Modern forces in historical settings?

Question

Just interested in getting some opinions of how people feel modern effective professional forces, such as 16 Air Assault battalion or the RAR would adapt to massive static defences such as on the Western Front. I am hypothesising that they would have the modern availability of combined arms assault, or try to utilise the massive wave assault of the era (as obviously troop numbers are insufficient and the modern soldier is much more valuable in terms of invested training etc) Do people feel it would be possible with fire and move and modern techniques to overcome such static defences??

Sorry guys, great answers but I had actually meant to say not utilising combined arms assault, but was typing too fast and missed the important not. The idea was, could modern professional infantry overcome heavy static defences such as present on the western front, better than the batter down the door with thousands that was used at the time....

Answer 1

You suppose that they are better trained, but that is at their craft. If they were thrown into the trenches of that era I doubt they would fair much better with the arms of the day. Some tactics might work a bit better, but they could encounter tactics they never trained on today.



g-day!

Answer 2

I've been wondering that myself.

I assume they'd resort to modern fire and movement tactics. Mass wave attacks inevitably cost a lot of men - something that can't be spared with the cost of modern equipment and training. For instance, It takes a total of 152 training days to take a fresh recruit and train him to the standard required of any light infantry battalion in the RAR. In the World Wars, it was perfectly common for soldiers to be rushed through in a matter of a few weeks, if trained at all.

Could they overcome it? Probably - German infantry organised as stormtroopers had great success late in WW1 when they left the trenches and crept toward the allied lines. Besides, against modern technology, old static defences just don't work. Just imagine what you could do to a trench with modern artillery or cluster bombs.

Answer 3

As with most technological weapons advancement systems that one side has, the other countries soon follow or develop in tandem, all it takes is a captured example to be analyzed before the copy's are churned out.

Your question doesn't really make much difference, as seen for example with WW2, the Germans started off ahead in technology but raw brute manpower and unsophisticated weapons defeated them in the long run.

The Germans were unable to obtain the raw materials and unable to keep the Allies from hitting their armament production centers.

In a WW1 scenario it took the intervention of Armour to punch through the front lines, followed by mass infantry and support to gain and hold ground.

The Germans already had highly trained, highly motivated Stormtroopers armed with sub-machine guns and flame throwers who were used to make the breach, late into the war, but in reality could not get enough reserves into place, due to the chronic shortage of men, caused by the mass slaughter in the early years of the war.

Answer 4

well if you took out the obvious advances in missile, tank and plane technology any static line of defence like the trenches of WWI 1 would be obliterated, taking this out of the equation a modern force would not cope against the WW 1 trench warfare purely because of numbers in each side after all in WW 1 thousands where slaughtered on a daily basis.

Answer 5

The best way would be just as George HW Bush did it in Desert Storm; Soften them up and remove most of their static defenses with air strikes then move in with ground troops to sweep and clear.

Answer 6

Yeah they could do it, wouldn't even be that hard. Modern missile technology makes static defenses pretty useless.

Any bunker will be collapsed by a bunker buster. Trenches will be cleared by cluster bombs. Hell.. there's even a single missle that can take out like 100 enemy armored vehicles at once. Anything that's left gets hit by a fuel air bomb..

Answer 7

it depends on who would be commanding the other armies, Napoleon or Julius Cesar a modern army wouldn't stand a chance provided the modern army had the same weapons at their disposal no modern weapons allowed.

Answer 8

Why not?
It was successful back in the past.
With the return of the Magnificent Seven.