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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
(HTM) Defending the city: An overview of defensive tactics
wolverine876 wrote 15 hours 15 min ago:
(2022)
The date is important because it was written before the Ukraine-Russia
war's use of drones ramped up. The article doesn't mention drones
(UAVs) afaict - how to use them in attack and defense, how to protect
yourself - which is today a major omission.
rossant wrote 15 hours 35 min ago:
(2022)
m3kw9 wrote 15 hours 45 min ago:
Not updated to include drone tactics
ninininino wrote 16 hours 46 min ago:
I want a tool that I can use to feed it a block of text or a URL to a
website and it will give me an LLM and a text prompt that would yield
said text/website.
I decided to ask ChatGPT 3.5 about what a Westpoint Academy instructor
would have to say about defending a city and defensive tactics beyond
those commonly known and the answer was not nearly as interesting.
itronitron wrote 15 hours 57 min ago:
or you could just visit the page
flawsofar wrote 16 hours 33 min ago:
be the language model you want to see in the world
JohnMakin wrote 17 hours 57 min ago:
> Military theorists have long described the defense as the strongest
form of war, and current doctrine agrees.
Indeed - one of the first wars fought with modern rifling, the American
Civil War, had General Lee learn this lesson in a very hard way on the
last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, in a failed infantry assault
known as "Pickett's Charge."[0]
Lee mistakenly attacked a position that was very easily defensible by
Union artillery on faulty theory that it would be weakened due to a
(failed) artillery barrage that happened previously. The Union
correctly predicted Lee would attack there, and he sent over 12,000 men
in a futile assault that resulted in 50% casualties in less than 1
hour, one of the bloodiest hours of the entire war.
[0]
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickett%27s_Charge
halJordan wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
Meanwhile going unacknowledged is Lee's defense of Richmond &
Petersburg where he successfully innovated trench warfare 50 years
before WW1, where we won't talk about the Battle of the Crater.
But hating on Lee is still one of the strongest virtue signals we
have. So you'll continue going on about Pickett's charge, Lee
'hagiography' and the Lost Cause mythos.
JohnMakin wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
I suspect youâre projecting a lot of your personal beliefs on
whatever you think Iâm saying - Iâm pointing out that a major
casualty event in an extremely pivotal moment in a major US war was
decided by a defending force in a city assault, which is what the
parent article and quote is commenting about . Iâd love to hear
where in the parent comment you think is âhatingâ on Lee,
unless you take the position that pointing out facts is âhate.â
surely one can point out historical facts without writing an essay
on military tactics on every other battle that happened during the
civil war - surely you could agree?
I am well versed on this subject and would love a debate. curious
you donât mention fredericksburg because that would actually
support whatever point you think youâre making.
runamuck wrote 17 hours 42 min ago:
Good point. For a counter point, the German Blitzkrieg helped them
get France in WW2.
dghlsakjg wrote 10 hours 40 min ago:
The Blitzkrieg isn't a great counterpoint since the objective is to
avoid frontal attacks on heavily defended positions, which is how
the Germans did actually manage to get France. Using a blitzkrieg
against a hardened position is doomed to failure.
The WWII invasion of France was so successful because they struck
through the undefended Ardennes, rather than frontally attacking
the Maginot line. In that sense the Maginot Line was actually a
success, since it prevented a direct invasion of France from
Germany, and forced the Germans to attack through other countries.
brazzy wrote 3 hours 8 min ago:
Traditionally, you sort of had to take heavily defended positions
in order to conquer territory because if you didn't, the
defenders would cut of your supply lines and attack your rear.
A key idea of Blitzkrieg (or "maneuver warfare" as it's called
today) is that if you can move fast enough, this stops being
true. You don't rely on fixed supply lines, and they can't attack
your rear when they're not sure where you are and could be
somewhere else by the time they organize an attack.
zeteo wrote 14 hours 47 min ago:
Just because the defense is stronger doesn't guarantee it will
always win. Take two sports teams with different levels of skill,
for example. In a single game, the team considered weaker can pull
off a surprise win. However, over a span of several games, the
stronger team will usually pull ahead.
