Troop Platoon Tactics Pt 1.

Vintage Army Training Film of how we were going to beat the Sov's

[@freefall0483]

I love these old training films. The sheer number of Ruperts is incredible.

[@ibana8449]

And porky ruperts as well

[@888ssss]

its like a yacht brokerage around here....

[@mwnciboo]

Yeah same with the Royal Navy, for years we had RR, it was expensive but exquisitely made and maintained. When we changed Contractor for overhauling Diesel generators after so many hours, the failure rate went up 1200%, but we were paying 50% less....You get what you pay for, just as you said above, cheapness kills.

[@xclonejager6959]

I feel like I have heard all of the radio chatter in the game Post scriptom

[@nuzod]

2:10 whats the point of all that camouflage when you have an asshole giving your position away from the shine of the crest on his beret.

[@RiktigaFimpen]

Assigning a tank to an infantry unit is tactical (i.e. on a smaller scale) done only when needed. The French did this on a much larger scale, the tanks were permanently attached to other units. One of the biggest problems with most French tanks was that the commander had to much to do. He would need to guide the driver, locate targets, communicate with other tanks in his unit, and shoot and load the gun, all on his own. The greatest advantage of the Germans was that each tank had a radio.

[@vaultsuit]

You're mistaken

[@TrangleC]

Isn't assigning single tanks to infantry units and thus scattering them instead of massing them for combined mobile operations frowned upon since the Germans overran the French in WW2? Every time you hear a historian or military expert speak about the "Blitzkrieg" they say that that is how the French lost. They had better tanks, but they used them scattered over the front in support roles for infantry, making them next to useless against the massive armored attacks by the Germans.

[@gleggett3817]

Germans didn't overrun the French, they manoeuvred around the French units and cut them off (with the British) in Belgium and hence encircled them.

[@decimated550]

cute radio control tanks!! at 7:30

[@TarnishUK]

They're not radio controlled, it's called stop motion animation.

[@notmenotme614]

14:47 These days Health and Safety wouldn’t be happy with fixing bayonets while still inside, might hurt yourself… before the enemy gets to shoot you.

[@vaultsuit]

I think it owuld be OK, as long as the vechicle is stationary. Don't be so Clarkson lol

[@smp220700]

Well I wasn't a tankie but when I went to school there was more than one tank in a Troop!

[@gungatim6630]

There's 3. It's a British troop.

[@manofwealthandtaste136]

Is that an airborne helmet at 3:50? Just reminded me of Major Howard's helmet.

[@harryb8945]

It's actually a RAC helmet the para helmet was simply an RAC helmet with a new chin strap and liner.

[@stevenbreach2561]

Never to be worn,cos it made you look a twat

[@steffiebee5224]

Im so glad i dont miss batco., as for camming up your wagon....absolute horseshit. The amount of times i had to cam up and cam down on ex was unreal.

[@gareththompson2708]

Very interesting. What year was this made?

[@mwnciboo]

Tactics is local, you are talking strategically but supporting it with tactical arguments. The old maxim goes, "Tactics win battles, logistics wins Wars". An armoured unit without supply is a bunch of pillboxes and you can just go around them, deal with them at a later date, or they will probably surrender. There is a huge element of Doctrine in here, which underpins the strategic thinking, being superior in equipment, training or leadership doesn't equal victory. Otherwise war would be simple.

[@decimated550]

14:50 - in my mind, i don't hitnk it's good to fix bayonets while inside an apc. makes exiting more dangerous, no? whether normally or in a in a case of vehicle struck by fire and emergency exit needed

[@dulls8475]

Its the army not the brownies. We always fixed bayonets inside apc.

[@aaronquak2139]

What if there's an angry Russian fellow who snuck right up against your vic hatch? You best have something to ward him off quickly right from the get go when the hatch opens.

[@WarReport.]

Early 70s?

[@RD-dn7yv]

Troopy is far too clean

[@dulls8475]

Is that the rare 432/30 near the start?

[@mwnciboo]

They simply couldn't intercede with the Panzer's racing out of the Ardennes. Yes if they had been massed, they may have held out a little longer before defeat. But ultimately the German Strategy made Tactics of massing or spreading your armour pointless. Rather like debating whether to take a Bayonet or a Switchblade to a gun fight, it was already pretty much over before it started.

[@mwnciboo]

Come on, the other three tried to get to the Filming but their Leyland's gave out. Quelle Surprise! :)

[@TrangleC]

Well, then how did the Russians and Germans do it later in the war, if it is impossible? You keep your tanks behind the front, wait to see where the enemy makes his breakthrough and then you do a counter attack. That is how every successful defensive operation during the war and in every war since then was executed. Defense in depth. You put weaker troops in the front to detect and slow down the enemy and you use the time they bought to get your most powerful forces to where they are needed.

[@mwnciboo]

I don't believe any of that. It is exceptionally un-nerving to know you have been cut-off from support or help regardless of your Qualitative or quantitative edge. When you have no chance of withdrawal or assistance, your moral tends to take a dive. I would suggest the French Tanks failed, not because they were poor or even committed in penny-packets, it's the fact they were surrounded, out of supply, out of assistance, with their rear areas in turmoil. The maneouvrist approach isolated them

[@lloyd9710]

Never show your arse to the enemy 🤬

[@888ssss]

ok pawns.....heres what to do.

[@mrsillywalk]

Stupid! Fitting the bayonet's in the confines of a lurching vehicle!

[@smp220700]

Yes worrying, they put an engine in made by the same people who made the Austin Allagrro! Why did they change from Rolls Royce Meteor engine, a far superior engine even though 30 years old when the Chieftain came into service, cost I suppose.

[@tomgoff7887]

No. There was a NATO agreement that all AFV engines should be multifuel hence then need to replace the Meteor. It was the multifuel requirement which made the Leyland engine so unreliable and so expensive.

