You are talking artillery here,and nobody in their right mind will prefer "shoot over the hill" artillery to tac-air. I understand artillery is a LOT more accurate today than it was in the past,but it's hard to beat a system where the shooter can see the actual target with his own eyes.
Direct fire support groups are also useful set up minutes before an engagement up to a mile away. They can move as engagement areas move, over time scales of hours.
No,they can't. They can in flat land areas,but NOT in mountains like this. All they would do would be slow down the light infantry who are in hot pursuit,and give the enemy a chance to regroup.
Both are simply operational tasks that have been well within our forces' capabilities in the past, and there is no reason whatever to tolerate loss of those abilities.
Wrong. When they have been used in the past,it was against a conventional force that was dug-in along well-defined lines of resistance,and in terrain where armor and weapons carriers were able to manuever. The only exceptions to this that I am aware of were the cases in Asia where the US Army used mules to transport weapons up and down mountainous jungle trails. Even then a 50 Cal,81mm mortar,or a 106 RR was about the limit to what they carried. I'm speaking about Merrill's Marauders here,as well as Fertig's guerillas in the Philapines,and I don't think they EVER had artillery support. Another example was in Italy,where the US Army used mules to transport supplies up the hill to Monte Casino,and the dead bodies back down. Again,no heavy weapons were deployed by ground forces.
Of course they do. Their guerillas are not armed with mere AKs,they have the standard weapons loadout of dismounted Warsaw pact style infantry.
This doesn't mean they are a conventional infantry force. They are working in the role of raider or guerilla now,not as a conventional infantry force. In other words,they ain';t making massed attacks against fortified positions in order to secure territory.
Horsepucky again. They have employed groups up to company size, and regularly employ groups up to platoon size.
These are raiding parties,not armies.
Yes, they are. You are simply in error here. They have used mortars defensively when we go to their areas, and offensively to come after ours.
You don't understand the difference between THEIR offensive operations and theirs? When they go on the attack,they ain't chasing nobody. They have all the time they need to move anything anywhere they need to move it. When WE go on the offensive,we are generally restricted as to how much time we have to act. We have to go right NOW.
If you don't even understand that the Taliban are not simply sitting up in their caves, but regularly fire on our perimeters, including using mortars and MRLs to do so, then you just haven't the faintest notion what is happening over there right now.
Name the last time they overran a US base. Or even made a serious attempt to overrun one.What they are doing is firing harrassment shots hoping to increase our casualities.
Straw man. Nobody is talking about mechanized infantry. I am talking about infantry heavy weapons, and heliborne infantry.
Please. Are you really going to argue the difference between transport methods? What's the real difference between troops and equipment rolled off the ramp of a heavy Chinook or brought in under a sling,and the same troops and equipment brought in via Bradley and Humvee?
Javelins and Mk-19s and HMGs and medium mortars are all designed to be used dismounted.
I agree with you,here. It MAY be practical under certain conditions to bring them in to do fire support missions,with the prime consideration being,"as long as they don't slow down the advance or further hinder operations". This was one of the problems created by the army and the politicians during the VN war. Troops weren't allowed to move into a area that hadn't been "prepped" with artillery and tac-air first,and this was a dead giveaway to the enemy that we were coming in a area. The result was boobytraps and ambushes while the main enemy element slipped away.
Our enemies use their versions of these things, without running them around in BMPs or BTRs. They hump them on their backs up and down 8000 foot mountains,successfully.
Of course they do. And they are on attack and in hot pursuit of a fleeing enemy while they are doing it. This DOES makea difference.
We have choppers to fly them near where they are needed, and only need to hump them short distances to where our plan needs them on a given occasion.
I'm just guessing here,but I suspect we have a limitied amount of airlift capability available there,and this probably has a lot to do with what gets carried where. I certainly agree with the above proposal if the airlift capability is there to do this without endangering the assault troops.
The delivery platform of lifts to high mountains is the CH-47,same as for the rest of the infantry. Lower down you can use UH-60s, same as the rest of the infantry.
I know this. I'm saying better platforms should be developed for this purpose. Those ain't the only mountains in the world.
The delivery platform for movements over relatively level ground, to save fatigue, can be a small ATV.
Sounds good,but adds another level of complexity to the manpower staffing,as well as a further burden on the supply system. More mechanics,more motor pools,more parts requisitioned,more cooks,MP,personell clerks,finance clerks,etc,etc,etc to provide for the new motor pool people. Pretty soon you have yet another "Camp Bondsteel".
