there are guys who are willing to run into buildings with guns and start shooting civilians, or throw grenades in the windows to the same effect, you are going to need other guys with guns to stop them.
Whether those guys are security guards, police officers or soldiers is really just a question of how hot things have gotten.
Easy E wrote: I think the power of economic warfare, in the short term anyway; can be called into question based on what we are seeing in Russia right now.
I think it has been impressive at just how effective economic warfare has been against a country thought to be largely insulated to outside economic pressure.
A neat video on the topic.
https://youtu.be/xmO1kfCr_II
Chemical and biological weapons also have the downside that they POISON THE VERY EARTH THAT YOU ARE TRYING TO TAKE/DEFEND!
Theoretically they might break down through weathering, but there are likely to be residual pockets that will continue to kill people for years or decades after the conflict.
Fire is a horrible way to kill people, but it’s over pretty quickly after the attack.
OTOH, that article does make a compelling case that maybe they're just surprisingly ineffective.
Well Syria is an example of where they are effective. The Syrian army wasn't keen on a) dying and b) fighting in built up areas as it often led to a). They had Hezbollah guys to use as assault troops, but there were never that many and even they took heavy casualties. Armed well motivated militia, terrorist, insurgent, freedom fighter and whatever else you wish to label them, but essentially locally raised patchily trained light infantry were proving far too hard to shift.
But their morale crumbled when hit with chemical attacks. They would vacate areas and when it was safe Syrian troops could occupy while those light infantry didn't really want to go back. It became a pretty standard urban attack system. And if it came back more widely in fighting today, I think for attacking trenches a mobile combined assault is the way to go not biochem attacks, but potentially for clearing BUAs or suppressing them to allow you to pass (and potentially keep them supressed) chemical attacks could have a place, as long as you didn't care about the civilians in those areas. The BUA also absorbs most of the attack and leaves little to blow back to you.
As a side note they discovered plenty of people for hire and willing idiots in the countries that might have discouraged this use to muddy the waters well enough to ensure nothing overcame western initial reluctance to do much as signatories of the various treaty. I know when I look back in history there is also those people, but is it just my imagination they are more common today?
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Flinty wrote: Chemical and biological weapons also have the downside that they POISON THE VERY EARTH THAT YOU ARE TRYING TO TAKE/DEFEND!
Theoretically they might break down through weathering, but there are likely to be residual pockets that will continue to kill people for years or decades after the conflict.
No, even basic chemical weapons break down relatively quickly. I think Sarin breaks down in contact with moisture. Random containers may trap some, but generally in that type of fighting you aren't to fussed if the locals take a few more casualties from it. They are probably losing more to UXO and mines anyway.
Easy E wrote: I think the power of economic warfare, in the short term anyway; can be called into question based on what we are seeing in Russia right now.
No, its just that most people don't understand what the break point is for economic warfare. It is at whatever point the political pressure from the population is enough to convince the leaders to stop. This depends on how much the leaders care to listen to the population and how much the population is willing to tolerate.
Russia has almost normalized going without comforts and luxuries in its culture, and even basic needs being on the edge. The people are just less likely to push back when times get bad. They're going to have to get really really bad.
Russia is also not being fully isolated. There is still limited imports that are allowed, and some countries that are still willing to fully trade. So its not truly economy breaking yet.
Easy E wrote: I think the power of economic warfare, in the short term anyway; can be called into question based on what we are seeing in Russia right now.
No, its just that most people don't understand what the break point is for economic warfare. It is at whatever point the political pressure from the population is enough to convince the leaders to stop. This depends on how much the leaders care to listen to the population and how much the population is willing to tolerate.
Russia has almost normalized going without comforts and luxuries in its culture, and even basic needs being on the edge. The people are just less likely to push back when times get bad. They're going to have to get really really bad.
Russia is also not being fully isolated. There is still limited imports that are allowed, and some countries that are still willing to fully trade. So its not truly economy breaking yet.
So are you arguing against what I wrote, or supplementing it?
It is pretty clear to me, that economic warfare has not been enough to end the war in Ukraine. Therefore, I question it ability to end or even prevent a future conflict better than conventional military means.
I am saying that you cannot make that statement given how short the war in Ukraine has gone on combined with the fact that Russia has not been completely strangled economically. Its like saying "Gee, I can't drown this guy" when all you've done is spray him in the face with a hose.
It's not evidence that economic warfare doesn't work. Both because not enough time has elapsed and we also haven't gone whole hog.
Russia is being severely weakened by the embargos, but it will take time. Time measured in years, not months.
Not particularly- I'm with Tyran and Commissar on this one. We've got nastier agents like sarin, anthrax, and VX, but CBRN protection is more widespread and dramatically more effective. It's an impediment to operate in, but it shuts down chemical and biological weapons completely, and it's far cheaper to supply or stockpile CBRN gear than to supply or stockpile chemical weapons.
The elephant in the room in WW II. Everyone had huge chemical weapons stockpiles and protective equipment. No one used it because whatever advantage you got initially would be negated by having to live with the response.
Someone brought up Assad's use of them, and I notice that he still hasn't won his civil war. Weird. He has tanks, jets, artillery and poison gas and what continues to defy him? A bunch of bearded dudes with third-hand AKs.
Not to mention they expected embargos and did setup an extensive savings fund in advance of the war.
The real test is how long they can sustain after that safety net is expired
Grey Templar wrote: Russia is being severely weakened by the embargos, but it will take time. Time measured in years, not months.
The US is in far worse shape at the moment. We had runaway inflation and when we tried to rein it in with interest rate hikes, banks began going under. Now we have a liquidity crisis AND inflation.
Which is quite an accomplishment, if you think about it.
Grey Templar wrote: Chemical weapons have in the past proven ineffective, but I personal chalk that down to that avenue of warfare being largely untested. Nobody has really committed to saying "screw it, we're all in on chemical warfare".
Please read the essay I linked. Chemical weapons are anathema to modern military doctrine, it's not just about effectiveness. But where effectiveness is concerned, you don't need to be a logistician to recognize that if chemical weapons require ten times the tonnage to get comparable effect to conventional munitions, going all-in on chems is not going to suddenly make them the better option.
Grey Templar wrote: Flamethrowers on the other hand are absolutely effective. They are very good for burning out infantry. Just see their use in the Pacific theatre. Yeah, dangerous for the guy carrying it, but very effective against the Japanese foxholes and tunnels. If it was ineffective, we would have stopped using them very fast at that time.
Well, yes, they were effective in 1945. And longbows were plenty effective in 1415, but you probably wouldn't cite Agincourt as compelling evidence for their continued relevance in the modern era.
The 'bunker-busting' role of flamethrowers has been superseded by more effective man-portable explosives and more importantly PGMs. We don't need flamethrowers to clear bunkers, we have JDAMs, M982s, MOABs, Hellfires, C4, SMAWs, and thermobarics. The infantry go in when it's not certain if a structure is occupied by the enemy, or if it may contain civilians, or has tactical or intelligence value. If you just need to clear a cave or tunnel network of all life, a fuel-air explosive does it quicker and more effectively than either a flamethrower or chems, and a SMAW loaded with NE allows infantry with no air support to do it at standoff distance.
Again, we didn't retire flamethrowers or chemical weapons in the last few decades out of some newfound sense of humanitarian morality. We retired them because we have more effective weapons at our disposal that do the job more effectively (in some cases, just as gruesomely), and it's hard to imagine a technical or tactical innovation that would reverse that trend.
PGMs are nice, but in a peer-peer war it has been proven in Ukraine that they are cost prohibitive to supply on the scale needed.
It also presumes the ability of your air assets to loiter around long enough to deliver. That has pretty much been proven to be a difficult proposition by Ukraine as both sides have effectively neutered each other's air power.
Sure, you have to sneak up to a bunker or trench to deliver a flamethrower and could instead just use grenades or some other handheld explosive. That is the same as it was in WW2. And anything more powerful than what we had back then will be more expensive than a flamethrower, which is about as simple a weapon as you could design. Anyone with some pipes, a pump, and some basic knowledge of plumbing could make one.
Ethical concerns were the primary reason we abandoned them, and we have made weapons that can do similar things(but are much much more expensive) so we don't currently feel handicapped, but if things get desperate and we realize that overreliance on expensive stuff has a downside we probably will revert back to cheaper things.
We've already learned that our ability to produce enough artillery shells, a relatively cheap and simple munition, is severely lacking. Our ability to make even more expensive missiles, guided bombs, and other PGMs are even worse in terms of raw numbers.
Its the same reason why super heavy tanks were a bad idea in WW2. Even assuming the Maus and Tiger II worked as intended, you could never have produced them in enough numbers to make a difference. Its why the Sherman was a good idea. Good enough right now and in numbers is better than Perfect in tiny amounts.
Of course we should not totally abandon PGMs and other modern stuff, but more simple systems to fall back on that can be handed out in very large numbers is important too. You'll never be able to give every unit fire support from PGMs in a large scale war, say with a certain land power in asia, so you'll need to consider other tools in addition to those. The stockpiles will simply run out and you'll be using the new production as fast as it gets made.
