The Most Effective Weapon on the Modern Battlefield Is Concrete
mwi.usma.edu
mwi.usma.edu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesco_bastion
Hesco is another very interesting material. Cheap, extremely light and easy to deploy, until filled, which can be done by anyone with an entrenching tool (small infantry shovel/spade that everyone carries) if required, and then basically indestructible.
How many of those concrete walls can a helicopter carry? One? It's going to take a long time to build any wall or structure. Or do you send an armoured cement mixer and create on-site? That's not realistic in a place like Afghanistan.
I'm not an engineer but I would also guess that Hesco survives better - a box of stones can lift up and crash back down with an explosion where if concrete cracks it's permanently broken.
Seriously? You never saw the giant prefab concrete walls around Bagram and Phoenix, and Eggers? Where were you in Afghanistan?
I have been to just about every significant ISAF base (while it was still called ISAF, not RS) and US DoD base in the country, and can assure you that giant prefab concrete walls lifted into place with cranes are everywhere.
A FOB somewhere near Lashkargah. I never went to Bagram, Phoenix or Eggers. I spent a few days in Bastion, which, as the name suggests, was also constructed from Hesco bastion.
The Army loves their t-walls. So much in fact they give out little awards that are shaped like t-walls.[1]
[1]: http://uswarriorsoutdoors.org/us/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/...
Got called out on quite a few. One in particular was a dude out at a COP in the middle of no where Farah, taking a piss next to a Hesco, looked up and saw a mine poking out of the barrier. Afghanistan is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. It's not surprising.
My Google-fu thinks FOB is short for Forward Operating Base.
FOBs are established by cargo that arrives by truck. The only FOBs I ever heard of being established by air cargo (Chinook, and in very mountainous regions of Kunar and Nooristan mostly) were not exactly what you would call a FOB in the context of Afghanistan, but were much smaller sites on hilltops that would be designated COPs (combat outpost) or firebases.
They were support for very (very) small sites. They were called FOBs by the airborne guys, but I don't know much about military terminology, and can't vouch for the correctness of the use of that term in this case.
EDIT: This doesn't look like what we worked on, but I just found this:
- http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2011/12/02/military-base-in-box-all-rage.htmlhttps://static01.nyt.com/images/2010/07/15/blogs/atwar-afgha...
In a dense urban environment there isn't likely to be thousands of cubic feet of readily available fill material, and a 3-5 foot thick Hesco is going to be much more difficult to emplace than a 12" thick concrete barrier.
There is another upside to the Hescos. They are much more difficult to undermine (literally). They are relatively soft and will likely collapse any hole under them. Concrete structures don't slump and so can be undermined.
Hescos are also better since they don't cause ricochets and they don't shatter on impact creating shrapnel.
From my experience when concrete walls are used for fortifications the SOP was to cover them with a sheet of Kevlar like fabric between two layers of metal webbing (concrete bolt/nail gun was used to secure the webbing to the barrier) to protect personnel from secondary impact risks.
If that wasn't available then you usually had a layer of either sand bags or a spaced secondary wooden or sheet metal wall with sand filling the gap between it and the concrete.
When bullets are flying at you you want to be behind a barrier but not near a bare concrete wall.
You need to remember that the concern is less about bullets and more about mortars/rockets/VBEDs, which I can assure you, both types of barriers did a reasonably decent job of stopping.
They are also slower to deploy, tho if you do it properly you dig both the obstacle outer ditch (which makes the effective height of barrier too high to scale) and trenches as you fill them since the ground needs to come from somewhere.
That said to deploy concrete barriers you need a crane, when push comes to shove a squad with shovels can fill a hesco.
Some concrete barriers can also be higher than hescos, tho you can stack hescos without much trouble.
Overall if you are building an FOB all you need is a few flatbed trucks and a bobcat (small earth mover) to pretty quickly deploy hescos, concrete barriers need heavy trucks (which also means proper roads, you won't be driving a truck filled with concrete barriers over soft terrain) and you actually need engineers (as in the military definition, not academically educated ones) to deploy them.
In an urban environment concrete can make more sense tho, you can't dig ditched to increase the height, can't dig up the ground randomly, and since concrete barriers are thinner they are more easily deployed in urban environments and it's not like you have issues with logistics.
