What would a modern symmetrical war look like?

RousseauX

Donor
It is definitely not impossible to hide entire armies, even from air and satellite reconnaissance, even in open terrain like plains and deserts.
Then you don't understand how big modern armies are, and even if you take out sat/air recon because magical cloaking devices or something you still have to deal with motorized recon/radio intercepts hum/sigint on the homefront etc all of which are much much more effective today than in the past.

Technology have gotten better at finding armies, the terrain havn't gotten better at hiding them

The only problems is that doing so will severely limit operational tempo, although that's not a bad thing if you don't have adequate supplies.
what this translates into is your tanks have no fuel good luck fight a war with that


This assertion is entirely false. In 1400, France had a population of about 11 million and could put maybe 40,000 troops together for a campaign, although 25,000 was more attainable. Right now, France has a population six times greater (66 million), and can have active and reserve forces totaling about 240,000. The ratio of population to army size now is very similar to the ratios in the Hundred Years' War.
This doesn't matter because geography hasn't gotten larger, French population is bigger, it's not ratio of army to population that matters it's ratio of army to geographic size.

Also that's because an actual war fought on French territory is non-existent

in WWI the French army called up 8.3 million men on a population base of 40 million: an actual levee en masse type war in which a nation-state's core territories are threatened is going to result in armies much larger than current French forces as porportion of total population

See the state of Israel for a good example
 
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This is an interesting perspective.

While there are elements of the analysis that I would disagree with, the overall idea is intriguing. One reason is that, without nuclear weapons on the table, none of the potential "top tier" peer pairing have sufficient stocks of equipment to fight an extended war, and modern weapons are so vastly expensive and complicated to build (to use an extreme example, in WW II The Willow Run Plant produced a B-24 every 63 minutes, 24/7/365, a B-2 takes several months per aircraft) that any war would be a "run what ya' brung" exercise, something that would take a few weeks/months. After that both sides would need to pause to a) rebuild a force AND b) find the money to rebuild the force.

While I generally agree with this, I suspect the U.S. and other nations (Russia ?) that have retained significant stocks of older equipment would have an advantage in this setting. For example older M1's, T72 tanks etc would be of some use until production of new equipment could be ramped up. My understanding is that the U.S. also has stock piles of munitions that while not considered suitable for use today could still be used in an emergency. (Reportedly once munitions have been taken out of storage and deployed overseas but not actually used they may be viewed as suspect and not considered suitable for re issue but could still be used in an emergency. I recall reading a report re this several years ago.)

Edit to add. Sorry not sure what happened re the quoting and my reply....
 
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The biggest issue with devolution of systems is that to reach the cheap/fast level you wind up with live fire targets if the other side has even a few modern pieces of equipment. A reasonable example is putting something like a T-55/M-48 or even a T-62/M-60 without modern electronics into an engagement with any of the modern MBT (Challenger 2, Leo 2A6, K2, T-90 etc.) with the odds under 25:1 and the modern tank goes home and the old systems burn on the battlefield. The same goes for 10 MiG-21 or F4 vs. a Gen 4++, or God forbid, Gen 5 fighter. F-22 pilots call these sorts of engagements "clubbing baby seals", a description that, while disturbing, is remarkably accurate.
Sure but it was pointed out that those fancy weapons would be unusable a few months in the conflict, especially with disturbed supply chains.

In a war between Russia and Europe say, wouldn't we see that at some point?
 

RousseauX

Donor
@Not James Stockdale

hey how about u try to explain your thesis in the context of:

Yom Kippur 1972
Sino-Vietnam War 1979
Iran-Iraq War
Gulf War I 1991
Operation Iraq Freedom
Donbass 2014

Can you explain to me how those wars (the last times when anything close to symmetrical were fought) didn't have front lines and had armies wondering the countryside instead?
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
While I generally agree with this, I suspect the U.S. and other nations (Russia ?) that have retained significant stocks of older equipment would have an advantage in this setting. For example older M1's, T72 tanks etc would be of some use until production of new equipment could be ramped up. My understanding is that the U.S. also has stock piles of munitions that while not considered suitable for use today could still be used in an emergency. (Reportedly once munitions have been taken out of storage and deployed overseas but not actually used they may be viewed as suspect and not considered suitable for re issue but could still be used in an emergency. I recall reading a report re this several years ago.)

Edit to add. Sorry not sure what happened re the quoting and my reply....
Fixed the quote issue. It was missing the closing "]"
 

Towelie

Banned
I would be cautious in assuming that these wars would be decisive and end quickly. People thought the same thing about the international finance system making sure that WW1 lasted no longer than half a year.

But advanced munitions would be expended quite quickly.