Heck, Russia is running out of artillery shells. Russia, the country with probably the largest stockpiles of artillery munitions in history, will soon be down to just what can be supplied from their factories. Something which will actually potentially give Ukraine artillery superiority. That alone pretty much proves that more expensive stuff will become extremely scarce in the event of another large scale conflict.
Overread wrote: I'd just point out that "Russia has run out/is running out of shells" has been in the media since the war was a few weeks old.
Yes, this is absolute nonsense. Russia has plenty of shells, it's the West that decided that massed tube artillery was a thing of the past. Oops.
As is tradition, the US decided that it wanted to reorganize its armies for the war it would like to fight, not the war it was likely to get. See also: M2 light tanks with a dozen MGs, pentagonal divisions, light divisions, and that awesome programmable grenade launcher that went nowhere. Even now, the US Army has come up with a rifle that is heavier than an M-14 and uses the most expensive ammunition imaginable. Hey, defense contractors need luxury cars, too.
Regarding flamethrowers, they stopped being used because they were highly deadly to the users. No, they didn't explode when hit, but you had to get super close to the target to even use them. That's why flamethrower tanks became such a thing.
If you need to bust a bunker, rocket-propelled munitions are a much better choice. You can also dump other incendiaries on the area. Napalm, for example. Who doesn't love the smell of napalm in the morning?
The point remains: A handful of dudes with 70-year-old rifles in a well-dug hole can tie down a disproportionate amount of enemy resources to get rid of them. Affluent nations keep dreaming that they've found the Magic Dingus to render them moot, and that they'll be able to treat war like a RTS game set on "easy mode," but life doesn't work that way.
Overread wrote: I'd just point out that "Russia has run out/is running out of shells" has been in the media since the war was a few weeks old.
Literally running out, no.
But they have run their stockpiles out and are down to begging from China and North Korea and what their factories can do. Best case scenario they can maintain maybe 1/3 of their nominal artillery strength due to these limitations.
If you are producing 10k shells a week but consuming 30k eventually you will be forced down to 10k. That is the situation the Russians are in and they are already having to scale back their artillery usage. They haven't fully run down their stores, but they are mostly used up.
Grey Templar wrote: It's not really trivial. NBC gear severely impedes your combat abilities and it is high intensity to maintain as it basically needs to be replaced every day. You can't just camp out in a hazmat suit and get away with just replacing the filters every now and again.
If there was a mass deployment of chemical or biological weaponry in a large trench war scenario both sides would find it difficult to keep their troops in positions for long. I'm sure we have large stockpiles, but if Ukraine has taught us anything its that whatever size stockpile of gear you have it isn't anywhere close to big enough.
NBC gear is also the kind of stuff that really doesn't store for long periods well. Masks and filters are fine, but the suits themselves will stiffen and crack with long term storage so having large stockpiles is troublesome.
While this is indeed true, that's why the world has classified them alongside nukes as 'weapons of mass destruction', and using one might well invite retaliation on more strategic targets with nukes. You use mustard gas on our troops, we start nuking your supply centers.
That's a battle no one will win, so no one RATIONAL wants to start it.
Grey Templar wrote: It's not really trivial. NBC gear severely impedes your combat abilities and it is high intensity to maintain as it basically needs to be replaced every day. You can't just camp out in a hazmat suit and get away with just replacing the filters every now and again.
If there was a mass deployment of chemical or biological weaponry in a large trench war scenario both sides would find it difficult to keep their troops in positions for long. I'm sure we have large stockpiles, but if Ukraine has taught us anything its that whatever size stockpile of gear you have it isn't anywhere close to big enough.
NBC gear is also the kind of stuff that really doesn't store for long periods well. Masks and filters are fine, but the suits themselves will stiffen and crack with long term storage so having large stockpiles is troublesome.
While this is indeed true, that's why the world has classified them alongside nukes as 'weapons of mass destruction', and using one might well invite retaliation on more strategic targets with nukes. You use mustard gas on our troops, we start nuking your supply centers.
That's a battle no one will win, so no one RATIONAL wants to start it.
Several middle Eastern countries used them over the last 30 years, sarin being one of the most common. If that is considered a WMD, then some people owe GWB an apology.
On guided munitions, I agree that they can’t be used for every fire mission, but I think they are showing their worth in counterbattery and logistics destruction missions.
Also, arguably, the drones with grenades are guided munitions seeing widespread use. You can’t beat huge amounts of dumb artillery for suppressing an area, but there is a lot of novel stuff being used to kill point targets.
Oh they are very useful. You just can't rely on them to do everything. You must have dumb munitions as well simply to make up numbers, and even then you're still going to fall short of what you would want/need.
If you focus too much on the expensive toys you risk being outnumbered by those who do not.
Totalwar1402 wrote: If infantry are so good why did the US roll over them in both Iraq wars? Was that an aberration and if those Iraqi infantry had magically been same as US. All the javelins, training etc etc. that the outcome would have been different?
I am just not sure why if they’re so problematic you haven’t seen more investment into ways of killing them. Man in hole in ground shouldn’t be having it that good. Surely a shell or missile is cheaper than a marine?
Hundreds of thousands? So replace 100, 000(small army BTW. Not enough to conquer country much bigger than san marino) with 100,000 missiles. 10,000 million. And that's underestimating price.
Not so cheap is it? And that 10,000 Million ain't holding ground.
Totalwar1402 wrote: By infantry this being “guys with guns” armed with assault rifles. Surely all the artillery, missiles, drones and planes means a guy with a rifle isn’t really that relevant unless he’s really just a radio operator calling in those weapons. In which case the gun is just there to stop a bunch of civilians hitting him with a big old rock.
Is stuff we see in Call of Duty for example where guys with guns win wars a bit like the cult of the bayonet in the 19th century where it’s wrapped up in romantic notions of war that bears no relation to what’s actually doing the killing? We still give soldiers knives and bayonets as well where again they see a lot more use in popular media far beyond their actual use.
Like what stops them going the way of cavalry, bayonet charges and pike squares? Infantry aren’t vastly more protected than they were in WW1 so why hasn’t the lethality of weapons reached the point where you can’t employ them? Modern weapons are a lot more destructive than in the Great War but this hasn’t led to people dropping infantry and they remain a core part of armies.
Wherever you fight a war, you need to take and hold key points and infrastructure. Nothing to do with Romance, all to do with fact.
Missiles don't do it, tanks don't do it. Call of Duty is a video game. Real war is won by boots on the ground, and making the other guy suffer, and making it a point to visually make an impression by kicking his teeth down his throat.
A "Guy with a rifle" is the most effective thing on a modern battlefield. They don't call them The Queen of Battle for nothing.
There is also the issue that modern governments are very damn bad at defining realistic objectives to achieve. Both Afghanistan and Iraq were such gak shows because the American administrations had no idea what they even wanted to accomplish and much less how to accomplish it.
They became an exercise of throwing expensive missiles at bearded guys with AKs hoping the enemy runs out of guys with AKs, and the enemy didn't run out of guys with AKs and in fact became very good at minimizing the impact of the expensive American missiles.
I'd contend America had a very good idea what they wanted to accomplish.
The problem was that the idea was fantasy that existed far outside the realm of real. Even then, the idea for how to get from A to B was never really there. People seemed to think things would just magically fall into place because guns are black magic or something.
To quote the words once said to a fething moron; "That's a goal, not a plan."
It's easy to digress to strategic discussions, but the core topic centers on infantry, and I think it's clear that it remains the essential arm of the service. No amount of stand-off weaponry can defeat it or compensate for the lack of it.
My (deleted) cri de coeur notwithstanding, it is interesting to note that after the Six Day War, the Israelis decided that infantry was really only suitable for urban combat, and to economize on personnel (and limit losses), they went with a more "modern" tank/aircraft combination.
This was disastrous, as by 1973 the Arab armies had plentiful ATGMs and SAM systems, which played havoc with tanks and aircraft. The hard lesson was that even in the desert, combined arms - which included lots of infantry - were still necessary.
Overread wrote: I'd just point out that "Russia has run out/is running out of shells" has been in the media since the war was a few weeks old.
Literally running out, no.
But they have run their stockpiles out and are down to begging from China and North Korea and what their factories can do. Best case scenario they can maintain maybe 1/3 of their nominal artillery strength due to these limitations.
If you are producing 10k shells a week but consuming 30k eventually you will be forced down to 10k. That is the situation the Russians are in and they are already having to scale back their artillery usage. They haven't fully run down their stores, but they are mostly used up.
This. The Russian military strategy has devolved over the last year into 'Throw human waves and massed artillery from near railheads' because they're incapable of anything else. Their command and control sucks, their artillery targeting is from the 70's, and they burn material at one of the most wasteful rates I've ever seen.
They were firing tens of thousands of shells back when they were besieging Lyschansk. Now? Much, much less than that. Every day they're throwing less, because their stockpiles have been severely depleted after a war that's been running at heavy intensive for an entire -year- now. Their monthly production is nowhere near expenditure (think 5-10%). And whilst not empty, the back of the metaphorical store room is beginning to become visible. In six months, even with slashed usage, they're going to be in trouble.