Although it wouldn't surprise me if the pentagon somehow managed to airlift these barriers from the US to Iraq to be deployed in Baghdad instead of just contracting the local concrete factories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPuw-f8JMTw
> Although it wouldn't surprise me if the pentagon somehow managed to airlift these barriers from the US to Iraq to be deployed in Baghdad instead of just contracting the local concrete factories.
What, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless gallons of fuel to transport big concrete blocks across the world? Our DoD? Surely you jest. 8)
This is more in line with how usually these things are deployed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_lsmE_EwEE
If it's more organized it's usually means it's deployed by the engineering corps or a contractor anyhow.
drying would be the main issue, probably.
The upside is that they don't ricochet as much if at all, the downside is that bullets leave pretty large impact craters and if the wall isn't thick enough simply pass through like it wasn't there.
But the problem remains if it's hard bullets will ricochet and it will splinter into shrapnel, if it's soft it's not an effective barrier and the wear on it is very high.
Hescos or any other similar fortification are simple and effective, there is a reason why we still use sandbags and planks of wood with sand in between them, sand is a great bullet trap and you can shoot at hescos and sandbags all day long and you won't really do much damage. there needs to be a pretty big hole for the sand to sip out since it's kept in place by the pressure and compression.
Roll out, inflate, soak in water, and wait for it to harden before releasing the pressure.
And such a gluing agent would be cement. Concrete is really nothing more than cement mixed with sand or gravel. The farm i grew up on had a barn where the foundation was nothing more than cement and small rocks from the land. It was built up like a layer cake. One spread of cement, then a layer of rock, repeated until desired height.
http://www.concretecanvas.com/
Their price (that I could find) quotes on old news sites were insanely high unfortunately (GBP15-20k).
It looks like the shelter use has been relegated to a secondary product vs the main use: rolls of the stuff for construction uses.
> A Concrete Canvas shelter would cost 15,000 to 20,000 pounds, in the U.K., for a one-off ($23,000 to $30,000), but the price steps down if you are buying volumes.
My guess is that they're not interested in dealing with small-volume customers, and so for large volumes the prices descend to a much saner price. "Look at how much your government/military/refuge 'saves' when you buy 1000 of these!"...
With this lower intensity warfare, the army needs to reduce complexity by scoping their problems.
This isn't new. That Boer war reference left out a few details... the British couldn't defeat mobile cavalry with pack howitzers, so they built fences, pillboxes and watchtowers across the countryside to restrict movement. Then they evacuated towns and villages to concentration camps and starved the non combatants until the soldiers surrendered.
It's a pretty common theme used in the Indian wars and vietnam by Americans, Germans in Angola and Europe, French in Algeria, etc as well.
> Existing structures [abandoned buildings] surrounded by walled compounds of some type were selected because there was little in the environment to use for protection—such as dirt to fill sandbags, earthworks, and existing obstacles.
so that might be part of the reason.
http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.5.5.html
Contrast with Galba in the early chapters of
http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.3.3.html
You would only exaggerate a little to say that in his telling, victory is all about being prepared and not slacking off.
A properly fortified base can take pretty much any conventional artillery fire for weeks without taking any real damage and unless there is an all out assault you can hold out as long as you have food and water, ammo might not even be that important as long as the enemy doesn't know that and or is incapable of scaling the fortifications.
Even when we'll be fighting on Mars and the jovian moons you'll still will have grunts digging trenches unless for some reason the war is going to transform to purely strategic weapons in which case it's usually the side that either has more or strikes first who would win.
But at the end of the day, the only purpose of the logistics are to support the fight to control the territory you need to win.
Of course there are limits to that strategy as the Chinese proved that if you're willing to lose 20 to 1 ratio you can simply deploy millions of infantry and ignore logistics, admittedly most of them will die, and regardless of logistic support next thing you know we're back south at the original DMZ.
The situation in Khe Sanh was similar, OK you're outnumbered 10 to 1 and surrounded, that's sustainable for months as long as the airdrops keep coming in. Of course Dien Bien Phu was an example where the airdrops didn't come in and the French were wiped out. After the war Gen. Westmorland was savaged in the press, Trump style, for making fun of Gen Giap for being the worlds most predictable one trick pony, but now that the politics and tempers have cooled its "OK" to admit the general only had one strategy that he used basically every time. Of course, in the end, it eventually worked, so losing 90%+ of your battles is OK if the enemy eventually goes home in defeat.
