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Throatwarbler posted:I have a pet theory that on the modern battlefield rifles are probably over-stated in their importance. If you took an American infantry platoon/company and swapped out all their rifles for M1903 Springfields, but let them keep their automatic grenade launchers and laser guided mortars and drones, how much less effective would they be? Not very much I would think. This is kind of silly. First off the lack of modern optics would noticeably decrease a platoons situational awareness. Second, it would be a much larger reduction in fire power than you think. Watch a few videos of US Marines or soldiers in a firefight. They typically pop out of cover fire 2-4 aimed semi auto shots. In a similar situation with a bolt action you are likely only going to be firing 1-2 shots in the same time. The length, recoil, and manual cycling with a bolt or all going to make such snap shots harder to do accurately. And of course in situation where you just need to throw rounds towrds the bad guys a modern assault rifle can put out 30 rounds in a few seconds as opposed to a minute. Not too mention that the heavier ammo means you are going to be carrying at lot less rounds.
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Aug 8, 2015 12:16
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Automatic weapons are essential to the economy. Otherwise you won't expend enough ammunition to keep the ammunition factory in operation, employing thousands of people. 
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Aug 8, 2015 12:22
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I believe it was 250,000 rounds for every kill, not even properly confirmed in Iraq. I can't imagine the amount of metal and other resources that went into making those bullets. I think the front page had an article about how it would be cheaper just dropping on Iraq.
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Aug 8, 2015 12:50
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I heard 20 000 somewhere during the early stages of the occupation i think, but I'd believe either.
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Aug 8, 2015 12:59
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Hazzard posted:I believe it was 250,000 rounds for every kill, not even properly confirmed in Iraq. I can't imagine the amount of metal and other resources that went into making those bullets. I think the front page had an article about how it would be cheaper just dropping on Iraq.  And I thought I was bad at Counter-Strike
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Aug 8, 2015 13:41
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These comments about the number of rounds required to kill a guy really miss the point. The point being: suppression fire exists. Shooting around the target to keep the enemy's head down is really the main purpose of gunfire in modern combat.
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Aug 8, 2015 14:02
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Fangz posted:These comments about the number of rounds required to kill a guy really miss the point. 
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Aug 8, 2015 14:05
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Training chews up a ton of ammo, guys.
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Aug 8, 2015 14:37
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 I hope Keldoclock someday experiences enough of war to shatter every single one of fantasies, preconceptions, and illusions. Without him getting serious injured of course.
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Aug 8, 2015 14:41
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JoeCL posted:This is kind of silly. First off the lack of modern optics would noticeably decrease a platoons situational awareness. Second, it would be a much larger reduction in fire power than you think. Watch a few videos of US Marines or soldiers in a firefight. They typically pop out of cover fire 2-4 aimed semi auto shots. In a similar situation with a bolt action you are likely only going to be firing 1-2 shots in the same time. The length, recoil, and manual cycling with a bolt or all going to make such snap shots harder to do accurately. And of course in situation where you just need to throw rounds towrds the bad guys a modern assault rifle can put out 30 rounds in a few seconds as opposed to a minute. Not too mention that the heavier ammo means you are going to be carrying at lot less rounds. Rifles can't really put down that much fire compared to machine guns, and my hypothetical would still have modern machine guns.
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Aug 8, 2015 14:48
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Klaus88 posted:
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Aug 8, 2015 14:49
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Keldoclock posted:I'm interested in combat, not politics. Somebody hasn't read his Clausewitz.
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Aug 8, 2015 14:49
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Throatwarbler posted:Rifles can't really put down that much fire compared to machine guns, and my hypothetical would still have modern machine guns. What you are describing was German doctrine in the beginning of WW2. There are reasons why they scrambled to develop a semi auto during the war. See also the insane numbers of SMGs the soviets deployed while the mosin was their main rifle and how those went away once they switched to the AK.
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Aug 8, 2015 14:53
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If I remember correctly, nearly every front-line infantry company in the Red Army had a dedicated platoon of dudes armed with PPShs instead of their regular rifles.
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Aug 8, 2015 14:55
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Throatwarbler posted:Rifles can't really put down that much fire compared to machine guns, and my hypothetical would still have modern machine guns. As soon as your hypothetical guys start kicking in doors there'd be a huge difference.
