Poll: Which Branch of Military Is Most Important In Modern Warfare?
- Thread starter Shock and Awe
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For any other country, the Marines are the Navy's soldiers. In Britain, they're part of the Navy like the Parachute Regiment is part of the Army and there's quite a bit of rivalry between the two. Each has its own special forces, the Special Boat Service and Special Air Service.BonsaiK said:
For the USA, the Marines are nominally part of the Navy but in practice they're internally tri-service, with their own air, land and sea units. The USMC is about the same size as ... either the British Army or the British armed forces ... and generally considered equivalent.
To the topic:
The big thing is control of the ground. It's people at the oil field, refinery and terminal, along the pipeline, at the road junctions, at the harbour, at the airport and on the streets. Looting happens where there's noone securing the streets. Sabotage happens where noone's watching. Ethnic cleansing, aka mass murder, genocide, civil war, gang violence or whatever, happens where there are no security forces patrolling.
An F-16 or Apache or a Harrier or B-52 is no use against a gang dragging people from their cars for being the wrong colour, religion, sect, cult, gender or age and shooting them. You can't stop a rape with a 500kg bomb. Well, you can but you won't be very popular afterwards. As has been shown again and again and again, you can't see what's happening on the ground and make the call while hurtling through the sky at 700mph and 10,000ft.
The talk of second-, third- and fourth-generation warfare concentrates on shifting emphasis among the support arms but the basic idea remains the same: control the ground. Tanks (cavalry's modern form) are support. Artillery (formerly a unit of archers, then siege engines) is support. Communications are support. The engineers are support. The catering corps is support. Medical personnel are support. Transport is support. Ground-controlled airstrike capability is Close Air Support. Intelligence is support.
Most of that funding goes to R & D, it's not a reflection of importance so much as it is a reflection of how much more expensive it is to develop, build, and maintain a large number of top-of-the-line aircraft than say, ships or tanks or rifles.Metalhandkerchief said:
Army. Air force is all well and good, but counter-terrorism and other such operations currently ongoing tend to need infantry.
I think there's an option missing; The intelligence services. Most armed forces have their own setup but they are all junior to the likes of the CIA, MI6, yadda yadda yadda. Who tells you where the enemy is in the first place?
I think there's an option missing; The intelligence services. Most armed forces have their own setup but they are all junior to the likes of the CIA, MI6, yadda yadda yadda. Who tells you where the enemy is in the first place?
God damn it, no love for the secret services? Those guys can even prevent a war if they put they're head to it....
That might have something to do with the cost of their hardware.Metalhandkerchief said:
Sniper bullet: £3.75
Infantry rifle: £300
Magazine: £30
Ammunition: 20p each
... and those are retail prices.
Challenger II: £2,000,000
AMRAAM missile: £200,000
Eurofighter Typhoon: £40,000,000
F-16: £20,000,000
F-35: £35,000,000
Then there's the fuel. That Tornado hurtling across the Iraqi desert to nail a SAM site took off with 16,000lb of fuel on board, and won't be bringing much of it back. You're burning up a soldier's annual pay just getting the aircraft to the target and back.
All of the military organizations overlap each other, at least a little bit. The Army has avation units, Airforce has infantry guys, Marines/Navy both have fighter jets; the only exception is that no one else has the really large battleships. They are really all of equal importance, however I will say that the VAST majority of troops deployed currently are Army. All services will have a presence in every major war, however it is usually the army that does most of the fighting.