Massive use of trench warfare occurred in the Eastern front in WW2, both sides had plenty of tanks.

There is a difference between the tactical use of trenches for cover during a maneuver battle or their use during a siege of a fixed target and the static trench warfare of the Western Front the OP is talking about.
 
There is a difference between the tactical use of trenches for cover during a maneuver battle or their use during a siege of a fixed target and the static trench warfare of the Western Front the OP is talking about.

No really, by the way, there was a lot of siege warfare in this campaign, check out Leningrad, Budapest and Sevastopol.
 

Deleted member 94680

There is a difference between the tactical use of trenches for cover during a maneuver battle or their use during a siege of a fixed target and the static trench warfare of the Western Front the OP is talking about.

Actually the OP is merely asking
So, I'm working on a dystopian TL with a POD where, instead of continuing to try to find ways to make trench warfare obsolete, various governments and scientists eventually decide that trench warfare is an inescapable fact of modern war, and begin investing in technology to make trenches even more effective, perpetuating the trenches up until present day or beyond.

Therefore, if the world ‘devolves’ into warfare routinely fought by manoeuvre battle and using “tactical trenches” that would fit the OP’s request.
 
Actually the OP is merely asking


Therefore, if the world ‘devolves’ into warfare routinely fought by manoeuvre battle and using “tactical trenches” that would fit the OP’s request.

If that’s the case, then there’s no need for an alternate techline because “trench warfare” is still widely used.
 

oberdada

Gone Fishin'
I believe there was a lot of trench fighting in the Ethiopian- Eritrean War.

I read a report claiming it looked like WWI.

They were fighting a bloody border war over a relatively small pretty worthless area.


So for a real dystopian scenario I would go for trenches at / or very close to the nation's borders.
And long-term warfare with politicians incapable of conducting peace negotiations and soldiers just motivated enough not to desert, but not to attack.


Maybe getting a convention against bombing targets further than atilary range from the frontline.
 
No really, by the way, there was a lot of siege warfare in this campaign, check out Leningrad, Budapest and Sevastopol.

Actually, there kind of is depending on what we're defining as "Trench Warfare". The fact that you're talking about cases of Trench Warfare on the Eastern Front, rather than the Eastern Front being a case of Trench Warfare, seems to suggest you and @Questerr are using different perceptions of what the term entails. The difference is one of battles vs. campaigns (A question of scale in space and time, which changes the dynamic)

I tend to agree with Questerr, in that to call something "Trench Warfare" the trench networks need to be the defining feature around which military decisions are being made, rather than the use of trenches being a incidental tool for use in a particular circumstance.
 
Question, but would the Maginot line qualify as a trench for this purpose? If so, couldn't a timeline where the line reached from the English Channel to the Mediterranean qualify for this, as this doesn't strike me so much as a problem of technology, but a problem of construction - there's no real reason why a country couldn't build a heavy, fixed fortification line on the border that is then mirrored on the other side, causing any conflict between the two powers to be waged entirely through those defensive positions with a vast no man's land in between, covered by pre-placed artillery in heavy, concrete bunkers protected from the air by in depth SAM and RADAR sites.

Hell, technological advancements will only make that stronger and perpetuate the trenchline style of warfare. Things like remote weapons platforms (which would allow a sort of pop-up machine gun nest to be added to the line, giving all the benefits of the exposed position of a machine gunner without the risk of losing a man) that can be found on modern tanks would be a big help against attacking waves of infantry, to give one example. So long as the ground can still take more concrete and that concrete can take more rebar, it should be entirely possible to build such a heavy level of defenses that the entire line would look like WW1, only with the men in concrete lines and underground barrackses than in the mud :p
 

oberdada

Gone Fishin'
I wouldn't want to live in that timeline either.

But I would read about it.

Military tech is not my field of expertise, so I only had some other ideas.


Adding:

Have a relatively short frontline between the opponents compared to the size of the countries.

Include complicated terrain. Or large urban areas.

