@Tuefel, in a crowded street, your mobility is limited anyway unless you want to run down civilians, and even in a quiet one, unless you see the attacked first, you're going to get hit. A hole in a wall, a narrow alley, a rooftop, anything that takes the enemy out of view is concealment, and if he's got a RPG you'd better hope you're in a tank or heavy APC, because nothing less will keep you alive. Mobility is useless if you get caught flat-footed. Seriously Strykers and Bradleys proved to be rather poorly armoured for urban warfare, and so needed armour upgrade kits.
IE Ds are another issue, because they don't even need operators, can be put almost anywhere, and can look like almost anything.
edited 10th Mar '16 1:04:56 AM by MattII
Matt: Again not true and ignoring the significant problem of armor becoming increasingly less effective and much slower to innovate then the weapons used against them. A Smaller more mobile vehicle has more options then a tank does because they are just that smaller and more mobile. They would have more clearance then the massive bulk of tank and if you implement the kind of mobility DARPA is looking at developing it is significantly more mobile in more directions then tank and that is possible because it isn't a big hulking thing like a tank. A tank and tank like vehicles like the Heavy APC's lose mobility because of there larger size and higher weight. Again number of problems with often lighter weight traffic bridges and low pressure side roads off of main drags and other urban features not meant to support the weight of an MBT or similar vehicle rolling over them. APS hard and soft kill systems are also amazingly effective at offsetting ambushes by such a significant degree that adding them drastically ups survival rate. Drozd the most primitive and unfriendly to everything around it boosted Soviet survival rates well over 80%. Newer systems up that rate even more. The Israeli's developed Trophy because the armor wasn't cutting it against even amateur coordinated attacks or tandem warheads.
Two key examples first the Israeli Merkava's prior to this latest flare up got a simply nasty surprise from mid gen RPG rockets penetrating their tanks despite ERA and the arrival of modern Russian ATGM's packing tandem warheads. The dumb rocket attacks were nothing but two quick fire shots at the same spot on the tank one to trip era the other penetrating into the tank. The Israelie response isn't more armor on the tank because it is already heavy it is to push APS . In the last flare up the exact opposite happened this time with significant improvement of tanks vs AT teams including noted success against ATGM's fired at Israeli tanks.
The second is Chechnya. Tanks rolling right into the cities and towns simply got slaughtered. Tanks are targeted first because the block all traffic around while the smaller vehicles could at least push by each other in the tighter spaces they couldn't push past the tank hulks. The tanks were also modern tanks with ERA. Again coordinated assaults from multiple directions targeting weak points blew the shit out of the tanks. Once the tanks were down the rest of the vehicles shortly followed as they were nice boxed in and easier to pick off thanks to the bulky multi ton road hogs turned into road blocks. Russians further develop and more actively deploy the newer APS systems on tanks. Round two tanks survival rate goes up drastically. The Russian answer was not more armor it was keeping mobility by avoiding the obviously dangerous cities and only moving in when the infantry had cleared buildings or suspected tank traps had been blasted from a safe distance and using APS.
To top it off the ambush situation you described has no trouble fucking up tanks at all as extensive modern experience has shown. It has also shown evasion, speed, and mobility along with adding APS systems has done a lot more to boost the survivability of the tanks at very lost cost of weight then just piling on layers of armor have.
It should be notable that the Russians manage high survivability overall using less actual armor, more robust ERA and effective APS where as western tanks until recently have relied on increasingly heavier armor packages including DU mesh installalltion into the Abrams.Doesn't it strike you as odd that with newer armor that can give more protection for less weight then RHA the only way to get comparable protection the Heavy Tanks of WWII had was to have comparable weight in new material of the tank. The reason is rather easy to figure out. AT tech rapidly outstrips armor tech. Every time a new armor has managed to surface in less then 5 years a new weapon offsets it often notably while the material tech to make passive armor effective takes notably longer as in up to three times as longer or more and it costs increasingly more. The most expensive part of MBT's isn't the fancy weapons or engines it is the armor packages.
edited 10th Mar '16 1:30:05 AM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?The sorts of ambushed you saw from Iraq resulted in damaged tanks, but no other vehicle could possibly have survived. in one example a Challenger 2, which got hit by 14 RP Gs and a MILAN, but was back in service just 6 hours after being recovered. Another was hit by 70 RP Gs and survived. A third took 10-15 RP Gs, plus a RPG-29 which penetrated the frontal armour, slightly injuring the driver, but didn't prevent him from driving the tank for a mile and a half. In fact, pretty much the only tanks actually destroyed during any operation by Western forces since 1990 was lost to friendly fire.
