Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!dptg!ulysses!andante!princeton!njin!rutgers!att!cbnews!military From: bnr-di!borynec@watmath.waterloo.edu (James Borynec) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: The death of mobile war Summary: smart projectiles will change warfare Message-ID: <8803@cbnews.ATT.COM> Date: 4 Aug 89 13:06:32 GMT References: <8033@cbnews.ATT.COM> Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM Organization: DI, Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, Ont. Lines: 70 Approved: military@att.att.com From: bnr-di!borynec@watmath.waterloo.edu (James Borynec) I believe that we are about to have a revolution in conventional warfare. Current doctrine maintains that we must concentrate our forces into one section of the battlefield in order to achieve success in offensive war. The idea is that we will be able to overcome the enemy in that sector before he can muster sufficient strengh to stop us. You have to do this in one (or a very few places) because you will never have enough strengh to overcome the enemy on the entire battlefield. This mustering of combat power requires the movement of men and machines. Unfortunately, bullets and rockets can concentrate much faster than men and their machines. Modern artillery doctrine covers the battlefield with observers. And, any one observer can, if the target is worthwhile, have every gun within range fire at that target. When you talk about guns and rockets with 30 to 40 km ranges, that can be a very large number of guns indeed. This wouldn't matter so much if it either took too long to organize all of these guns so that they would all point in the same direction (a particular drawback of the Russians, and to a lesser degree the Americans, when compared to the British), or if the fire that landed didn't do that much damage. This is particularly true of High Explosive fire against armoured fighting vehicles. The problem of organizing the fire is largely a matter of the proper doctrine. The British had this down pat in WWII. Today, with modern battlefield computers and communications, there is no technical reason that the time from initial call for fire for all of the guns in a Corps to the time that rounds start to land should be more than two minutes plus time of flight (say 3 minutes in total). Several of the worlds armies can do this today. The problem of the projectiles is a more difficult one. Tanks (buttoned up) are relatively immune to HE (High explosive) unless there is a direct hit. Since artillery was traditionally an area weapon, you had to fire a lot of bullets to get a few direct hits. With the advent of terminally guided and self guided munitions this changes. Now, if you can get these munitions into the right area, a lot more of them will find their targets. You may even place an instant minefield directly on top of your conveniently concentrated enemy forces. Since the guns are distributed over a radius of 30 kms, it is hard to strike at them, and it may be quite difficult to locate the joker with the radio who is making life so difficult for them. The result of all of this, is that you can concentrate immense and effective firepower faster than the enemy can concentrate his men and machines. Since you need to concentrate your forces in order to achieve offensive success, the defensive comes to the fore. A similar situation held in World War I. The strategic mobility of the railroad was greater that the tactical mobility of attacking troops. Thus, you could always rush enough men to the area with the heaviest fighting before the attacking troops got too far. Needless to say, this placed a great damper on offensive action. With the advent of long range guns and rockets, tied together into an effective communications network, and equipped with weapons (ie. projectiles) which will destroy (or at least immobilize) armoured fighting vehicles, warfare will once again, become a matter of siegework. -- UUCP : utzoo!bnr-vpa!bnr-di!borynec James Borynec, Bell Northern Research Bitnet: borynec@bnr.CA Box 3511, Stn C, Ottawa, Ontario K1Y 4H7