In war, various factors, like the element of surprise, can allow
the offense to temporarily overcome an inherently stronger defense.
In 1940, the Germans quickly overran the French by catching them
off guard tactically and strategically. The French couldn't adapt
their defense quickly enough and suffered too many crucial losses
early on.
Next year, the Soviets fared even worse than the French initially;
but due to geography they managed to survive two crucial years and,
at Kursk in 1943, they showed how a well designed defense could
stop cold even the best German tanks. The French themselves had a
similar experience in WW1: after initially surviving for two hard
years, they gave the German attackers a very bloody nose at Verdun.
southernplaces7 wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
>but due to geography they managed to survive two crucial years
and, at Kursk in 1943, they showed how a well designed defense
could stop cold even the best German tanks.
At Kursk as your first example? I agree that the battle of Kursk
showed the Germans how their best tanks could be crushed, but
it's not a good example of your point as I understand it.
Firstly because the main reason for victory wasn't so much the
ability to destroy German tanks. The Soviets already had this
well before July of 1943. Instead victory was because they knew
German attack planning in advance and were able to prepare an
incredibly robust defense in depth against them while also
concealing a superbly equipped counterattack.
Secondly, Kursk isn't the best example because the Battle of
Stalingrad much earlier showed how it was possible to stop and
then destroy a powerful, well equipped German Army with a
tenacious defense and then even mount a ferocious counter
offensive (operation Uranus).
Part of the success of Stalingrad for the Soviets was also due to
a major earlier blunder of confidence by Hitler, who thought the
6th army alone was enough to take Stalingrad and ordered its
accompanying 4th army to separate away from 6th and continue
south to join the rest of the previously already split Army Group
South (in an even earlier Hitler order that further weakened the
later attack on Stalingrad) for an attack on the Caucasus
zeteo wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
I felt Kursk was a good example of the superiority of defense
over offense in WW2 as the other factors were generally even
(no major surprise, both sides had good logistics etc.)
Everything you say about Soviet preparations is right, that's
how good you could make a defense with WW2 tech if you knew
what you were doing!
georgeecollins wrote 17 hours 34 min ago:
Even more modern example: The little green men who seized Ukraine.
llamaimperative wrote 13 hours 25 min ago:
Eh, seized a small sliver and failed with extremely high
casualties to seize a much larger chunk.
The botched invasion was nothing like the German Blitzkrieg.
asdasdsddd wrote 17 hours 36 min ago:
Only worked because armor was so dominant and anti armor wasn't
there yet.
vondur wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
I think French tank commanders lacked radio to coordinate their
movements.
anigbrowl wrote 11 hours 51 min ago:
No. There was relatively little actual fighting during the
BLitzkrieg. It was about speed and the cutting of communications
(in the military sense of roads and bridges rather than radio and
telephone). France also had staggeringly poor command structures
and they were so invested in the Maginot Line scenario that they
simply didn't take the invasion seriously at first.
Surprisingly, one of the best histories of Blitzkrieg I've read
was a pop-history book (just called 'Blitzkrieg') by Len
Deighton, better known for his spy novels. What it lacks in
detail, biographical material and so on is made up for by its
broad scope, going from industrial production and methods during
the interwar rearmament period through to the logistics of the
BEF evacuation at Dunkirk.
sabarn01 wrote 15 hours 0 min ago:
The british and French assumed the germans were going to swing
though belgium again as they had done in WW1. Also they spread
their tanks out as infantry support the germans had concentrated
tank units.
sushibowl wrote 15 hours 24 min ago:
This is in my opinion an oversimplification. Generally, the
success of blitzkrieg had more to do with speed and coordination
than the strength of armour. A combination of mechanised
infantry, tanks, and close air support were instrumental to the
tactics. German tanks were the only ones universally equipped
with radio units at the start of the war.
leashless wrote 10 hours 16 min ago:
"speed and coordination"
Meth.
