How have modern warfare tactics changed since World War II?
In: Other
Rough summary: modern warfare consists of teams of professional soldiers with tactical equipment, while WWII was conducted with millions of conscripts who may have only had weeks of training before deployment.
In WWII a fighter plane was a cheap coffin-shaped box that happened to have wings and a machine gun, that you were likely to die in. Now it’s a billion dollar flying supercomputer with supersonic missiles, that happens to have a pilot.
Tactics don’t really change in warfare. The biggest changes are the inclusion of information warfare, and cyberspace in the war fighting domains. The remaining tactics are tried and true fire and maneuver, though greatly different than what our grandfathers were familiar with.
The biggest conventional factors in fighting a war are the ability to move, shoot, and communicate. Of recent, we’d add Medicate to that as well. I addressed information and cyber, but those are whole other animals compared to WWII.
The ability to move, not just across the battlefield, but across the world has greatly increased. An Airborne Brigade in the United States could be anywhere on earth within 18hrs. Likewise, helicopters have made inaccessible terrain accessible along with the ability to rapidly move troops and vertically envelope battlefields. Other factors such as knowing exactly where we are on a map has greatly increased the ability to not just move, but effectively maneuver on the battlespace.
The ability to shoot has improved greatly with the increase in precision guided munitions, increased QA/QC lowering failure rates. Innovation with fire control systems, optics, sensor systems that identify targets, weather, account for low-light/no-light, etc. Utilizing Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities from satellites to aircraft of both manned and unmanned variety, and ground and ship based sensors allows unprecedented engagement on the battlefield.
Communications abilities have greatly increased. At one time *maybe* you could catch a transmission bouncing off the ionosphere, long range communications have become increasingly reliable and effective. The ability to encrypt communication has made secured messaging across the battlespace more assured. Tying systems together has allowed unprecedented awareness of the battlespace and everything on it. Reverting back to the previous bullet, our sensor systems in ISR have made messaging more clear and concise by having real-time observation capability over targets.
And for Medicate, the ability to treat casualties in the field, move casualties to the rear, and then treat and reintegrate those casualties has greatly increased since the days of setting up field triage and moving casualties rearward occasionally.
In short….. the tactics haven’t really *changed* per se, they have just grown increasingly better.
FPV drones are changing the way war is being fought in Ukraine. Their cheap cost, easy availability and lethality are being studied by all of the top militaries and insurgencies to develop strategies and tactics for future engagements.
They haven’t.
Because we haven’t really fought a “Total war” since then. Ukraine is probably the closet we’ve been, but even it isn’t reaching the total mobilization that World War II had.
Modern war is practically the same as WW2, but “better, faster, stronger”.
1. Communication is now everywhere and secure. You have digitally-encrypted comms that fit into pockets, while in WW2 you had special guys with huge backpacks. This allows much better and realtime coordination with HQ of large-scale operations.
2. Navigation with GPS – everyone now knows their precise location. Easier to call in artillery and just not get lost.
3. Long range precision artillery – you can hit targets on 3rd shot from 30-50km away and scoot in minutes.
4. Precision long-range missiles – you can hit a 10x10m square 500km away. Also bombers aren’t a thing anymore because surface-to-air missiles are just so good.
5. Drones with real-time video feeds. Artillery units can see impacts in real time.
One of the interesting consequences of it is that force concentration isn’t a thing anymore – you can’t amass troops for push. If you ask Ukrainian soldiers about their experience what they say to you is that as soon as you bunch up in a group of 5 or more – you’ll get mortared. Any point can be hit. Any barracks, any rail station, any factory, any stockpile. Any concentration is now impossible.
You also can’t hide. A tank now can have a drone overwatching it and relying everything in realtime. A HQ would have a Discord room (literally, lol) with streams from every part of the frontline.
Another factor is that casualty treatment advanced greatly. Most of the wounds are now survivable. Soldiers carry IFAKs that can easily treat wounds that would kill WW2 soldiers in minutes.
In theory very little has changed since the development of Blitzkrieg prior to the 2nd world war. The means to do it have become more sophisticated, but the components, the tactics and the ways of thinking, derived from Auftragstaktik, would be immediately recognisable to a German Battlegroup commander from 1938.
Communications have absolutely made the biggest leap. The ability to quickly communicate and share information has truly made the biggest impact and transformed the field. Vehicles are all aware of each other automatically, units can easily determine their location as well as the enemy’s. Targeting computers make strikes much easier and quicker and equipment and vehicles are all interconnected, all aware of each other’s position, and one man on the ground or one vehicle can convey targeting information to everyone else.
Now that computerised systems have become standard on the battlefield the next step is the use of drones, with many tasks that required personnel and vehicles to be carried out to be able to be performed by unmanned machines, from surveillance to actual striking of the enemy.
MAD has obviously changed everything. There’s no such thing as a total war when every major power has city busting weapons it can deploy within an hour, and so do a lot of minor ones.
A lot of why places like Iraq and Afghanistan are theaters of war is because smaller governments will need powerful allies and patron states who can give them resources and security in one form or another, but another major power can still overwhelm those powers with a directed offensive, and without a strong defense pact their patron may just abandon them to it.
The U.S. solution to this dynamic is to just spread military bases across western Europe, Japan, Korea, ect. so that if anyone tries anything on *their* allies, they’ll have the full might of the U.S. military within hours after them. Russia’s CSTO theoretically is the same thing on a smaller scale, but has been proven to be less effective as of late. China theoretically doesn’t have a large defensive bloc but still has deep ties to nations like Pakistan that have lasted for decades now. Either way the military theory is that if you present the overwhelming force of a major nuclear power power allied with several smaller ones(A large portion of which contain nuclear arms) nobody will attempt war to begin with due to the obvious disastrous consequences.
I was in basic when the towers went down.
We went from studying cold-war era anti-Russian tactics to developing close quarters/city fighting tactics within my first year.
Lessons on how to dig a tank-proof foxhole were replaced with lessons on identifying IEDs.
— Forward operating bases with armored food trucks/trailers
— drones deliver pizza, ramen, even tactical tacos if desired
— Ubereats-OD-green in cases where drone signals are jammed, can still be used to order meals for delivery with encrypted comms so the enemy can’t see what you’re eating and ambush the delivery driver
— there are have already been examples of MBRLS or multiple burrito rocket launch system to provide overwhelming texmex suppressive fire with guacamole, it’s also being adapted to supply infantry with eggs Benedict stacked vertically, cookies etc.
Edit: lol
Latest Answers