Of course down on valley floors you can add Humvees.
I don't think there are any battles being fought on the valley floors anymore.Maybe some sniping,and that's about it.
The delivery platform for movements up ridge faces from drop off point to firing position is a human back, same as we now hump AT-4s and 60mm mortars around to have something,anything, on the ground that can damage an adobe hut.
60mm mortars are a LOT more practical than your earlier proposal to have 7.62 sniper rifles in every squad. Don't be fooled by all the nonesense you hear about the 7.62 penetrating MUCH better than the current 5.56mm round. It just ain't so at any practical distances. There ain't gonna be very many people making shots at beyond 300-400 meters out there because most riflemen can't hit squat beyond that range,and even most than can don't have the ability to do so in the mountains with the swirling winds whipping around. "Doping wind" isn't something everybody can learn to do properly.
It requires no more for an LZ for heavy weapons than is required for an LZ for a stick of grunts with rifles and SAWs.
You're right here. No doubt about it. It IS a added burden placed on the back of the infantry unit making the assault,though.
Moreover, an LZ for heavy weapons doesn't need to be as close to an objective to be useful, since heavy weapons have superior range.
What you are overlooking is that this isn't "set piece" warfare with clearly defined lines. The Taliban can be anywhere in that area,and the cave complexes and tunnels make it possible for them to come out of a hole in the ground right next to your new heavy weapons guys.
All the usual tactics for employing heliborne forces of course apply to insertions, regardless of what you are inserting - including prior spotting overflight, suppressive fire, etc.
See,here is another area where we disagree. I've already stated why I object to crap like suppressive fire on a LZ. You might as well take a ad out in the Taliban Times to let them know when and where you are coming. All this really does is give them more time to prepare for you.
The Taliban have some of the most primitive air defense of any adversary we are likely to face, and they still manage to put the most advanced gunships out of action with rotor damage, and to bring down other choppers, with mere MGs and RPGs.
OK,so why do you want to risk more by bringing in heavy weapons on slings?
How many choppers do we have to lose, with the men on the ground afterward hung out to dry for hours on end, before anybody wises up and admits that you need some firepower on the freaking ground?
I dunno.How many choppers AND 105's do we have to lose before this becomes a bad idea?
And then I get lectured for pointing it out, because some people would rather think say or do anything, than admit that ranged firepower matters in modern warfare, even ground warfare. Which is simply insane.
I understand the desire of you heavy weapons guys to get into the fight,but the old saying that "to a kid with a hammer,everything looks like a nail" applies here. I'm sure there are situations where your suggestions would work well,and other places where if they became doctrine,it would only result in more US losses. Post Reply | Private Reply | To 40 | View
I am talking about mortars with modern smart ammo. Tube artillery is heavy for use on high mountains, and high trajectory fire is more effective. Mortar firebases can be set up rapidly and give rapid, responsive fires in mountain terrain. And these days, smart ones, using laser designators, GPS coordinates, counterbattery radar locations, or terminal IR homing. And plenty of people in their right mind would prefer rounds on target in 30 seconds to trying to talk an F-16 strike toward a pimple on the side of a K2-sized mountain only 200 yards from friendlies.
Infantry heavy weapons can certainly move in mountain terrain. You land by chopper at this ledge or clear area, you hump up to that ridgeline to cover the next draw over. When you want to reposition, you reverse the process and repeat, for another ridge. They aren't going to "slow down" anybody, as they are not co-located with all of the ordinary infantry. They are, however, going to cover positions ordinary infantry moves against, seal off escape routes by fire, etc. It is pretty hard to cover 70 square miles with a few hundred 5.56mm weapons. It is a lot easier with long range weapons on dominating terrain. Which is what our opponents understand about fighting in such mountains, and why they bother humping around 82mm mortars and heavy machineguns. Which in case everybody just forgot, are the weapons giving our guys trouble.
"When they have been used in the past,it was against a conventional force that was dug-in along well-defined lines of resistance"
Completely false as a matter of history. Use of supporting heavy weapons for bases of fire was SOP in Vietnam, against guerillas, in difficult terrain. Also against Japanese in the Pacific, fighting from cave complexes without conventional lines. 50 cals, medium mortars, and modern weapons as light or lighter than recoilless rifles (automatic grenade launchers, shoulder-fired ATGMs) are exactly what I am talking about as infantry heavy weapons. At the battalion level, there are also 120mm mortars which are heavier, but have the range to act from centralized firebases. The idea that no heavy weapons were used in Italian mountain fighting is also wrong. Medium mortars and medium machineguns were used as a matter of course. Indeed, SOP was to clear a hilltop with direct mortar fire or longer range arty, and then defend it with MMGs, which would dominate the surrounding terrain. Nobody thought you could fight in mountains with mere small arms, precisely because lines of sight are long.