The problem here is that many nations you have in mind for this are in the American security umbrella, and one thing that we do with these nations is to standardize their military forces along our lines and make sure that they are desperate for the US to supply their munitions and spare parts (this bit is huge). So you would see nations not used to it have to suddenly come up with their own ideas for defense along their own lines, using whatever weapons they can get their hands on (most likely, Russia sells weapons to both sides).
 

Towelie

Banned
@Not James Stockdale

hey how about u try to explain your thesis in the context of:

Yom Kippur 1972
Sino-Vietnam War 1979
Iran-Iraq War
Gulf War I 1991
Operation Iraq Freedom
Donbass 2014

Can you explain to me how those wars (the last times when anything close to symmetrical were fought) didn't have front lines and had armies wondering the countryside instead?
Each of these wars involved a force on one or both sides that had no conception of modern maneuver warfare or were simply not prepared to really fight.

The Iraqis were built largely on Soviet mass battle doctrine in their first two major wars, and in their last one, they suffered from immediate collapse of morale before the enemy, not to mention incompetence at the top.

Yom Kippur justified the quick war thesis, as it was a brutal and quick slugfest decided in the span of less than two months, with the Syrians and Israelis losing a large portion of their best troops in the first few days, with Egyptian penetration halted as well, and finally decided by the situation in the air and the collapse of Arab morale once the initial attack had been blunted.

The Chinese were still using human wave tactics in 1979 for reasons that I still don't understand. That was not a modern symmetrical war.

The initial skirmishes in the Donbass reflected an asymmetrical struggle slowly being won by the incompetent and logistically inept Ukrainians who were making WW1-esque advances against the Separatists (massive artillery barrages at fixed positions followed by a lightly contested advance). When Russian "volunteers" suddenly provided the necessary manpower and equipment to turn the tide, the fight turned into a stalemate that was largely only a stalemate because Putin wanted it so. The rout at Debaltseve and subsequent battles showed a static conflict being kept static for political reasons.
 
@Not James Stockdale

hey how about u try to explain your thesis in the context of:

Yom Kippur 1972
Sino-Vietnam War 1979
Iran-Iraq War
Gulf War I 1991
Operation Iraq Freedom
Donbass 2014

Can you explain to me how those wars (the last times when anything close to symmetrical were fought) didn't have front lines and had armies wondering the countryside instead?

You obviously don't understand the OP. We are talking about modern, symmetrical war. The two wars you listed that were symmetrical, Yom Kippur and Iran-Iraq, were not modern. The Yom Kippur War was fought between symmetrical Cold War-era conscript armies, and the Iran-Iraq War was fought between symmetrical World War I-era armies. Obviously, neither of these are modern.

Then you don't understand how big modern armies are, and even if you take out sat/air recon because magical cloaking devices or something you still have to deal with motorized recon/radio intercepts hum/sigint on the homefront etc all of which are much much more effective today than in the past.

Technology have gotten better at finding armies, the terrain havn't gotten better at hiding them

what this translates into is your tanks have no fuel good luck fight a war with that

Let's talk about Serbia in 1999. Despite deploying a thousand combat aircraft and flying 38,000 combat sorties, NATO warplanes found and attacked Serbia military vehicles and artillery only two thousand times. NATO claimed to have destroyed about a thousand vehicles and artillery pieces, but later Serbian and third-party reports put that number at fewer than fifty. NATO also initially claimed to have killed more than 5,000 Yugoslavian soldiers and wounded 10,000 more, but quickly revised their numbers down to 1,200 killed, close to the Serbian claims of 956 soldiers and policemen killed. Throughout the air campaign, the only thing that impaired the capabilities of the Serbian army was the continued bombing of road bridges and railway infrastructure; those strikes began later in the campaign as it became apparent to NATO that continued airstrikes against Serbian ground forces were ineffective. Furthermore, despite 78 days of continuous airstrikes, NATO never fully destroyed the Serbians' integrated air defense system and never operated with the kind of impunity they had over Iraq or Afghanistan.

The takeaway here is that air power is, first, simply bad at finding enemy forces on the ground (look at the SCUD hunts in the Gulf War if you want), and, second, has a hard time actually interfering with the aforementioned ground forces if they do find them.

This doesn't matter because geography hasn't gotten larger, French population is bigger, it's not ratio of army to population that matters it's ratio of army to geographic size.

You were the one talking about the ratio of population to army size and saying that was what mattered. Even if we did want to talk about geography, the French Army's two divisions and six combat brigades would have difficulty covering more than forty miles of front. The rule of thumb is that a division is capable of covering - not attacking or defending, but simply covering and surveilling - about twenty miles of front. In an attack, a combat division could be compressed to cover as little as four miles of front before front-line units start becoming too laterally compressed to operate under harassing artillery fire. The French border along the Rhine is a hundred miles long, plus another hundred miles to Luxembourg. There is no way that two combat divisions could completely cover this distance, and they'd be too spread out to counter a concerted enemy attack if they did attempt to do so while leaving the rest of the country entirely unprotected.