Maybe neutral Belgium and France and Germany fighting Maginot to Westwall across the Rhine.
I was also thinking of Israel and Egypt in the early 70s at the Suez Canal.


+ Bonus points if you include Bunker Albanian style.
 
Actually, there kind of is depending on what we're defining as "Trench Warfare". The fact that you're talking about cases of Trench Warfare on the Eastern Front, rather than the Eastern Front being a case of Trench Warfare, seems to suggest you and @Questerr are using different perceptions of what the term entails. The difference is one of battles vs. campaigns (A question of scale in space and time, which changes the dynamic)

I tend to agree with Questerr, in that to call something "Trench Warfare" the trench networks need to be the defining feature around which military decisions are being made, rather than the use of trenches being a incidental tool for use in a particular circumstance.

Clearly, we need a definition here, but I sort of get where you are coming from.


Maybe neutral Belgium and France and Germany fighting Maginot to Westwall across the Rhine.

Both the Maginot wall and the Westwall from late 1944 were a "defining feature around which military decisions were being made." Both changed the conflict greatly.


I was also thinking of Israel and Egypt in the early 70s at the Suez Canal.

This is a complex one, it can be argued that to the Egyptians the Bar Lev line was a trench that had to be crossed, from the Israeli point of view, it is unclear what it was. One point that is interesting is that it could be argued that the Bar Lev line was never broken or that it never existed as such.

The Egyptian lines proved once Israel seriously assaulted it easily penetrated. The problem here was the high concentration of anti-tank and anti-air defences.
 
Trench Warfare on the western front in WW1 was primarily due to the density of troops on both sides and the capacity of both sides to construct and field weapons such as machine guns and artillery that slowed down the combat and made movement more expensive, while effectively rewarding people for digging in by letting them live longer due to being able to reduce the effects of exposure to artillery and machine gun fire.

The rapid development of aircraft between the wars, made fixed defences less viable, especially development of dive bombers such as the Stuka which could deliver a large explosive charge into a precise area on demand.

In a modern context I could see Trench Warfare being a *thing* in a conflict where both sides are fairly evenly matched in their force levels both on the ground and in the air, and where neither side is able to concentrate enough forces in a single place in order to achieve a breakthrough.
 
At work.

Some thoughts.

Taking into account 'Our' reality and European topography. (No insane/inane dystopian British science fiction tropes like WH 40K) then we kind of need to change an aspect of the mitary thinking between the 1800's and the 1900's.

Remember, trenches had started to evolve even back in the black powder era. (Note: There's a tech change. The formula for smokless powder's discovery gets pushed back some).

So..... instead of the great nations 'Sinking' their economies into a 'Super - Dreadnought' style arms race. They posture with troop numbers instead?

Following with...... sink Brittain with some cataclysm and lower every one's fear/need of matching historic navies? :p

Just soms random thoughts to try and help things along. :)

EDIT: Here's a question for any historians. What prevented the Americans from utilizing things like the Dreyse and it's French derivitive style of gun? The South imported Whitworth 'Prescission' rifles after all?
 
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They posture with troop numbers instead?
Have them posture through construction of massive, thick land fortification complexes, so that every national border looks like this :p

JxEiYeL.jpg


Combine that kind of fortification work with, say, surface to air missiles (to protect against airstrikes and missile attacks, as well as to make any idea of using paratroopers absolute suicide) and you could probably keep these fortresses relevant indefinitely, since the defender would have an enormous, inbuilt advantage of being able to quickly look after their wounded, bring up fresh ammunition, launch aerial attacks from underground hangars...and all that without counting the enormous advantages of being in such a heavily fortified position with things like a tank ditch (a massive, wide and steep trench that a tank would just fall into and get stuck), minefields, bunkers and probably even heavily fortified and protected artillery batteries that have pre-ranged the killing field and can just use their already calculated tables to bombard any attacker with precise fire.

