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I keep looking at historical army equipment and it's fascinating how simple the equipment even of an entire infantry regiment can be.
An example from WW2:
All an infantry regiment really needed (if I break it down to minimum required quantity of arms types) was:
- rifle
- submachinegun
- universal machinegun
- recoilless gun
- mortar
This can be further reduced with an automatic closed bolt action such as StG 45 had (a late WW2 prototype weapon, but not out of reach technology-wise by early WW2):
- battle rifle
- universal machinegun
- recoilless gun
- mortar
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(Keep in mind mines, demolition charges, rifle grenades and hand grenades count as munitions rather than weapons. Flare guns were a tool rather than a weapon outside of German armed forces. Pistols were not a serious weapon post-1871 and irrelevant by WW2.)
Moreover, recoilless gun and mortar could be had in one calibre (90...120 mm smoothbore), sharing some fuze and grenade designs and not needing any expensive rifled barrels. A 105...120 mm smoothbore recoilless rifle would excel at using shaped charges for anti-tank work out to about 500 m distance (moving target, 1 km against standing tank). A rifled one would instead be able to penetrate 100+ mm of RHA with a HESH/HEP approach.
The whole arsenal of such a force could have been produced in backyard workshops save for the supply of unfinished steel parts including barrels. (Again, munitions excluded, but TNT, mercury fulminate and cordite are enough and all simple 19th century tech.) No extraordinary skill was needed, one fully qualified gunsmith, one metalworks machining instructor and maybe one welder would have sufficed to train the entire workforce via snowball system. The only extraordinary production tech was the then-new stamping (particularly for the StG45 - modern machinery, but usable by unskilled labour).
The most difficult equipment to produce for such an infantry regiment were probably the radios with their rechargeable batteries. The typewriters were quite complicated, too. And then there were the motor vehicles, but those were still optional during WW2.
You may think something is missing - air defence. Actually, effective air defence (better than ordinary machineguns) was hardly ever present in WW2 infantry regiments. A well-rounded one could have had something like the Madsen 20 mm M/38 for keeping ground attack aircraft at 1.5 km distance and dealing with nimble armoured cars, of course.
BTW, historical WW2 infantry regiment arsenals weren't that much more complicated. Again excluding pistols and flare guns, about seven weapons types was an ordinary diversity of arms types.
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The Imperial Japanese Army even tried to make it more simpler and to use one weapon instead of mortars and recoilless guns which could be used in both roles, the Type 92 gun. There were even hollow-charge anti-tank round for this gun, and with a different calibre and a longer barrel it would have been even more effective. One could think for example for an kind of light mountain artillery type of gun, which could be used for anti-tank, mortar like fire and standard artillery tasks in one gun and could be dissambled and used as pack-artillery. For Air Defence you could simply add more machine guns with anti-aircraft sights. moreover, if such an infantry regiment would be light infantry without vehicles, the aircraft of this time would not be able to destroy it so easily (assuming suitable terrain). If you use assault rifles for everyone instead of unverisal machine guns you could instead use heavy machine guns which would then also be used against aircraft, so no need for an 20mm.
ReplyDeleteIn the end it would be:
Assault Rifles
Heavy Machine Guns
Light Mountain (Pack) Artillery
The issues with 75 mm howitzers:
Delete- they cannot du bursts of fire like mortars (which can fire 16...20 times in first minute to break an assault)
- they are inefficient by comparison with mortars for illumination
- long minimum range for indirect fires (spin-stabilised shells can be shot at maximum elevation 70°, at higher elevations they land tail first, fin-stabilised mortar bombs can do 80°)
Heavy machineguns were too ineffective against aircraft during WW2. Effective range was ~500 m, for 20 mm it was 1...2 km depending on target.
One could reduce it all to a M27-ish closed bolt operation assault rifle that doubles as LMG and a smoothbore pack howitzer, though.
Patria 81mm commando mortar weighs one eighth of that and shoots a bigger shell to a closer range. Now if you add Merlin or ACERM...
DeleteMerlin and STRIX had horribly small footprints. They basically corrected a miss of maybe 50 m into a hit. You cannot use that as a general AT weapon against moving tanks, within woodland or within settlements. Also 81 mm mortar minimum range is about 200 m. The 81 mm calibre yields an insufficient shaped charge power to overcome frontal armour in a flat trajectory at less than 200 m.
DeleteMoreover, WW2 75 mm howitzer shells weighed about 6.5 kg. 81.4 mm mortar bombs weigh around 3.2 kg. The calibre doesn't tell enough about the shot weight.
120 mm mortar bomb ~ 105 mm howitzer shell in weight
Madsen weighs 307 kg traveling, and doesn't seem to unpack into a 360° high-aiming turret. How does the AA function work? Also how much can infantry tow without a vehicle? Is an auxilliary gas powered engine an option?
ReplyDeleteThere were multiple AA mounts for it. This
Deletehttps://www.lonesentry.com/ordnance/2010/09/11/2-cm-flak-madsen-a-a-a-t-gun-ex-danish/
and a simple pivot one. I saw the latter in context of National Chinese troops (a photo) and also as naval mounting.
