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Look to history. You mention the Iraq war, and certainly there you did see ineffectual infantry- but look at Vietnam. All the bombs, napalm, minefields, and defoliants America could toss at them.... and we still had to send infantry into the jungle, and often under the jungle to clear it. Every weapon system out there, from the bombs to the drones has a human behind it. Humans are just durable beyond belief, and able to be deployed, and combat effective for times none of our other elements can match (with the exception of naval vessels, which don't really compare- infantry are notorious ineffective at assaulting the ocean, and ships don't work well on land).

An infantryman can clear a house, cave tunnel, climb or demolish a wall, secure supplies and carry them back to base, operate under complete ECM jamming, and more or less handle any threat if they're given the right tools. Their flexibility is also unmatched. They're not as good at it as specialists- a howitzer beats a man portable mortar any day- but the howitzers also not doing antiaircraft duty, or area denial, or building entrenchments and fighting positions.

Another factor is just length of operation. A soldier "can" (disregarding direct combat ops, where it's a lot less) be self sufficient for 3-7 days. They'll be hating life carrying a week of rations and water, but if you want say, surveillance? There's not a drone or anything on the market that can get itself to position, sit there 5 days and get out. Its battery won't last. In addition to being far less flexible than a patrol of soldiers.

 Farseer Anath'lan wrote:
Another factor is just length of operation. A soldier "can" (disregarding direct combat ops, where it's a lot less) be self sufficient for 3-7 days. They'll be hating life carrying a week of rations and water, but if you want say, surveillance? There's not a drone or anything on the market that can get itself to position, sit there 5 days and get out. Its battery won't last. In addition to being far less flexible than a patrol of soldiers.

Infantry units stationed on their home turf, literally on their own supply lines have limitless staying power for minimal cost.

What's the cost of a single RPA orbit? How about a CAS sortie? I'm not even talking about expending munitions, just fuel and maintenance.

Advantage: grunt.

The reason the Iraqi infantry failed was due to morale issues, not equipment or organizational issues. Though having poor equipment or bad organization can contribute to crumbling morale.

The Iraqi's were mostly made up of already demoralized conscripts who had zero desire to fight. Then they were on the receiving end of an essentially flawless air superiority campaign which further demoralized them. If, in the end, they had chosen to stand and fight anyway the Iraq and Gulf wars would have gone very differently as the actual damage the air campaign caused was not sufficient to destroy them completely. Instead, they chose to surrender or flee.

The Republican Guard units which did stand and fight put up fierce resistance, but if it only happens in a few pockets it won't make a difference. You can concentrate truly overwhelming force on the areas where there is resistance and destroy it. That isn't possible if the entire line holds.

Vietnam is the poster child of what can happen when you have infantry who won't break morale. They are essentially immovable outside of brute force which is exceedingly costly for an attacker. If you are stuck in trench/urban warfare there are only 2 ways to win. Hope the enemy runs of morale or runs out of bodies before you do.

And honestly this isn't a modern phenomenon. Through all of history most fights only get decided by one side losing their last bit of hope and surrendering. In the few cases where they did fight to the bitter end it was always extremely costly for an attacker. And as technology improved through the late middle ages and into the modern era it has become much easier for people to be willing and able to fight to the bitter end.

It doesn't help that frankly most weapons kinda suck at killing infantry that are hiding in trenches, buildings, etc... You can pound a series of trenches for weeks with artillery with truly awful attritional ratios. Ratios which suggest that continuing with the bombardment might take years to destroy all the infantry, and that is assuming no reinforcement occurs. But of course reinforcement will occur, so you can end up with stalemates where realistically nothing will be accomplished for years on end.

WW1 ended because the Central Power's economies all collapsed, not because of anything that happened on the battlefield. Which is really how all wars between peers will be fought in the future. A grinding stalemate till one side's economy can no longer support it.

99% agree with that excellent post Grey Templar, with one addendum; “ till one side's economy or population can no longer support it.”

trexmeyer wrote:

 Gert wrote:

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
If infantry are so good why did the US roll over them in both Iraq wars? Was that an aberration and if those Iraqi infantry had magically been same as US. All the javelins, training etc etc. that the outcome would have been different?

Ah see now you're definitely trolling. Oh well.

I don't think he's trolling, I think he's just that <redacted>.
Especially because asymmetrical infantry literally never gave up in the WoT and eventually "won" in Afghanistan.