(HTM) [1]: https://time.com/5752114/nazi-military-drugs/
petsfed wrote 10 hours 41 min ago:
I think this is the correct analysis.
In the context of the conversation, Blitzkrieg worked because
it specifically avoided getting bogged down in heavily
fortified urban areas. The German army of WWII was not at all
suited to long battles like what they encountered in WWI (see
the eastern front casualty numbers for a good illustration of
how that went).
Stalingrad (mentioned in the article) is rather famous for
being a perfect urban battlefield to grind a massive and well
equipped modern (for the time) army into pulp. They couldn't
blitzkrieg it, and so it defeated them.
The German Army ca. WWII's entire doctrine centered on (as
podcaster Dan Carlin describes it) throwing a haymaker and
ending the fight quickly. They by no means had a glass jaw, but
compared to the Americans or (especially) the Soviets, they
simply could not sustain a battle of attrition. And urban
warfare so heavily favors the defenders that assaulting a city
is almost always a battle of attrition.
ethbr1 wrote 10 hours 6 min ago:
The Blitzkrieg worked because the French political leadership
was incapable of effectively directing its military, refusing
to budge from a "Defend everywhere! All of the time!"
strategy.
Folks forget that the French had rather excellent tanks ~1939
[0], especially in their calvary arms (the Hotchkiss H35 and
SOMUA S35).
Which makes sense, since they essentially invented the modern
tank in the FT. [1] The rapid success of the Blitzkrieg was
mostly a result of (a) France still being in the middle of
re-organizing, equiping, and training their armored forces,
(b) some bullshit at Sedan, and (c) French leadership making
terrible strategic military decisions again and again [2].
Had the DCr's been supplied (who knew tanks need fuel?) and
used to effectively counterattack, as designed, German plans
would have ground to a halt.
Instead, you had the French Prime Minister declaring that all
was lost six days after the Germans invaded the low
countries.
[0] [1] [2]
(HTM) [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanks_of_France#Inte...
(HTM) [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_FT
(HTM) [3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_France#Fre...
llamaimperative wrote 13 hours 26 min ago:
And, counterintuitively, lack of coordination. Blitzkrieg units
were uniquely autonomous and trusted to meet higher level
objectives how they saw fit rather than following a recipe book
written weeks before and miles away from the action.
panarky wrote 11 hours 0 min ago:
See also Russia's campaign to rapidly take Kyiv using highly
centralized command that failed catastrophically when faced
with mobile, autonomous, hit-and-run tactics using antitank
missiles like Javelin.
asdasdsddd wrote 12 hours 50 min ago:
The point is that tanks at the time were faster(along with
mechanized infantry) and virtually unstoppable past enemy
lines. This is pretty much unprecedented which allowed them
to basically take strategic objectives uncontested.
This would not happen today because the exposed tanks would
be taken out by relatively cheap anti tank missiles.
jltsiren wrote 11 hours 33 min ago:
The speed of logistics is more important than the speed of
combat troops. Tanks can go behind enemy lines, but only
for a short while. If they don't return, they will quickly
run out of fuel and become vulnerable.
Genghis Khan would have laughed at the slow German
Blitzkrieg.
ethbr1 wrote 10 hours 37 min ago:
Genghis had the advantage that his tanks ate grass, and
grass grew everywhere the Mongols decided to conquer.
That said, they still specifically timed their campaign
cycles around the availability of forage in the country
to be attacked.
brazzy wrote 3 hours 17 min ago:
> Genghis had the advantage that his tanks ate grass,
and grass grew everywhere the Mongols decided to
conquer.
More like: wherever you didn't have abundant grass,
Mongol armies essentially couldn't go, or at least lost
so much advantage that they usually chose not to.
On a related point: the southern half of Ukraine has
some of the best soil in the world for agriculture, yet
for centuries it was very thinly populated and called
the "Wild Fields", because it's naturally steppe and
living there put you in reach of the Crimean Tartars,
descendants of the Mongols who also used the same
tactics for devastating raids. Further north, where the
land was covered in forest, they did not go.
