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Russia Light Infantry


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11 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

This I suspect is the crux of it.....Lose the initiative for even a moment and you are screwed.

Not quite "losing the initiative," no. Artillery on-call doesn't care about who has the initiative. It's that lightly protected forces can't afford to occupy any piece of terrain longer than it takes a fire mission (or should I use the Russian term, fire strike?) to arrive. It worked pretty good in WW2, with limited comms, fire support that was considered responsive if it landed twenty minutes after an attack started, and a dearth of even the latter among many combatants.  I'm not nearly so certain it will be viable overall (exceptional successes, sure) in modern times. Like, everyone has a radio and even Grad batteries answer calls with, "May I take your order?"

Alternatively, you might just blunder into something like a tank company backed by two platoons of motor rifles. That would, if competently handled, run through almost anything light like **** through a goose, regardless of who was driving events. 

There is something of a meme or brainbug, what have you, that going fast with minimal armor is protection. I think modern military history disagrees with that idea. Firepower is protection. Armor is protection. Stealth is protection. Numbers, in mutual support, are protection. But none of them, except maybe the third, are especially sexy nowadays and they are either agnostic to or negatively correlated with going fast.

But like I said, fine for light occupation and better than nothing in straight-up brawl.

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The 9th Infantry Division experiments basically showed;

1. Light rapidly mobile infantry could often out maneuver heavier forces and inflict disproportionate damage

2. Light motorized infantry allowed for a very flexible rapid strategic movement, but significantly more "maneuver" and respectably more firepower than Airborne or Air Assault troops offered.

However

1. While able to often do damage out of proportion to it's size and equipment, they also struggled to inflict lasting damage on their heavier foes (trading a tank platoon for a dune buggy was not a way to win a war, but it was never inflicting losses on a scale to militarily destroy major maneuver units).  

2. Motorized light infantry did not survive if decisively engaged.  Once the mechanized-armored forces got a bite into the motorized infantry, it died in detail.

3. While the motorized infantry could often evade heavier forces, they usually experienced "gambler's ruin" in that every evasion had some chance of failing, and it was inevitable, even if the evasion was likely, that something would go wrong and the motorized light infantry would die in place.

4. Still reliant on logistics that are often heavily exposed

The problems I would contend with motorized light infantry comes down to the following:
a. It's "damage" focused.  They're good at inflicting damage, but bad at decisive effects or taking/retaining key terrain (which often leaves the Light motor infantry increasingly penned in).  
b. Assumes risk by existing.  All things do on the battlefield, but things that sacrifice protection (war fighting function protection), and security often exist on a razor's edge.
c. It offers false saving, either requiring extensive augmentation to limit it's weakness, or basically offering a duality between "very low losses" and "total destruction."

As sort of an Annex:

The key differences with Stryker would be:

1. The Stryker unit is designed to rapidly move around the battlefield, but it is not reliant on speed to survive (it remains "boot" heavy enough to conduct traditional infantry missions, artillery/AT/direct fire is fairly heavy).

2. Increasingly the Stryker is being seen as sort of a Dragoon option, in that it uses the vehicle for mobility before fighting as conventional infantry (with heavy firepower augmentation), and further armor-cross attachments are proving to be more common for SBCT NTC rotations.

 

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Apocal,

The quote is "Speed is armour" and originated from Jackie Fisher, father of the British battlecruisers eaten alive at Jutland by German battleship shells. Apparently, his idea was that the BCs, taking advantage of better FC (which they never got) and faster firing guns, would stand off at range and clobber the slower and slower firing enemy BB flagship, which had a low likelihood of hitting the much faster and agile BCs. Never happened, and those fine ships wound up in the line of battle with the BBs--and got shot to pieces! Unsurprising, since this was akin to pitting a frigate against an SOL, in the Age of fighting Sail, in a straight up broadside duel.

panzersaurkrautwerfer,

A most cogent and useful analysis.