Visitors often commented how different this area felt from its surroundings (and perhaps even from much of the city), and apparently the reason is that this area was generally spared bombings.
Just thought that was neat.
Do you really think this is a stable strategy? Drones are probably cheaper to shoot down than they are to build. At least the quadcopters. Imagine a few very fast automated shotgun turrets with birdshot.
Even if war is automated, the same basic strategies apply. The fortifications will just be built and manned by robots instead of humans.
Mounted on a smaller, lighter, much shorter range defensive quadcopter. Don't even need the fancy weapons, just collide with the larger, long range, very expensive attacking quadcopter.
Nothing is ever really new, and a lot of the "drones will solve everything" talk sounds exactly like "missiles will eliminate guns in military aircraft" from the 50s/early 60s. That didn't turn out very well, and if you ignore the details that don't matter, drones are tactically merely very slow, short range, traditionally cheaper, missiles. Yeah yeah the electronic speed controllers are infinitely interesting to a EE but to a grunt a drone weapon system is tactically a lame cheap missile. So your attack helicopter of the future will have drone wingmen, but it'll also have guns. Or some infantry platoons might carry a couple anti-armor drone weapons instead of a couple AT-4 or LAW rockets, but they'll still dig trenches and carry some kind of M16 variant.
Quadrocopters could certainly be shot down by robots, but probably not by humans once they get fast enough at flipping themselves around and making evasive maneuvers.
US drones operate in an uncontested environment let them try fly over Russian or Chinese airspace, the soviet shot down a bloody U2 thy can hit a globalhawk or a reaper.
A drone or a soldier it doesn't matter a sandbag that stops a bullet is still cheaper and faster to make than training or building a new combatant.
All modern wars are in effect industrial wars at least when both sides are even remotely equal in military power, the US simply out produced both Germany and Japan to win the war.
If you are fighting a war then it's always better to reduce force depletion than to increase manufacturing if nothing else than it's cheaper, faster and leaves you with more options for the long run.
If you allow this, everyone dies. So not much use preparing for this other than mutually assured destruction.
These are also not missiles, but very very heavy bombs.
And you can also reinforce against them, just usually not at the FOB level, but considering the cost of every one of those bombs they aren't really going to be used to blow up a pillbox on a hill.
A fortified base will also not protect you from strategic bombardment on a massive scale, but that doesn't mean they are useless even against nations with modern standing armies, it's not like they are going to attack every outpost and base with everything they got, that would be pointless.
Force depletion can happen rapidly without any casualties, if you are going to use the bombs you would want to use to take out strategic command and control centers, factories, and natural resource reserves to blow up a couple of of dirt boxes you ain't going to be winning that war.
On the other hand pretty much the most basic field fortification will be enough to nullify virtually all field artillery which is exactly what it's likely to encounter - self propelled howitzers, mortars, and multi-role ground attack missiles.
I think ultimately it depends on the situation and the resolve of the aggressor to take you out. After 9/11, the US went balls to the walls with conventional military.
This is why I specifically talked about wars where there is any level of parallelism between the belligerents.
The US will not fire a 2M missile at every Russian pillbox if there would be a real war, because they would lose. When you are fighting the Taliban who doesn't have any real long range or strategic weapons you don't really care about force depletion, if you are fighting a standing army with equal equipment, equal or greater manpower and at least as far as war economy goes equal or greater production capabilities you start picking your targets with considerably more discrimination.
The US excels at combined arms coordination, but it also makes it's engagement very wasteful, granted one can argue that losing less men is important than having more bombs but that doesn't go very far once the economics of a full war with an equal opponent kick in.
If you are going to waste an airstrike on every ground engagement, and a Javelin missile on every truck you'll have issues when 50,000 tanks start rolling into Europe (these are cold war numbers, chillax ;)).
Shock and Awe might work against Iraq and the Taliban, it wouldn't work against China or Russia, they can withstand it and return in kind, you also will never push a nuclear power into a corner, so US tactics will change to facilitate holding and controlling the ground rather than carpet bombing Beijing or Moscow for 48 hours expecting a surrender.
