in strategy games you usually have troops at the frontline whose sole purpose is to die fighting to buy you time to execute your plans or to protect stronger troops. is this something that happens in real life / used to happen before, if so what are the logistics of it, do the troops know that they are most likely goona die, etc..
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I’d say yes, but in reality you are ordering troops into high danger rather than certain death. I think a good example both to illustrate both the similarities and differences between reality and RTS is the Wild Weasel pilots, the American pilots who *intentionally* get targeted by enemy air defenses so they can be located and destroyed. In this case, neither the pilots nor their commanders expect or want those pilots to die, per say, but they are intentionally going into an extremely dangerous scenario. The difference is that reality isn’t perfectly mathed out like RTS. In RTS, your guy follows your commands perfectly, but the enemy unit also has perfect accuracy, so you KNOW for certain if I send this guy here they enemy will kill him. In reality, there are a lot of tactics your guy can use to survive, and there’s a possibility the enemy will miss. So you can get situations like this where yes, you are sending your guys into highly dangerous scenarios to bait out an enemy response, but in the complicated real world that might not mean certain death so is significantly more reasonable to order.
Really good answers in here, I just wanted to add this quote from GEN Patton
>No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country
In any military conflict, casualties are expected, but if you can minimize your losses, your chances of success go up. As a career soldier, I realize that any mission against an armed enemy could be my last.
Have you heard of Wagner Group?
A lot of great answers already here. I’ll add: you incentivize soldiers going to the front lines either through cash payments (usually to the family members, since the soldier may not live long) or you offer prisoners a get-out-of-jail ticket (see: Russia).
Yes
How it works: a soldier is motivated to think as part of a bigger picture. There are a number of methods used. Ranging from making a soldier stop being a human and instead feeling like a fighting weapon. At the other end is to feel part of a unit and to value your friends and others’ lives over your own. A soldier mentality can be akin to brainwashing.
I saw an account from someone in Ukraine where they said “as a soldier, you are more effective if you already perceive that you are dead”
In practice, at a unit level, an expected human cost will be weighed against an objective beforehand. From here either reward or punishment will be used to get soldiers to obey these orders.
At an individual level there will be personalities who are more likely to run away Vs others who feel they have less to lose by putting their life down in the exchange for giving their colleagues a chance at survival.
One big and common threat used in Ww1 and prior was many armies had a doctrine of deserters being shot. I’m sure the threat of death for retreating has been used throughout history. And only from the devastation of Ww1 did this tactic start to get phased out, though some countries were still doing it in ww2.
Intimidation, fear, religious/patriotic fervor.
Superior officers were armed with swords or pistols not to use on enemies but on their troops who didn’t fight. This supposedly happened with Soviet troops during WWII.
There are stories about Soviet tactics where a squad might only have 1 weapon and they were forced to attack enemies and recover weapons for further attacks. These don’t appear to be true: [https://www.warhistoryonline.com/history/soviet-armament-in-wwii.html](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/history/soviet-armament-in-wwii.html)
During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran used human wave tactics where poorly armed and trained Iranian troops faced heavy weapons, artillery, and aircraft when attacking Iraqi targets: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ramadan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ramadan)
Also, don’t forget about Japanese Kamikaze pilots who attacked Allied ships: in suicidal attacks [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze)
During the Korean War the Chinese sent human wave attacks where there were more Chinese soldiers than the Americans had bullets.
However, their goal was not to die and the attacks actually worked and the Americans had to withdraw.
Depending on the era such as Republican Rome, infantry formed up in three lines. Kids/Green troops in the first line would more or less be the answer to your question. The second line is made up of hardened more senior troops with a few campaigns under their belt. The third line, The Triarii, were the adults, the most senior and elite troops of the formation. So rarely were they used that a phrase came into being. “It comes down to the triarii”.
Now, you may ask why the elites aren’t out front preventing unnecessary losses among the Green troops? For one, the fastest way to harden your men are to throw them head first into the fight. Better they learn now then later. Also, if they can’t hack it, well, the problem sorts itself out pretty quickly. If they attempt to rout, well, the troops behind them might not be the most forgiving of them. If leading with your elite troops and their formation gets peirced. There is nothing stopping the rest from running all the way back home. If the first line stands their ground, yet when reinforcement are called to sure up a faltering line or fill breaches. It will be your most elite troops to do so, with the higher potential to throw back the enemy and save the day. You don’t want your salvation to be in the hands of a boy fresh off the farm, with his peach fuzz, weak behind the knees and wet in his pants. When it could be in the hands of Maximus, who has been in the army since before the boy was born, who has yet to fight this campaign and is absolutely frothing at the mouth over this.
Next up, this goes for all eras of warfare. Elite troops simply are never good enough to avoid attrition due to bad luck. These losses can not be replaced in any meaningful amount of time. If you loose all your fifteen year veterans. It will take that long to replace them. Possibly longer if their knowledge is lost. This is why NCO’s and the like have always been important to preserve institutional knowledge.
As an example there’s a [US force in Korea](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Forces_Korea) that has traditionally been intended as a trip wire. US forces in Korea (post war) were never large enough to do more than act as a speed bump but killing tens of thousands of American soldiers would justify full scale intervention in a second Korean war.
The [442nd Infantry Regiment](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/442nd_Infantry_Regiment_(United_States)) during WW2 consisted of Japanese Americans so they were frequently used to achieve objectives when very high casualties were expected.
[Penal Battalions](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_military_unit) as a concept have been around since at least the the napoleonic wars in Europe and the Han dynasty in Asia. The goal was twofold. If soldiers refused to follow orders in their regular units, they’d be punished by being sent to a unit with a much higher chance of death. Maybe you don’t want to send your best guys through that breach you just created in the wall, but those guys that weren’t good for anything else might be useful. Second Penal units frequently were basically just taking everyone in a prison and giving them a weapon. If they die, there’s no political or economic consequences.
During the Japanese invasion of China, China fielded some units armed with sword and shield simply because they didn’t have guns to give them. I doubt that the leaders even anticipated the melee companies would be effective in the age of machine guns, but there was no other option. During the revolutionary War, the continental army had several pike (spear) weilding units for the same reason.
Foreign fighters also falls under this same concept. Whether you’re talking about an organized army like the French foreign legion or disorganized foreign ISIS fighters, the voting populace doesn’t really care if some German dies for France or some brit dies to make the Islamic caliphate happen.
There has been “true believer” small units in several conflicts. Japanese Kamikaze pilots are the best well known but the soviets had a similar program. Many isis fighters went into combat with suicide vests on with the intent to donate if an opportunity presented itself, and an AK to shoot people in the mean time. Anarchist and socialist revolutions during the late 1800s and early 1900s tended to have a lot of volunteer sacrifices, as did many religious conflicts.
While there’s many examples of “soldiers put in a position where death is basically guaranteed”, manpower is actually one of the most limited resources in a war. Every soldier that dies or is seriously injured in combat cannot fight anymore, they can’t build guns at home, they can’t pay taxes. The napoleonic wars, the war of the triple alliance, both world wars, and several other notable examples exist of wars that ended because one side ran out of people capable of holding a gun. The russo- Ukraine War is an interesting modern example of this, Ukraine has better equipment and many units have better training, but Ukraine has millions fewer people that they can call into military service. Governments are also responsible to their citizens, and the Franco-Prussian War ended the way it did in part due to France losing so many soldiers that a French Civil War broke out.
That is what the Russians do. Throw men at them until they run out of ammo then swarm them with the last few people they have.
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