> That said, they still specifically timed their
campaign cycles around the availability of forage in
the country to be attacked.
Everyone did that (had to) back then.
jltsiren wrote 10 hours 5 min ago:
And his soldiers could eat tanks, if necessary.
A Mongol army could have reached Paris in 2-3 days,
because their troops could operate without support for
a while. WW2 Germany still relied largely on
horse-drawn carts for logistics, and its armies could
not advance substantially faster than a Roman legion.
livueta wrote 11 hours 43 min ago:
Afaik, while better anti-tank weapons did come about during
the war, a lot of it was also to do with adapting tactics
and usage of existing weapons to counter the new "meta".
For example, the flak 88 and the 90mm M1 were originally
intended for use as antiaircraft weapons and were widely
deployed as early as 1936-38. They just so happened to also
be excellent antitank weapons, once people figured out how
to deploy them as such.
llamaimperative wrote 12 hours 35 min ago:
There were several innovations bundled into Blitzkrieg so I
don't think it's productive to clarify what the point is.
Virtually unstoppable armor helped, extreme local
coordination helped, and extreme general decoupling helped.
All of these factors are relevant to Blitzkrieg's success.
fyt2024 wrote 13 hours 19 min ago:
the ghost division :-)
davidw wrote 18 hours 12 min ago:
We're seeing massive use of drones in the UA/RU war. I wonder how those
change these points?
jacoblambda wrote 17 hours 36 min ago:
I'd argue it's still the same, there's just a tech accessibility
difference between defense and offense. When they are equal, defense
still tends to win out but it'll take a bit for the access to catch
up.
The counter for drones will be the proliferation of CRAM/CIWS and
APS. Currently there exists cheap, publicly available (and commonly
heavily open sourced) tech stacks for drones but the same is not the
case for CRAM/CIWS and APS. But fundamentally the systems that can
effectively kill artillery shells, mortars shells, rockets, and
missiles in flight will be able to kill drones as well. There are
some differences (such as that drones tend to fly lower/slower) but
fundamentally the tech applies the same.
And to be entirely honest this proliferation is almost entirely a
software problem. Of course the existence of public hardware designs
is important as well but getting effective sensor integration,
detection, targeting, tracking, and response at a low enough latency
will be bottlenecked by access to high quality domain specific
software.
denton-scratch wrote 16 hours 44 min ago:
CRAM and CIWS are for point-defence; it would be very expensive to
cover e.g. 100 miles of international border using those systems.
Because drones are steerable, they can fly between the gatling guns
and on to their target. Of course, if the target has point-defence,
that won't work!
In Ukraine, it seems that a lot of the defender's drones are hybrid
surveillance and attack, so they don't know what their target is at
launch. You can't point-defend a trenchline. I think the Russians
are relying on jammers. Broadband jamming must require a lot of
power (and presumably impairs their own comms); narrowband jamming
requires knowledge of the attacker's frequency.
CRAM/CIWS generally consists of several weapons systems, and a
command centre with the radar, communicating by radio. So those
defensive systems are also exposed to jamming, which could be
achieved by a high-altitude drone; these systems aren't designed to
shoot things at 20,000 ft., although many of them can have a SAM
system strapped on.
Anyway, I suspect that drone-antidrone warfare is going to come
down to a radio arms-race; i.e. jammer vs. anti-jammer. And you can
defeat a jammer using beamforming.
jacoblambda wrote 11 hours 13 min ago:
> 100 miles of international border using those systems
Yeah that's not really the point. You use CRAM or CIWS at
installations, cities, and maybe even towns. But then you use APS
for military vehicles.
You don't need to stop every attack along a border, you just need
to protect important installations and population centers.
> You can't point-defend a trenchline
Sure you can't but you can point defend mobile artillery, tanks,
and other mechanized infantry. This greatly reduces the actual
value you get out of a drone strike. You won't be hitting high
value targets without spending a lot of resources in a saturation
attack.