That's not the kind of position you're going to break through :p
 

Deleted member 94680

Have them posture through construction of massive, thick land fortification complexes, so that every national border looks like this :p



Combine that kind of fortification work with, say, surface to air missiles (to protect against airstrikes and missile attacks, as well as to make any idea of using paratroopers absolute suicide) and you could probably keep these fortresses relevant indefinitely, since the defender would have an enormous, inbuilt advantage of being able to quickly look after their wounded, bring up fresh ammunition, launch aerial attacks from underground hangars...and all that without counting the enormous advantages of being in such a heavily fortified position with things like a tank ditch (a massive, wide and steep trench that a tank would just fall into and get stuck), minefields, bunkers and probably even heavily fortified and protected artillery batteries that have pre-ranged the killing field and can just use their already calculated tables to bombard any attacker with precise fire.

That's not the kind of position you're going to break through :p

While that’s pretty dystopian, if both borders get that fortified (with miles of no man’s land in between, one assumes) would anyone ever attack? If there’s a Maginot Line facing a... Groener(?) Line, along the length of the border, would there be any warfare?
 
There had been quite a lengthy discussion recently about the Maginot line and whether the Germans could have broken through it if they attacked head on. I was on the side that expressed the opinion that no, they could not have: the Maginot Line is an extremely tough obstacle, and the Germans historically never had the firepower required to be able to match the capabilities of French artillery, suppress or destroy the line, and achieve a breakthrough in a specific section, for its most well fortified parts (they did conversely, have the capacity to destroy weaker, non-standard sections of it, and could achieve limited breakthroughs along the Rhine). But the key to the areas where the Germans did have success is that those places where they attacked, had seen the Maginot Line interval troops withdrawn. They were thus able to concentrate sufficient force, firepower, and support, to achieve overwhelming local superiority and crush them.

The problem with the suggestions of using fortified lines to produce trench warfare, is that if you pour funding to the extent to make fortified lines like those of the propaganda of the Maginot Line, then the mobile forces which you can field are correspondingly heavily reduced. The enemy's mobile forces inherently have the ability to concentrate on a specific point of the front, and they can achieve decisive fire superiority. My argument in the thread concerning the Maginot Line wasn't that the Germans couldn't destroy the Maginot Line, facing it on their own they inevitably could, it was that the Maginot Line would be enough to transform any offensive into a static attrition warfare, where the Germans would ultimately be repulsed by French mobile troops reinforcing the Maginot line. If you just have fortified lines and minimal mobile troops, the enemy will inevitably break through and there isn't anything to stop them.

So let's say, using Germany as the aggressive nation, that every nation surrounding Germany fortifies to the maximum and invests everything into fortifications. The Germans meanwhile go into a mobile army with large amounts of mobile artillery - well, as "mobile" as super-heavy artillery can get. They can simply proceed to concentrate this at specific points of the front, wipe out enemy fortification sections one by one at specific parts, then pour through the gap and exploit the vulnerable rear areas. Fundamentally you face diminishing returns with fortifications: the Maginot Line can be argued as being cost effective (I have seen ones both way), but its point was to free up mobile troops for use elsewhere, provide time to mobilize, channel German attacks into specific regions, and help secure vital border resources. It wasn't intended to be an impregnable line in of itself.

These fortifications fundamentally become obsolete once you do get missiles, precision guided weapons, and above all else, nuclear weapons. Reinforced concrete is fundamentally to my knowledge about as strong as it has always been, but the destructiveness of missiles is far bigger than that of even super heavy artillery. Most importantly, precision weapons once you get around to them make everything so much more accurate that the devastating becomes orders of magnitude more dangerous. And nukes of course, are an atomic problem solver that there is no real good response to.

WW1 fortifications, if they weren't backed by powerful mobile units, proved catastrophically vulnerable. Look at what happened to the Belgian, Russian, Austrian Galician fortifications or select French fortifications in the north of the country. They were destroyed and overrun without much problems, this despite often have large garrisons and on paper formidable artillery armaments. Meanwhile Verdun and Osowiec both proved hard obstacles to crack due to their supporting field army units. WW1 on the Western Front wasn't a static trench warfare because of fortifications (most of the line went through regions without fortifications) but because of the advances in firepower, lack of advances in (tactical) mobility, and the limited geographic space which could be deployed compared to the number of troops positioned along the front. Simply building more fortifications won't make it into a trench warfare, as these fortifications will be defeated. Instead the context in which those fortifications exist has to be altered.
 