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Aug 8, 2015 15:03
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Endman posted:Somebody hasn't read his Clausewitz. Seriously. Politics influence combat down to an individual level (Rules of Engagement are things which exist and which aren't made up by the Platoon Sergeant), and until you understand that you're just one of the guys who write angry posts in the comments section of fox news about how they don't understand why we don't just nuke ISIS.
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Aug 8, 2015 15:34
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Keldoclock posted:I don't see how "this battle occurred in this place at roughly this time on this day, here is a video of it from 5 angles" can be wrong. I mean once, sure ok super expensive fake for something that the world doesn't care about, but they can't all be like that. I just like seeing people work through the problem of "ok these guys are trying to kill us lets kill them" and seeing all the infinite variates of the problems and solutions. I don't watch the stuff that's like, some dude filming a mass grave or a medic station with some young new amputees and saying "group X is responsible for this". I'm interested in combat, not politics. There are a couple of big problems with this: 1) combat can not be separated from politics. The politics defines not only who is fighting and why but frequently how they are fighting and what their objectives are. Using a modern example, you cant even begin to understand the reason that the US fought the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the way we did without understanding modern domestic american politics. Two quick examples: the American public's allergy to combat losses made us adopt all sorts of tactics to minimize them (drones, anyone?) and our unwillingness to just completely poo poo on and break the Iraqi people made certain tactics completely unthinkable. Imagine how the Red Army ca. 1955 would have dealt with the urban shitstorm that was Falluja, for example. Somehow I doubt it would have featured quite as much small unit house to house action and significantly more battalion level artillery barrages. The latter is acceptable for a Stalinist nation in the mid 50s and utterly unacceptable for a modern democracy in a limited war in the early 21st century. 2) you don't seem to be taking a critical view of the material you are seeing. Video ins't some purely objective medium that tells no lies. Who is doing the filming? Why are they filming? What have they chosen to show you and more importantly what have they not chosen to show you? Ignoring all of the more politically fraught things like the treatment of civilians and prisoners, how about the effectiveness of their tactics. How many times do you think the Free Syrian Army shot at a helicopter and miss for every time they got a hit and uploaded it to Youtube et al? Looping back, most importantly WHY did they show that video? What did they edit out? EVen if it's a continual shot what did they take off the beginning or end? Watching videos of a battle, even multiple videos of the same event, is like watching a football game through a keyhole. You'll get some of it, you might even get the most important bits, but the full story just isn't there. That's why video (and other primary sources) are but a single tool that a historian uses to try to reconstruct events and make some kind of interpretative statement about them.
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Aug 8, 2015 15:34
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Throatwarbler posted:I have a pet theory that on the modern battlefield rifles are probably over-stated in their importance. If you took an American infantry platoon/company and swapped out all their rifles for M1903 Springfields, but let them keep their automatic grenade launchers and laser guided mortars and drones, how much less effective would they be? Not very much I would think. Close quarters city combat?
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Aug 8, 2015 16:09
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Wouldn't we just be stuck in a World War 1-esque battlefield if we were still restricted to bolt-action firearms? Since, in the end, its boots on the ground that must capture locations, the lack of any increased volume of fire aside from support weapons would seriously hamstring any offensive made by infantry. You would rely so heavily on artillery, tanks and airpower that it would mean any losses to them would threaten to cripple your forces. Infantry wouldn't be able to advance, so they would dig-in. The enemy would do the same. Then you'd just be stuck shelling each other and hoping to break their will or throw a lot more men towards an objective and expect heavy casualties.
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Aug 8, 2015 17:04
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Except the advent of precision-guided munitions make trenches a lot less safe from shelling. A laser-guided artillery shell with a modern proximity fuse will explode exactly above the trench or foxhole to shower anyone in it with shrapnel from above. But really, in a WWI-situation I'm not too sure if a modern assault rifle would be the sole thing necessary to allow the infantry to take terrain essentially unsupported again.