If nothing else is that this only works when you can unilaterally walk out of the fight like the US can do it now, they could and had dumped everything they could on Afghanistan and Iraq and they can and did just walked away, if you do the same thing to a country that can then chase you home you probably going to reconsider how you wage war.
http://www.thecivilengineer.org/online-historical-database-o...
If anyone can recommend similar articles on weird/impressive/ballsy historical battle gambits, I'd love to hear it!
If you look at most battles throughout history, there is a single, simple tactic that almost always assured victory: rolling logs downhill at your enemy.
But because we have so much whiz-bang tech doing our fighting for us we've delegated our thinking as well.
A marine I know of often complained that the most effective tactic the Iraqi insurgents utilized again and again was to set up a missile or RPG pointed generally in the direction of a military base and fire it off long after they've left the area. Even if the rocket doesn't get anywhere close to do any damage, everybody has to stop what they're doing and go on the defensive, and even when they've located the source of the attack, nobody's there.
A stupid rocket that doesn't damage anything can bleed the U.S. Military of millions of dollars at a time.
It erodes your mental health, never knowing when a random explosion might happen. Damaging in its way just like a bullet.
The Jersey barrier isn't so named because of its size. It was developed as a barrier by the NJ highway dept [1]. The newer barriers used for the military are just given other state names to follow along with the original. It just happens to be smaller because of its original civilian purpose.
Wanting to see real life usage of these barriers, a contingency of Marine combat engineers working with the ROK Marines got tasked to breaching them.
From that I learned two interesting things of note. Concrete serves two means: it's actual use as a barrier and the other being a manifestation.
In combat zones, Hesco containers prevail. Rapid deployment and durability makes them a much better fit. But imposing concrete blocks represent the continuity of the state.
Heavier and harder, with more logistics required, building out concrete walls is meant as a way for the state to declare they are here to stay, not retreat. So actually it's wielding a supply chain effectively that is the most effective weapon on the battlefield.
That said though, we made short work of the concrete.
In a nutshell: Don't concrete walls prevent recovery? Don't they split the population, creating even more groups with differences? Should we plan for them to be "reconfigured" in the following years, when the conflict improves?
Side question: Sorry I didn't follow, why was USA in Irak again? Did it start with the famous WMD accusation at the UN conference then the intervention got bogged into a long unpeaceful situation, am I recollecting events in the correct order?
"Of the twenty-five people who signed the PNAC's founding statement of principles, ten went on to serve in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz."
They were planning this for a long time.
The thing I was wondering while reading the article is what will they do after the fighting is done?
Will the barriers and walls be left in place or dismantled?
Is it easier to take down or move concrete vs Hesco?
I suspect lots of them will remain until they fall apart, especially in situations like lining highways. I bet that the walls in the city, and the enclaves formed by them, will be affecting the culture off the city years after the conflict is done.
I was looking at satellite images of the area my FOB was at in Fallujah - no sign of our presence. We had double stacked hesco all over the place, as well as Texas and Jersey barriers on the road.
> Is it easier to take down or move concrete vs Hesco?
Easier to take down hesco (boltcutter and a knife), impossible to move. Concrete is easy to move with common construction equipment, I'm sure the people of Fallujah found a new use for the barriers pretty quickly.
One can imagine some Roman boots bitching about lugging the stones up for some temporary cover.
For what plausible reason would you invade and occupy a city with a population of over 10 million? Here is a list of cities with a population of 10 million or more, please tell me for what good reason any one of them should they be invaded:
Tokyo, Shanghai, Jakarta, Karachi, Seoul, New York City, Mumbai, Manila, Mexico City, Delhi, Beijing, São Paulo, Lagos, Wuhan, Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Cairo, Los Angeles, Chengdu, Dhaka, Moscow, Tianjin, Bangkok, Istanbul, Kolkata, Rio de Janeiro, London, Buenos Aires, Tehran, Kinshasa, Paris, Shenzhen, Harbin, Rhine-Ruhr, Lahore
Maybe invest as much time and money thinking about peace as you do on war and you might not need to bankrupt your country to fight another one. The US's military industrial complex is the ultimate case of when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Pakistan and India have gone to war no fewer than 4 times since their independence not 7 decades ago. It was considered basically a miracle that the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai didn't spark a war, and the tensions between the two countries remain the most likely potential nuclear war. That gets you Karachi, Mumbai, Delhi (Kolkata is on the wrong side of the country).