> I think the Russians are relying on jammers
They try to and it's not particularly effective.
> So those defensive systems are also exposed to jamming
This is only the case if you communicate by radio. In an active
combat environment, if you are setting up installations that may
be the best you can do at the time but for regions that are
currently at peace, you can absolutely run fiber-optics between
the weapons systems, sensor systems, and command center(s),
leaving radio comms as a fallback. It's definitely more expensive
but if you are installing equipment in a city or permanent
military installation, you probably already have access to fiber
runs that could be procured as dedicated/dark fiber.
> Anyway, I suspect that drone-antidrone warfare is going to come
down to a radio arms-race
That'll definitely be a heavy component of it but the defense
side should be able to insulate themselves from the arms race as
long as they invest in the infrastructure ahead of time rather
than waiting until a hot war starts to protect soft targets.
throwup238 wrote 17 hours 3 min ago:
I don't think we've even seen the real potential of drone warfare
on the battlefield, yet. Right now their guidance is very crude,
little more than the adaptation of consumer FPV technology. Once
US/RU/CN have had time to develop the technology, build up the
manufacturing and logistics, and give them AI automated target
selection, it's going to completely change the nature of warfare
IMO.
Instead of dropping tons of expensive guided bombs and shells,
attackers will drop tens of thousands of cheaper small
anti-personnel hunter-seeker drones that can not only seek out
human targets but wait in low power mode for a target to appear if
it can't identify one at first. It'll make most kinds of static
installations and defenses untenable. Units will have to constantly
be on the move and camouflaged, and avoid giving up all kinds of
life signs like sound/gunshots, thermal, RF comms, etc. The smaller
drones will be able to help larger drones with targeting any armor
they can't handle themselves while acting like free flying land
mines.
I agree that it's a software problem. The Slaughterbots video [1]
is already six years old and all of the pieces to make killer drone
swarms were already there (just not as miniaturized as the video).
Now there's data in Ukraine about how well individual drones work;
AI is getting better and better; the compute is getting cheap
enough to just slap on a drone; SOTA single use aluminum air
batteries can already enable drones with much longer flight times
than consumer batteries. All the pieces are there to make a
nightmarish weapon that changes warfare as much as the machine gun,
land mine, or air support.
(HTM) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecClODh4zYk
082349872349872 wrote 15 hours 44 min ago:
> attackers will drop
From what will they be dropping them?
PeterisP wrote 14 hours 35 min ago:
You could probably fire them with special artillery shells,
just as deploying remote minefields or cluster munitions.
throwup238 wrote 15 hours 27 min ago:
I assume US/RU/CN/etc will drop them from stealth and
supersonic bombers. Everyone else will use basic bombers and
cargo planes if they can punch a hole in AA defenses and if
they cant, release them from 20ft shipping containers or box
trucks as close to enemy lines as possible.
Theyâre also small enough to deploy with infantry.
unethical_ban wrote 15 hours 52 min ago:
I think/hope civilian organizations get access to this technology
or the defensive counterparts before it is banned.
Having guns and food and ammo is good, but if civilians want to
have a chance against NYPD or (insert dystopian boot) then night
vision, drones for surveillance and offense, as well as drone
defense are needed.
Having offensive drone tech in the hands of domestic law
enforcement scares the shit out of me. I think we are one human
generation away from the Matrix "Sentinels" being a reality.
Swarms of autonomous disposable killer drones.
oceanplexian wrote 13 hours 10 min ago:
I agree and am a huge advocate for the idea that self defense
is a human right.
Civilians should have a right to access to the exact same
technology that a government employs with its infantry. I'm not
talking Nuclear Weapons or Stealth Bombers, if a 17-year-old
recruit can be trusted to operate a drone to kill human beings
in a far off foreign country, law-abiding citizens should have
access to the same technology. Or, alternatively, we can ban
the technology, as long as the police are restricted from using
it the same as civilians.
flawsofar wrote 16 hours 38 min ago:
And thus begins the serious electromagnetic weapons age
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