While that’s pretty dystopian, if both borders get that fortified (with miles of no man’s land in between, one assumes) would anyone ever attack? If there’s a Maginot Line facing a... Groener(?) Line, along the length of the border, would there be any warfare?
It would seem so, but not in the way that you'd expect. It'd be infiltration tactics on steroids - small groups trying to get through to the defenses on the over side under the cover of night, or tunneling teams underground trying to sap their way into the enemy tunnel or undermine it to try and cause the bunkers above to collapse, that kind of thing. It'd still be warfare, but it'd be focused entirely on trying to identify weak points in the defensive line, then breach it with a heavy attack. The defender could counter by moving reserves and mobile forces to that area, and so you'd get heavy fighting till either the line is broken through or until the attacker decides to stop and try and find a vulnerability somewhere else.

Rinse and repeat for both sides. The good news is that factories can actually produce bunkers and deliver them to the front line as entirely prefabricated pieces, so you can make large shipments of bunkers by train, then place them where needed behind the main defense line as a secondary, sub wall to delay an attacker until reinforcement can arrive.
They can simply proceed to concentrate this at specific points of the front, wipe out enemy fortification sections one by one at specific parts, then pour through the gap and exploit the vulnerable rear areas.
Isn't the problem there, though, that it is a lot easier to make a huge cannon that stays in one place and keep that well protected than it is to make a huge cannon that can move? After all, whilst the Germans in this scenario could build a railway gun or something of the sort, there's no reason why the French with this super-Maginot couldn't build an equivalent - or even larger - cannon and keep it in a heavily fortified complex, benefiting from the additional space which could be used for better ammunition stores, fire control and artillery plotting rooms, more capable reload mechanisms and other things that wouldn't be practical to put on an already heavy chassis. The Schwerer Gustav, for example, weighed 1350 tons, but that's counting the weight of its entire assembly including the track base, and had a very complicated reload procedure due to the sheer size of the weapon. A fixed version of that gun would weigh substantially less and wouldn't need to be confined to tracks, so it could have a much larger reload mechanism, meaning that it should be able to have a much higher rate of fire.

Fixed weapon positions are basically always more capable than mobile positions, because they've got the benefit of how they don't need to move, which frees up a lot of what would otherwise be serious engineering constraints. You don't need to worry about a bunker causing a bridge to collapse when it tries to cross over it, for example, or about it being too wide to fit on a railcar or go through a tunnel or even just sinking into the earth. A concrete bunker can be fixed into the ground with steel piles to keep it from moving and to absorb recoil, it can be expanded easily if there is the need and, perhaps best of all, they're pretty cheap to maintain after they've been built. The problem is building them in the first place and getting the political will to get them built and keeping it around long enough for the complex to be finished :p

Reinforced concrete is fundamentally to my knowledge about as strong as it has always been,
Nah, concrete has gotten a lot stronger since the past. Concrete from the 70s crumbles at 3500 psi, modern concrete can go much further than that, especially if it is the prestressed kind. That stuff can go to eight thousand psi, absolutely dwarfing anything you'd find in WW2. Concrete from the 20s was even weaker on average, between 500psi to 1000psi from what I know, but that might just be the samples that are like that.

