ARMS-D-Request@MIT-MC.ARPA (Moderator) (01/10/86)
Arms-Discussion Digest Thursday, January 9, 1986 5:05PM
Volume 6, Issue 16
Today's Topics:
Automatic weapons
Deep Strike
Paranoia
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Date: Thu, 9 Jan 86 13:49:38 EST
From: Jeff Miller AMSTE-TEI 4675 <jmiller@apg-1>
Subject: Automatic weapons
The function of automatic weapons is primarily to achieve full fire super-
iority by means of fire suppression.
Many "old timers" have never understood this concept, and have traditionally
groused about the demise of older, long-range aimed fire small arms like the
M-1 Garand and the M-14.
Unfortunately, as the Germans during the latter stages of WWII, and then the
Soviets right behind learned, the era has long passed where the majority of
infantry combats would take place at 600-1000m ranges, favoring more accurate
slow fire weapons. The fact that combats since mid-WWII average about 150m or
less, and the advent of automatic weapons at all levels of infantry
organizations, has placed emphasis on lighter, higher firepower weapons which
allow for the massing of fires so as to overpower the enemy's fires.
This means, in effect, that keeping the other guys' heads down is more
important than individually zapping them. Going back to the original musing
that started further musing on automatic weapons, theorizing incorrectly that
the advent of automatic weapons was somehow inspired by a need to
indiscriminately plaster the opposition so as to obviate the chances that
soldiers would deliberately choose to miss enemies out of humanitarian
concerns, it just isn't so.
- It may be of some interest along the lines of that earlier discussion that
great numbers of Vietnam veterans were traumatically affected by their
inability to acquire targets so that they could strike back at the enemy who
they hardly ever saw, yet who remorselessly slew and maimed their comrades.
Perhaps the humanitarian reluctance to shoot the other guy is a noble feeling
among troops fresh to the fray, but one which dissolves rapidly as the reality
of seeing one's friends killed, and of being a target one's self, comes home.
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Date: Thu, 9 Jan 86 13:55:42 EST
From: Jeff Miller AMSTE-TEI 4675 <jmiller@apg-1>
Subject: Deep Strike
** Tried to send this to Gary Chapman <PARC!CSLI!chapman@glacier,
but our mailer burped it back at me.
Glad to hear you are aware of the OMG's. They are actually a carry over of the
Mobile Groups, a concept that has been around since WWII.
The OMGs are not specific tactical units assigned specific missions as you
state, but are a concept for task organizing of combined arms groups anywhere
in size and strength from the battalion to the front (army group), depending
on the opportunity presented the Direction commander.
You have your terms mixed-up - it is AirLand Battle 2000 that is currently
called Army 21 (not Army 20), since tha innovations envisaged now extend a
couple of decades past the turn of the 21st century.
AirLand Battle and AirLand Battle 2000 are not different birds, altogether or
separately. ALB is the basic concept, again, akin to the concept of the OMG,
whereby the Army is attempting to switch emphasis from the defensive set-piece
battle relying on continuous frontal lines fighting either in retrograde
defense based on strongpoint anchors or linear offensive, to the notion of
penetrating in strength at weakpoints, going deep in the enemy's rear to
disrupt his second and third echelon follow-on forces and his supply and LOCs
as well. This is somewhat revolutionary for us as it concedes that the
enemy's local superiority will disadvantage our traditional approach to
conventional warfighting; fat, dumb and happy - i.e. counting on our
traditionally expected high consumption of supply based on our traditionally
ample availability of bullets, beans and bodies. Now our leaders must be
prepared to live off the land, travel with less baggage, use captured
materiel, and practice other areas of resourcefulness which we historically
didn't have to worry about.
ALB 2000 is/was the projections out thru the turn of the century as to how we
would carry out this concept in the future. Unfortunately, in my opinion, a
lot of the pragmatic rightthinking involved in adopting this approach to
warfighting is diluted by the overemphasis on hi-tech gizmos envisaged to help
fight this difficult sort of battle, thus promoting the notion of a "Genie in
the bottle" to save our forces butts, replacing the older notion that our
wealth of resources would save our butts.
Again, the tactical concept of deep penetration to cut off and disrupt local
enemy forces, and the strategic concept of deep penetration to ultimately
sever enemy theater forces from support, are not fundamentally new ideas in
warfare, and if either sides' adoption of them can be said to be more
"dangerous" than any other tactic, I don't see how.d
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Subject: Paranoia
Date: 09 Jan 86 13:42:57 PST (Thu)
From: foy@aero
>What difference does it make that the Soviet leadership considers its military
>outlays purely defensive if their defensiveness is based on a paranoia that
>requires them to look upon the world from behind militarized borders and bands
>of buffer states which never seem to totally satisfy? No informed person
>believes that they have held the East Europeans in thralldom as part of their
>"world-wide ideological conspiracy" It is their buffer zone against the West
>in general and against Germany in particular, the specter of whose re-
>unification strikes more fear into the Russian soul than six Ronald Reagans.
> J.Miller
It makes a big difference if their expansionism is coming from paranoia rather
than something else. The worst way of dealing with paranoia is to do things
which reinforce their belief that the world is out to get them, ie installing
cruise misssiles in Germany etc.
richard foy
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End of Arms-Discussion Digest
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