Forard into Battle Fighting Tactics from Waterloo to the Near Future [Paperback]

The first edition (1981) took a critical look at the accepted wisdom of historians who interpreted battlefield events primarily by reference to firepower. It showed that Wellington's infantry had won by their mobility rather than their musketry, that the bayonet did not become obsolete in the nineteenth century as is often claimed, and that the tank never supplanted the infantryman in the twentieth. A decade later, the author has been able to fill out many parts of his analysis and has extended it into the near future. The Napoleonic section includes an analysis of firepower and fortification, notably at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. Additional discussions of the tactics of the American Civil War have been included. The evolution of small-unit tactics in the First World War is next considered, then the problem of making an armored breakthrough in the Second World War. Following is a discussion of the limitations of both the helicopter and firepower in Vietnam. The author points to some of the lessons learned by the U.S. military and the doctrine which resulted from that experience. Concluding is a glimpse at the strangely empty battlefield landscape that might be expected in any future high technology conflict.1
Introduction
 
 
Nicky Rokossovsky held his breath as his gunner’s laser rangefinder registered on the blurred image of the T94, then the protracted muffled ‘boom’ of firing told him that the first 120 mm round had started on its three kilometres of accelerated, arching flight. The unequal midnight battle, for which he had manoeuvred his squadron so hectically during the past four hours of darkness and radio silence, had finally begun. Everything now depended on whether his tiny force of eight Challenger Mark VIIIs could make its ambush stick against that Soviet tank battalion eerily jinking its way across the video-image of meadowland in the distance – and then whether he could bug out in time to find and ml³*