We really need a mechanism to "fork" a tread when sometning interesting but off topic comes up, What follows really belongs to land forces. (maybe some sort of searchable tag ?)ChrisPat wrote: ↑1:19 PM - 1 day agoThere's a web site which recounts RA history in WWII, starting, as you must, with how they were at the end of WWI. The author's summary of that is that they knew what they wanted to do, they knew what was stopping them from doing it and they spent much of the inter war steadily overcoming those obstacles.
That's probably a fair summary for most senior officers late in WWI but they had to apply each advance immediately. Earlier they had to learn what of the stuff they thought they wanted to do they really didn't. That applied to nations as a whole too, which means civilians too.
The big things the RA developed were comms and procedures, early in WWII they were using much the same guns albeit with pneumatic tyres and MT suited brakes, but they achieved most of what they wanted too with them.
Give WWI commanders effective comms and procedures and all the other proclaimed war winners would probably be for nought.
To some extent we still haven't learned. Note how the dreamers of mobility tell us present wars aren't being done "properly" because they don't fit the dreams. Dreams just about every army feeds to itself and its political masters in peacetime because they promise it will be easy, dramatic and glorious.
How do "dreamers" fit in with "they knew what they wanted to do" looks like the two groups co-existed within the same army, and IMO we have a very large group of "this worked fine, so why change?" (what I call inertia).
Its a lot easier to push for more of a technology that has already shown to be useful, and has no apparent negative effects, like comms, though you still need to develop procedures to avoid it becomming disruptive, than for a totally new doctrine to leverage new tecnology than is mostly unproven, and that you might get totally wrong.
The Germans realized that the huge firepower available to the infantry with the MG, and with the introduction of the LMG or worse GPMG that had gotten down to the squad level, combined with the even greater one of modern artillery assuming it could be directed, required an unprecedented level of dispersion, that in turn required leaders trained to make autonomous decision at the squad level. Most other countries played catch up for all the war about this during WW2, and some never could as they lacked the "raw materials" of a large pool of educated people used to making decisions.
The next step was improving comms and procedures so that the squad, that had become the base manouver unit on the tactical battlefield, could call down artillery, tough call as the arty is now likelly to get a lot more "we need it right now" calls than it can handle despite its own tech improvents, theoretical ROF, or even practical considering the need to relocate often to avoid conter battery, might be sufficient to satisfy everybody but ammo supply is not likely to ever be. Note that low intesity conflicts are likely to teach all the wrong lessons here, the requirements for support in guerrilla combat are on a different scale.
So the next step is the "networked" battlefield that should give commanders enough information to prioritize, but that carries the risk of micromanagment.
OFC robots and drones do not care about micromanagment, they actually thrive on it, but leveraging those capabiliries might require an entirey different doctrine.
statistics: Posted by TOS1956 — 5:20 AM - Today — Replies 4 — Views 29