And nukes of course, are an atomic problem solver that there is no real good response to.
To be fair, that solves pretty much all problems, though :p

Here's the way I could foresee such a line being structured: a heavy, Maginot-esque superfortification on the national border, backed up by number of fast response mobile units able to rush towards any breach in the defense wall and close it before the attacker can properly exploit it, as well as to relieve any sections of the wall that are under serious attack. Concealed, ground level AA posts are spread across the lines, equipped with quick firing autocannons (37 to 40mm) to protect against low flying bombers that would have the accuracy to hit turret and bunker roofs, which themselves would either be reinforced to better resist direct attack or concealed with a sheet of grassed earth over the top to make them nigh impossible to spot from the air. As technology progresses, this line would first be upgraded with radar posts to provide early warning of enemy air attacks, then SAM sites to replace ballistic AA, then culminating with something akin to the Israeli Iron Dome for shooting down missile strikes and protecting any exposed vulnerabilities in the line itself.

That creates a line that modern technology is more or less incapable of breaching without escalating to nuclear weapons as you're facing one of the following situations:

a) You can't actually find the target because it is concealed, so you can't attack it in the first place.

b) You can't use artillery to snipe the defense posts, because the defender has similar guns and has the benefit of being able to encase them in fixed positions, whereas the attacker has to bring them up...with all the engineering problems that entails.

c) You can't use aircraft to bomb out the defense positions because of a combination of point A and the amount of ground fire that they can receive...and even then, airstrikes are going to be of limited effectiveness as there is a serious limit on the amount of explosives a plane can carry before you need to spend months designing an entirely new airplane and retooling the production line to build it in numbers, whereas it is much, much easier to just reinforce the bunker wall itself...and where said modifications to make the plane better suited for taking out said positions in the first place is going to render them even more vulnerable to interception.

d) You can't use missiles to bomb out the defense positions either, because the ground base on the defender's side would be able to shoot down the cruise missile before it reached its destination, and being themselves in a fixed position, would be able to have enough ammunition on hand to intercept an entire barrage of fire without too much difficulty, protecting the static positions from easy destruction.

e) A nuclear attack on the line would likely be met with one in kind upon the attacker, meaning...well, bad things all around. At least they'll have bunkers to keep the fallout away, though.

You'd need a radically different political climate to get this stuff built, though, and quite a bit of cash to build the wall up in the first place. Armies have the benefit of being able to, y'know, go on the attack. Concrete bunkers aren't nearly that good at attacking as they are at defending :p

Still a fun thought experiment to be sure! :D
 
Nah, concrete has gotten a lot stronger since the past. Concrete from the 70s crumbles at 3500 psi, modern concrete can go much further than that, especially if it is the prestressed kind. That stuff can go to eight thousand psi, absolutely dwarfing anything you'd find in WW2. Concrete from the 20s was even weaker on average, between 500psi to 1000psi from what I know, but that might just be the samples that are like that.[/quote]
Hmm, I didn't realize there were so important improvements, but regardless, the level of firepower which modern weapons can deliver is far, far, larger than an increase of even the 5-10 times that indicates.

To be fair, that solves pretty much all problems, though :p
And its the fundamental problem with fixed positions because it is almost inevitable that a modern pitched war would result in nuclear weapons being used.

Here's the way I could foresee such a line being structured: a heavy, Maginot-esque superfortification on the national border, backed up by number of fast response mobile units able to rush towards any breach in the defense wall and close it before the attacker can properly exploit it, as well as to relieve any sections of the wall that are under serious attack. Concealed, ground level AA posts are spread across the lines, equipped with quick firing autocannons (37 to 40mm) to protect against low flying bombers that would have the accuracy to hit turret and bunker roofs, which themselves would either be reinforced to better resist direct attack or concealed with a sheet of grassed earth over the top to make them nigh impossible to spot from the air. As technology progresses, this line would first be upgraded with radar posts to provide early warning of enemy air attacks, then SAM sites to replace ballistic AA, then culminating with something akin to the Israeli Iron Dome for shooting down missile strikes and protecting any exposed vulnerabilities in the line itself.
The problem is that with so much money having been spent on the line, then there's very little left over for mobile forces. Fundamentally trying to build a line on the borders of most nations of sufficient length to cover it entirely is impossible without severely degrading mobile forces. The Maginot Line on the Franco-German border and the Alps could be done because those are fundamentally narrow and limited borders: trying to extend it to cover, say, Switzerland and Belgium just makes it even more terribly expensive. And for other nations, it just becomes impossible: Russia's border is far too long to provide for defense all along it, China ditto, the small states in Europe can't hope to come up with such formidable defenses. If you put anti-aircraft positions all over the front, the enemy will just use combined arms and launch air attacks supported by artillery to suppress those anti-aircraft defenses, and because they're the attackers, they can choose where to attack and how to concentrate forces.

