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Bad ideas in war

I would say Theiu's decision in 1975 to abandon the Central Highlands and the Northen Third of Vietnam is up there in the "Bad Military Decisions" of all time.
Granted, South VIetnam was pretty much doomed anyway, but it would have lasted a lot longer if Theiu had not made the stupid decision. Destroyed moral in South Vietnam.
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
If anything gunned aircraft have been held onto too long in the US air forces. For example, the only thing keeping the A-10 alive is the more dakka aspect of it. Operationally Desert Storm showed that it was obsolete even in its alleged role as a ground attack aircraft.

And with drones and missiles becoming better and better with each passing year, guns are less and less useful.
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Yes that's the current situation. But fighter designers have to consider the life of the aircraft.

It's easy to imagine defence against improved attack drones flying low and needing look-down, shoot-down capability because of their low flight height, numbers and performance. Maybe with a mixture of manual control and AI .

High speed airborne guns or their replacement could be potentially useful in such situations again. Not BVR missile engagements but more like interceptors
 
I'd say that drones also bring something else to the equation. They're cheap. If you have to use a $400,000 AIM-9X (for a Block II Plus model) to take down a $400 drone (assuming it could even lock onto one, which it can't,) you soon have a problem. It's not even hyperbole: it can literally cost just 400 bucks for a racing drone that can haul an old RPG-7 warhead around just fine.

Even the behemoth that is the US economy would eventually go broke if they tried to fight each drone with a missile.

And that cheapness brings another problem with it: numbers. You can easily just put more of them in the air than the other guys even have space for on their wing pylons.

Guns simply are the better option.

Not sure I'd use a fighter plane as a platform for those guns, but if they can make the sensors and computers able to do that, one extra option can't hurt, right?
 
Speaking of dogfighting, though, I wonder why nobody is making fighter drones yet. (Well, ok, the F-35 wingman drones kinda is just that.) You'd need better latency than going to orbit and back, but otherwise a couple of 5.45mm rounds (just to use one calibre that Ukraine has plenty of) is probably the cheapest way to dispose of an enemy drone. If you can make a drone that can carry and fire, say, an AKS-74U, that could take care of enemy drones just fine. And if they can't find one, hey, they can also mag-dump on some Russian conscripts on the way back to base :p
 
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HansMustermann said:
Speaking of dogfighting, though, I wonder why nobody is making fighter drones yet. (Well, ok, the F-35 wingman drones kinda is just that.) You'd need better latency than going to orbit and back, but otherwise a couple of 5.45mm rounds (just to use one calibre that Ukraine has plenty of) is probably the cheapest way to dispose of an enemy drone. If you can make a drone that can carry and fire, say, an AKS-74U, that could take care of enemy drones just fine. And if they can't find one, hey, they can also mag-dump on some Russian conscripts on the way back to base :p
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Video in link

https://x.com/wilendhornets/status/1831403531988844566
 
Stability of the firing platform, accuracy, complexity. They're working on it, though. Meanwhile, they're getting better at just ramming drones with other drones. Apparently it's a pretty cost effective way to get enemy recon drones out of the sky.

Long term, I expect we'll see something with a lidar designator, cueing either EXACTO type bullets, or a variant of the APKWS.
 
HansMustermann said:
I would say that any airforce I know of would agree with that, once missiles got good enough. That's why the USA paid for AIM-120 air-to-air missiles (aka AMRAAM,) with a range of 150km (about 93 miles for the imperials.) And now for its shiny new AIM-174B, which can attack aerial targets as far away as 400 km (250 miles.)

Seems to me like they very much would rather not end up in close range if they can avoid it.
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It's an air launched Standard and weighs nigh-on a tonne; a stand-in while the AIM-260 is persuaded to actually work.
And like all such very long range missiles it has the problems of target designation and flight time.
 
Well, nevertheless, it shows that they want SOMETHING to hit that far away. They're not proposing to go into gun range with the enemy AWACS (equivalent.)
 
HansMustermann said:
some people seem to have weird idea of what "dogfight" even means. It just means ANY kind of short range combat between fighter planes. Whether you got into a turning and looping match in your Zero against a Wildcat, or use boom-and-zoom against the Spitfires in a ME-262, it's still a dogfight. So the USN did... what? Switch from dogfighting to dogfighting against the Zero? :p
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You're on your own there.
 
HansMustermann said:
I'll start this out with the WW2 British idea that German paratroopers could just land in Central Park, and who's gonna stop them?

Well...

1. The German paratrooper units had been depleted in the invasion of Crete. They had won, but they took serious losses that were never replenished. Sure, Germany conscripted more soldiers, but they tended to go to just about any unit except paratroopers. Even when they devised a paratrooper weapon like the FG-42 (Fallschirmjägergewehr 42 = "paratrooper rifle 42") it only got issued in limited numbers in 1943 and beyond, way after the Battle Of Britain, and really, still the number of paratroopers they had was really just to tick the box that they had any at all.

2. MORE IMPORTANTLY, you have to undertstand how German paratroopers worked AT ALL. Seriously, it's counter-intuitive.

You may have seen in stuff like Band Of Brothers how the allies jumped with their weapons attached to themselves in various bags and all.

The Germans didn't.