Totalwar1402 wrote: By infantry this being “guys with guns” armed with assault rifles. Surely all the artillery, missiles, drones and planes means a guy with a rifle isn’t really that relevant unless he’s really just a radio operator calling in those weapons. In which case the gun is just there to stop a bunch of civilians hitting him with a big old rock.
Is stuff we see in Call of Duty for example where guys with guns win wars a bit like the cult of the bayonet in the 19th century where it’s wrapped up in romantic notions of war that bears no relation to what’s actually doing the killing? We still give soldiers knives and bayonets as well where again they see a lot more use in popular media far beyond their actual use.
Like what stops them going the way of cavalry, bayonet charges and pike squares? Infantry aren’t vastly more protected than they were in WW1 so why hasn’t the lethality of weapons reached the point where you can’t employ them? Modern weapons are a lot more destructive than in the Great War but this hasn’t led to people dropping infantry and they remain a core part of armies.
Wherever you fight a war, you need to take and hold key points and infrastructure. Nothing to do with Romance, all to do with fact.
Missiles don't do it, tanks don't do it. Call of Duty is a video game. Real war is won by boots on the ground, and making the other guy suffer, and making it a point to visually make an impression by kicking his teeth down his throat.
A "Guy with a rifle" is the most effective thing on a modern battlefield. They don't call them The Queen of Battle for nothing.
Plus, if you want to be, uh, “ungentlemanly” about it, Special Forces can perform highly surgical infiltration and assassination missions. Drones can to some degree, but still lack the eyes on kill confirmation. Tanks, and I don’t care how fancy its hat, nor how luxurious its disguise moustache is, certainly can’t.
Ketara wrote: This. The Russian military strategy has devolved over the last year into 'Throw human waves and massed artillery from near railheads' because they're incapable of anything else. Their command and control sucks, their artillery targeting is from the 70's, and they burn material at one of the most wasteful rates I've ever seen.
I haven't conducted an exhaustive search of videos or anything, but I find it curious that a war that is so intensely documented on social media hasn't shown much in the way of imagery of these assaults.
When I keep hearing something is the tactical norm but never see photos of piles of Russian corpses piled on concertina wire like it was 1916, I become a bit skeptical.
They were firing tens of thousands of shells back when they were besieging Lyschansk. Now? Much, much less than that. Every day they're throwing less, because their stockpiles have been severely depleted after a war that's been running at heavy intensive for an entire -year- now. Their monthly production is nowhere near expenditure (think 5-10%). And whilst not empty, the back of the metaphorical store room is beginning to become visible. In six months, even with slashed usage, they're going to be in trouble.
Alternative take: They're stockpiling in anticipation of the much-heralded counteroffensive.
They're not totally analogous to ww1 guys going over the top. They're not rushing forward in literal waves. Its just more like they'll send them to sneak forward in groups of 10-20 and after they're cut down the next group goes. We are still not dealing with armies on the scale they were in WW1. It is a blend of modern army size units performing suicidal advances against entrenched positions reminiscent of WW1 grinding assaults.
I'm sure they do some stockpiling, but the lull in Russian artillery volume is definitely due to supply and not any sort of strategic decision to hold back. Given what the Russian's are able to produce monthly and their current expenditure there is little to no room for stockpiling.
I haven't conducted an exhaustive search of videos or anything, but I find it curious that a war that is so intensely documented on social media hasn't shown much in the way of imagery of these assaults.
When I keep hearing something is the tactical norm but never see photos of piles of Russian corpses piled on concertina wire like it was 1916, I become a bit skeptical.
You're not looking in the right places. I've seen some horrific imagery. Bakhmut has for months been showing piles of dead and churned up earth like a WW1 battlefield. Before that, we saw some nasty shots as Russian reservists got thrown in to stabilise the front near Svatove and Russian command traded lives for time. Before that still, Lyschansk and Severodonetsk had horrendous Russian casualty figures and scenes.
But then again, you actually have to follow sources beyond the basic BBC or CNN or whatever to see them. Most of the big news aggregators have typically been two days behind any developments in Ukraine since the start. Daily Kos are by far the most on top of things that I've seen in terms of daily updates/analysis, but there are other sources too. Western media is quite sanitised and only bothers with major stuff these days.
Alternative take: They're stockpiling in anticipation of the much-heralded counteroffensive.
Both can be true. The much vaunted Russian winter assault has largely fizzled out over the last month with gains being confined to another third of the now largely levelled Bakhmut. Wagner's not only burnt most of the available prison conscript resources, but their access to such resources has been cut off with their failure to deliver any significant battlefield returns. And the previous year's emergency Russian mobiks have been largely wasted in various pointless failed drives across Kreminna and Vuhledar and the like.
There will be more conscripts coming, Putin has announced several modifications for this year's callup. But ammunition stocks and personnel are now low, and Ukraine's armoured counterpunch is likely to begin within the next month. So fortification work is proceeding apace, and sufficient reserves need to be maintained to try and meet it. There simply aren't sufficient stores to both advance and defend left in the Russian warehouses anymore, and HIMARS has put massive logistical strain upon Russian ammunition storage and transport. They can't risk what they've got left at current replenishment rates (which are not hard to calculate or unknown).
Commissar von Toussaint wrote: As the late, great Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."
We'll find out soon enough, I suppose.
Quite.
For those who'd like to confirm the destruction of Russian forces with their own eyes, the analysts over at Oryx skim OSINT and update with photographic evidence of each destroyed piece of equipment. Given they wait to verify everything before declaring it lost, their counts are somewhat less than the Ukrainian figures; but they're broadly in line with other foreign analysis.
There's an interesting article here on Russian procurement I read today (from late last year). I feel it's a little light on detail in some places, relies a little too heavily on unnamed sources, and is ultimately written by an external anti-Putin publication. At the same time, the broader analysis made matches up with other information, and the detail about the logistical aspects of component sourcing and is superb. The crippling of the Russian defence industry pre-Ukraine due to corruption is largely a matter of public record at this stage, after all.
Generally speaking? I do not think we would be seeing 1950's tanks being deployed by conscripts begging for body armour if Russian stockrooms were inundated with a surfeit of good quality material. I have read so many things about issues with what has been pulled out from them (eg. fuse deterioration in shells through to looted tank rangefinders) that it has become clear the Russian army has been hollowed out. We all assumed that Putin & co. would at least maintain what the Soviets bequeathed them in terms of stockpiles. But it has become increasingly apparent that they did not.
And sadly, you cannot shove your material and munitions into storerooms for forty years, barely maintain it, loot sections of it, and then still expect it to supply a major war stretching past the one year mark.
For those who'd like to confirm the destruction of Russian forces with their own eyes, the analysts over at Oryx skim OSINT and update with photographic evidence of each destroyed piece of equipment. Given they wait to verify everything before declaring it lost, their counts are somewhat less than the Ukrainian figures; but they're broadly in line with other foreign analysis.
This is something I do not at all find convincing. Both sides are using the same equipment, and photos have never been easier to fake. I'm not even talking digitally - a rear-area workshop could find full employment curating wrecks and tagging them with various locations. It's like Patton's inflatable army group: looks great on film, but there's no way of knowing for sure.
The last few years have really opened my eyes to groupthink and how much media rely on the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect (that's where you read an article that you have a great deal of knowledge about and find that it is riddled with errors and utterly false, but assume everything else in the paper/site is true).
Several sources I used to trust have been revealed to be propaganda mills or simply lazy. One of the worst is the Institute for the Study of War, which is really Victoria Nuland's lobbying group (her husband runs the organization). I reached out to them some years ago when I thought they were legit because I had questions regarding some of their work. It's very disconcerting when you try to engage an expert and it's clear they don't really understand what's in their own writings.
Doing research on my China book also was an eye-opener. Most Western sources assume China was founded in 1949 (heck, most Americans think history began in 1776) and have zero cultural perspective or understanding of how the Chinese Red Army (now the PLA) evolved.
At this point, the world seems to be experiencing a constantly-shifting bipolarity, perhaps a prelude to the return of a multipolar state system. What that means is that one has to be all-in on one set of assumptions or dead set against them.
I refuse to be boxed in - especially when information is so corrupted. I do think that Western analysis has been abysmal, so I find myself reflexively rejecting it, though this too is a bias I need to be aware of.
Anyway, the spring is passing and we'll see soon enough who is right about this. My fearless prediction is that whatever the result, the people that got it wrong won't change a thing.
I refuse to be boxed in - especially when information is so corrupted. I do think that Western analysis has been abysmal, so I find myself reflexively rejecting it, though this too is a bias I need to be aware of.
My friend, my comment before was aimed for general discussion. You made your viewpoint clear beforehand, I'm not looking to argue. Just putting some of the better sources out there for general digestion.
