Can you win a war with only light infantry in the 21st century?

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leibowitz

Junior Member
Lezt said:
Vesicles, I do not doubt that the PLA and NRA were able to fight limited head to head battles. Before 1941 when the USA entered the war, the disparity between China and Japan is like that of the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan wars.

The typical Chinese formations were light infantry with rifles, grenades, DaDaos and LMG; No HMG, no Motars, No artillery, No tanks, No close air support. The Japanese opposition had, rifles, LMG, MMG, HMG, motars, tanks, artillery, naval gunfire support, close air support.

In a sense, I would feel on paper, the NVA provides a much more formidable challenge to the USA; they had tanks, artillery, mortars, soviet air crewed migs, RGP7s, AK47s, GPMGs, SAMs and China and the USSR behind their back. Like the mujahadeen pulling out stinger missiles, or Hamass shooting Vampir

Afghanistan, Palestine, Vietnam all had heavy foreign backers for the light troops, the PLA/NRA did not really until much later in the war. So in that sense, I consider the Chinese armies primitive.
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This. A single Japanese WW2 regiment had as much organic firepower (tons of shells and bullets able to be fired per hour) as two KMT and five CCP regiments. Even near the end of the war, when supply issues drastically hampered the IJA and nullified close air support, the Japanese still often had a 30-50% advantage in deliverable firepower. Only the very best-equipped KMT and CCP units could hope to match an IJA unit in raw strength, and many KMT/CCP units were literally equipped with nothing but bolt-action rifles and swords.

EDIT: Also, the IJA were not even that well-equipped by WW2 standards: a standard Soviet rifle division (if Army-level firepower was divided evenly between divisions, which was not Soviet SOP) had 80% more firepower than a IJA division; and an American infantry division had 30% more firepower than a Soviet rifle division. On top of that, the Americans had fire control computers and could execute time-on-target fire at the regimental level. This makes it much more amazing that the Chinese were able to push the Americans back from the Yalu, as they were often advancing in the face of a 5:1 artillery disadvantage and 20:1 air support disadvantage. I still have no idea how Peng Dehuai was able to look at a map of Korea in November 1950 and think that he could possibly make the intervention work, but somehow, he did.
 
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L

Lezt

Junior Member
t_co said:
This. A single Japanese WW2 regiment had as much organic firepower (tons of shells and bullets able to be fired per hour) as two KMT and five CCP regiments. Even near the end of the war, when supply issues drastically hampered the IJA and nullified close air support, the Japanese still often had a 30-50% advantage in deliverable firepower. Only the very best-equipped KMT and CCP units could hope to match an IJA unit in raw strength, and many KMT/CCP units were literally equipped with nothing but bolt-action rifles and swords.

EDIT: Also, the IJA were not even that well-equipped by WW2 standards: a standard Soviet rifle division (if Army-level firepower was divided evenly between divisions, which was not Soviet SOP) had 80% more firepower than a IJA division; and an American infantry division had 30% more firepower than a Soviet rifle division. On top of that, the Americans had fire control computers and could execute time-on-target fire at the regimental level. This makes it much more amazing that the Chinese were able to push the Americans back from the Yalu, as they were often advancing in the face of a 5:1 artillery disadvantage and 20:1 air support disadvantage. I still have no idea how Peng Dehuai was able to look at a map of Korea in November 1950 and think that he could possibly make the intervention work, but somehow, he did.
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Agreed,

I think it would be an interesting thing to do an analysis some day showing which each basic troop unit in WW2 can deliver at what range.

What I never really understood is why did the Chinese never developed Motars in WW2 a 80 mm motar is man portable, simple to make and use and will provide sorely needed artillery to Chinese troops.

The second question I always have is why did the Japanese never develop a simple panzerfaust against the Sherman.

What Peng did was undoubtedly impressive, but I won't call it that successful. No major UN units were overrun and destroyed. Most GI retreated in an orderly fashion and were able to fight another day. I.E. The US deliberately gave ground in a classical Manstein elastic defense. But yes, the VPLA did a phenomenal job.
 
L

leibowitz

Junior Member
Lezt said:
Agreed,

I think it would be an interesting thing to do an analysis some day showing which each basic troop unit in WW2 can deliver at what range.

What I never really understood is why did the Chinese never developed Motars in WW2 a 80 mm motar is man portable, simple to make and use and will provide sorely needed artillery to Chinese troops.

The second question I always have is why did the Japanese never develop a simple panzerfaust against the Sherman.

What Peng did was undoubtedly impressive, but I won't call it that successful. No major UN units were overrun and destroyed. Most GI retreated in an orderly fashion and were able to fight another day. I.E. The US deliberately gave ground in a classical Manstein elastic defense. But yes, the VPLA did a phenomenal job.
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Yes, MacArthur was a decently competent theater commander, in that he was not insane or bound by political considerations to avoid ceding ground to avoid encirclements.

However, several UN units did get annihilated, such as the 2nd Infantry Division during the Battle of the Chongchon River. In that battle, Peng managed to defeat a numerically superior UN force with over 4x his artillery and six fighter-bomber squadrons compared to his zero airpower. That's an insane feat of generalship. Had MacArthur dithered for another two days, the Eighth Army would have been encircled and the US Army would have suffered its worst loss since the Civil War. If there is such a thing as a finest hour for the PLA, that would be it.
 
solarz

solarz

Brigadier
t_co said:
Yes, MacArthur was a decently competent theater commander, in that he was not insane or bound by political considerations to avoid ceding ground to avoid encirclements.