APS also has its issues, because it relies on radar, which can't be armoured, and can thus be vulnerable to M Gs, and open has trouble with attacks coming in from high angles.
edited 10th Mar '16 2:45:59 AM by MattII
It might also be salutary to note that the RPG-29 penetration was more of a fluke than anything since it just happened to hit smack bang on a weld seam.
At any rate, since it seems to have taken over the discussion perhaps I should have kept my mouth zipped about tanks.
Weird, I come here in response to a holler about civility and discover modern tactics being discussed instead of sci-fi tactics...
edited 10th Mar '16 6:06:39 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I can vouch for them and say that where we do discuss modern or historical tactics, it's typically to illustrate a point w.r.t. how warfare may be conducted in the future or to extrapolate how we might fight in future (my question falls under the latter, for example - I'm extrapolating that mobility, lethality, etc. all continue to increase and ask how that might affect combat in the far future).
Locking you up on radar since '09On that topic, then, what about aspects of future combat that wouldn't be too similar to modern warfare? And I mean far-future sci-fi, not sci-fi in the sense that it's like 2016 but with slightly better battery technology and faster computers. Warfare that would be totally alien to today's militaries and modern technological limitations.
A few big ones I can think of would be the elimination of weapons you hold in your hand and aim, in favor of mounted ones that are either completely computerized or else otherwise slaved to your control via some sort of mental interface; the simplification of supply chains and logistics as a result of materials fabrication technology (think something like Star Trek or Supreme Commander, or even just "regular" 3D printing); outright replacing soldiers with autonomous vehicles and drones; spacecraft with the potential to operate in air or even underwater; giant punchy robots (okay, yeah, impractical, I know...
); hover technology allowing for land-based aircraft carriers. Not necessarily all of these at once, mind you. I mean in the sense that they're possibilities.
edited 10th Mar '16 3:13:28 PM by nman
As I said earlier, I think it's possible that you'd see ever further compressed timescales and ever more information to take in, and weaponry would be far more lethal than it is today. Battles might be decided in a fraction of the time it takes today, and casualties would be more likely (or perhaps the opposite would be true simply due to the fighting ending before any significant amount of time - and hence opportunity for injury - passes). In order to make sense of it all there would probably be a crapload of automation and synthesising information sources to preclude information overload. Manoeuvre and means of blinding enemy sensors (stealth, electronic warfare, etc.) become even more important.
So compared to the modern day, engagements would be chaotic, hyper-lethal affairs that are over before you have a chance to properly take stock of what happened. More than that I can't really think of...
edited 10th Mar '16 3:52:23 PM by Flanker66
Locking you up on radar since '09I wouldn't rule that 3D printers would reduce the burden of combat that much, since they still require generous amounts of raw material and sometimes other finished compounds to print objects.
I'd wager they'd reduce the manufacturing costs and make it less dependent on regions by allowing armies to supply their troops with fresh equipment from much shorter supply lines instead of bringing stuff from across the world, or solar system or maybe star systems.
On a live battlefield they wouldn't do much.
Inter arma enim silent legesUnusual warfare. Drastic increase in remotely operated or largely autonomous unmanned weapons platforms to the point you almost never see a person on the field. There might be people still controlling them but they aren't out on the field to risk being shot. You could take it further and battles only take place in designated warzones as otherwise real estate is too valuable to damage in a full scale conflict. If you want to go really weird an entire world is a designated warzone and any conflict that calls for a force arms response occurs on the planet.
Lots of weird and interesting problems to solve in all of those that could make an odd if interesting story.
Who watches the watchmen?All that said, the basic tactics of warfare aren't liable to change anytime soon. Different sections of the military may get emphasised depending on what tech is currently the most viable, but the basic concepts will likely stay the same. Heck, the basic concepts have more or less stayed the same since the creation of the first genuine combined arms armies in the BCs.
If you were to show a medieval commander a scene from WWII there would be lots of things that surprised him (duh). But many things would still be recognizable, from the need for infantry to hold positions once they're taken, through to the continued use of shock cavalry in the form of tanks.