My rule of thumb is
platoon weapons = man-portable
company weapons = crew-portable
battalion weapons = crew-towable/pushable
regimental weapons = crew-towable/pushable for short distance (exception 15 cm sIG)
Auxiliary drives for short distance movement were only introduced long after WW2 afaik. At below 500 kg the mobility issue without pulling animal or motor vehicle isn't so much movement on hard flat ground, but getting through fences, soft ground, over ditches or uphill.
That doesn't look like Madsen at all. Here, found it opened up. Apparently it turns into a tripod pintle mount:
Deletehttps://www.jaegerplatoon.net/AA_GUNS1.htm
The lightest modern 20mm AA I could find from Jane's was Zastava M-75 at 275 kg traveling. (NOT M-55)
https://www.armedconflicts.com/YUG-M75-protilietadlovy-kanon-t38030
500 kg you say? 81.4mm PAW 600 was 640 kg. And the 105mm PAW 1000 was 1035 kg.
The lightest 20 mm of WW2 would be the Oerlikon 20 mm with simple pintle mount (it was also used for ground combat).
DeleteAbout 500 kg is the limit for satisfactory crew-powered mobility on a battlefield. This was learned during WWI when some mountain guns proved to be too heavy for direct fire infantry gun tasks.
~1,100 kg is the limit for moving very short distances between means of towing for the march and firing position (thus better grades for 5 cm Pak 38 and ZiS-3 unlike 7,5 cm Pak 40 that were often left behind on the battlefield).
PAW 600 was not built with indirect fires in mind and its shaped charge was too weak for the effort by 1944.
The absolute lightest 20mm was/is the Japanese Type 99-1, a copy of Oerlikon at 23 kg. It's not the gun weight it's the whole mount that matters. I wonder why pintle TAAGs did not take off. All the Cold War ones have cranks and a seat.
DeleteBut it was! The ammo is literally based on 81mm mortar. Is 140mm not enough pen for AT job?
Cold War light AAA without radar fire control was more of a helicopter deterrent. To aim properly for a burst against a helo 2 km away may have been the driver behind their carriage design (and munition capacity).
DeletePAW 600 was mostly built on obsolete Pak carriages. It was a cheap AT gun, not built for indirect fires.
I think you can reformulate the weapon requirements in terms of roles and parameters: effective range/lethality (weight of explosives/number of rounds)/precision and all this is constrained by weight (of the weapon and ammo).
ReplyDeleteThe roles, as I see them, are Individual weapon, Supression Weapon, Breaching weapon. From the roles you derive the requirements (a mix of range, lethality and precision).
All the different weapon types are can be play one or more of the roles and the current variety of the infantry weapons comes from the different mix of capabilities and constraints at different technology levels. See for example recoilles rifles replaced by ATGMs and RPGs/LAWs.
If a game like Arma Reforger is acceptable as a trial and error source, a select fire BR and an RPG is all you need. As in Mk 14 EBR and Carl Gustav M4.
DeleteI don't know the mechanics implemented in Reforger, but I doubt supression works realistically there. I've read a paper about the tests DTIC(?) did in the 70s(?) on the connection between calibre/proximity of shot/supression but I think there's too many variables to model it realistically.
DeleteYes, some servers have suppression mods. I'm just trying to minimize the types of weapons. Mr. Ortmann started with 5 and arrived at 4. This is 2. If you use the BR as DMR at long range you don't need suppression, just aimed shots. Up close, full auto.
DeleteThis is a good read, though I don't approve of the conclusion:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335004124_Towards_a_600_m_lightweight_General_Purpose_Cartridge_v2019_Full_Paper
The CG is marginal as indirect fires weapon. It can be used in a somewhat high trajectory to hit a point target and it's an (inefficient) smoke and ILLUM provider, but not comparable in capability to even only a 60 mm light mortar.
DeleteI think it's interesting to note that this also describes a sort of wish-list (sub-machine guns, recoilless rifle, effective mortar) of a First World War infantry regiment.
ReplyDeleteEarly WW2 infantry regiments were largely updated WWI infantry regiments. The differences were mostly
Deletesubmachine guns
universal instead of heavy machineguns (in Germany only)
Brandt mortars
light anti-tank guns (rarely actually part of infantry regiments in 1940, but de facto attached)
suitable infantry guns (mostly in Germany and Japan, some in USSR)
more motor vehicles (especially important as messengers)
widespread use of radios (morse AND voice, down to battalion or even company level)
Hey, what do you think about this article? last year you wrote something around this lines and it appears this authors have reach a similar conclusion.
ReplyDeletehttps://warontherocks.com/2026/02/is-the-age-of-drones-really-the-age-of-poor-maneuver/
It's good, unusual framing, weak spot is they don't really dare to look ahead and thus it's not going to hold up in its entirety for long.
Delete´´it's not going to hold up in its entirety for long.´´
Deletecan you elaborate?
They write about drones as they exist today. No look forward about the changes that greater drone autonomy will cause.
DeleteThe greater the drone autonomy in decisionmaking, the less relevant the decisionmaking skills of the humans and the more important becomes who (or what) created the software.