As an infantryman of 17 years myself it always entertains me when I see armchair generals like that dude who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. He also failed to understand that if you're seeing a picture of calm infantry formations or crowds in the warzone, then you are seeing them AFTER opposition has been completely destroyed or routed.


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 CptJake wrote:

 Totalwar1402 wrote:

Engineers are logistics and aren’t front line combat troops.

Clearly you've never seen 12Bs (US Army combat engineer MOS) in action or have any idea what they do. Not a logistics function at all.

Exalted.

 Jadenim wrote:
99% agree with that excellent post Grey Templar, with one addendum; “ till one side's economy or population can no longer support it.”

TLDR:

Carthage: "We have money."

Rome: "We have reserves."

Carthage ran out first.

I was thinking more from a morale perspective. Vietnam is the classic example again; the US didn’t run out of money, troops or weapons, but the US population ran out of patience, which forced the politicians to abandon the war.

 Jadenim wrote:
I was thinking more from a morale perspective. Vietnam is the classic example again; the US didn’t run out of money, troops or weapons, but the US population ran out of patience, which forced the politicians to abandon the war.

To be fair, the same issue plagued Carthage.

An entire political faction was dedicated to just ending the Second Punic War mostly to spite the Barca family. They got a victory lap until the Third when Rome just enacted ye olden genocide because they hated Carthage a lot more than they hated Hannibal (though they hated Hannibal too).

In comparison, Hannibal's strategy of breaking Rome's Italian allies failed utterly. The other Italian states remained loyal to Rome and kept refilling Roman armies faster than Hannibal's tactical brilliance could crush them until Hannibal finally lost and Carthage itself refused to do anything about it.

A people who don't want to win, tend not to.

Now you're making me wonder if there's ever been a country who Mr Magoo'ed their way through a conflict.

cody.d. wrote:
Now you're making me wonder if there's ever been a country who Mr Magoo'ed their way through a conflict.

The British Empire did it all the time.

cody.d. wrote:
Now you're making me wonder if there's ever been a country who Mr Magoo'ed their way through a conflict.

Any answer would be profoundly subjective.

People who win wars tend to want to pat themselves on the back, not admit after the fact they had no idea what they were doing and people rarely happenstantially find themselves stumbling into a war they subsequently win.

EDIT: And hold up, I'm being dumb.

There is a perfect example of this. In 1485 was born the son of a lesser noble family who would, more or less, flunk out of life. Rather than giving up, he said feth it, went to Cuba where his career met a very sudden end. Except he said feth that gak, went completely rogue, went to Mexico, met the natives, went on the run from the law, stayed with some kings, killed some kings, recruited the army sent to apprehend him by burning their boats down and saying 'Let's go boys' and then overthrew an Empire.

He did basically all of this on his own initiative, without permission from literally anyone.

Except by the time the Spanish finally caught up to Hernan Cortes, he'd already toppled the Aztec Empire and laid the groundwork for Colonial Mexico so the Spanish crown shrugged, stamp of approval'd his actions after the fact, and gave him that 'good job son' moment Hernan never got from daddy Cortez.

To be fair, Spain wanted to conquer Mexico anyway. It just wasn't exactly the plan that this one guy basically gallivanting into the sun would be the one to do it, let alone so quickly. But then the flip side is no one had a rock solid understanding of germs back then so they probably didn't expect disease to do so much damned heavy lifting for them along the way. Reading between the lines of the memoirs some of Cortez' men published later on, you can see parts where Cortez was literally making gak up as he went because he figured his career was over if he didn't succeed so he just started throwing gak at the wall and managed to stick a shocking amount of it to the effect of empire toppling, some genocide, a whole lot of enslavement, and founded New Spain a lot faster than anyone in Spain probably thought was possible.

EDIT EDIT: Another example is the First Crusade, started to help restore lost lands to the Byzantines from the Caliphate, and somehow spiralled into a bunch of rogue nobility conquering the Holy Lands.

Worth noting the Azecs were deeply unpopular with their neighbors at the time, a huge factor that often gets overlooked.

Turns out ritually sacrificing another country's soldiers doesn't tend to go over well.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Worth noting the Azecs were deeply unpopular with their neighbors at the time, a huge factor that often gets overlooked.

Turns out ritually sacrificing another country's soldiers doesn't tend to go over well.

Also worth noting that the frequency of Aztec sacrifices is probably exaggerated.