However, several UN units did get annihilated, such as the 2nd Infantry Division during the Battle of the Chongchon River. In that battle, Peng managed to defeat a numerically superior UN force with over 4x his artillery and six fighter-bomber squadrons compared to his zero airpower. That's an insane feat of generalship. Had MacArthur dithered for another two days, the Eighth Army would have been encircled and the US Army would have suffered its worst loss since the Civil War. If there is such a thing as a finest hour for the PLA, that would be it.
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Agreed. The Korean War alone is enough to place Peng Dehuai in my books as one of the greatest generals in Chinese history, right up there with Yue Fei.
 
D

delft

Brigadier
t_co said:
Right, the lesson of Vietnam was that air interdiction alone couldn't shut down motorized supply routes through the jungle. But had the US opted to invade North Vietnam and Cambodia, then it could have cut the supply lines with ground forces. Also, the most of the air ordnance the US dropped on N Vietnam was wasted. It would have done much better with a systematic firebombing campaign against Hanoi, Haiphong, and every Vietnamese city, in order to deplete the manpower available to the NVA.

EDIT: They also should have followed it up with systematic bombing of food supplies and chemical/biological warfare against the Vietnamese rice crop. Unfortunately, the US was too sensitive to take civilian casualties to adopt such a strategy. Given that the Vietnamese people were engaged in a total war against the United States, they should have been regarded as legitimate military targets, however.
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They caused plenty of civilian casualties rightly seeing the South Vietnamese as their main enemy, but the war was just too expensive. It caused Nixon to end the gold sales, thus ending the use of hard currency in the world. Now there is only fiat currency which now makes it possible for the Fed to create scores of billions of dollars per month from thin air. It might end in as many tears as were caused by the German inflation of 1923, a late result from the US war against Vietnam.
 
D

delft

Brigadier
313230 said:
IMO, if US actively engaged in North Vietnam's ground then there are advantages:

No need to fight in the jungle, just control main road, which supplied North Vietnam army food, fuel, ammo from Chinese. Without trucks and trains, very hard to carry supply around the country. This would force NV to active engagement and let the US wait, lower the cost of war very much.

Political engagement: local government can help in spreading propaganda and preventing North Vietnam recruiting new men for its army.

With these two, and the superior firepower, US could push NVA to jungle very fast and so it would not be a total war but just a COIN operation. Without manpower and resource, NV would be a dead army
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That was the war the US were fighting South of the 17th parallel and it didn't work out as you describe, with political engagement, local government, the Phoenix terrorism program. The support for the military dictatorship just didn't come.
Also look back at the French war against Vietnam, especially the Battle of Dien Ben Phu. The Vietnamese had superior artillery with plenty of shells supplied by bicycle.
 
solarz

solarz

Brigadier
With the entrance of the French in the Mali civil war, we could perhaps get a first-hand example of how things would play out.
 
L

leibowitz

Junior Member
solarz said:
With the entrance of the French in the Mali civil war, we could perhaps get a first-hand example of how things would play out.
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Quite true. It looks like the main issue, though, is that the Mali AQ has extreme mobility and dispersion in the desert (thanks to pickup trucks and APCs looted from the Libyan insurrection), and is essentially conducting disruptive raiding operations with no cohesive front line. One French officer noted that they could "pack up and move a dozen kilometers on five minutes' notice". They're fighting like Mao's PLA. Will be interesting to see how such tactics fare against 24/7 US spy satellite and drone coverage.
 
solarz

solarz

Brigadier
t_co said:
Quite true. It looks like the main issue, though, is that the Mali AQ has extreme mobility and dispersion in the desert (thanks to pickup trucks and APCs looted from the Libyan insurrection), and is essentially conducting disruptive raiding operations with no cohesive front line. One French officer noted that they could "pack up and move a dozen kilometers on five minutes' notice". They're fighting like Mao's PLA. Will be interesting to see how such tactics fare against 24/7 US spy satellite and drone coverage.
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Agreed, and I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but these islamic insurrections in Africa and Middle East are not separate incidents. They insurgents, at the very least, are connected. This is apparent from the increasingly sophisticated tactics and organization that they are displaying. From Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Syria, the Islamic insurgency is slowly but surely learning how to fight effectively against Western technological superiority.

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It will be interesting to see how well those defenses serve them.

In his four-month-long captivity, Fowler never saw his captors refill at a gas station, or shop in a market. Yet they never ran out of gas. And although their diet was meagre, they never ran out of food, a testament to the extensive supply network which they set up and are now refining and expanding.
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P

PanAsian

Major
solarz said:
From Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Syria, the Islamic insurgency is slowly but surely learning how to fight effectively against Western technological superiority.
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To be accurate, in Libya and Syria the rebels weren't/aren't fighting Western technological superiority. The rebels there are/were fighting much more limited local government technological superiority as per older Russian weapons and maybe intelligence help.

The rebels have gotten/are getting help from Western technological superiority via intelligence and/or weapons in both cases. In Libya the rebels also received direct help from Western air forces' attacks on government forces. Not to mention all sorts of external logistical help given to at least the Syrian rebels which may not directly relate to technology but are crucial in facilitating their capabilities.

The imminent French/Malian/African governments' fight with the Malian Islamist rebels should be a better contemporary example of how a mostly self-sustained light infantry force might fare against technologically superior combined arms forces.
 
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