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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

If you went far enough in the direction of professionalized warfare in the Harry Potter universe, I have a sneaking suspicion it would turn pretty stupid. People with enchanted sniper rifles and invisibility cloaks playing “don’t move first” or something boring like that.

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You can definitely get pretty creative and interesting—for example, transmuting a pile of primed hand grenades into a handful of confetti and then tossing it over your enemy right before the spell wears off. That said, you're right, it's highly likely that boring strategies would dominate. However, the Harry Potter magic system is so fast and loose that you can always make up some new spell to cancel out whatever OP strategy; the author has almost unlimited leeway.

All wizards seem limited by the speed of sound. They hear/see spells coming and react by waving arms and saying things. Bullets are faster than wands. Only Jedi have the prescience to react prior to the bullet being fired.

Do they need to react though? Surely there's some sort of kinetic barrier spell they could use. Just checked and there's protego, a shield charm that blocks other spells and physical objects. A high mobility special forces wizard squad would have one person responsible for casting protego while all the others use avada kedavra on everything that moves. They could also use some sort of explosive spell to destroy cover, walls, obstacles and fortifications. All while shrugging off bullets, shrapnel and pretty much anything muggles could throw at them short of a nuclear missile.

We only really see up to, basically, the wizard version of a detective in Harry Potter. Maybe some of the aurors are like SWAT team members?

In general the wizard society imagined seems to actively reject the idea of professionalizing things and work more as a collection of hobbyists so I suspect “professional soldier wizards” don’t even exist in universe, and there’s no Wizard Raytheon to really optimize Wizard Radar. So it is hard to speculate about what it would look like.

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