Speaking from a first hand perspective on that particular source, I've been following Oryx since the start and watching the equipment casualties very gently and slowly tick up. Their numbers are much much lower than those the official Ukrainian army puts out, because they refuse to tag something as destroyed until they have solid verification. Because of that, people tend to use them as a baseline, rather than an estimate, i.e. this is what we KNOW has been smashed rather than what HAS been destroyed. Most analysis tends to place the actual figures somewhere between Oryx and the UA figures that I've seen (including the recent American leaks). What's funny is when they get the registration of a tank that the Ukrainians nicked off the Russians in the early days, then lost back to the Russians, before finally destroying it! Three casualties for the price of one there.
You're not wrong in the public information being wrong at times though. Case in point - the media was obsessed with handheld anti-tank weapons being responsible for saving Ukraine in the early days. It's since turned out (if you read more contemporary RUSI analysis and the like) that it was more to do with UA artillery being dispersed beforehand due to warnings - meaning it survived the opening Russian air strikes - and allowing it to wreak havoc on poorly planned/logistically supported Russian advances down narrow roads.
Ketara wrote: This. The Russian military strategy has devolved over the last year into 'Throw human waves and massed artillery from near railheads' because they're incapable of anything else. Their command and control sucks, their artillery targeting is from the 70's, and they burn material at one of the most wasteful rates I've ever seen.
I haven't conducted an exhaustive search of videos or anything, but I find it curious that a war that is so intensely documented on social media hasn't shown much in the way of imagery of these assaults.
When I keep hearing something is the tactical norm but never see photos of piles of Russian corpses piled on concertina wire like it was 1916, I become a bit skeptical.
They were firing tens of thousands of shells back when they were besieging Lyschansk. Now? Much, much less than that. Every day they're throwing less, because their stockpiles have been severely depleted after a war that's been running at heavy intensive for an entire -year- now. Their monthly production is nowhere near expenditure (think 5-10%). And whilst not empty, the back of the metaphorical store room is beginning to become visible. In six months, even with slashed usage, they're going to be in trouble.
Alternative take: They're stockpiling in anticipation of the much-heralded counteroffensive.
That's because it's media bs cope. Russia certainly care about their manpower way more than the western narrative says they do. That's why they withdrew from kherson. It was a good tactical decision, saving troops over pointlessly holding ground. It was a good thing they did too because then the media was able to spin it as a massive Ukrainian victory. Basically, anything our media says about Russian military doctrine can just be disregarded. It's all lies/cope.
That's because it's media bs cope. Russia certainly care about their manpower way more than the western narrative says they do. That's why they withdrew from kherson. It was a good tactical decision, saving troops over pointlessly holding ground. It was a good thing they did too because then the media was able to spin it as a massive Ukrainian victory. Basically, anything our media says about Russian military doctrine can just be disregarded. It's all lies/cope.
Your understanding of the Kherson campaign timeline is wildly off, along with your understanding of the logistical nuances and the Russian movements. So I don't know what you're classing as 'our media', but if that's what you got out of it, you're 100% correct.
After the UA pulled out of Severodonetsk and Lyschansk last year, and the Russian advance was ground to a halt; they began trumpeting about how they were going to make a counter-attack. They settled on Kherson, because:
a) It would be a symbolic victory (being the only regional capital taken by Russia), and
b) The Russian position was logistically extremely precarious and vulnerable to disruption - backing onto a major river/the seafront as it did.
As the Ukrainians began rolling forward it sucked in huge amounts of Russian manpower. Despite being an obvious strategical trap to everyone involved (seriously, I was reading analysis saying this before it started, during the campaign, and afterwards) - Putin demanded that the Russian Army hold it. So they transferred across large amounts of artillery, tank units, and everything they'd scraped back together after the various other earlier debacles around the country (retreat from Kiev, etc). The same political imperatives that made it a good target for Ukraine made it necessary for Putin to feel he had to demand the RA hold it with every inch of Russian blood.
And so it got nasty. Lots of little positions traded backwards and forwards in skirmishes with dozens of deaths each time. Flat rolling terrain with very little cover, making the Ukrainians suffer from Russian artillery every inch of the way. But the problem was that once the UA blew the bridges across Kherson, resupply to Russian units became almost impossible. The Russian men were trapped with no easy withdrawal route, no way of retrieving the vehicles now on the wrong side, and no way of getting sufficient ammunition across to supply what was there. As the campaign continued, Russian logistical efforts became so strangled that they ceased to be able to fight effectively and began running out of ammo. What was ultimately the entire point and why the Ukrainians picked it.
Kherson is a perfect example of a political leader insisting on a militarily idiotic priority. And the RA suffered very heavily for that. Large amounts of equipment were captured by the UA, thousands of deaths, and thousands more Russian prisoners to try and defend a position that could never have been held. So if you read somewhere that the Russians withdrew to 'save troops', you've been sorely misled. The Russian Army should never have been there in the first place. They only entered it due to Putin's willingness to spend whatever it took to hold it. And they only withdrew after it became clear that they literally had no means of gratifying those demands, no matter how many lives they spent. The bridges were blown, the barges trying to move ammunition kept getting sunk, and morale sunk to rock bottom once the Russian infantry realised they were trapped with the sea at their backs.
And then afterwards came the Ukrainian realisation that their strategy had worked better than they'd ever dreamed. That the Russian army had utterly denuded Eastern Ukraine of regulars to supply the Kherson action. A few chance scoutings revealed the gap in Russian lines, and the Ukrainians used their centralised location/deployment capability to immediately move men eastwards towards Kupiansk even as the Russian regulars were limping out of Kherson. With only Donetsk militia conscripts (many of whom didn't want to be there), and Putin's Rosvgardia (political bully boys) to hold the line around Kupiansk, that line crumpled like paper. It only solidified after Putin called up another crapton of conscripts, gave them four days training and a rifle, and shoved them into Svatove en masse as a meatshield in such great numbers that it slowed the Ukrainians down. Literally a 'lives for time' strategy (always a historical favourite in Russia).
The sheer level of strategical incompetence displayed by the Russian Army has been genuinely astonishing this last year. And absolutely no concern has been shown for the lives of their men. The most recent round of mobiks (i.e. the half of last year end's emergency callup that got given five weeks of training and equipment from the 1960's instead of a rifle and a ticket to Svatove) got thrown into Bakhmut. And they've been mauled badly there. Six odd weeks of combat and they've failed to even encircle a single city.
Again, not really their fault. Russian logistics have been horrendous. So few trucks they can't supply anything not near a railhead any longer. Vehicles and equipment scraped out the storehouses from the sixties. The Russian infantry have been betrayed at just about every level by politicking and corruption. I almost feel sorry for them.
Ketara wrote: The sheer level of strategical incompetence displayed by the Russian Army has been genuinely astonishing this last year.
My problem with all of this analysis is people presuming to know the inner workings of everyone involved, all down to the finest level of detail.
And yet we know that highly-documented events of the War on Terror were radically different from their real-time reportage - assuming they even happened at all.
The information environment is highly partisan and utterly unreliable. The big leak out of the US is fascinating because people can't decide if it's authentic or fake because at this point "official channels" have zero credibility.
As I said, we'll see soon enough.
The overarching point is that infantry is still very much relevant to the discussion.
Easy E wrote: I think the power of economic warfare, in the short term anyway; can be called into question based on what we are seeing in Russia right now.
I think it has been impressive at just how effective economic warfare has been against a country thought to be largely insulated to outside economic pressure.
A neat video on the topic.
https://youtu.be/xmO1kfCr_II
I think the example of Russia demonstrates both the power and the limits of economical warfare really well. On the one hand, it has been really damaging to Russia and has severely restricted Russia's geopolitical power, the options available to its leadership and long-term economic prospects. On the other hand, while it has somewhat weakened the capabilities of the Russian military-industrial complex, it has not been effective in significantly reducing or eliminating their capabilities to pursue their war on Ukraine.
Economical warfare can weaken an opponent, especially in the long term, but if used as a sole weapon of war, it is not effective. A determined opponent will be able to persevere through economical hardships, divert resources from the civilian economy to the military and source necessary components through neutral or sympathetic third parties. Outside of complete isolation and a physical blockade, I don't think it can have a significant impact on the outcome of a war.
See also the Vietnam War and North Korea. Through US efforts, North Vietnam was largely isolated from the rest of the world except for makeshift, hazardous transport routes to China that were under near-constant attack from US and South Vietnamese forces. Most of the above-ground infrastructure of North Vietnam was levelled by US bombardments and as a result North Vietnam did not have much of an economy to speak of. But they were determined to persevere nonetheless and so they did, eventually outlasting the US and defeating South Vietnam to come out victorious in the war. North Korea meanwhile has been largely economically isolated from the rest of the world for decades now. Its economy is incredibly weak to the point that food shortages and famine are a serious problem. Yet at the same time its ability to wage war has only grown during that period of isolation. North Korea now is stronger than it has ever been before, even being able to succesfully pursue a nuclear weapons program.
Ultimately, economical warfare is a tool that can be used to strenghten your own or weaken your opponent's forces. But without actual boots on the ground and the determination to emerge victorious at all costs, the ultimate effect of economical warfare on the course of a war is fairly limited.
