Thus, in response, modern tactics center in large part around putting down fires in """wasteful""" ways that don't immediately lead to kills, but enable (or prevent) decisive movement to destroy the enemy in close assault, or to fix the enemy in place for destruction by supporting fire assets such as artillery. Open order tactics which allowed infantrymen to spread out and maximize cover are necessary precisely because modern fires would rapidly destroy any closed order unit. We thus arrive at a counter-intuitive point - the number of kills per round has dropped because of tactical changes made due to the increased lethality of the individual weapon. Even then, these battles show the modern trends - ANZAC fires were mostly successful insofar as they kept the enemy from immediately moving to overrun them, with the bulk of destructive fires applied by the supporting artillery, and the Brits leveraged supporting fires primarily to enable movement to close with and destroy the enemy and destroy them in close combat. I chose Long Tan and Goose Green for a reason, as they are probably the closest to closed-order style events, with the ANZAC infantry at Long Tan beating off a massed enemy infantry assault with rifle fire, and Goose Green having several Company strength attacks against enemy positions. With an enemy thus fixed, an assault can be prevented or a target unit can be pinned in place for a deceive assault to overrun their position and destroy them with close range fires. The machine guns, rifles, and grenade launchers are firing controlled rates of ammunition to apply psychological pressure to the enemy to fix them in place, drive them to take cover and thus be unable to move or return fire. Further, and this is the crucial thing - the bulk of their fires are not aimed to be destructive against a massed enemy in the open, but instead are suppressive in nature. We could instead take the British assault on Goose Green, or the Battle of Long Tan, both of which are equally illustrative of fairly sizeable groups of modern infantry conducting a positional infantry slugfest.ĭuring those battles, the infantry aren't fighting shoulder to shoulder in closed ranks - they're strung about in a loose organization, clinging to whatever cover is available and working in teams of 8-10 men under an NCO. Infantry arms of this period made up roughly 75% of causalities inflicted, and an infantry unit would be expected to hold ranks and continue fighting as a unit until the point where it broke as a cohesive organization.Īfghanistan isn't the best example, since it's also an asymmetric conflict, rather than positional warfare. One of the most important shifts to understand between Gettysburg and Afghanistan is the shift from Closed Order to Open Order tactics, which occurred roughly during the 2nd Boer war and WW1, with the latter being the genesis of proto-modern infantry tactics.ĭuring Gettysburg, the bulk of riflemen fought in fixed ranks as (at minimum) Company sized elements, firing volleys with relatively low rate of fire weapons. First, I would recommend the splendid work by English and Gudmundson, On Infantry.
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