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Aug 8, 2015 17:23
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Wouldn't we just be stuck in a World War 1-esque battlefield if we were still restricted to bolt-action firearms? Not really. There have been too many advances in too many other areas for things to turn into WW1 redux only ditching modern small arms for their WW1 equivalents. Just look at the man portable firepower available to your average soldier. Carl Gustavs will do a loving number on a bunker or prepared position. Drones give a level of situational awareness that any WW1 commander would have sold his own mother for. poo poo, one of the big reasons WW1 went the way it did is because man portable radios weren't really a thing, which made coordinated assaults gently caress near impossible. Even WW2 levels of company level command and control make attacks bogging down like they did in WW1 much less likely. That's just looking at the most basic level of infantry. Bring PGMs dropped by supersonic fighters and stratosphere-loitering bombers into the equation and poo poo gets even uglier for prepared defensive positions. poo poo, we're even developing precision guided artillery at this point. THEN you have all of the more behind the scenes advances such as modern logistical chains and 100 years of advancement in military thinking, both tactical and strategic. That said, infantry with modern small arms would still spank infantry with bolt actions in any kind of infantry-on-infantry engagement. Despite all those advances I listed above infantry-on-infantry is still an important thing so this would be a bit of a problem. While it's true that no army ever won a war because they had rifle A over rifle B, all of those examples involve guns that were on rough parity with each other. Mauser v. Mosin just doesn't matter and even Mauser vs. Garand is not an insurmountable problem. Mauser vs. M16 though? loving forget about it. ArchangeI posted:But really, in a WWI-situation I'm not too sure if a modern assault rifle would be the sole thing necessary to allow the infantry to take terrain essentially unsupported again. edit: poo poo, just look at the existence of SMGs in WW1. Sure they were handy, but the thing that made the German 1918 summer offensive (and the allied counter-offensives) work was major advancements in assault tactics and offensive doctrine. If I were a dude assaulting a trench in WW1 I'd much prefer to have an MP18 to a Gew98, but blown out to the level of an army the fact that we're bypassing strong points and have half decent coordination with artillery is much more important. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Aug 8, 2015 |
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Aug 8, 2015 17:24
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ArchangeI posted:But really, in a WWI-situation I'm not too sure if a modern assault rifle would be the sole thing necessary to allow the infantry to take terrain essentially unsupported again. I'm not saying it is, what I'm saying is that you would need a lot more infantry to make any sort of territorial gains, since bolt-action rifles don't allow a tremendous amount of firepower. My WW1 comparison was bad, I'll admit, but the lack any effective offensive weapon by the common infantryman means they would be investing a lot more in other weapons, either to counter-act enemy munitions and weapon platforms, or to help with an offensive.
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Aug 8, 2015 17:34
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Fangz posted:These comments about the number of rounds required to kill a guy really miss the point. The point being: suppression fire exists. Shooting around the target to keep the enemy's head down is really the main purpose of gunfire in modern combat. I believe the point being made in the article was that the soldiers jobs was now pour lead over people and not actually defending America. This was written by a British person, I think it might have been Jeremy Clarkson. On WW1 with modern weapons, wouldn't even just giving modern scopes to soldiers suddenly turn your average infantryman into a marksman by WW1 standards? Some quick googling gave me 400 yards as the effective range of a Lee-Enfield, but I don't know what that's referring to. http://www.thefield.co.uk/shooting/lee-enfield-rifle-25484 The article says sights were set for up to 2000 yards when mass firing at artillery, if I'm reading this right. This site: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/m16-specs.htm cites M18's as having an effective range of 602 yards when firing at a point target, That gives it 1.5 times the range of an Enfield. A Garand apparently has 440 yards. Even that extra range sounds like a huge advantage for the modern weapons. Not to mention an M16 on semi-automatic can shoot faster and for longer. Sounds like a wash to me. Thinking about supporting elements. I remember someone telling me a lot of the smaller artillery weapons like the mortars were introduced precisely because of the short distance between trenches in WW1, to prevent that scenario happening again.
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Aug 8, 2015 18:05
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Hazzard posted:Thinking about supporting elements. I remember someone telling me a lot of the smaller artillery weapons like the mortars were introduced precisely because of the short distance between trenches in WW1, to prevent that scenario happening again. Mortars WERE introduced during WW1, and fairly early on, too, with some folks even cobbling together homemade mortars on the front due to demand far outstripping official supply at first. They helped, but they didn't end trench warfare on their own.
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Aug 8, 2015 18:25
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Hazzard posted:I believe the point being made in the article was that the soldiers jobs was now pour lead over people and not actually defending America. This was written by a British person, I think it might have been Jeremy Clarkson. Mortars didn't prevent WWI, they became a part of WWI. Probably killed more people than rifles and machine guns really.
