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[Jackrabbit]

Sea fights were fought in rows because it was not easy to maneuver in front of the bow or stern of your enemy's ship and broadsides were the best option.

As for land battles, Jesus it must have sucked to have been an infantry man back around the time where people were figuring out how to make guns hit their targets more than once every ten shots.

[Dwarf]

I think ships were designed for the very purpose of fighting in lines - I guess a more mobile kind of ship with more turret-like weaponry would have been possible.

[smjjames]

They were passionate.

But, to stress that again:
The French fought gentlemany, which means you stand on a field, make rows and hope to hit something. They were completely unprepared and untrained for other kinds of combat.
Hell, even sea fights were fought in rows.

Thats what I was talking about as far as gentlemanly and traditional battles. I don't know when the beginning of the end of all that was, but the Revolutionary War seems like a good place to start.

Sea fights kind of had to because they didn't have rotating guns, they were fixed in one direction.

[Phmcw]

Not at all. Spain was a former superpower with a strong nationalistic mentality, and they were fanatics catholics.
French were led by a guys who kidnapped the pope, trashed their army, and killed a lot of civilians. Yes, there was trouble.
But not that much, considering France has to hold the rest of Europe as well, nothing like the whole O.T.A.N. not being able to hold Iraq .
Guerrilla's war is not a magic technique who give an unsurmountable advantage to those who employ it.
It just means that the whole population of the country want your guts. Or at least a significant portion.
French used the famous"kill everyone in rebellious area especially those who may lead (priest, locals leaders,...)" technique.
You may use the "make the resistants unpopular" techniques, or make peace with them. First one work for a time, but have to be repeated often, second one is hard but perfect, third one may come at a price but is efficient. You can combine any of the three.
The problem is when they don't work because you're doing it wrong.

Guerrilla always existed by the way. "Used" since the antiquity. I write "used" because as I said, it's just what happend when you don't confront the enemy directly. Used a lo by the German tribes against the Romans.

Also, world war 2 was won by Russia, with the help of everyone else, by basically zerg rushing the German army. Nothing to do with superior techniques.

[smjjames]

Can we get some WWII experts in here?

For one, WWII was fought on more than one theatre and you can't count out the battles fought by the Allies besides Russia.

[HAMMERMILL]

Soviets won WWII, they didn't need any help toward the end of the war. They took the main brunt of the German war machine and after Stalingrad (which happened before d-day) they were unstoppable.

They would have taken the entire whole of Europe if the allies never landed on D-day.

[Jackrabbit]

I think ships were designed for the very purpose of fighting in lines - I guess a more mobile kind of ship with more turret-like weaponry would have been possible.

This was the age of sail, although I think round Napoleon's time steamships were coming about. The most mobile ship was a steamship, and those (obviously) came to be the norm over time, but I don't think turrets made an appearance until much later, mostly because ship cannons actually had rather abysmal penetrating power, and more sailors were killed by flying splinters of wood than were ever killed directly by a cannonball. Which means that putting rotating turret-like cannons would have work insofar as they would have been able to fire and rotate (not the full 360 though - nobody wants to blow out their own mast) but the problem is you wouldn't sink diddly squat with the what, six or so guns you can fit onto a deck without taking up too much room with the gun itself and the mechanisms required to have it rotate and remain a stable firing platform. Broadsides were just that much more efficient and they when both ships are trying to maneuver so they can get off a broadside first then you end up with ships lining up to fight.

[Aqizzar]

Oh good, now the thread's devolved into milwanking about wars that nobody with power (or a brain in their head) wants to fight.  Can we get some Tom Clancy quotes up in here?  Maybe some of those defense contractor infomercials with the early 90s production values?  (yeah, you know what I'm talking about)  Oh, and let's not forget the more-hooah-than-thou-ism.

But what the fuck am I talking about here. Why are we talking about hypothetical wars here? As entertaining as it sounds, all this will lead to is somebody claiming how advanced some military system is, somebody else showing the flaws in that claim in a rather ham-handed way that insults the entire country spoken of, fights break out and crap gets ugly.

That's all that needs to be said.  This thread is lost to the age-old demon of Nerds Who Think They Know Shit About War, complete with the same bogus attack lines made up in 1972 about why America left Vietnam and a bunch of crap about the French army's élan they made up themselves.  Gentlemen, I leave you to your Armchair General Wankfight.

[Jackrabbit]

I think Aqizzar just called me out for discussing 18th century naval tactics.

[Aqizzar]

Not specifically no, but for nerddom's sake, yeah you're kind wrong.  Sailing ships were not replaced by steamships until well after the American Civil War - there was a long transition period where ships had steam-paddles for maneuvering and sails for travel, but even that was after Napoleon's time.  Ships didn't have turrets then either, because they just couldn't build heavy turret mechanisms that you could put in a ship like that, along with the crowded deck problem.

Which brings me right back to my exasperation at all this spawning out asking how likely North Korea could trigger a war.  Happens every time with discussions of anything having to do with armed conflict, everyone goes back to ridiculously oversimplified text-book analysis of wars out of living memory, based more on the recollections of RTS manuals than anything having to do with reality.

[HAMMERMILL]

Yeah, I really don't think anybody here is qualified to make these overwhelming judgements on the quality of any nation's military.

Using video game terms like "zerg rush" to describe anything that isn't Starcraft is a sure sign that you have no fuckin clue what you are talking about.

[Phmcw]

Nerd discussion about incoming (or not) war could have been the topic of this tread you know.
What were you waiting for?
 
And I used zerg rush for lol's sake.
Of course I means "bury them under massive deployment of well equipped troops".
Aka zerg rush.

[zchris13]

China in Korea came pretty close to "Zerg Rush".

[Heron TSG]

Aye. Sheer numbers alone can make all the difference. Zerg Rush is a bit catchier than 'overwhelming hordes of soldiers', though.

[HAMMERMILL]

Which doesn't really make much sense anyways. History has shown that numberical advantage is more of a logicistical hinderance then a deciding factor. Massive numbers of soldiers means massive causalities. This is 2010, not 1860. Massed formations of troops is asking for a massed destruction of said troops. Trenches and machineguns rendered massed formations idioitic back in 1914. Its even more true today.

Iraq's million-man Army proved to be nigh useless a decade ago.

No, an ancient spearman in the mountains cannot destroy a battleship in the real world.