Cairo, Istanbul, and Tehran could become war zones in a future Middle Eastern conflict, although the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does seem to have declined in importance to the Arab region as a whole. The risk of a World War III involving China or Russia is probably understated--especially given Putin's responses to the increasing failure of the Russian economy since the 2008 financial crisis.
It is also worth pointing out that many of the megacities that people are concerned about don't exist yet--the number of megacities is expected to grow, predominantly in Africa, a region not known for stability of governments. You might say that solid middle-class countries would help to stabilize the governments, but the Syrian and Libyan civil wars really ought to be clear signs of the fallacy of that belief.
In many respects, though, the main point of a military is not to fight wars--it's to figure out how to, and be prepared to, fight the next war. Acting as if wars won't happen won't guarantee you peace--indeed, WWII, the bloodiest war in history, was so bloody precisely because its principal actors refused to believe that is was going to happen.
Most of their navy can't even get from their west coast to their east coast, never mind supporting an invasion of Tokyo, over 300 miles of water.
Neither the Libyan nor Syrian civil war was caused by a failure of the middle class or institutions. In both cases the wars were fomented by external state actors who sought geopolitical advantages at the expense of these nations. In any case your sample size of 2 is insufficient to prove anything
If a war broke out in Tehran no prizes for guessing which nation would start it.
Historically, wars have happened because the balance of powers of nations becomes ambiguous. Thanks to natural human over-confidence, each believes they could win it, and so they go to war even though in reality everyone loses. The U.S. has been the undisputed global power since WW2, but there's a ticking demographics time-bomb that's pretty apparent in your list of cities.
Imagine 1% of that 10 million joined an insurgency. That is 100,000 people. I think this is a distinct enough possibility for a military to prepare for. In fact, the US already works on both ends. Supporting insurgencies in Libya and Syria while helping fight them in Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan. These aren't mega cities but the possibility still remains.
> For what plausible reason
> would you invade and occupy
> a city with a population of
> over 10 million?
1920 Tokyo: 3.7 million[1]
1950 Shanghai: 6.2 million[2]
1971 Mumbai: 5.9 million[3]
1921 Greater London: 7.5 million[4]; Inner London: 4.9 million
Terms like Metro-area and Megalopois are different stories...
[0]https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/nyc-population/...
[1]http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/ABOUT/HISTORY/history03.ht...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Shanghai
Surely this is a failure of imagination, rather than a complete impossibility?
In the last few years we have seen:
The US Airforce providing aircover for Iranian militias.[1]
Turkey shoot down a Russian fighter/bomber over Syria[2] and then become close (?) allies[3]
The Philippines win a ruling against Chinese actions in the South China sea[4], then decide to ally with China and accept Chinese ambitions in the South China sea[5], and then return to their original position (maybe?)[6]
The world's most populous Islamic nation has a Christian governor of its capital city[7].
The UK voted to exit the EU, but no one is quite sure how it will happen
And Donald Trump won the US election.
So yeah.. I have no idea why the US would want to invade and occupy a 10M+ population city. But it is entirely possible something like that could happen.
[1] https://warisboring.com/american-coalition-is-providing-clos...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Russian_Sukhoi_Su-24_shoo...
[3] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37045724
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines_v._China
[5] http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/10/philippines-duterte-ch...
[6] http://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2016/11/13/ro...
I agree that the MIC is a toxic influence on policy, but lets not let that blind ourselves to conducting healthy analysis on what warfare might look like in the future.
Considering the level of corruption from top to bottom in Rio, do they really bring "law and order"?
I'm sure they have scenarios where an armed sectarian revolt in 2040 Los Angeles-San Diego needs to be suppressed by force. The region is potentially vulnerable and critical for food security.
And, for that matter, what about NYC and LA? Another round of civil war in the US is unlikely but not impossible, and the military wouldn't want to be caught on the hop.