Lots of things change in warfare. Some don't.
It is the difference between Metal Gear Solid and Fallout, Metal Gear states that warfare changes since the weapons and the rules for war always change according to the era and technology while Fallout states that whatever ware the weapons or the era the reasons why war is waged don't.
Inter arma enim silent legesI suppose you could say that in a way, things still go similar except for scale, but how much bigger and faster can an attack have be over one a century or two in the past before it's not really similar?
edited 10th Mar '16 10:24:07 PM by MattII
I'll second the bit about infantry. You will always need infantry to hold positions, no matter how mechanized warfare might become.
Certain things, like the line attack example, do change. Basic ojbectives, however, remain the same, and that ensures a degree of continuity. And yes, I do subscribe to the notion that just because something has gotten bigger, does not make it new.
Honestly, I think the entire idea of waging war from a continent away only works because we've only been beating up uneducated insurgents with no E-war ability worth noting.
That being said, I can easily see drones being a thing on the battlefield but most of them would need local controllers to be effective. IR signals, for example, are difficult to intercept and more so to jam but are strictly line of sight.
At most you'll get teams with half a dozen drones being controlled by one dude with a toolkit, service rifle, and remote control suite. More likely, you'd see them integrated with infantry as scouts, pack mules, heavy weapons carriers, and meat(?) shields.

Tom: Except your off in the weeds still. It is always better to never take the hit and have mobility then be designed to deliberately take a hit and have mobility restrictions.
I hate to burst your bubble but heavy APC type vehicles suffer the exact same slew of problems as tanks which is amusing because they are almost entirely based on a tank chassis often with the weight savings they may have had from loss of the turret they just dump back on which doesn't stop them by being swatted by infantry in an urban environment. They weigh around the same as tanks are massive just like tanks and have trouble fitting the same spaces as tanks. You have solved nothing and are simply shuffling around the problem and removing armament.
MBT's are heavy because the effective armors in the requisite thickness to even resist modern weapons is really damn heavy. That also includes the need for heavier frames, larger automotive components, and a big and powerful enough engine to haul it around. In case you haven't been paying attention to where things are actually going there Tom the reliance is no longer on toughness of armor but has been increasingly proven to be in favor of mobility and APS systems which have proven track records in combat.
The various multi-wheel vehicles actually can go more places then tanks by simple virtue of being quite a bit lighter and have proven repeatedly to be more useful in urban environments then the tanks because they can go more places. Even the Bradley has more mobility options then an Abrams. Kinda funny how the Russians had no issues making a slew of lighter more mobile vehicles with features that are often cited as being desired in urban combat.
Citing the horribly flawed GCV only proves you do not understand the extensive problem with that kind of armor scheme never mind how grossly flawed the concept was to begin with. The project was so badly flawed it was allowed to die fairly easily.
Improved mobility, harder to detect and track, and an ability to actually evade a hit do a lot more then sitting there letting your vehicle get slapped around. Tanks have reached the point where AT weapons are again killing and injuring crew which we covered numerous times across multiple threads and just around the bend is the next gen of AT weapons looking to push the gap even wider. The armor chase is armor barely keeping up if at all. That is why less reliance on armor and more on mobility and other systems is being emphasized to make the next gen of weapons less effective in general.
To add to there are already several notable instances where these newer systems did a lot more to protect the tank then armor did. Since Drozd first saw use all the way up to modern systems like Arena and its near Israeli successor Trophy.
I hate to tell you folks modern tanks and tank like vehicles are not very good as urban combat platforms for many of the reasons already covered. In fact tanks especially modern ones are ironically designed for open field combat where a higher degree of mobility and positioning allows them to make the best of all of their systems including their armor. They get that mobility thanks to less impediment to their ability to move freely so size and weight are not as serious issues. In a city where a bridge could be too week a road could crumble or space outside of main drags is limited for tanks to maneuver they run into a lot of issues and lose a significant amount of mobility making them more vulnerable. Tank country is the open country. You want more flexibility in an urban environment you need more mobility and that means smaller and lighter. You aren't getting that with tanks. IFV's are better suited to urban fighting then a tank because they are lighter and most of them are smaller that they have better mobility. With a bit of an ironic twist WWII tanks like the M4 Sherman were better suited to urban combat then modern tanks for those reasons.
edited 9th Mar '16 7:52:39 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?