Defending the city: An overview of defensive tactics
mwi.westpoint.edu
mwi.westpoint.edu
Indeed - one of the first wars fought with modern rifling, the American Civil War, had General Lee learn this lesson in a very hard way on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, in a failed infantry assault known as "Pickett's Charge."[0]
Lee mistakenly attacked a position that was very easily defensible by Union artillery on faulty theory that it would be weakened due to a (failed) artillery barrage that happened previously. The Union correctly predicted Lee would attack there, and he sent over 12,000 men in a futile assault that resulted in 50% casualties in less than 1 hour, one of the bloodiest hours of the entire war.
This would not happen today because the exposed tanks would be taken out by relatively cheap anti tank missiles.
Virtually unstoppable armor helped, extreme local coordination helped, and extreme general decoupling helped. All of these factors are relevant to Blitzkrieg's success.
Genghis Khan would have laughed at the slow German Blitzkrieg.
That said, they still specifically timed their campaign cycles around the availability of forage in the country to be attacked.
A Mongol army could have reached Paris in 2-3 days, because their troops could operate without support for a while. WW2 Germany still relied largely on horse-drawn carts for logistics, and its armies could not advance substantially faster than a Roman legion.
More like: wherever you didn't have abundant grass, Mongol armies essentially couldn't go, or at least lost so much advantage that they usually chose not to.
On a related point: the southern half of Ukraine has some of the best soil in the world for agriculture, yet for centuries it was very thinly populated and called the "Wild Fields", because it's naturally steppe and living there put you in reach of the Crimean Tartars, descendants of the Mongols who also used the same tactics for devastating raids. Further north, where the land was covered in forest, they did not go.
> That said, they still specifically timed their campaign cycles around the availability of forage in the country to be attacked.
Everyone did that (had to) back then.
In the context of the conversation, Blitzkrieg worked because it specifically avoided getting bogged down in heavily fortified urban areas. The German army of WWII was not at all suited to long battles like what they encountered in WWI (see the eastern front casualty numbers for a good illustration of how that went).
Stalingrad (mentioned in the article) is rather famous for being a perfect urban battlefield to grind a massive and well equipped modern (for the time) army into pulp. They couldn't blitzkrieg it, and so it defeated them.
The German Army ca. WWII's entire doctrine centered on (as podcaster Dan Carlin describes it) throwing a haymaker and ending the fight quickly. They by no means had a glass jaw, but compared to the Americans or (especially) the Soviets, they simply could not sustain a battle of attrition. And urban warfare so heavily favors the defenders that assaulting a city is almost always a battle of attrition.
Folks forget that the French had rather excellent tanks ~1939 [0], especially in their calvary arms (the Hotchkiss H35 and SOMUA S35).
Which makes sense, since they essentially invented the modern tank in the FT. [1]
The rapid success of the Blitzkrieg was mostly a result of (a) France still being in the middle of re-organizing, equiping, and training their armored forces, (b) some bullshit at Sedan, and (c) French leadership making terrible strategic military decisions again and again [2].
Had the DCr's been supplied (who knew tanks need fuel?) and used to effectively counterattack, as designed, German plans would have ground to a halt.
Instead, you had the French Prime Minister declaring that all was lost six days after the Germans invaded the low countries.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanks_of_France#Inter_War
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_FT
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_France#French_lead...
Meth.
Surprisingly, one of the best histories of Blitzkrieg I've read was a pop-history book (just called 'Blitzkrieg') by Len Deighton, better known for his spy novels. What it lacks in detail, biographical material and so on is made up for by its broad scope, going from industrial production and methods during the interwar rearmament period through to the logistics of the BEF evacuation at Dunkirk.
The botched invasion was nothing like the German Blitzkrieg.
In war, various factors, like the element of surprise, can allow the offense to temporarily overcome an inherently stronger defense. In 1940, the Germans quickly overran the French by catching them off guard tactically and strategically. The French couldn't adapt their defense quickly enough and suffered too many crucial losses early on.