As for "infantry", nowhere is it written that making massed attacks against fortified positions is the definition of "infantry". It flat isn't. The Taliban use infantry to hold fortified positions, and to snipe at fortified positions. They'd use it to interdict movements past terrain defiles if we moved around on the ground, as well. They do not use mere AKs for any of the above, and in fact organize around longer range heavier weapons. Getting those into position, or protecting them from our men with nothing more than 5.56mm or 200 yard range weapons, is what the rest of the ordinary riflemen are for.
"When WE go on the offensive, we are generally restricted as to how much time we have to act. We have to go right NOW."
A chopper with a Javelin team aboard is not any slower than a chopper full of snake-eaters. It takes light infantry hours to move in high mountain terrain, anyway. The enemy does not get away in mere minutes because no one can hike up and down thousand foot chasms in mere minutes.
"What they are doing is firing harrassment shots hoping to increase our casualities."
Duh. They are fighting by fire, at range. That is how the modern game is played. You do not counter it by trying to run over them with men in shirts armed with nothing heavier than a SAW. You counter it by IDing their positions and taking them out by fire, at range. Sometimes you can do that with called airstrikes, particularly when the target is visually prominent, immobile, tightly concentrated, or not too close to friendly forces. Sometimes you can do it by putting a Javelin crosshair on a bunker apeture - *if* your doctrine is not so hair-brained it doesn't force you to leave said Javelin behind, as supposedly "too heavy". (You can carry it on one shoulder fer pete's sake).
"as long as they don't slow down the advance"
Screw "the advance". We aren't trying to take territory either, and they aren't trying to defend it, except to have something to shoot at when the shooting looks good. The decision against small bunches of enemy can be achieved by ranged fire. It doesn't matter how fast "the advance" is once the target of that advance is a pile of dead bodies.
The new method on the modern empty battlefield is to place ranged assets with good coverage, able to trump particular enemy weapons in assymmetric engagements (e.g. Javelin against MG, Mk-19 against RPG, smart 120mm with radar vs. dumn 82mm without), from beyond range of effective reply. Then probe with light infantry, into areas covered by such overwatch. When enemies engage, destroy them from range. If they stay down, the light infantry creeps on top of them and finishes them. No maneuver massing is required. The battle resolves into discrete ranged duels, with movement by light forces merely the triggering threat to force enemies to open up, displace, or be overrun. Firepower is in the driver's seat, not men with mere SAWs.
"I suspect we have a limitied amount of airlift capability available there"
The primary limit on airlift is actually safety of the choppers. Once an HMG opens up in a given area, they are vectored out, and additional drops are only allowed some distance away (behind a couple of ridges, typically). The result is that every hot LZ becomes an isolated former LZ, with the men on the ground thrown back on their own resources, and called fixed wing airstrikes. The men can then only move (1) once all enemy heavy weapons have been eliminated, to remove their "pinning" effect or (2) after dark, by slow ground movement to a safer location (often made far more difficult by the presence of friendly casualties).
Other friendlies can be dropped some distance away, but must then hump up difficult terrain to reach locations that can see the same enemy engaging the LZ area. If not already planned ahead of time and so already in progress, that takes hours. Typical short movements as the crow flies may involve elevation changes of 1000-2000 feet. Which do not occur at a "chasing" pace, I assure you. The idea is to put ranged and heavy weapons on dominate ridges either beforehand when possible, or as a consequence of these supplimentary lifts, as well as having some on the ground in the original LZ. E.g. there could be a javelin team and 7.62mm sniper rifles in every squad. These give the guys on the ground an ability to silence the enemy ranged weapons pinning the LZ, and preventing chopper support. Right now, they lie there helplessly trying to keep their wounded from bleeding to death while calling "danger close" F-16 strikes.
I mentioned "a small ATV", and you said "Sounds good, but adds another level of complexity to the manpower staffing, as well as a further burden on the supply system." What crap. Like we can't get an ATV that will run for the duration of a single combat mission. An AH-64 requires 10 man-hours of maintenance per hour of flight time, but you want "another gunship" instead of Javelins on the ground, because the Javelins on the ground are going to involve -more- maintenance work?