Pakistan has nukes. Please don't invade countries with nukes. And if there's one thing that Syria has taught us, or at least should have: urban fighting ultimately destroys cities leaving a near-empty ruinous shell and creates huge numbers of refugees which are both an economic burden and political dynamite that sees ultra right-wing leaders and policies voted in.
A city is a city because it's where a vast amount of people live. You're bringing deadly conflict to people's doorsteps and creating tomorrow's terrorist. This is fundamental, not something that can be solved with technology or hip new ways of thinking.
> future warfare
[1] http://gothamist.com/2016/11/09/nypd_trump_tower_security.ph...
https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/5bugud/sand_blockade_o...
Note that these barriers are much less obtrusive than even a jersey barrier, this is something with which NYPD has plenty of experience in a very different light than the article
I miss Bushwick sometimes. :)
In the UK we've been using them for a long time to provide protection for people working on motorways i.e. separate traffic from lanes where work is going on
"The more you sweat today, the less you bleed tomorrow."
http://www.npr.org/2012/02/17/147047553/concretes-role-as-a-...
[1] http://www.btselem.org/download/separation_barrier_map_eng.p...
You might also be interested in this talk, which if memory serves discusses the wall's impact on the community: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSkevV-CoO4
[0]http://www.btselem.org/download/201411_btselem_map_of_wb_eng...
couple days of tomahawk cruise missiles barrage followed by 10 years of nation _building_
(Of course, much depends on who controls the walls and the citadel...)
Walls and barriers can offer protection from the "others" but I feel more often then not, they are used to separate territory and control movement. That separation and control comes at a cost. One such cost, is freedom of place.
Firstly, concrete isn't a weapon, it is a defensive utility, not an offensive one (weapon).
Correcting that, the best defense is people. More specifically, "civilians".
You can now easily defend yourself if you surround yourself with civilians like ISIS has done. Without civilians, no-doubt the US will "precision bomb" your entire stronghold to dust.
That's the whole reason the US spend trillions of $ on precision weaponry and surveillance now. The US is trying to develop weapon systems that, even when defending oneself with civilians, when you walk outside your civilian-filled afghan hut alone to go to the outhouse, a tiny precision bullet from the sky assassinates you in an instant. They are getting there, and it's ever closer to fruition, regardless of how disturbing it all is.
EDIT: I mean, why do you think they are pouring money into drones that can stay in the air for ages, path-changing (steerable) "smart" bullets, face recog AI, flight stablisation, etc.. It's ALL an effort to create the aforementioned precision assassination system.
That is a very dubious assertion. If the stakes are high enough, a sufficiently equipped aggressor will attack a city despite the civilian population within. Stalingrad, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Falluja,
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/08/16/syria/russia-incendiary-...
More seriously, I have no idea. Submarines normally involve an advertisement for the advertising company somewhere in the latter part of the article; no company = no giveaway ad. But knowing Trump and his way with memes, I wouldn't be surprised if the author just had walls on the brain, without having to be paid for it...
If we're going to play this semantics game, then the most effective weapon on the modern battlefield is food. Without food, your people can't do any of the other things they're there to do. Take away concrete, and your military can still do plenty of stuff. Take away food and your military ceases to exist.
It was an informative article, oddly an issue never covered in the mainstream press.
Experts do say that logistics is one of the most important factors in warfare. An army marches on its stomach, Napoleon reputedly said.
Imagine feeding 20,000 people on the march: That's 40-60,000 meals per day, who knows how much water, plus waste - all shipped through war zones. And that ignores other supplies: Fuel, bullets, parts, medicine, etc.
And that's the problem. Men and women keeping ... fighting .. for causes that aren't there. American soldiers are duped into thinking they're fighting for some noble cause when they're just the strong arm of a corrupt system that continues to blaze on with wars no matter who is elected.
Conniving people to fight is the only way to wage war. It's also how we make money. It's also how we make slaves.
On a tactical level, mealie bags and biscuit boxes were famously used to defend a British outpost in the Zulu wars. :)
Then how you allocate and deploy food is a measure of where you could potentially resist a seige.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meal,_Ready-to-Eat
i have no military experience but i'm guessing this is actually one of the easiest things to strategically deploy. a day's worth of ammo for a platoon probably weighs a few hundred pounds. a day's worth of food is probably like 10 pounds.
see: restrepo, korengal films.