No good title

.

There were a couple ages-long tensions regarding force composition and armament in land forces:

One example was the conflict of choosing between melee and missile capability. There were archers with good melee capability (such as the Babylonian troops with bow and spear), but much of the time missile troops were poor in melee and melee troops were poor or mere targets at range. Attempts to create a hybrid that was good at both were made, but didn't seem to be successful enough to finally settle the question.

State of the art during the mid-17th century was to have a growing share of missile infantry (musketeers) and a waning share of melee infantry (halberdiers) to protect the missile infantry especially against cavalry. There were also some late attempts to combine missile and melee prowess, such as by the double-armed man with longbow and pike (the sword didn't count, being a mere sidearm).

The arrival of practical bayonets seemed to  settle the issue. The musketeer  became able to turn his musket into a lousy spear. It was good-enough to scare horses and the shots were good enough to scare hostile infantry. Some attempts were made to improve the melee prowess with blade sidearms, but they proved largely impractical (and the iron alloy quality for blades was quite expensive).

Then - a long time later - the problem came up again. Again, there were two kinds of infantrymen; submachinegunners with short range firepower and riflemen with long-range firepower. It took only a generation to harmonise this by moving towards intermediate cartridges and the assault rifle.

Now we hear people 'whining' about supposedly insufficient range (that is, from mountain to mountain) of such cartridges, and more powerful single shot rifles ('designated marksman rifle') were introduced, in yet another effort to enjoy more longer range specialists' benefits.

The lesson is probably that we should be glad to have a hybrid, but there will always be people who think they're smarter than the compromise and long for the benefits of specialisation. I guarantee you; the more specialisation we add, the more people will think that the hybrid is the smarter choice.

___________

Another such tension was about armour; how much protection is the right level of protection?

Heavily armoured warriors / soldiers usually are more capable in melee. Lightly or unarmoured troops are cheaper, quicker, have better endurance, are better-suited for extreme temperatures, can swim and unlike some of the most-armoured troops types they do need no servants.

Rome attempted to standardise its troops into armoured troops under Marius, probably because this was best-suited for professional (16, 20 years of service) troops. This was hugely successful, but they had to support their core of professional troops with lots of specialist and mercenary troops, most of which were much less well-armoured.

The question about armour appeared to have been answered for good by the late 18th century when even heavy cavalry no more used even only breastplates. The bullets of muskets had good penetrative power and armour seemed to be quite pointless. It was reintroduced for a short stint during the Napoleonic Wars (for cuirassiers, but other troops added at least some head protection as well).

Iron manufacturing improved, and 'bullet-proofed' body armour was tried again and again from the mid-19th century to WW2. It never made it into general usage, though steel helmets did in face of the high explosive munitions' fragmentation threat. Other materials were used to add protection tot eh torso against fragmentation, but only by the 1990's did the bulletproofing of torsos take off again. Helmets were bulletproofed against rifle bullets again sometime around 2010.

Again, it's nothing but an ancient struggle. The drawbacks of personal armour protection remain largely the same (weight, cost) while technology swings the pendulum around.

___________

The force composition between highly mobile (cavalry) forces and rather slow-moving (infantry) forces was another such struggle.

The pendulum swung towards mounted forces during the migration period, and swung back towards dismounted forces in the 14th and 15th centuries (in Europe). The great increase of rifle firepower during the mid-19th century seemed to make cavalry obsolete save for mostly non-combat purposes, but the motorization seemingly pushed the pendulum back towards  highly mobile forces, up to complete motorization. On the other hand, horse cavalry forces were not really much quicker on long-distance marches than infantry anyway. Horse cavalry had its advantage mostly in battle mobility and in quick marches for a day or two as required for reconnaissance. We still have a similar difference between tracked and wheeled forces; tanks are more mobile off-road, but wheeled mobility gives most troops actually better march mobility than the tracked tanks possess. So motorization did not really push the pendulum around all that much; the overall level of mobility was increased (albeit not by much in face of opposition*).

Theorists of the 60's to 80's thought of the helicopter as being the true high speed alternative on the nowadays, but their costs grew to such extremes after the 1960's that their use en masse has become unaffordable.

___________

Professional high quality troops vs. cheaper low quality troops in greater numbers. Frankly, this choice almost always ended the same way; a mixes force was more cost-efficient to both a high end-only and low end-only forces in land warfare. The only exception I can think of is the enlightenment age when armies became quite homogenous in their internal quality in Europe. There were Jäger and Grenadier units among more common Prussian Füsilier infantry and there were different kinds of cavalry, but overall the German, princes, French and British appeared to have applied high expectations to all their infantry at least and the rather mixed concept and mixed quality Austrian army did not prove superior to this.

The idea of all-high end land forces was revived by de Gaulle in his theoretical work, but an all-mechanised force still seems impractical and most importantly, we know it would be inefficient.

The interest in all-professional forces was renewed post-Vietnam War, but "professional" did not necessarily equate "higher quality" compared to long-serving conscripts as peacetime comparisons between U.S. Army and (West) German Heer revealed. Nowadays we have good reason to believe that even professional forces need a strong reserve personnel pool.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: I remember a 1990's article from an American military professional journal that showed how the advance speeds of quick campaign moves didn't change much with motorisation. Pre-motorisation armies were often very quick for a couple days as well. Motorised armies didn't come close to exploiting their technical speed.

.