We know how many temples there were in the city and how many altars from the Conquistadors themselves. It's mathematically impossible for as many people to have been sacrificed as was claimed. A good thing to keep in mind is that Cortez and his men essentially were fugitives for a while. In all likelihood, they exaggerated the brutality of the natives in letters to the Spanish crown in their search for legal legitimacy. Not that sacrifices didn't happen, but literally everyone in Mesoamerica practiced it so it seems unlike that specifically upset the Aztec's subjects in particular. More likely, they aligned with Cortez because no one wants to be under someone else's thumb and they didn't fully appreciate that they couldn't oust Cortez when the time came. He only had a few hundred men. Most of his Indian allies would rationally presume they could get rid of him themselves and saw Cortez as their ally against the Aztecs rather than his allies in establishing Spanish colonialism.

Cortez of course had no way of knowing the political situation in central Mexico when he arrived.

The expedition he was originally contracted to lead (before being fired) was to the Yucatan. The dude ended up in Mexico because he said 'feth it let's go!" If he'd actually gone to Yucatan, I wonder if he'd have met the same success. Gonzalo Guerrero would go on to out wit and magnificent bastard his way around men with much greater military credentials than Cortez when the Spanish actually went after the Yucatec Maya.

 LordofHats wrote:
Also worth noting that the frequency of Aztec sacrifices is probably exaggerated.

I'm going to say that there isn't really an ideal number for that sort of thing other than "zero," especially if it's your friends, family and extended kin who are bleeding out on the altar.

I will again point people to the British Empire, which managed to subjugate the Ch'ing Dynasty with a handful of warships simply by figuring out how to blockade the Grand Canal. Cortes had nothing on those guys.

Sure, but as LordofHats noted, everyone did human sacrifice. The problem wasn't the human sacrifices, the problem was being under Aztec hegemony.

Also fear of the outsider and the upstarts. By all accounts the Mexica people were not native to Mexico (though the region now bears their name, funny how history works) and the other people in the central valley and outlying areas resented being subjugated to outsiders.

Which is just another irony that plays out when they ended up overthrowing one ruling power to get themselves stuck with another.

To round back to the thread topic on infantry;

The Mesoamericans were not very impressed with guns. Loud yes and armor piercing, but slow to relod. They much preferred their own bows and spears, especially given the terrain.

What freaked them out were horses and Cortez's cannons. This is the area where the cannon was a direct fire support weapon, but one where mass infantry blocs were the norm. Aztec troops would form lines to fight only to have cannon balls shred them.

The horse apparently just freaked them the feth out.

There was zero context pre-Columbian contract for cavalry in American native warfare.When the plains tribes got their hands on horses from the Spanish groups like the Comanche and Souix would rapidly conquered anyone who didn't adapt the same battlefield tactics. The horse was an overwhelming psychological weapon as well as offering all the advantages of a horse.

So you know.

History can always repeat itself and there could be a phase of warfare that puts infantry down through the advent of weapons that are inconceivable to fight against. But such things are inconceivable so it's hard to guess what such a weapon could look like.

 LordofHats wrote:

What freaked them out were horses and Cortez's cannons.

Fighting on narrow causeways, cannon were absolutely devastating. Cavalry in the open was pretty darn effective - especially if you haven't seen it before.

But we digress...

Of course, the technology to get infantry out of entrenched positions does exist. And it's not very expensive. The issue is it is a taboo thing in the current climate.

I am of course talking about chemical and biological weapons. And I guess mass deployment of flamethrowers.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Of course, the technology to get infantry out of entrenched positions does exist. And it's not very expensive. The issue is it is a taboo thing in the current climate.

I am of course talking about chemical and biological weapons. And I guess mass deployment of flamethrowers.

Yeah, this came to my mind.

But chemical weapons and flamethrowers have come to be seen as so abhorrent basically everyone with the capacity to actually deploy them generally doesn't. Until they change their minds, anyway.

Chemical and biological weapons are trivially countered by any modern force that expects them.

Their only real use is against civilians, not prepared militaries.

It's not really trivial. NBC gear severely impedes your combat abilities and it is high intensity to maintain as it basically needs to be replaced every day. You can't just camp out in a hazmat suit and get away with just replacing the filters every now and again.

If there was a mass deployment of chemical or biological weaponry in a large trench war scenario both sides would find it difficult to keep their troops in positions for long. I'm sure we have large stockpiles, but if Ukraine has taught us anything its that whatever size stockpile of gear you have it isn't anywhere close to big enough.

NBC gear is also the kind of stuff that really doesn't store for long periods well. Masks and filters are fine, but the suits themselves will stiffen and crack with long term storage so having large stockpiles is troublesome.