The Germans jumped with just a pistol on themselves, while the rest of their weapons (not just heavy equipment, but even rifles or SMGs) dropped separately. After you landed, you had to scramble towards WTH place you saw a parachute fall and search for your equipment. (Sounds dumb, and IS dumb, but nobody said the Nazis were geniuses:p)

So, yeah, if they paradropped in Central Park, they'd have just about a Luger or Mauser C96 between every second or so of them, while even their basic rifles dropped in, say, Peckham or Camden:p

The Londoners among you will understand the problem, but for everyone else, imagine your rifles and ammo dropping a couple miles away in an urban jungle, AND YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE. Literally.

The whole German paratrooper doctrine was devised for open fields, not urban jungle.

Would "Dad's army" of old reserve guards be able to take them on? <BLEEP!> even a couple of angry cop precincts could :p


Feel free to add your own mis-conceptions in wars in any era.
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Evidence of how vulnerable Paratroopers can be is what happened when German Paratroopers tried landing near three airfields in Crete in 1941.
the paratroopers were very vulnerable and many were just massacred has they landed. Student's plan to seize the three airfields was very poorly thought out and frankly landed paratroopers much of the time far to close to well armed troops.

In fact Cretan civilians near Malme for example killed the paratroopers with crude guns and in some cases with rocks and sticks and took the Guns etc., of the Germans and then used the weaponry to kill, capture and wound even more Germans. The landing at Malme worked out for the Germans for a lot of reasons which some were sheer luck.

Late on the first day a little over 1,000 paratroopers landed successfully east of the airport with little to no opposition from anyone. The following early morning the British withdrew from a hill over looking the airport, allowing the Germans to take it. Student realizing he had largely blown it seized this chance to get victory by flying troops fast and furious to Malme. The Allies were hampered by the following delusions. They actually thought German aircraft could land in all sorts of places and not just at airfields. Further the Allies thought if they just prevented the Germans from landing troops by sea they would win. Of course German air supremacy was very important.

It is interesting to think about what might have happened if the Allies had distributed 10,000 or so rifles + ammo among the local population near the airfields, given how effective the Cretans turned out to be.
 
Pacal said:
Evidence of how vulnerable Paratroopers can be is what happened when German Paratroopers tried landing near three airfields in Crete in 1941.
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We don't even have to reach all the way back to World War 2 anymore. US Army Rangers and Special Forces got badly mauled in Mogadishu much more recently. And even more recently than that, "Elite" Russian airborne infantry got absolutely massacred at Hostomel Airport in Ukraine.

Similarly, the security teams in Benghazi were hard pressed. While not exactly paratroops, they had similar training and experience, and fall squarely into the same "elite light infantry" category. These kinds of troops are great at surprise attacks via rapid movement, but cold suck at holding ground without immediate heavy reinforcements.
 
Paratroops need very rapid reinforcement and support on the ground. They can take a position quickly but don't have the firepower to hold it.

German paratroops famously couldn't carry any equipment with them other than a pistol and a couple of grenades because of the design of their parachute. It attached to one point on a belt on their backs. When they landed they had to roll and they couldn't control their direction of descent etc.
They relied on quickly finding and securing their equipment canisters that were dropped with them.
Having the benefit of the earlier German experience British and later American para's had the now standard two point shoulder attachment for their chutes and an equipment bag secured to their leg which, after they opened their chute hung below them attached to their harness. When they landed the equipment hit the ground first so the weight wasn't on the para.
Consequently they had proper weapons and ammunition with them right from the start.

British paratroops at Arnhem took vehicles and light tanks with them and secured their objectives but couldn't be supported as the ground offensive stalled and where overwhelmed.

Probably the best use of airborne troops in the war were the attacks on the Pegasus Bridge and those around it in Normandy and the Bruneval raid that captured and stole a German radar installation.
 
Pacal said:
Evidence of how vulnerable Paratroopers can be is what happened when German Paratroopers tried landing near three airfields in Crete in 1941.
the paratroopers were very vulnerable and many were just massacred has they landed. Student's plan to seize the three airfields was very poorly thought out and frankly landed paratroopers much of the time far to close to well armed troops.

In fact Cretan civilians near Malme for example killed the paratroopers with crude guns and in some cases with rocks and sticks and took the Guns etc., of the Germans and then used the weaponry to kill, capture and wound even more Germans. The landing at Malme worked out for the Germans for a lot of reasons which some were sheer luck.

Late on the first day a little over 1,000 paratroopers landed successfully east of the airport with little to no opposition from anyone. The following early morning the British withdrew from a hill over looking the airport, allowing the Germans to take it. Student realizing he had largely blown it seized this chance to get victory by flying troops fast and furious to Malme. The Allies were hampered by the following delusions. They actually thought German aircraft could land in all sorts of places and not just at airfields. Further the Allies thought if they just prevented the Germans from landing troops by sea they would win. Of course German air supremacy was very important.

It is interesting to think about what might have happened if the Allies had distributed 10,000 or so rifles + ammo among the local population near the airfields, given how effective the Cretans turned out to be.
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Partially the issues at Crete were down to poor Fallschirmjäger equipment, their equipment design meant that they didn't have proper small arms until after landing.
 
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