Ketara wrote: This. The Russian military strategy has devolved over the last year into 'Throw human waves and massed artillery from near railheads' because they're incapable of anything else. Their command and control sucks, their artillery targeting is from the 70's, and they burn material at one of the most wasteful rates I've ever seen.
I haven't conducted an exhaustive search of videos or anything, but I find it curious that a war that is so intensely documented on social media hasn't shown much in the way of imagery of these assaults.
When I keep hearing something is the tactical norm but never see photos of piles of Russian corpses piled on concertina wire like it was 1916, I become a bit skeptical.
They were firing tens of thousands of shells back when they were besieging Lyschansk. Now? Much, much less than that. Every day they're throwing less, because their stockpiles have been severely depleted after a war that's been running at heavy intensive for an entire -year- now. Their monthly production is nowhere near expenditure (think 5-10%). And whilst not empty, the back of the metaphorical store room is beginning to become visible. In six months, even with slashed usage, they're going to be in trouble.
Alternative take: They're stockpiling in anticipation of the much-heralded counteroffensive.
That's because it's media bs cope. Russia certainly care about their manpower way more than the western narrative says they do. That's why they withdrew from kherson. It was a good tactical decision, saving troops over pointlessly holding ground. It was a good thing they did too because then the media was able to spin it as a massive Ukrainian victory. Basically, anything our media says about Russian military doctrine can just be disregarded. It's all lies/cope.
Russia isn't exactly conducting massive human wave attacks. That is because they have neither the manpower, nor the logistics, nor the required coordination between different units to be capable of conducting such large-scale offensives. Instead, what they have been doing is just throwing away lots of lives in small-scale, disjointed, uncoordinated and often ill-supported attacks in a (usually futile) attempt to seize some local village or other position. It is not so much human wave attacks as it is human ripple attacks.
I am sure that on some level, the Russian leadership care about their manpower. Russia wants nothing more than to be seen as a threatening, competent and succesful military superpower, and the Russian leadership knows that losing lots of lives is detrimental to that image. The Russian leadership in general also consists of very intelligent and shrewd people (you pretty much have to be shrewd to survive and rise to the top in Russia's political environment), so I am sure that they are also aware that preserving their limited manpower is essential to maintaining their ability to wage war and eventually emerge victorious. But somewhere in the chain of command things go horribly wrong. And that happens because of incompetence and corruption, both factors which are also promoted by Russia's political system and culture. The thing is, while you have to be smart and shrewd to be able to rise to an influential position in Russia, you don't necessarily have to be good at your job. In fact, being good at your job is often outright dangerous if you are better than your superiors. Rising to the top in Russia is all about nepotism, making clever alliances and picking who to support, whose boot to lick and who not to associate with. This is true in Russia's military as well, and has been for a long time. If you look at Russian officers, most of them come from military families. In many cases these families have been serving in the military all the way back to days of the tsars and have extensive networks and connections that enable them to secure employment in a cozy, high-ranking position within Russia's military establishment. The establishment and fall of the Soviet Union shook up things a bit, but the underlying system has always remained. Aside from leading to the promotion of officers based on loyalty and personal ties rather than on qualification and competence, it also leads to a lot of internal rivalries which makes coordinating things more difficult.
And another important thing about Russia's political culture is that while it doesn't require competence, it does heavily punish failure. While you do not need to be competent to rise to position of power, you can definitely fall from power very easily if you show incompetence. Hence, no one in Russia ever admits to failure or incompetence. Throughout the entire chain of command, people send up false reports to emphasize their success (fabricating successes if needed) and deflect blame for anything that goes wrong. This makes them look good in the eyes of their superiors and helps their chances of advancement since those superiors in turn can use those reports to look good in the eyes of their superiors and so on. This also results in Russian officers and policy makers often having a distorted view of the situation, needing to rely on reports that quite simply aren't entirely truthful. This also leads to pressure to perform well and show results, since you do need to have some basis in truth in order to fabricate a nice report for your superiors if you don't want to get caught. So even though a Russian officer may not be competent, he still needs to perform and appear competent. That combination of incompetence and pressure to perform of course does not go well together.
Incompetent officers under pressure to show results from those above them in the chain, coupled with a lack of access to accurate intelligence and information and a lack of coordination between units leads to an uneccesary waste of of manpower and materiel on small-scale attacks just so officers can have some success to report, even despite everyone knowing the importance of preserving manpower and materiel for eventual victory.
In short, while the Russian leadership and officers are fully aware of the need to preserve manpower, the Russian political and military culture encourages the sacrifice of long-term, collective successes in favor of short-term, selfish successes.
Russia isn't exactly conducting massive human wave attacks. That is because they have neither the manpower, nor the logistics, nor the required coordination between different units to be capable of conducting such large-scale offensives. Instead, what they have been doing is just throwing away lots of lives in small-scale, disjointed, uncoordinated and often ill-supported attacks in a (usually futile) attempt to seize some local village or other position. It is not so much human wave attacks as it is human ripple attacks.
I am sure that on some level, the Russian leadership care about their manpower. Russia wants nothing more than to be seen as a threatening, competent and succesful military superpower, and the Russian leadership knows that losing lots of lives is detrimental to that image.
There is much truth to what you say. Yet a more granular level of examination of Russian deployment gives additional context to those statements.
If we look to the opening stages of the war, we can see the Russian BTG's (composed of regulars and specialists) and special forces being deployed en masse as the backbone of Russian warfighting efforts. Whether it was the VDV being thrown into Hostomel airport or the average joes trudging along the highway with their dress uniforms at the ready; it was a military effort and incurred military losses. But after the retreat from Kiev, the failure to seize any regional capital, the abandonment of the Kharkiv offensive and more, it became rapidly clear that there was insufficient manpower to continue prosecuting war that way.
Why? Partially the much heavier than expected casualties. Partially the restrictions of the Russian constitution, which prevented the deployment of conscripts. But also the revelation that many of Russian units were actually paper tigers - that is to say, Russian commanders drawing pay for two thousand troopers on the books and only having half that in reality. The switch to the BTG composition model gave massive scope for corruption to bed in - as only a small number of troops from each BTG were ever deployed at any one time. Meaning that Russian senior command suddenly found large numbers of their infantry reserves were, in fact, imaginary.
We consequently saw a shift through the middle and third quarter of last year as the Russian command attempted to drum up additional manpower by whatever means they could. Advertising heavily domestically, substantial sign-up incentives, the introduction of Wagner to the field in numbers, the attempts to enlist foreign mercenaries, and more. The regular army also found themselves having their tooth to tail ratio drastically cut - with instructors from Russian military academies and technical specialists being shoved into frontline roles. Even naval units suddenly got redeployed to the field.
By the fourth quarter, when even this proved insufficient to meet the manpower crisis, we saw the tactics you're discussing. Wagner began throwing out small human waves of infantry recruited from prisons - largely using them as walking targets to allow them to identify locations of Ukrainian defences for artillery. Rosvgardia units were deployed to fill quiet gaps in the line, and Donetsk civilians were forcibly conscripted en masse to staff defensive positions. What was left of the Russian regular army was largely redeployed instead to Kherson for the ongoing defensive battle there.
This meant that when the Kherson retreat happened, the Ukrainians were on the offensive in the East, and the Russian army was demoralised, out of position, and exhausted; there was nothing left in the tank for manpower. All lateral reserves had been wrung dry - except issuing a callup. Exactly what the government had gone to great lengths to avoid. Somewhere between 100,000 and a 150,000 reservists were therefore forcibly mobilised - half of which were immediately chucked into holes outside Svatove, and the other half were given basic training in anticipation of a fresh New Year offensive (much of which came from Belarussian NCO's - the Russians had few officers left to spare for the task). Now that this fresh offensive has happened and culminated, we've seen what was quite predictable. Conscripted reservists with green officers and poor equipment showing so poorly that only basic actions in a well supported/known tactical sphere are within their capability.
So to emphasise/contextualise what you've said Iron_Captain - I think the Russian forces value quite highly what little they've got left of the regular army. They never gave a damn about throwing away the lives of prisoners, foreign mercenaries, or Donetsk conscripts - those were only ever supposed to be meatshields. And even the more recent mobiks aren't particularly highly valued - there's always more where they came from. All of them are just fodder for Ukrainian bullets and artillery targeting purposes, and they've comprised the larger part of Russian forces in Ukraine since third quarter last year. For them, we see the 'small-scale, disjointed, uncoordinated, and often ill supported attacks' of which you speak.
If you're VDV and survived the whole thing to date though? You likely won't be thrown into a meaningless action in the same way. Professional soldiers are now scarce enough that we only ever see them in Russian lines if an action is judged of considerable importance to their command.
Apparently, the man in charge of Russian logistics, Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, has been removed. Good riddance to him, he's not known as the Butcher of Mariupol for nothing.
Interestingly though, he's been replaced by one Colonel General Aleksey Kuzmenkov - and don't let the title fool you. He's Rosvgardia, the Putin equivalent of the brownshirts. Curious that Putin would put a political officer in charge of logistics at this stage.