World War 1 saw a massive use of chemical weaponry in large trench warfare, yet utterly failed to change the extremely static nature of the conflict.

 Tyran wrote:
World War 1 saw a massive use of chemical weaponry in large trench warfare, yet utterly failed to change the extremely static nature of the conflict.

I would think 100 years of advances in chemistry, logistics, and delivery mechanisms would probably make things a bit more effective.

I mean, 100 years of technological advance cannot change the issue that wind can simply scatter any chemical weapon making them extremely unreliable to the point you can easily poison yourself.

And of course protective equipment hasn't exactly been static for those 100 years either.

I'm not sure where the idea that Iraq demonstrated wholly ineffectual infantry comes from. Fallujah is a perfect example of total air superiority and unimpeded mobility still not eliminating the need to go door-to-door to secure territory- a Predator can't patrol a city street and an Abrams can't clear rooms.

 Polonius wrote:
I would think 100 years of advances in chemistry, logistics, and delivery mechanisms would probably make things a bit more effective.

Not particularly- I'm with Tyran and Commissar on this one. We've got nastier agents like sarin, anthrax, and VX, but CBRN protection is more widespread and dramatically more effective. It's an impediment to operate in, but it shuts down chemical and biological weapons completely, and it's far cheaper to supply or stockpile CBRN gear than to supply or stockpile chemical weapons.

Here's a pretty good essay on the modern use of chemical weapons. The tl;dr is that modern militaries don't use them because they impede maneuver warfare, and less-modern militaries don't use them because they're not nearly as effective (or difficult to protect against) as the same tonnage in conventional explosives.

We don't avoid flamethrowers and chemical weapons because of moral qualms about their use. We avoid them because they're ineffective.

Oh, I don't think chemical weapons, or any other weapon, would suddenly make entrenched infantry obsolete, but I do think that if there wasn't a taboo on their use we would use them at least in niche applications. Situations like Iwo Jima or Vietnamese tunnels seem like circumstances were some sort of chemical agent could have been effective.

OTOH, that article does make a compelling case that maybe they're just surprisingly ineffective. The example of the Sarin attack on the Tokyo subway might be the most persuasive: an attack in ideal circumstances against unprepared civilians still only killed 12 people.

 catbarf wrote:


We don't avoid flamethrowers and chemical weapons because of moral qualms about their use. We avoid them because they're ineffective.

Chemical weapons have in the past proven ineffective, but I personal chalk that down to that avenue of warfare being largely untested. Nobody has really committed to saying "screw it, we're all in on chemical warfare".

Flamethrowers on the other hand are absolutely effective. They are very good for burning out infantry. Just see their use in the Pacific theatre. Yeah, dangerous for the guy carrying it, but very effective against the Japanese foxholes and tunnels. If it was ineffective, we would have stopped using them very fast at that time.


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 catbarf wrote:
I'm not sure where the idea that Iraq demonstrated wholly ineffectual infantry comes from. Fallujah is a perfect example of total air superiority and unimpeded mobility still not eliminating the need to go door-to-door to secure territory- a Predator can't patrol a city street and an Abrams can't clear rooms.

The ineffective infantry were the Iraqi conscripts, not the US.

The Iraqi army, in both the Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom, was totally ineffective at putting up resistance precisely because the bulk of their infantry surrendered or ran away. Pretty much only the Republican Guard gave any resistance. It is a good demonstrator of morale being what breaks armies, not necessarily weaponry.

On the flipside, you have the Japanese in WW2 where they pretty much wouldn't break at all and we had to resort to Flamethrowers and brute force to dig them out of holes. Or we could just sail past a particular island that wasn't worth it and let them starve.

But where we had to dig them out, Flamethrowers were very effective. And chemical would probably have been too. Though the flamethrower was definitely the better option, less danger of hurting friendlies with a flamethrower.

As long as there are guys who are willing to run into buildings with guns and start shooting civilians, or throw grenades in the windows to the same effect, you are going to need other guys with guns to stop them.

Whether those guys are security guards, police officers or soldiers is really just a question of how hot things have gotten.

 Easy E wrote:
I think the power of economic warfare, in the short term anyway; can be called into question based on what we are seeing in Russia right now.

I think it has been impressive at just how effective economic warfare has been against a country thought to be largely insulated to outside economic pressure.
A neat video on the topic.
https://youtu.be/xmO1kfCr_II