Eli5 why are combat units “ineffective” after taking 15% losses?
In: 1029
This is a really big rule of thumb that you need to take with a big, BIG, grain of salt.
Let’s first understand that a military unit can do one of three things: advance, hold, and retreat.
For retreating units there is no upper limit on casualties they can take and keep retreating. Question is how disorganized the retreat is going to be. You want men coming back with their equipment and in a position to be given a rest, a hot meal, and sent back out then you better not have 50% casualties.
For holding units the question becomes when will they retreat against orders, or surrender. You make it easy for people to surrender and not think they are going to get killed, and just imagine yourself in that situation, what chance of death do you think you’d need to convince you that whatever this cause is, it isn’t worth that risk? So things like cut off food, cut off fuel, incompetent leadership can all matter just as much, if not more, than how many people are actually dead or wounded.
But the real issue is those advancing units. Imagine you’re part of a tank division, say 500 tanks in your group, and a ton of support people being fuel tankers, food trucks, etc.
So, lets go take that town. We swoop in, pow, pow, pow, win the battle and holy christ! 5 of our tanks got smoked in the fight. We didn’t kill any Ukrainian tanks, how the hell did that even happen? And the people in those tanks… you can smell the cooking flesh. Poor bastards never even had a chance and their tanks BLEW UP. This isn’t a little hole kind of thing – or if it is how the hell did that kill everyone in them. But the tanks, instead of being armoured protection, are like BOMBS that we’re fighting inside of. The fuel went up, the ammunition went off, shit man.
Well, ok, that was pretty shocking… but that’s war right, we trained for this. We do another town, this time we’re trying to be a bit more careful, and 10 tanks bought it! And now its haunting, one of the tanks, the guy who has my job, he was half out, trying to crawl away as he burned to death. I mean… that seriously could have been me.
They want us to take another town. Let’s sit the hell down first and figure this out. I am not getting burned to fucking death on account of this crap. So what did we do wrong that we were losing tanks? Well it turns out our infantry wasn’t doing their jobs and going in ahead of us to take out the anti-tank soldiers hiding in the villages. Well shit man, why the hell are we doing our job if they aren’t doing there’s?
Command tells us the infantry got a VERY stern talking to, next town’s going to be better. AND SON OF A XXXXXXX we lost 20 tanks! THOSE WORTHLESS MOTHERLESS XXXXXXXXXX!
So, at some point, pretty quickly, command says you go take another town and you say “unfortunately I’m fresh out of bullets, gasoline, and my tank needs fresh treads and guess what, it doesn’t matter how many bullets, gasoline, or treads you send me because my real issue is that I’m not going in there until the infantry does its job – but I can’t tell you that.
And then, at some point after that, when ever more of my buddies got killed, I’m just done with this whole war thing. Thanks, but not as fun as it seemed in the recruiting videos. I think I’d like to go home and spend the next decade waking up screaming every day. If its all the same to everyone.
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