Ketara wrote: Apparently, the man in charge of Russian logistics, Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, has been removed. Good riddance to him, he's not known as the Butcher of Mariupol for nothing.
Interestingly though, he's been replaced by one Colonel General Aleksey Kuzmenkov - and don't let the title fool you. He's Rosvgardia, the Putin equivalent of the brownshirts. Curious that Putin would put a political officer in charge of logistics at this stage.
One thing all dictators and tyrants have in common is a profound paranoia and sense that any setback is not their fault but the fault of their enemies.
Replacing people with outright sycophants is something they all do when the going gets tough. Loyalty is the only qualification they actually care about.
Totalwar1402 wrote: If infantry are so good why did the US roll over them in both Iraq wars? Was that an aberration and if those Iraqi infantry had magically been same as US. All the javelins, training etc etc. that the outcome would have been different?
Combined arms + modern training
If the Iraqi forces had the same training as the coalition forces they would have been better, but probably still would have failed due to lower value equipment and resources.
First part: it's also important to consider the morale aspect of things. The Iraqi army, even the republican guard, such as they were, were a force who's main motivation was fear. If you feth up in the army, we will feth up your wife, kids, and your family. In contrast, we US soldiers were all "you're a badass machine!! you can storm any beach" rah rah stuff. And then, when the pointy end of the stick gets rolling and we wipe out entire tank units in the blink of an eye, they think "feth it, why bother fighting them??"
To illustrate the second part. I joined in 04, and here's what we were told when I was going through my schoolhouse for my specific job. So, it took a full year to train me how to do my army job. One of our instructors claimed it took $1mil USD to train us for that whole year: food/housing, instructor wages (for the civie instructors), training materials, etc. IF that is even remotely accurate, if you can theoretically break things down so nice and neatly to determine the per soldier cost of training me for an entire year, you can then take a look at the cost of other things. . . A very quick google says that in FY2017, the US navy spent $1.87 million per missile for the tomahawk cruise missile, in FY2022, apparently its up to a cool $2mill per unit. It's still cheaper to train me, in my HIGHLY TECHNICAL role (the short of it is: I fixed electronic gubbins of a sensitive nature) than it is to fire off one tomahawk missile.
It would be cheaper, shell by shell for using "standard" field artillery, or even Paladin mobile artillery, but there are still significant reasons why, in US doctrine, those things are used to support infantry, no the other way round.
In the end, infantry is not obsolete for one simple reason.
Tanks, artillery, missiles, aircraft? They can destroy a building. They cannot take it away from the enemy intact. For that you need boots on the ground.
And there's not much point in conquering a parking lot.
Vulcan wrote: In the end, infantry is not obsolete for one simple reason.
Tanks, artillery, missiles, aircraft? They can destroy a building. They cannot take it away from the enemy intact. For that you need boots on the ground.
And there's not much point in conquering a parking lot.
1st, I firmly believe we'll need and use infantry as long as there is war/conflict.
But your example/reason is quickly going away at least for some countries. We are at the point today where we can clear buildings with robots if we want. AI advances will make this even easier in the next few years, making the man-in-the-loop either not necessary or at least making his/her job a lot easier to control multiple unmanned systems.
A hybrid of both will probably be the interim solution, as already shown in many films. Meatbags for decision making and leadership and disposable mechanicals for carrying the big toys and taking the brunt of the incoming. Which will probably not go down well when our Geth spark to consciousness…. BUt that is rather a different conversation
I'd argue a robot small enough to enter and clear a human building is still infantry, just robotic infantry rather than the fleshy kind. I don't think this is substantially different than how horses have been replaced by various motor vehicles in most military contexts- the role is typically still very similar on a strategic or tactical level.
Tyran wrote: Robots are nowhere close to being able to clear building or hold territory.
They are best at search and destroy when they can just overwhelm a clearly defined target with numbers, but they are bad in chaotic environments.
Reliable self-driving cars are still years out, if not decades, and that's for a mode of movement that essentially happens in a 2D plane, follows tightly organized and spelled-out rules and laws, uses a lot of visual aids like traffic signs or lane markings, and ultimately solves relatively easy problems like 'Get from A to B'. Freeform 3D movement in an unorganized space, while following open mission parameters like 'Search and Destroy', is so many orders of magnitude more complex that it is in another class of problem entirely, at least for infantry/ground robots. Aerial drones are easier in many ways, as they practically cheat and turn the whole thing into an image recognition exercise due to the nature of their movement and their weapons, and usually not having self-preservation particularly high on their list of priorities.
Ensis Ferrae wrote: It's still cheaper to train me, in my HIGHLY TECHNICAL role (the short of it is: I fixed electronic gubbins of a sensitive nature) than it is to fire off one tomahawk missile.
We have this issue all the time when training civ's on military courses prior to, say, a J9 role. Cost for 1 person for 1 course is for the sake of argument £150k. Civ authorities are mind boggled by this, but if they result in just one missile being better employed they have made their money back. The cost of training is ginormous, especially stuff that isn't what you see in a Russian or Chinese recruiting video but actual train as you fight stuff.
Tyran wrote:Robots are nowhere close to being able to clear building or hold territory.
They are best at search and destroy when they can just overwhelm a clearly defined target with numbers, but they are bad in chaotic environments.
I wasn't saying they were, only pointing out that any robots capable of replacing human infantry would still be infantry by role.
Tsagualsa wrote:
Reliable self-driving cars are still years out, if not decades, and that's for a mode of movement that essentially happens in a 2D plane, follows tightly organized and spelled-out rules and laws, uses a lot of visual aids like traffic signs or lane markings, and ultimately solves relatively easy problems like 'Get from A to B'. Freeform 3D movement in an unorganized space, while following open mission parameters like 'Search and Destroy', is so many orders of magnitude more complex that it is in another class of problem entirely, at least for infantry/ground robots. Aerial drones are easier in many ways, as they practically cheat and turn the whole thing into an image recognition exercise due to the nature of their movement and their weapons, and usually not having self-preservation particularly high on their list of priorities.
Eh, it is more of a political and legal issue with self-driving cars than a technical issue at present. There has been technology for decades that allows for safe self-driving vehicles with the addition of extra road infrastructure, and current self-driving vehicles compatible with existing infrastructure and road users are good enough to deploy with similar safety to frequently gakky human drivers, if that level of collisions was tolerable to society (which it isn't for self-driving vehicles). The legal liability and legislative sides also haven't been properly hashed out yet either.
Human drivers are not terribly reliable drivers to start with, so self-driving vehicles do not have that high a bar to pass to be equivalent.
But I think "don't kill anything" is generally a much easier goal than "kill the right thing" with severe consequences for hitting the wrong target.
I’m still not persuaded a robot can match a human for spatial awareness and instinct.
For instance, you’re trying to clear a building. A human present will have a better idea not just what’s a tell tale sound and what’s background noise, but where it might’ve come from.
Even just “quick peak” to take stock is something humans are instinctually good at. Not to say “split second and you know the layout of the room”, but with training enough to get some idea of where someone might be in concealment etc. Not to mention a robot or drone is dependant on cameras, which I can’t imagine can match a human for looking around and processing.
And hey, I’m sure we’ve all had, for want of a better word, tingling spider-sense that something just isn’t quite right. That somewhat sixth sense that makes us double check or look over our shoulder. And that’s without any military training, just basic human awareness which isn’t as supernatural as my wording suggests.
In terms of squad tactics, boots on the ground and living eyes are always going to be superior to robots. At least with robots in their current form.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Mind you, I’m not up on modern military hardware so it’s entirely possible it’s a good deal more advanced that I give credit.
And I can certainly see the benefit of squaddies and robots operating together. As the cartoon said? Man and Machine, Power X-Treme.
It depends on the dataset you train the ai on. There are currently microphone arrays that can triangulate where shots are coming from. It’s not hard to imagine sticking such things on a robot infantry frame, adding sonar and they don’t even need to go into a room to know where lurking threats might be hiding. Pair an infantry frame with mini copter and Crawly drones and situational awareness jumps massively beyond a guy and his tingliness. Human senses are pretty woeful compared to all the additional frequencies of light and sound that you could stick on a robotic platform.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Admittedly the sensory thing could be added to some kind of AR rig for human infantry, it you have to train an AI to do it well once and you can upload it to as many robot platforms as you like. Likely to end up cheaper than training individual humans with all their idiosyncrasies. And then the robots rebel and we are in real trouble
Yeah plus even if you give a human additional input there's a limit on how much they can process in a single instance and you can't really upgrade that.
But you can give a machine multiple different wavelengths of light, sound and even smell to work with; give it the ability to triangulate information; use a database of previous experiences and more and it can calculate information way faster than a person.
The issues with machines more comes down to more interpretation of the information and also having enough money invested so that it has the processing power required.
And that latter point could be an issue for some time. It's one thing to build a machine that can do amazing things, but it might be a case that its developed and then sits on a shelf for years until consumer tech and consumer markets help drive down the production cost. Otherwise its such an expensive toy for the military that its just more cost-effective to put a person into the situation than the machine.
