Learning about Tactics

Although I'm not exactly a staunch supporter of military intervention in most situations, I've long been fascinated with warfare. As such, I'm always interested in how this fighting business actually works, and over the years I've learned a few basic things - from history books, RTS games (which I suck at) and even This Very Wiki. However, I've still got a long way to go before I can be a proper Armchair General! I know there are many Tropers on here with much greater military knowledge than me, even some who have actually served (or still serve) in the armed forces of their countries. And, of course, there are many Big Books Of War out there which you might know of.

Right now, my knowledge of tactics includes the following notions, which may or may not be correct. I'd like to ask for your help in refining, expanding and correcting this list.

• Cover is very important. Soldiers don't leave their cover unless they're pretty damn sure that there's other cover wherever they're going.
• This means that suppressive fire - throwing lots of Dakka in the general direction of the enemy to prevent him from leaving his cover - is very important as well; it uses up many more bullets than the shots which are actually intended to hit something.
• Tanks are big, powerful and scary things, but they're easy targets for anyone who brings a bazooka or similar weapon.
• Machine guns trump just about everything that isn't heavily armoured.
• Air support can be a real Game-Breaker if left unopposed, but Heaven help your pilots if the enemy has brought AA guns.
• Artillery fire can be traced, so put wheels on your guns and move them around a lot if you don't want the enemy to return your serve.
• A bunch of jerks with Kalashnikovs can bring the mightiest, best-equipped and best-organised armies to their knees. Then again, sometimes they can't.
• Easy Logistics is averted hard in Real Life. Vehicles need fuel, weapons need ammunition, and soldiers need food, water and sanitary facilities. Ensuring that all these basic needs are met can be a much greater pain than actually fighting the enemy.

edited 16th May '12 3:30:04 PM by MidnightRambler

Quite a good primer. You missed one, I think.

• Chemical weapons if deployed correctly give precisely no shit how good your personal NBC protection is. Particularly if the deployer has been reading the Russian playbook - don't stick with one type, cocktail that sucker.

One of the nastier tricks our NBC instructors taught me and my mates when we were learning how to "survive" that stuff is the Russian's tendency to use vomiting agents^ in addition to the Nerve, Blood, Choking and Blister Agents - strictly speaking, only the first three are meant to be Lethal. Giving you a choice of suffocating inside your respirator as you literally puke your lungs out, or taking your respirator off and getting a face-full of the stuff that is meant to kill you. That is, of course, assuming you are fast enough to get your respirator on when the attack alerts go out in the first place.

And if you think you can avoid all that nasty dying stuff by keeping your respirator and associated kit on 24-7, think again. Wearing full NBC protective clothing for extended periods of time, particularly when you are doing normal day-to-day work, can and has killed as well. Even in temperate climates.

^Also shows that the Russians learned from history - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloropicrin shows how that trick was used in the First World War.

I'll go on what I know. Chances are other military tropers will contradict or prove me wrong on one or more spots.

