Infantry survivability

 
I believe that infantry survivability in major war hasn't been addressed as much as it needs to be.
Many small wars have taught us that our infantry can be seen by the enemy and survive for months, with minimal losses.

That's not what we'd experience in a major war and it's not the experience of our opponents.

To be seen by the enemy means to play Russian roulette with several cartridges. Modern weapons have become too lethal. Modern infantry warfare in major war wouldn't be about better weapons, but about who sees whom first. The killing is the comparably simple part in most terrains. You need only to be calm and have some minutes of instruction to be able to hit someone at up to 300m distance with a rifle today.

That's why we need to enable our future infantry reinforcements to remain unseen even without long training.
Camouflage and deception of dismounted/infantry troops require good NCOs more than anything else, but we can help it also with equipment.
Our equipment has a remarkable emphasis on lethality/firepower; survivability has been enhanced in the past decades primarily by adding armour to the infantryman's equipment.

That's the appropriate reaction to the small war situation; you're visible anyway, so you add armour instead of deception or camouflage.

Well, this approach won't work so fine in major war conditions in my humble opinion.
The addition of so many, heavy armour plates is an extreme reaction for an extreme situation - an it will fail in other situations. Armour isn't worth much if you get shot at with machine guns, sniper rifles, assault rifles, mortars and possibly even (guided) antitank weapons. They'll eventually crack the plate once too often or simply hit the soft, unprotected body parts.

Deception and camouflage are not really reliable means, but they have huge potential that you don't see at all in small wars. Deception and camouflage are not only defensive tools; they are ingredients of surprise, and therefore very useful for offensive actions as well.

Camouflage is also quite lightweight - a full body camo suit like this


(example: Saab Baracuda Sotacs) weights only as much as a fragmentation protection vest and doubles as rain protection (general infantry suits can weigh less, this one is rather well-suited for scouts, snipers/observers and heavy weapons crews).
Such a suit increases the reload times and it generally takes longer to use equipment stored behind the suit, but the value of camouflage can hardly be overestimated when the lethality of a modern platoon is greater than the lethality of an entire 18th century field army.

Another important ability is to fight when concealed or even behind cover. Old-fashioned periscopes for machine guns and sniper rifles


(this is a periscope on Austrian MG74 - gloves would have made the camouflage even better) enable the use of the weapon without much exposure. That needs to be common, not uncommon.

Such equipment doesn't need as much training as conventional camouflage, deception and hiding does. Let's do the NCOs their jobs in teaching our infantry - but give them the right tools, and make sure that they don't use the wrong lessons.

We need to emphasize camouflage over armour; low intensity warfare has taught us the wrong lessons; we'd bleed a lot in the next major war if we don't prepare for it properly.

S O