Tech marches ever on

Sucks to be infantry.

Doughboys
Dogfaces
Grunts
A proud heritage that dates back to when Grugg organized a group of guys with clubs, and used them to take over another groups cave and hold that ground. I’m a proud Member of that Brotherhood.

In its current form, it just is no longer a viable force as it is. If anything, the Krainian Klown show is a prime example of the need for the Infantry to evolve. It’s going to have to go more technical/mechanical if you will, as right now? The current day protective gear just isn’t enough to keep up with the advancements of the ISR.

We’ve all been watching the videos.

In fact, I got a sinking feeling during the Armenia–Azerbaijan border crisis back in 202/21. That was one of the first time we saw, in real time, drones having a direct net effect against scores of Infantry in the open so to speak. When I saw my first video in shitty 480p of a platoon of Armenian Infantry walking down what was supposed to be a ‘safe road’ and getting first spotted by the drone, then lased by the drone, and then getting utterly obliterated by the Artillery that was called in by the drone.

Now, even in the short jump in tech, we’ve seen drones completely come to dominate the ISR (intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance) field of battle… hell, not only are the drones performing recon/seeking and peeking but also as offensive weapons? Despite the naysayers of hobbyist Drone Folks, let me tell you, just because it looks like and/or your in your civilian experience that a drone can NOT carry a load large enough to be offensive?

Man, there’s a metric fucktonnage of wrecked rooskie and krainian vehicles out there that’d like to have a word with you.

T’was ever thus: as generals and war-planning “experts" are always famously preparing to re-fight the previous war, technological advances are busily blasting holes through all the old assumptions, leaving the footslogger in the field holding a great big ol’ bag of pure suckage. And the face of warfare is fundamentally transformed again, just as it is always and forever doing.

At the start of WW1, those newfangled aery-o-planes were almost universally derided by naysayers both military and political as completely without meaningful utility as weapons of war, for the first year or so restricted entirely to flying over stalemated entrenchments on redundant recon missions, a role already filled by tethered observation balloons. It took the creative ingenuity of pilots and their ground crews who saw the combat possibilities of powered flight to radically rejigger the Oldthink—over the most stringent objections from Higher-Higher as to the obvious impossibility of such a preposterous idea—until by the end of the Great War the indispensable necessity of establishing and maintaining domination of the skies over the field of battle, and suddenly Air Supremacy had become A Thing.

Which, it still is.

The development of a reliable rapid-fire machine gun likewise put paid to what had for centuries been the very bones and sinew of war-fighting: massed infantry assaults against prepared defensive positions, converting that quaint, heroic notion into nothing more than straight-up suicide.

Armored mechanized cavalry spelled the end of the saber-wielding horseback charge; the ancient tradition of armies facing each other in tightly-spaced ranks, standing upright in an open field with neither cover nor concealment as one foe ran directly into the other's serried lines wildly cheering and yelling all the way, was undone forever by the small-unit guerrilla tactics of American Revolutionaries like Nathanael Greene and the Swamp Fox, Francis Marion:

Marion was a student of Major Robert Rogers’s 28 Rules of Ranging, and in his long military career, Marion formulated, practiced and executed his own particular modes of “maneuvering.” The United States Marine Corps’ modern doctrinal manual, Warfighting, defines maneuver warfare as “a state of mind bent on shattering the enemy morally and physically by paralyzing and confounding him, by avoiding his strength, by quickly and aggressively exploiting his vulnerabilities, and by striking him in a way that will hurt him most.” The sentiment certainly applies to Marion’s approach.

By the time of the Revolutionary War’s Southern Campaigns of 1780–1782, enterprising 48-year-old Patriot partisan General Francis Marion did everything in his power to effectuate Rogers’s concepts in the Carolinas following the surrender of Charleston. His philosophy, as described by the Harvard Business Review in a description of how the practice can be adapted beyond the battlefield, amounted to “not...destroy[ing] the adversary’s forces but...render[ing] them unable to fight as an effective, coordinated whole...Instead of attacking enemy defense positions, maneuver warfare practitioners [to] bypass those positions, capture the enemy’s command-and-control center in the rear, and cut off supply lines. Moreover, maneuver warfare doesn’t aim to avoid or resist the uncertainty and disorder that inevitably shape armed conflict; it embraces them as keys to vanquishing the foe.”

Ultimately, as a result of Marion’s simpler, straightforward execution of innovative techniques, guerrilla tactics, interdiction and irregular warfare, liberty was slowly won blow by blow in South Carolina combat. The hand of fate was also in play for Marion’s success. First, he escaped the surrender of Charleston because he was recuperating from a broken ankle away from the city. Then, days before the Battle of Camden, Marion and two dozen men rode into General Horatio Gates’s camp offering assistance. These men were scruffy, backcountry Williamsburg District militia. Colonel Otho Holland Williams, adjutant general, asserted that Gates was “glad of an opportunity of detaching” the “burlesque” Marion away into the South Carolina interior. Whatever the reason, by August 15, 1780, Gates ordered Marion to “go Down the Country to Destroy all boats & Craft of any kind” to prevent British troops from escaping Camden. The dismissal spared Marion being captured or killed in that devastating Patriot loss.

Marion’s new way of war was widely condemned as “uncivil,” “dishonorable,” even “cowardly” by his increasingly-flummoxed adversaries. But at the end of the day, there just ain’t no arguing with success. Despite the generals’ hidebound inclination to stick with the tried and true ways and tools they know best, having made their way up to higher rank by employing them earlier in their careers successfully, the unstoppable evolution in technology, methodology, and tactical doctrine will triumph over Oldthink every time.

Repeating carbine rifles; pistols; wireless radio communications; tanks; submarines; radar; sonar; piston-engine airplanes; the Norden bombsight; jets—all scoffed at as either extravagantly costly toys or unworkable, pie-in-the-sky daydreams by an ossified officer class who would soon find themselves shocked—SHOCKED!—at armies under their command having their asses kicked all to Hell and gone by them, often wielded by OpFor numbers greatly, even lopsidedly, inferior to their own. It’s the oldest story in the long annals of human warfare, going all the way back to mighty, invincible Goliath laughing at David and his puny slingshot, if not longer. The really baffling part of it is how very few professional officers seem capable of learning the lesson history keeps trying, again and again and again, to teach them.

It has long been said that you can’t kill an idea. Left unspoken is the correlating truism: ideas can for sure kill you. For the infantryman, they will, and have.