• Cover is important. Really the primary reasons to displace from cover are simple, the enemy is using anti-cover measures such as armored vehicles, air support, grenades, mortars, artillery, RPG's... We learned long ago a static cover position will not under any circumstance hold out forever. You need to be mobile, staying in cover too long will result in you getting pinned or worse.
• Suppressive fire experience seems to be showing is having the opposite effect. Sure the enemy doesn't move but logistically it's killing our operational capabilities. Who cares if your average rifleman can carry 600 rounds of 5.56mm ammunition if he wastes all 600 suppressing (and not killing) one target? Historically, dependence on suppressive fire tactics has gotten soldiers needlessly killed by people who are smart enough to realize aimed fire > suppressive fire. (And accurate aimed fire > aimed fire.) If you can't hit the enemy and kill him in 30 rounds or less you are doing it wrong.
• Tanks are also quite unbeatable en masse unless you have en masse anti-tank measures such as ATGM's. Even then there's no guarantees. The only true way to stop a tank offensive is fighter and/or helicopter gunship support. Even that is problematic to do if the airspace is contested or the enemy has significant anti-aircraft defenses (read: SAM's).
• Machine guns (barring universals such as the M60, M240, PKM/PKP Pecheneg/AEG-999, etc.) are often heavy, immobile objects. They have limited traverse and elevation rate much of the time. Like tanks they only dominate in the open. A .50 cal does you no good if the enemy can bypass your left flank by avoiding roads or open channels and coming through the trees. Machine guns are also heavily limited, most of them cannot fire for prolonged (read: greater than 60 seconds continuous) amounts of time either due to ammunition or their barrels getting too hot. When they pause for reloads or barrel cooldown/swap out that's when you strike. They don't like it when the enemy shoots back.
• Air support alone however cannot win a war. Desert Shield and Operation Enduring Freedom taught us that. Anti-aircraft guns are increasingly obsolete anymore. (Anything less than 30mm anymore won't even reach the range many combat aircraft can attack at, let alone be able to put enough hits/damage on the craft to bring it down.) SAM's are also somewhat limited in capabilities. Chiefly they are often large targets ripe for SEAD style missions or are priority targets by ground forces. Secondly they are often only capable of engaging a few aircraft owing to relatively low amounts of ammo. (By comparison an old WW 2-era 90mm battery of four guns could engage theoretically a hundred aircraft provided the barrels didn't melt or the aircraft escaped by virtue they were well stocked with ammunition. A typical SAM site has maybe 2-3 dozen missiles that you will not get a 100% accuracy out of. At most a SAM battery can engage only as many aircraft as it has missiles often less.) Thirdly, they are secondary assets to air defense. If your air defense strategy is to rely on SAM's and AA guns you will be hopelessly outclassed against a combined arms enemy. If you can't contest the airspace in the air you will lose the air war every time.
• Counter-battery fire is hard to pull off. Most of the time, you'll need to engage towed artillery batteries from the air or via tank offensive (be wary, some artillery batteries have anti-tank capabilities).
• Actually the only thing they brought to their knees were spineless politicians. Even the Soviets had a ridiculously lopsided count of victories to defeats in Afghanistan. (Lopsided in favor of victory.) Yes they attacked the Panshir Valley (or whatever it was called) eight times and lost all eight, but they ran the mujaheddin ragged for 8 years and only lost due to political pressures.
• However an army too dependent on its logistical train is one that is routed by a far more cunning opponent. All the supplies in the world mean nothing if you cannot defeat the enemy on the battlefield.

Gah. A good thing they aren't used much nowadays.

Thanks for the input! About the "air support" thing: I was using 'AA guns' to mean 'anything on the ground that's primarily meant for shooting down aircraft'... I don't know very much about the proper terminology. Anyway, it's good to know that ground-based anti-air defences are not the Magical Bringers of Instant Destruction to Any and All Enemy Aircraft which they're often modeled as in strategy games.

Also, I had a feeling that counter-battery fire would be hard - I've read in 10 different places that it's possible, but I couldn't imagine it would be easy to calculate where a projectile was coming from if it came flying at you at high speed and then exploded violently.

edited 17th May '12 3:03:05 AM by MidnightRambler

Counter-battery radar does that for them, along with UAVs.

edited 17th May '12 3:41:56 AM by Greenmantle

Chemical weapons are dirt cheap as the precursor chemicals for most of them can be bought in bulk for pennies, and the formulae for just about all of them can be found on wikipedia, down to the last molecule. Hell, you can make a reasonably good Choking Agent out of two commonly available household cleaning agents, available from all good supermarkets. And if you are clever enough not to premix them, they are easily transported to where you do want them to go whiiiisssh.

And I can guarantee that their deployment in a civilian area will cause far more panic than yer average bomb. Witness what happened in the Tokyo subway some years ago when Aum Shinrikyo Kuo let off some Sarin devices. Even relatively half-assed as it was, it still killed or severely wounded scores of people, caused vision problems in hundreds more and scared the shit out of a whole city.

The question is not if another terrorist group or groups is going to do the same, but when? As a tactic of causing terror, it is hard to beat.

And yeah, counter-battery fire controlled by radar can really spoil your day if you are in an artillery battery and are slow to get the hell out of dodge once the last shell has gone down the tube.

edited 17th May '12 4:10:39 AM by TamH70

The most important tactical weapon is timely and accurate intelligence

I demur slightly on that one. How do you know your intelligence is accurate and timely? The Israelis, (yeah, even them) relied too much on their Intel assets before what became the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Particularly on a high-ranking member of the Egyptian armed forces, who had previously fed them what seemed like accurate and timely tactical and strategic intelligence. It had panned out before. So much so that they trusted the very safety of their state on the information that he was giving them, that the Egyptians were nowhere near ready to attack them.

Bad thing for them was that they were, and that the man was a double.

This book is very instructive on just how badly intel sources have screwed up a country's security.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Military-Intelligence-Blunders-John-Hughes-Wilson/dp/1841190675

No Kindle Edition. Which is bad form as far as I am concerned.

Fact checking is as important if not more so than mere intelligence gathering. But Military Fact Checking doesn't sound as sexy as Military Intelligence, so...

Terrain.