Regards,

John Kettler

Edited by John Kettler
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3 hours ago, John Kettler said:

Apparently, his idea was that the BCs, taking advantage of better FC (which they never got) and faster firing guns, would stand off at range and clobber the slower and slower firing enemy BB flagship, which had a low likelihood of hitting the much faster and agile BCs.

Never heard that version before. The way that it came down to me was that the BC was to be able to outgun anything it couldn't outrun and outrun anything it couldn't outgun. So its natural prey was to be the armored cruiser and anything smaller, and to strictly avoid the main battle line. As you state, they were misused at Jutland by sending them up against the German BBs which ate them alive...as was predictable but apparently came as a surprise to the British admirals. But enough of the OT...

Michael

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19 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Occupying ground is the last thing forces that depend on their mobility for survival should do, hit & run attacks are a much better policy.

"Occupying" in the sense they exist somewhere. If you're doing a hit and run attack but take longer than a few minutes (maybe as low as five, possibly less) you might just get smoked, is what I'm saying.

Edited by Apocal
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9 hours ago, Michael Emrys said:

Never heard that version before. The way that it came down to me was that the BC was to be able to outgun anything it couldn't outrun and outrun anything it couldn't outgun. So its natural prey was to be the armored cruiser and anything smaller, and to strictly avoid the main battle line. As you state, they were misused at Jutland by sending them up against the German BBs which ate them alive...as was predictable but apparently came as a surprise to the British admirals. But enough of the OT...

Michael

Yes, reading that it was similar to CO's trying to use TD's or IFV's as tanks.  Either out of stupidity or deliberate attempt to sabotage a theory of fighting they didn't like.   However, the BC concept still seems sound if used appropriately.  So, I wonder if there was another more compelling problem that uh sank that concept. 

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3 hours ago, Erwin said:

I wonder if there was another more compelling problem that uh sank that concept.

While ship-on-ship action was rare in WW2, the last battles of the Scharnhorst and Kirishima serve to illustrate Panzer's point about existing "on a razor's edge" - one unfortunate brush with a battleship and down to the bottom of the sea. That being said, one game on my hard drive that I hope to play some day is War Plan Orange - precisely to ponder questions like this. :D

But the naval discussion is also relevant to the topic if we think about the 'guerre de course.' For more than two centuries, first frigates, then cruisers were built for a role that was the naval equivalent of motorized light infantry, and yet there are no surface vessels fulfilling that role today. The explanation seems to be simply that any surface vessel attempting to do so would be promptly detected and annihilated. Thus, in line with Apocal's historical approach to the topic, once technology prevents you from sailing/steaming/riding/driving off and disappearing after the 'hit-and-run' attack, the role ceases to exist.

Now, 'hybrid' light infantry, on the other hand... :ph34r:

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12 hours ago, Erwin said:

However, the BC concept still seems sound if used appropriately

I believe that is true. The problem was to find a tactical situation where they could be used properly. The occasion where one needed to send out a squadron of BCs to hunt down commerce raiding cruisers almost never arose. So they got used to fill out the line of battle, with predictable results. Ironically, what was possibly the most successful BC design might have been the Iowa class BBs. They were fast and big gunned, and may have been armored heavily enough to stand up against any other battleship in the world, with the possible exception of the Yamato class. But that never came to the test. By the time the Iowas and the Yamatos came along, the day of the dominance of the big gunned battleships was over.

Michael

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46 minutes ago, Michael Emrys said:

Actually not all that rare.

I should have used qualifiers: While decisive action between capital ships was relatively rare in WW2 in comparison to air and submarine attacks. :)

I'm not sold on the BC concept, though. They required funds that were just short of a battleship and considerably more than a cruiser, so CM QB junkies like myself can feel the dilemma. No wonder the BC concept eventually merged with the 'fast-battleship,' which is how I would classify the Iowas - and the Hood, which is why I didn't mention her demise as an example.

Indeed, Panzer's input on SBCTs increasingly getting cross-attached with armour in training goes to show that 'filling in all the gradations' in the force structure isn't the best approach.

Now I have an itch to play HPS Sims' Future Force:D

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