Next year, the Soviets fared even worse than the French initially; but due to geography they managed to survive two crucial years and, at Kursk in 1943, they showed how a well designed defense could stop cold even the best German tanks. The French themselves had a similar experience in WW1: after initially surviving for two hard years, they gave the German attackers a very bloody nose at Verdun.
At Kursk as your first example? I agree that the battle of Kursk showed the Germans how their best tanks could be crushed, but it's not a good example of your point as I understand it.
Firstly because the main reason for victory wasn't so much the ability to destroy German tanks. The Soviets already had this well before July of 1943. Instead victory was because they knew German attack planning in advance and were able to prepare an incredibly robust defense in depth against them while also concealing a superbly equipped counterattack.
Secondly, Kursk isn't the best example because the Battle of Stalingrad much earlier showed how it was possible to stop and then destroy a powerful, well equipped German Army with a tenacious defense and then even mount a ferocious counter offensive (operation Uranus).
Part of the success of Stalingrad for the Soviets was also due to a major earlier blunder of confidence by Hitler, who thought the 6th army alone was enough to take Stalingrad and ordered its accompanying 4th army to separate away from 6th and continue south to join the rest of the previously already split Army Group South (in an even earlier Hitler order that further weakened the later attack on Stalingrad) for an attack on the Caucasus
Fair enough and I see your point, though I still consider Stalingrad a more interesting example of how effective defense can be specifically because there (unlike at the Kursk Salient), the Soviet forces were at first inferior, weakly prepared and poorly commanded, yet still managed to grind the Germans to a gradual halt before grinding them down entirely through sheer tenacity.
And if we're arguing about the wider viability of both organized and even improvised defense tactics vs. intense, well-done offensive tactics, especially when you draw enemies into a complex urban area, Stalingrad excels as an example of what's possible.
The WWII invasion of France was so successful because they struck through the undefended Ardennes, rather than frontally attacking the Maginot line. In that sense the Maginot Line was actually a success, since it prevented a direct invasion of France from Germany, and forced the Germans to attack through other countries.
A key idea of Blitzkrieg (or "maneuver warfare" as it's called today) is that if you can move fast enough, this stops being true. You don't rely on fixed supply lines, and they can't attack your rear when they're not sure where you are and could be somewhere else by the time they organize an attack.
But hating on Lee is still one of the strongest virtue signals we have. So you'll continue going on about Pickett's charge, Lee 'hagiography' and the Lost Cause mythos.
I am well versed on this subject and would love a debate. curious you don’t mention fredericksburg because that would actually support whatever point you think you’re making.
The date is important because it was written before the Ukraine-Russia war's use of drones ramped up. The article doesn't mention drones (UAVs) afaict - how to use them in attack and defense, how to protect yourself - which is today a major omission.
The counter for drones will be the proliferation of CRAM/CIWS and APS. Currently there exists cheap, publicly available (and commonly heavily open sourced) tech stacks for drones but the same is not the case for CRAM/CIWS and APS. But fundamentally the systems that can effectively kill artillery shells, mortars shells, rockets, and missiles in flight will be able to kill drones as well. There are some differences (such as that drones tend to fly lower/slower) but fundamentally the tech applies the same.
And to be entirely honest this proliferation is almost entirely a software problem. Of course the existence of public hardware designs is important as well but getting effective sensor integration, detection, targeting, tracking, and response at a low enough latency will be bottlenecked by access to high quality domain specific software.
Instead of dropping tons of expensive guided bombs and shells, attackers will drop tens of thousands of cheaper small anti-personnel hunter-seeker drones that can not only seek out human targets but wait in low power mode for a target to appear if it can't identify one at first. It'll make most kinds of static installations and defenses untenable. Units will have to constantly be on the move and camouflaged, and avoid giving up all kinds of life signs like sound/gunshots, thermal, RF comms, etc. The smaller drones will be able to help larger drones with targeting any armor they can't handle themselves while acting like free flying land mines.