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Aug 8, 2015 18:30
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Those numbers you're seeing for effective gun ranges are all kinds of weird. That's probably effective point range against man sized targets over open sights. Put decent glass on something and 600+ yards isn't that big a challenge for a trained shooter. poo poo CMP matches shoot out to 600 with irons and there is a special long range event that goes out to 800-1000
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Aug 8, 2015 20:38
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Throatwarbler posted:I have a pet theory that on the modern battlefield rifles are probably over-stated in their importance. If you took an American infantry platoon/company and swapped out all their rifles for M1903 Springfields, but let them keep their automatic grenade launchers and laser guided mortars and drones, how much less effective would they be? Not very much I would think. It's an interesting theory, but the problem is that modern infantry doctrine is predicated on having rapid-fire battle rifles and wouldn't work without it. CQB would be a complete mess, of course, but you'd probably end up having to throw out half the FM 7-8. A squad can't perform suppressing fire with bolt-action rifles, which means they really aren't that useful. Your theoretical rule-set would simply end up with almost every soldier being armed with a SAW or something heavier, which would limit the flexibility and adaptability of the platoon. Rapid-fire is really useful.
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Aug 8, 2015 21:30
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The comments about WW1 with modern poo poo is now having me think about how the trenches would've looked with VX floating everywhere.
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Aug 8, 2015 21:43
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LostCosmonaut posted:The comments about WW1 with modern poo poo is now having me think about how the trenches would've looked with VX floating everywhere. Pretty empty.
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Aug 8, 2015 21:53
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Cyrano4747 posted:Those numbers you're seeing for effective gun ranges are all kinds of weird. The trouble, as I understand it, is that some of those estimates are mechanically measured, ie they put a gun into a stable bench rest and fire it so that the gun is aimed exactly the same way each time, and some of them are measured by reports from the front or from firing ranges with real soldiers holding the guns. Most of the time a given firearm can outperform its shooter, and once you can aim perfectly every time (with years of training, or a bench rest to hold the gun while you do the testing), you run into all sorts of interesting bottlenecks:  You have the distance at which the bullet will drop below the speed of sound (Once weird air current poo poo starts happening you can't guarantee accuracy), the sort of energy the bullet will still have at a given range (no point shooting at a guy from far away if you won't kill him), how much you can expect the wind to blow it around all that stuff. It's really hard to get solid numbers on these things, as the air you are shooting through changes every test, from the wind currents to humidity to even density of air. The figures you see above are all averages.
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Aug 8, 2015 23:55
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This is not TFR. What is the historical point you're trying to make or at least address?
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Aug 9, 2015 00:14
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wdarkk posted:Pretty empty. I don't think anyone would be removing the corpses.
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Aug 9, 2015 00:54
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Owlkill posted:Heads up to any Kindle-using UK goons - "Europe's Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War" by Peter Wilson, which if I recall correctly Hegel recommended, is currently free on Amazon (normally it's about £8 for the ebook) Cheers! Just picked it up free. Fader Movitz fucked around with this message at 04:18 on Aug 9, 2015 |
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Aug 9, 2015 04:15
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All this laser guided artillery and bombs talk makes me think any infantry that's not moving at least 60km/h at any time is dead.
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Aug 9, 2015 05:52
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JcDent posted:All this laser guided artillery and bombs talk makes me think any infantry that's not inside an AA envelope is dead
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Aug 9, 2015 05:59
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JcDent posted:All this laser guided artillery and bombs talk makes me think any infantry that's not moving at least 60km/h at any time is dead. Every time someone mentions infantry, all I can think of is a B-1 full of CBU-87s.  I don't know why.
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Aug 9, 2015 06:01
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Can that AA envelope stop fancy shmancy arty directed by some Russian piloting a UAV?
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Aug 9, 2015 06:17
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JcDent posted:Can that AA envelope stop fancy shmancy arty directed by some Russian piloting a UAV? They could shoot down the UAV... then counter-battery the arty
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Aug 9, 2015 06:28
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Infantry is disturbingly hard to kill. You can fire one round and knock out a tank. And spend two days firing artillery on a hill and some of those fuckers will still be alive.
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Aug 9, 2015 06:32
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Jobbo_Fett posted:They could shoot down the UAV... then counter-battery the arty I'd like to hear more about modern counter-counter battery
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Aug 9, 2015 07:10
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