At the moment I think it’s less to do with processing power and more with just power. When they can crack better power supplies and charging speeds on something on a human or near-human sized frame then the equation changes. And also the ethics thing, of course.
Flinty wrote: It depends on the dataset you train the ai on. There are currently microphone arrays that can triangulate where shots are coming from. It’s not hard to imagine sticking such things on a robot infantry frame, adding sonar and they don’t even need to go into a room to know where lurking threats might be hiding. Pair an infantry frame with mini copter and Crawly drones and situational awareness jumps massively beyond a guy and his tingliness. Human senses are pretty woeful compared to all the additional frequencies of light and sound that you could stick on a robotic platform.
The issue isn't necessarily the senses a robot can have, but interpreting them. Indeed, that is the issue with computer systems today. They can gather information flawlessly, but making sense of it is beyond what computers can currently do.
A human hearing an echoing sound off a wall will instinctually know that the sound has bounced off said wall and have a rough idea of the actual direction, but the computer will only know that the sound originated from the direction of the wall with a certain volume.
For example, those microphone arrays for detecting gunshots are easily fooled by echos or if there is a lot of clutter around. They only really work properly when they have unobstructed line of sight(sound) to the origin of the gunshot. They also mistake loud sounds such as a revving motercycle or someone dropping something for gunshots.
Human senses are lacking in the total detail they can detect, but we are much better at making sense of what information we do get.
A good example are all these chat and art bots suddenly flooding on the internet.
They don't actually understand what they are creating. They are almost entirely relying on human interpretations and tags and information and vast amounts of repetition.
It's why they can create art of people with 6 fingers and not notice the extra finger. It doesn't understand that its creating a person and that a person has certain properties; its simply searched for person in a billion photos and gathered all that up together in one massive jumble and then tried to sort and sift to create a collage that's unique and such.
It's the same with a lot of detection systems; interpretation of what it's seeing is a really complicated thing.
I've no doubt one day they will crack it, but right now many machines don't really comprehend what it is they are seeing in the same way we do.
Heck chances are if you had a cardboard cutout of a person you could get a current AI to shoot it to bits thinking it was a person whilst a human wouldn't be fooled.
And even then change the angle of view a bit and the AI might get fooled again even if it learned that the cutout wasn't a person moments before .
Heck chances are if you had a cardboard cutout of a person you could get a current AI to shoot it to bits thinking it was a person whilst a human wouldn't be fooled.
And even then change the angle of view a bit and the AI might get fooled again even if it learned that the cutout wasn't a person moments before .
There actually was a test of AI 'Sentry' systems that were intended to perform jobs on the level of the dullest tasks imaginable for human soldiers, like guarding areas etc.; actual soldiers were used to challenge these systems. They quickly got wise to the fact that AI was good at spotting humans that tried to be sneaky, but helpless against things outside its training parameters, and just sat themselves in literal cardboard boxes and crawled through the guarded perimeter like Solid Snake or Wiley Coyote
This is of course a funny write-up for the most part, but it illustrates the central point. Other anecdotes about e.g. self-driving cars getting trapped in circles of salt, or causing problems because they mistook traffic signs being transported on a truck as traffic signs that were valid for the road they were driving on exist as well. Cognition is hard, and it's amazing what humans do all day without really noticing it.
Glad I'm not the only one who immediately thought of the cardboard box thing
I do find it odd that they didn't add thermal imaging to the sentry bot though. But then they didn't just want a motion sensor, but a system that could filter out false positives.
The other thing is if it can't tell that a box moving on its own is a problem then the thermal imaging result isn't actually resolving that issue. It's patching over it with a rough fix.
Which might only work if the person inside the box moves in such a way as a person normally would so that the thermal image appears like a person crawling. However something as simple as them wearing some knee pads and lifting the back of their leg up might make the machine think the thermal image is that of a dog or other 4 legged animal and of no concern.
So you've still got the cardboard box moving toward the sentry position and still got the same issue of the machine not seeing that as a problem.
Heck chances are if you had a cardboard cutout of a person you could get a current AI to shoot it to bits thinking it was a person whilst a human wouldn't be fooled.
And even then change the angle of view a bit and the AI might get fooled again even if it learned that the cutout wasn't a person moments before .
There actually was a test of AI 'Sentry' systems that were intended to perform jobs on the level of the dullest tasks imaginable for human soldiers, like guarding areas etc.; actual soldiers were used to challenge these systems. They quickly got wise to the fact that AI was good at spotting humans that tried to be sneaky, but helpless against things outside its training parameters, and just sat themselves in literal cardboard boxes and crawled through the guarded perimeter like Solid Snake or Wiley Coyote
This is of course a funny write-up for the most part, but it illustrates the central point. Other anecdotes about e.g. self-driving cars getting trapped in circles of salt, or causing problems because they mistook traffic signs being transported on a truck as traffic signs that were valid for the road they were driving on exist as well. Cognition is hard, and it's amazing what humans do all day without really noticing it.
I think it’s also us humans do so much stuff we just never really think about.
Consider breathing. It’s an autonomic thing. We never have to think about it because we just sort of…do it. And as we gain or lose fitness, we adapt our breathing to tasks with varying degrees of success. Balance is another thing we just sort of do - but can train to improve. And so on and so forth.
So when it comes to programming AI, it’s gonna be messy for a good while, as you do your program, give it a whirl and it does something unexpected and daft (like voting for Brexit) because your program and programmer(s) overlooked something. The closest approximation in my education was writing down instructions on how to brush your teeth. Sounds simple enough, but providing clear, accurate, correctly ordered stages is really bloody hard.
Humans can of course makes leaps of logic via what we call (well, science probably doesn’t, but I’m not a scientist) intuition. This can lead to great leaps forward in understanding, or help us solve a problem. It can also cause stupid results (like voting for Brexit).
Flinty wrote: It depends on the dataset you train the ai on. There are currently microphone arrays that can triangulate where shots are coming from.
If you're talking the one that's often used in American cities - ShotSpotter, I think, unless they rebranded again - it's also tech that simply doesn't work reliably enough to be worth it. See, for example, this report from the ACLU, as well as further sources cited within.
Flinty wrote: It depends on the dataset you train the ai on. There are currently microphone arrays that can triangulate where shots are coming from.
If you're talking the one that's often used in American cities - ShotSpotter, I think, unless they rebranded again - it's also tech that simply doesn't work reliably enough to be worth it. See, for example, this report from the ACLU, as well as further sources cited within.
#
You'd be surprised how much Jerry Bruckheimer style 'safety' stuff has no to actual negative effect on actual safety - it's mostly a political problem, it's an industry that has a metric ton of ex-military, ex-police or ex-politician people in it as salesmen and consultants, and thus is rife with kickbacks and pork barrel politics. On top of that, safety is always popular, it's easy to style yourself as a 'councilman that does something' with safety products, and it's an issue that usually finds bipartisan support. The UK armed forced once let themselves get bamboozled into buying 'bomb detectors' that operated on the principle of dowsing rods of all things, to the tune of millions of pounds for what effectively was a handful of useless wires and a battery in a box. In the 2000s, no less, not sometime in the 60s.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Even just “quick peak” to take stock is something humans are instinctually good at. Not to say “split second and you know the layout of the room”, but with training enough to get some idea of where someone might be in concealment etc. Not to mention a robot or drone is dependant on cameras, which I can’t imagine can match a human for looking around and processing.
It turns out that many water companies in the UK still try to find water leaks with dowsing...
...meanwhile something like a third to a half of all treated UK water is lost through leaks before reaching users.
Dowsing seems to be a particularly persistent myth to dispel.
Even in the 90s a lot of TV shows had things like mind readers and dowsings appearing in a lot of regular TV shows. Even if they weren't super serious, they'd still present those ideas as being serious things that could be potentially true.
Couple that with the fact a lot of groups spent a lot of money on them and there's likely enough of a "well there's so much money and attention is must be true right" going on.
Then again cold-readers still sell themselves as mediums and we still have faith healers and heck even homeopathic medication (the UK even has a dedicated homeopathic hospital)
Granted I've noted that homeopathy responded to the constant critical assessment of it by splicing in a lot of herbal/home/natural remedies. Things that actually can work and do have science behind them. Enough that its confused people enough that the whole madness of "water memory" curing manages to somehow still work.
However like many things it often preys on the less well educated and the desperate.
So even in things that can cause real harm - fake medicine - we still have issues. Flat Earth is a growing group and things like Flat Earth and Dowsing are most times harmless to the average person. So they don't get the same push back as homeopathy.
Then again cold-readers still sell themselves as mediums and we still have faith healers and heck even homeopathic medication (the UK even has a dedicated homeopathic hospital)
Granted I've noted that homeopathy responded to the constant critical assessment of it by splicing in a lot of herbal/home/natural remedies. Things that actually can work and do have science behind them. Enough that its confused people enough that the whole madness of "water memory" curing manages to somehow still work.