Also that's because an actual war fought on French territory is non-existent

We have historical records of two thousand years of warfare on French soil, from Julius Caesar's conquest through the Hunnic and Frankish invasions to the war with England up until three disastrous wars with Prussia. In only one of those wars, WWI, were the French able to cover the full extent of their contested frontiers.

in WWI the French army called up 8.3 million men on a population base of 40 million: an actual levee en masse type war in which a nation-state's core territories are threatened is going to result in armies much larger than current French forces as porportion of total population

Why did the French have to maintain 1.3 million men under arms in 1914? Was it because they wanted to, like Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to have a navy, or was it because they had to, because there was no way they could call up, train, and equip as many soldiers as they needed before the Germans made it to Paris? Right now, the US Army needs six months to train raw recruits for the infantry. More specialized fields often take longer. After those first six months, combat units may require another six months of training to become combat-capable. While that year of training is going on, your country's factories are going to need to be gearing up for production. However, this is where costs begin to become a problem. While it was possible to equip 8.3 million soldiers over 4 years with a helmet, uniform, rifle, and ammunition, shortages of heavy weapons were almost constant. The increased expense of modern weapons systems would magnify that problem to such an extent that fielding an army of more than a million would be extremely difficult for a modern nation like France, Germany, or the UK.

See the state of Israel for a good example

Israel is a terrible example of what we're talking about. They have a conscript army (second-rate at best, but they only seem good because their enemies are fourth-rate armies) and large numbers of moderately trained reserves. Except for equipment, there is little difference between the Israeli army and any of your standard WWII European armies. They simply do not have the small, professional forces that we are looking at in this thread.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
@Not James Stockdale

hey how about u try to explain your thesis in the context of:

Yom Kippur 1972
Sino-Vietnam War 1979
Iran-Iraq War
Gulf War I 1991
Operation Iraq Freedom
Donbass 2014

Can you explain to me how those wars (the last times when anything close to symmetrical were fought) didn't have front lines and had armies wondering the countryside instead?
The only one of these that could truly be considered "peer-peer" is Iran-Iraq. It was a terrific example of military formations caught in two different generations of weapons, with senior officers not really prepared to fight with either (the very best of Iran's senior command structure was either seriously deceased, behind bars, or in exile).

The October War was a 2:1 fight (although The Crossing remains one of the great tactical successes in the last half century) with substantial interference by outside powers, including the U.S. both stripping Reforager supplies out of NATO stores and transporting them to Israel on USAF aircraft and U.S. forces interdicting Soviet efforts (including pushing Strategic Forces to DEFCON 2)..

The PLA incursion into Vietnam was exactly that. It was meant to be a demonstration to Hanoi that the PRC was to be accomodated in all things. Instead is demostrated that the PLA was LONG overdue for reorganization. It was never meant to be a war.

Gulf War 1991 was a matter of the entire Western World taking four months to ships forces to the region and crushing a low second tier military force like a bug (in, it should be noted, a tactically simple manner, namely a holding attack, that was achieved brilliantly)

Iraqi Freedom was Godzilla vs., if not Bambi then Bambi's mother.

Donbass was Ukraine against Russia. That made Iraqi Freedom and the Gulf War look like a fair fight.

You also missed what was, perhaps, the closest to a peer-peer conflict since 1945, namely the 1971 India-Pakistan War. While not an example of top tier forces engaging (and impacted by support to both combatants by outside agents with equipment) it was a remarkably short, sharp and quite bloody engagement that does very much fit the pattern of a "100 Year's War". Combined 12,000 KIA, ~30,000 WIA, close to 100K PoW. Over in two weeks, territorial gain returned to the losing state as a measure of "good will" by the winner, with both sides taking some time to lick their wounds before having another go (worryingly it is almost time for the next round after the 1997 war). Any further war between the two countries will be anything but peer-peer in a conventional engagement. The Indian armed forces have far outpaced Pakistan's, especially since 1997 with India having reached top-tier (i.e NATO/Russia/ROK/Japan) status. The only place the two sides are equal, and terrifyingly so, is in deployable nuclear weapons.
 
Sure but it was pointed out that those fancy weapons would be unusable a few months in the conflict, especially with disturbed supply chains.

In a war between Russia and Europe say, wouldn't we see that at some point?
That was doctrine as much as theory. The Soviet's figured in any WW3 warplan their Cat A/B divisons were going to be chewed up and spat out no matter how successful they were or how far they advanced (rather the further they advanced they would expect even more wear and tear, also you know tac nukes), and the same would apply to NATO forces. The next phase would be decided by if they can beat Reforager in churning out new units to the front, obsolescence and quality control be damned. The moneky models were practice for how much you can downgrade your own equipment.

Of course the Russians have realized that the Cold War is over, and that the actual Cold War didn't involve any of that anyways.
 
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