Mountains, deserts, marshes, jungles, hillsides, wide open plains...since time immemorial, your choice of terrain to fight in has been essential. Sun Tzu even dedicated a whole section to it. Terrain dictates what ground units you can use, your visibility, the flow of battle as well as your options for pulling back when things go badly. Rivers and forests will make things difficult for tanks and vehicles, while fighting in the mountains will rely very much on who knows them best. And fighting in urban areas is a chapter all in itself.

edited 18th May '12 2:14:14 AM by Lemurian

I was always taught that even suppressing fire should be aimed or, as it was worded the first time: 'If you can't see what you're shooting at, stop fucking shooting. That's what the Royal Artillery are for'.

Additionally, I know the Americans certainly used to be great fans of the 'fully automatic' option, but we were always told 'single, aimed shots only' the only exception to that being building clearances or the actual assault phase of an attack.

edited 18th May '12 11:36:44 AM by InverurieJones

Yeah, I should have added that- intel is only useful if it is in fact timely and accurate...

Generally, you aim your shots if you want to kill the other guy, you spray only as a desperation move to keep the other guy from killing you

I am old enough to have learned section-level tactical doctrine twice. When I was an Army Cadet, not long after the Flood, (no, not that one in Halo), we still had Lee Enfield No.4 Mk1* rifles and Bren Guns, we were trained in sections that had a Rifle Group and a Gun Group, with the former engaged in fire and manoeuvre and the latter, with the Bren and the section 2 i/c providing suppressive fire, constantly firing just in front of the Rifle Group moving forward on the objective, always listening for the command "Switch Fire" so that when that objective was hit, they didn't mow their mates down.

Things didn't change much when I entered the Territorial Army, even though the rifles in use were the SLR and the machine guns the 7.62 NATO version of the Bren. Tactics, in my view, went to shit when the SA 80 was brought in, with the section split into two fire teams, each responsible for its own fire support with the TLIO (my abbreviation for what was euphemistically called the Light Support Weapon - Three Lies In One). Which, at the time was fucking impossible. The TLIO could not be fired in bursts because the groups would always split and ran the risk of shooting your mates in the back instead of keeping your enemies heads down, and the SA 80 personal weapon - I am not calling that thing a rifle - could not be reliably fired in single shot as the thing would jam at the slightest provocation.

Yet it was drummed into us that we had to use single aimed shots from our personal weapons instead of bursts, even though that capability existed on the thing, and to rely on the TLIO to suppress our enemies. Little wonder I started to wonder what planet my seniors were living on.

Things got better when they updated the SA 80 to the Mk.2 and binned the LSW in favour of the Minimi.

edited 18th May '12 10:45:51 PM by InverurieJones

I was out by then. Years of bitter experience had taught me that anything with the appellation of SA 80 on it were anathemae. It is hard to re-route those mental pathways and over write them with the information that "SA 80 is Good now"

It sounds like they were letting their equipment choices determine the tactics, instead of the other way around.

Oh, that is true, but it goes a lot deeper than that. Margaret Hilda Roberts Thatcher was bound and determined to privatise the (world renowned at the time) Royal Ordnance factories. And decided that the best way to fatten the business up for said privatisation was to award them the contract for the next generation of small arms for the British armed forces.

Thing is, rumours have had it ever since that R.O. not only did not have a design fixed yet, it had no hope of doing so in time. That is pretty much the minority view, though. I personally don't think they were that stupid. What they did do was in many ways worse. It involved state-sanctioned theft of a design from Eugene Stoner's Armalite company, and mating that design with the forty-odd year old EM 2 from Royal Ordnance Enfield. And making such a half-assed job of so doing that it took nearly thirty years to fix with the afore-mentioned SA 80 A2.

I always thought that if they had simply licensed Stoner's AR-18 they would have ended up spending less money for a better gun, but this is turning into a derail.

Anyway- in so far as the tactics you were taught are concerned, it sounds like they had the MG using aimed long bursts to suppress an enemy target, while a rifle team snuck up to take them down.

Yeah, that was the first way I learned of how section attacks should work. I think the second system was trying to copy American doctrine, with "Fire Teams" and such, yet not with the proper kit to do the job.

Which, in any sphere, is just plain daft.

Use of fireteams in general

US Marines use of fireteams (the good stuff starts in chapter 3)

US ROTC Squad and Platoon movement and fire procedures. The basic idea is 2 groups providing overwatch while the other moves.

Thanks for that. Something has struck me though. Why would the Americans tell the world how they fight wars at section level and higher?

I'm not into military stuff, but one thing I've learned from history: don't get embroiled in a guerilla war with somebody in their own nation. It rarely if ever ends in victory for you, and even if it does it's very often a Pyrrhic one.

Oh, and: don't get involved in a land war in Asia, and never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

Kudos for the Princess Bride references, 8-)