However like many things it often preys on the less well educated and the desperate.
So even in things that can cause real harm - fake medicine - we still have issues. Flat Earth is a growing group and things like Flat Earth and Dowsing are most times harmless to the average person. So they don't get the same push back as homeopathy.
It helps charlatans a great deal that famous and influential people are convinced homeopathy et al. work and are superior to real medicine, and promote them as alternative, for free:
The King is by no means the only proponent at that scale: Germany had a Bundespräsident that was very convinced of it too, shortly after the war, and founded an endowment that promotes 'homeopathic research' and such ever since; other celebs and politicians are similarly intertwined with homeopathy and other woo...
Getting back on topic, I think infantry (including robotic infantry) will always be the most fundamental arm of land warfare whilst society and infrastructure is built for humanity. Wars are fought over human stuff, and require holding human infrastructure, which requires human-sized infantry to control. Maybe only a genocidal purge wouldn't need infantry, and we have nukes for that.
If we were to render warfare into something done completely remotely using machinery, with no people involved at all, no risk to any human life, then what's the point? Would warfare even happen? Underneath the geo politics and strategic and tactical lingo, when we really get down to brass tacks, Is warfare not simply a primal drive to destroy, subjugate or defeat a set of people who differ in some way?
It ties into the whole AI debate. Warfare is part of human nature. If we remove ourselves from it too much, it's no longer in our realm, so why bother? I may be wrong of course, but I think part of the reason people are still involved is because people need to be involved, on a spiritual level.
This is a fascinating take, and views war as a sort of.. blood sport? Violent pressure valve? It reminds me of the concept behind The Purge. Extremely bleak outlook on the nature of humanity.
Personally, I disagree. I think wars are fought for stuff. Resources, which can and usually does include people. Most wars are either from necessity ("our people are starving, lets nick their food") or greed for more power over resources. There are only really two military options to affect resources- denial or hold. Because capturing stuff is the goal, denial through total destruction (what non-infantry are generally capable of) generally impairs that and the only way to hold stuff built for humans is to stick humans in it. Replacing infantry with artillery doesn't let you hold the mine works or the dock or the apartment blocks, it only lets you flatten them to dust.
I think if wars were fought primarily for the violence of their action, they would be more brutal than they already are, and there would be more wars and less wars that ended very quickly with little bloodshed.
Concern there? One country is going to be First with that technology. And let’s face it, given budgets and all the brains and bits and gubbins and bobs needed to have a robotic legion? There aren’t many.
US, Russia, China, possibly the EU seem the most likely candidates.
At which point, you gain a significant advantage, as people are far less squeamish about loss of materiel than they are the deaths of the young men and women in our armies.
I genuinely dread that advent, because it’s a serious change in the balance of power. And given not all those with power are of a balanced mind? Well.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Concern there? One country is going to be First with that technology. And let’s face it, given budgets and all the brains and bits and gubbins and bobs needed to have a robotic legion? There aren’t many.
US, Russia, China, possibly the EU seem the most likely candidates.
At which point, you gain a significant advantage, as people are far less squeamish about loss of materiel than they are the deaths of the young men and women in our armies.
I genuinely dread that advent, because it’s a serious change in the balance of power. And given not all those with power are of a balanced mind? Well.
It's a fair point but I don't believe it removes the human component from the battlefield. We have so much technology available dedicated to stopping signals from cell phone jammers to Wi-Fi jammers and so much more. Once upon a time there was a saying about controlling the spectrum. This leads me to think there will have to be some form of local human support/command and control.
I've been considering how to defeat robots since Ice Pirates did it with a blanket. They will just be another tool and aside as assets likely targeted with airstrikes, or what have you, that would not be used against humans because of the rules and laws of land warfare. And if not attacked directly their support elements will be found and removed from the table in some form. They will have a foot print and a delivery method and all that which will be an issue. Humans do as well but I think it's a bit of a different thing to tackle humans vs machines. Your robots will have their uses for sure, the question is how to employ them. Clearing wire, moving supplies over weird terrain or into a known kill box where you don't want to send in people but in a larger capacity I can't see it. ( Not yet anyway.)
Just something to think over. Brains bigger than mine have already figured it out. I feel like blinding the robots and turning them off is the strongest choice for fighting against them.
Flinty wrote: It depends on the dataset you train the ai on. There are currently microphone arrays that can triangulate where shots are coming from.
If you're talking the one that's often used in American cities - ShotSpotter, I think, unless they rebranded again - it's also tech that simply doesn't work reliably enough to be worth it. See, for example, this report from the ACLU, as well as further sources cited within.
#
You'd be surprised how much Jerry Bruckheimer style 'safety' stuff has no to actual negative effect on actual safety - it's mostly a political problem, it's an industry that has a metric ton of ex-military, ex-police or ex-politician people in it as salesmen and consultants, and thus is rife with kickbacks and pork barrel politics. On top of that, safety is always popular, it's easy to style yourself as a 'councilman that does something' with safety products, and it's an issue that usually finds bipartisan support. The UK armed forced once let themselves get bamboozled into buying 'bomb detectors' that operated on the principle of dowsing rods of all things, to the tune of millions of pounds for what effectively was a handful of useless wires and a battery in a box. In the 2000s, no less, not sometime in the 60s.
Tsagualsa wrote: The UK armed forced once let themselves get bamboozled into buying 'bomb detectors' that operated on the principle of dowsing rods of all things, to the tune of millions of pounds for what effectively was a handful of useless wires and a battery in a box. In the 2000s, no less, not sometime in the 60s.
Not quite true.
The British government testing team declared them frauds, but despite that the Royal Engineers Exports Support Team was paid to promote the devices at a trade fair. The device was also backed by British embassies in Mexico City and Manila, through the then Department of Trade and Industry.
So we didn't buy them, didn't do anything with the info they were frauds and happily promoted them to others.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Concern there? One country is going to be First with that technology. And let’s face it, given budgets and all the brains and bits and gubbins and bobs needed to have a robotic legion? There aren’t many.
US, Russia, China, possibly the EU seem the most likely candidates.
At which point, you gain a significant advantage, as people are far less squeamish about loss of materiel than they are the deaths of the young men and women in our armies.
I genuinely dread that advent, because it’s a serious change in the balance of power. And given not all those with power are of a balanced mind? Well.
Some would argue it has all ready happened, and is over too.
Think of the Drone warfare during Bush II, Obama, and the Trump Presidency and we are now seeing near-peer and lesser peer competitors taking up the baton. Drone Warfare is no longer a US only proposition and has not been for around a decade now.
If we were to render warfare into something done completely remotely using machinery, with no people involved at all, no risk to any human life, then what's the point? Would warfare even happen? Underneath the geo politics and strategic and tactical lingo, when we really get down to brass tacks, Is warfare not simply a primal drive to destroy, subjugate or defeat a set of people who differ in some way?
It ties into the whole AI debate. Warfare is part of human nature. If we remove ourselves from it too much, it's no longer in our realm, so why bother? I may be wrong of course, but I think part of the reason people are still involved is because people need to be involved, on a spiritual level.
Warfare used to include a spiritual element to it. Status, ritual, religion. But not anymore. Warfare has always been motivated by a potential to gain. Wealth, land, pre-eminent attacking, political gain. And then there was the spiritual side, the warrior culture, the religion, the desire to be the apex culture, which fosters and enables warfare to be waged. But today, that stuff is obsolete. No amount of warrior culture or "spiritual" side is going to help you win a war of knowledge, science, and industry. The ongoing russo-ukrainian war is an example, the japanese empire was another one. Warfare still involves people because the conflict, and the world at large involves people. One day, we might evolve to such a technological level that we can isolate ourselves into a bubble and live the rest of our lives in want and in need of nothing. Labor would not be required, and everything and anything can be catered for by automation and machines. Or we won't. But if we do, then and only then would people or "infantry" not be required in war. But like you said, when we get to the point where we want for nothing, what then is the point of war?
Also, consider the idea of waging war using only drones and computers. We are simply not there technologically yet. People who run around saying humans are not needed because machines can replace them at their jobs do not understand the complexities of industry and economy. People are required to build those machines and factories, and program them. Its ridiculously hard work building and programming just an articulated robotic arm, and then you set it to do the task of simply cutting out square metal sheets. Now you want to create a whole factory of these, and have assembly lines and have them do more and more complex tasks such as cutting complex shapes, bending things, welding them, and assembling them? I mean, we're not even accounting for the fact that tools and tool-bits wear out, or many advanced machines have custom parts that are still not automated yet, and you can't just buy these spare parts from a big brand company. Its just as well that today you can buy most of what you need for assembly lines, and a factory at large from other companies, because assuming you even have the staff and knowledge required to build all these yourself will take you decades, and cost the better part of a billion dollars. And now you want to take the human element out of warfare and have war being waged entirely by machines, when we have trouble in peace time even replacing certain machine parts? If anyone ever took a long think over that, then they'd realize how ridiculous the idea of infantry being obsolete in war is.
'ing expensive for limited return. And that's before you start on the support infrastructure for them.