That creates a line that modern technology is more or less incapable of breaching without escalating to nuclear weapons as you're facing one of the following situations:
There is no line which is invincible, fortifications only give an advantage to defense, and that comes out of the cost of something else, initiative, and tying up your forces.

a) You can't actually find the target because it is concealed, so you can't attack it in the first place.
Anything can be found in time and with good enough sensors, nothing can be completely hidden. Eventually if nothing else those things have to reveal themselves to fire, at which point they get plastered. Regardless the general region is known so suppressing it with the greater amount of firepower that an attacker can inherently deliver, given his capacity to concentrate firepower, is possible.

b) You can't use artillery to snipe the defense posts, because the defender has similar guns and has the benefit of being able to encase them in fixed positions, whereas the attacker has to bring them up...with all the engineering problems that entails.
The defender will have similar guns and better protected, but the defender also has the disadvantage in that they're fixed, which means that they will inherently have far less at any particular point of contact. There's a reason why fortifications in the First World War were destroyed despite having their own guns in them - look at the Belgian, French, Austrian, Russian fortifications, all of which collapsed before the enemy, because the enemy could concentrate far more guns against them and hence could destroy enemy guns despite these guns being positioned in concrete. The Russian fortifications in Poland had 9,300 guns, but because they were in individual fortifications, they could not concentrate against the Germans and were destroyed in detail. The same thing would happen with the line you propose.

c) You can't use aircraft to bomb out the defense positions because of a combination of point A and the amount of ground fire that they can receive...and even then, airstrikes are going to be of limited effectiveness as there is a serious limit on the amount of explosives a plane can carry before you need to spend months designing an entirely new airplane and retooling the production line to build it in numbers, whereas it is much, much easier to just reinforce the bunker wall itself...and where said modifications to make the plane better suited for taking out said positions in the first place is going to render them even more vulnerable to interception.
No air-defense is invincible, and a combination of air-attacks and artillery should be able to suppress and attrition defenses in a WW2 context. Later on it just gets worse once one gets precision weapons, SEAD, stand-off weapons, and missiles. Bunker busters complete the picture.

d) You can't use missiles to bomb out the defense positions either, because the ground base on the defender's side would be able to shoot down the cruise missile before it reached its destination, and being themselves in a fixed position, would be able to have enough ammunition on hand to intercept an entire barrage of fire without too much difficulty, protecting the static positions from easy destruction.
Shooting down cruise missiles is a highly difficult, as is generally conducting point defense against advanced weapons in general, which is shown by the generally dismal results of Patriot missiles. Cruise missile strikes in Syria have generally faced no real problems in dealing with Syrian-Russian air defense.

e) A nuclear attack on the line would likely be met with one in kind upon the attacker, meaning...well, bad things all around. At least they'll have bunkers to keep the fallout away, though.
No, its far worse for the defender because they're in a static position, where it is known roughly where they are. Mobile forces meanwhile, are inherently, well, mobile, and thus are better able to avoid a nuclear attack: there were significant concerns in the cold war about whether targeting was good enough to catch up with fast moving armored divisions. Here, one side's mobile forces can be dispersed, move, and present a very difficult target. The other one's positions are going to be detected eventually, because you can't hide your positions so long when you are in fundamentally static warfare, and then the atomic problem solvers can wipe that out.

Still a fun thought experiment to be sure! :D
Of course, but I am extremely doubtful that fixed positions have any value in a world similar to our own. In a world with different fundamentals, like one with much more population, then something akin to trench warfare can be achieved, but in ours states don't have the resources to both build huge fixed defenses and the mobile troops required to support them.
 
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