[@TrangleC]

You are missing the point that being surrounded comes after failing to prevent the enemy from surrounding you. If they would have had better tactics, they probably wouldn't have gotten surrounded. It isn't as if the French tanks would have started the war in a state of being surrounded. Also, the speed of the Blitzkrieg hardly left them time to run out of supplies. For many French soldiers the war was over before they even had the time to get demoralized or run out of ammunition or food.

[@mwnciboo]

Let me be clear...Your premise is flawed as is many historians view. You are saying that spreading tanks is not effective, and you should mass armour together for critical mass. The French and British, were not able to re-align their axis of defence / counter attack across multiple Armies (multiple corps), because logistically it was just not possible to shift massed tank formations hundreds of miles in a day. So your point on using them spread out or in groups is moot.

[@scouttroop291]

ok 1980s war far lol

[@RiflemanMoore]

Early '70s.

[@TrangleC]

I don't get it. You started off as if you'd wanted to refute what I said, but then you don't really talk about the point I made. All I said was that this video advocates a way of deploying tanks that has been deemed responsible for the French's defeat in WW2 by every military expert and historian who ever wrote on the subject of Blitzkrieg. What does being surrounded and running out of supplies have to do with that? Those two things are always bad, no matter what strategy or tactic is used.

[@TrangleC]

@ageingdrummerboy As far as I can tell, nobody else was doing this at the time. This is weird. Obviously my comment was supposed to be a reply to someone who had replied to a previous comment of mine, but both that other dude's reply and my own initial comment are gone. Never saw this happen before. Why wasn't the whole thread removed when my initial comment was deleted somehow? And why would someone delete a harmless, un-political comment about a military training video and the use of tanks?

[@TrangleC]

@ageingdrummerboy Yeah, I remembered it wrong. I had this video in memory as being about some regular infantry just sitting in a foxhole, with a MBT parked next to them, which isn't the case at closer inspection. Just the one point that nukes weren't the only reason for dispersing units. It was the main MO of the Red Army to basically organize itself in large scouting units and heavy artillery contingents. Mechanized infantry in BMPs, accompanied by MBTs, would just roll forward like a sniffing pack of fox hounds, till they met an enemy somewhere, then try to pin him down and report his position back and wait for a massive artillery barrage to wipe the enemy out. Because of that, NATO defenders always had to be mobile and do hit and run attacks and change position after taking out some enemy vehicles. As I said, after watching the video closer again now, I see that the infantry is mechanized and that they are talking about a moving defense, so my criticism from 8 years ago was premature, or better said, based on wrong assumptions.

[@TrangleC]

@ageingdrummerboy Yes. Basically the western coalition forces in Afghanistan were doing the same thing the Soviets would have done in WW3, just on a smaller scale. You send out a patrol, that patrol finds the enemy, or the enemy finds the patrol, the patrol pins the enemy down with suppression fire and calls in an air strike. That is why they are expending something like 200 000 rounds of ammunition for every killed Taliban. It is all the suppression fire. Nobody does the good old "running at the enemy under cover fire till you are close enough to throw hand-grenades or shoot him"-thing from WW2 anymore. The Soviets would have done the same thing, just with whole battalions as scouts and huge artillery barrages. That was the real issue, not so much the numerical superiority, as most laymen think. Facing a force 4 times as big wouldn't have been as much of an issue as people think. The Germans in WW2 or Allied forces in Korea faced worse odds and still won battles. The problem was that that numerically superior enemy fought in kind of a slippery, stand-offish way that made it hard to inflict much damage on him. Basically all the NATO defenders could do was to wait for the first BMPs and tanks to show up, hold fire for a while till they had enough stuff to shoot at, fire and then haul ass before the artillery shells landed. I recently had a interesting talk to a commanding officer who actually studied tactics at a military academy. It is interesting for a layman like me, to learn how it really is a science and a art form, much like other stuff you can study at regular universities. The subject we specifically talked about were reinforcements. It was interesting, because as a layman, you think reinforcements just means additional forces that get called in when things get bad. Simple enough and hardly much to talk about, you'd think, right? Quite the contrary. I learned a lot about different ways of reinforcing units. The most obvious option, just have a new unit go to where a front unit is in trouble and let them fight side by side is actually almost never done and only considered a stupid last ditch option, that should be avoided whenever possible. The two better options are to leave the endangered unit where it is and use the reinforcements to attack their attackers from the side, or have the reinforcements take up new defensive positions behind your weakened unit and then have that weakened unit retreat past those new positions, so the reinforcements can ambush the enemy when he pursues the retreating unit. The problem with just having your reinforcements move in with the reinforced unit is that: A: It caused logistical problems when two units have to share the same position. But more importantly: B: The position is known to the enemy and it is positions that count, not units. That was the revelation to me and what I learned in that conversation. Modern combat isn't actually so much about who has more soldiers and tanks and so on, it is all about positions. Who has the most un-scouted positions. Modern tacticians kind of talk about positions like its a currency. A currency that has a expiration date and goes bad when the enemy scouts the position. The point being, a small, even weak unit in a position that is unknown to the enemy, is worth more than the greatest fighting force in positions the enemy knows about. Accordingly, a smart commander will often even ignore enemy forces with known positions in favor of hunting down the enemy reinforcements. Once they are pinned down and you have all the enemy forces bound, the rest is usually only a mop up operation. It is all about reconnaissance and scouting. Moving a undetected unit into a already known position is thus one of the stupidest things you can do. It means giving the enemy a present, even if you safe and hold that position. Also, it is doctrine in many NATO forces to keep up to 1/3 of their forces as reinforcements in the back, to keep tactical flexibility, even if it means weakening the front line.