Of course there are fights down on valley floors. They come out on their mortar and MRL raids against us, and we chase them back to the higher ground. So Humvees are still useful. The nice thing about them is that in a pinch you can sling them under a chopper and shift to the next valley. But all of that was a side comment of mine to begin with. As for the comment, "some sniping, that is about it", the -war- is "some sniping". Winning the "some sniping" engagements, lopsidedly, is the idea. If they fight them with 82mm mortars and HMGs and we fight them with SAWs, we aren't going to win them. Airpower may let us break even, but we could just win these outright.
"There ain't gonna be very many people making shots at beyond 300-400 meters out there because most riflemen can't hit squat beyond that range"
Again this is crap. With a good 7.62 and scope, hits out to 1000m can be achieved regularly, meaning up to 40% of the time. When the Brits fought in Afghanistan long ago, even without scopes, they regularly engaged in rifle duels at ranges up to 1500 meters. The same happened in the Boer war. Sparsely populated open battlefields with long lines of sight are not built up and heavily vegetation-covered western Europe. Shooting at long range may be an art the army no longer teaches to line infantrymen, and that is fine. But there is no reason 1-3 men per squad can't be trained to the standards of line riflemen in other people's armies a century ago. Especially not with modern optics to help them.
In the era of mass conscript armies, this may have seemed pointless because rifles hit only a few men. But modern battlefields are distinctly less populated, and a few hits make more of a difference because of it. If they can be achieved at range. Ask anyone who has been over there if he'd like to climb 2000 feet of mountain face with a sniper shooting at him from a mile away. The pinning and dominating effect of ranged weapons is multiplied in such rugged terrain, because there are few troops, few feasible routes, and movements are agonizingly slow.
"this isn't "set piece" warfare with clearly defined lines."
I am not only not overlooking it, I am counting on it. Put the heavy weapons up on dominating terrain, and maneuver light squads around the areas they overwatch, in every direction. You walk your lines of sight around an objective, not your men. Or rather, your men second, afterward, into places under your overwatch. When you get a heavy weapons position onto ridge A, you "own by fire" all the places seen from A. You men can move over those areas, knowing that any enemies firing from those areas can be eliminated by your overwatch replies. Once your squads have reached just below B, move a heavy weapons group to B (or occupy it first with just sniper rifles and a javelin team, then leapfrog a heavy weapons section forward).
"possible for them to come out of a hole in the ground right next to your new heavy weapons guys."
Fine, shoot them. They will be in the same position in reverse, as our guys are these days when pinned down in a hot LZ. With the difference that they won't have any airpower to come save them.
"risk more by bringing in heavy weapons on slings?"
What slings? Every item I am talking about fits inside choppers for lift. But regardless, the point about their AD abilities is that the guys on the ground cannot rely on fire support from choppers once an LZ goes hot. You can't put only eyeballs on the ground and have all the ranged weapons flying. Because they can and do drive away the stuff flying (choppers, I mean). The solution is some ranged weapons on the ground, so when the chopper "bridge" is cut, you can still take out the enemy heavy weapons closing the LZ.
"I understand the desire of you heavy weapons guys to get into the fight"
Not what is going on here. I am reading the after action reports of the guys on the ground, talking about how outgunned they were. Detailing their problems, like "there is an MG in a bunker under a tree 200 yards away, and we've got 3 men wounded already, and the LZ is hot so the choppers have all D'ed". And you know what they are reduced to? They try Audie Murphy charges at MG nests and take more casualties. They try cover fire - from 5.56mm SAWs that can't go through an adobe hut. They try calling in F-16 strikes "danger close". They wait hours, as men bleed to death. This happened. They said so. I am listening to them, and somebody else isn't. I have just sort of noticed that e.g. in the Gulf, a man would have put an ATGM crosshair on that bunker and their problem would be gone.
Why do I get all of this resistence? I explain for the benefit of the peanut gallery. Because there are people around today who want tomorrow's armed forces to consist of (1) things that fly and shoot and (2) men on the ground IDing targets, traveling as light as possible and (3) nothing in between. And it is just a cockamamie idea that does not work in practice. When actual experience shows this to be so, doing anything about those actual experiences is verboten. Because it might lead to categories of future military personnel, or expense line items, not part of the Grand Vision (TM). Which looks more and more like Les Aspin not sending what the guys in theater asked for, every day.