I agree that it's a software problem. The Slaughterbots video [1] is already six years old and all of the pieces to make killer drone swarms were already there (just not as miniaturized as the video). Now there's data in Ukraine about how well individual drones work; AI is getting better and better; the compute is getting cheap enough to just slap on a drone; SOTA single use aluminum air batteries can already enable drones with much longer flight times than consumer batteries. All the pieces are there to make a nightmarish weapon that changes warfare as much as the machine gun, land mine, or air support.
Having guns and food and ammo is good, but if civilians want to have a chance against NYPD or (insert dystopian boot) then night vision, drones for surveillance and offense, as well as drone defense are needed.
Having offensive drone tech in the hands of domestic law enforcement scares the shit out of me. I think we are one human generation away from the Matrix "Sentinels" being a reality. Swarms of autonomous disposable killer drones.
Civilians should have a right to access to the exact same technology that a government employs with its infantry. I'm not talking Nuclear Weapons or Stealth Bombers, if a 17-year-old recruit can be trusted to operate a drone to kill human beings in a far off foreign country, law-abiding citizens should have access to the same technology. Or, alternatively, we can ban the technology, as long as the police are restricted from using it the same as civilians.
Yeah sure that sounds absolutely sane....
I'm not aware of cops having rocket launchers, but maybe they shouldn't.
If you want to own anti aircraft weapons sure, maybe with a license and a background check. If spending a few million $$$ to explode things in the desert is your jam you should be able to do it. Maybe you could even open source it and help develop better weapons for people in Ukraine or whatever.
From what will they be dropping them?
They’re also small enough to deploy with infantry.
In Ukraine, it seems that a lot of the defender's drones are hybrid surveillance and attack, so they don't know what their target is at launch. You can't point-defend a trenchline. I think the Russians are relying on jammers. Broadband jamming must require a lot of power (and presumably impairs their own comms); narrowband jamming requires knowledge of the attacker's frequency.
CRAM/CIWS generally consists of several weapons systems, and a command centre with the radar, communicating by radio. So those defensive systems are also exposed to jamming, which could be achieved by a high-altitude drone; these systems aren't designed to shoot things at 20,000 ft., although many of them can have a SAM system strapped on.
Anyway, I suspect that drone-antidrone warfare is going to come down to a radio arms-race; i.e. jammer vs. anti-jammer. And you can defeat a jammer using beamforming.
Yeah that's not really the point. You use CRAM or CIWS at installations, cities, and maybe even towns. But then you use APS for military vehicles.
You don't need to stop every attack along a border, you just need to protect important installations and population centers.
> You can't point-defend a trenchline
Sure you can't but you can point defend mobile artillery, tanks, and other mechanized infantry. This greatly reduces the actual value you get out of a drone strike. You won't be hitting high value targets without spending a lot of resources in a saturation attack.
> I think the Russians are relying on jammers
They try to and it's not particularly effective.
> So those defensive systems are also exposed to jamming
This is only the case if you communicate by radio. In an active combat environment, if you are setting up installations that may be the best you can do at the time but for regions that are currently at peace, you can absolutely run fiber-optics between the weapons systems, sensor systems, and command center(s), leaving radio comms as a fallback. It's definitely more expensive but if you are installing equipment in a city or permanent military installation, you probably already have access to fiber runs that could be procured as dedicated/dark fiber.
> Anyway, I suspect that drone-antidrone warfare is going to come down to a radio arms-race
That'll definitely be a heavy component of it but the defense side should be able to insulate themselves from the arms race as long as they invest in the infrastructure ahead of time rather than waiting until a hot war starts to protect soft targets.
Just installing point defence for all the power generation would be expensive. Point-defence for e.g. Odessa or Kharkiv is impossible, because they are cities, not "points".
I decided to ask ChatGPT 3.5 about what a Westpoint Academy instructor would have to say about defending a city and defensive tactics beyond those commonly known and the answer was not nearly as interesting.