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Re: winter conditions | |
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by Forestfire » Tue Jun 16, 2015 5:54 pm | |
Forestfire
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Another concideration is outfitting your troops, like the difference between being dressed for winter and jumping into your car and being dressed for winter and going skiing. No country can afford to equip all of its soldiers with the best of everything. So everyone gets warm clothes but only select groups get the realy good parkas in winter camouflage.
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Re: winter conditions | |
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by jgnfld » Tue Jun 16, 2015 6:34 pm | |
jgnfld
Posts: 468
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The following video shows some of the basic pure infantry equipment like shoes, tobaggan, etc. Note the uniforms can be folded to exhibit various degrees of brown and white. This is better than pure of either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah-_ivTF54c Of course machinery helps/is necessary, but as another person mentioned, the forces here are trained to exist and operate without it for a time. Good stuff: Magnesium snoshoes, wonderful double wall tents, transport tobaggans for unit level equipment, great clothes. Must cost a small fortune even before further mechanization.
Last edited by jgnfld on Tue Jun 16, 2015 7:05 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: winter conditions | |
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by saber964 » Tue Jun 16, 2015 6:48 pm | |
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If you want a good example of what properly equipped snow troops can do to modern army look at the Winter War 1940 between Finland and Russia. Finland was handing the Russians there heads until spring rolled around to the tune of a 10 to 1 casualty count.
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Re: winter conditions | |
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by jgnfld » Tue Jun 16, 2015 7:07 pm | |
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Absolutely except that modern air and sensors obviate many of the old advantages. |
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Re: winter conditions | |
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by SWM » Wed Jun 17, 2015 8:14 am | |
SWM
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Oh, interesting. So, essentially, there is no longer a "mechanized infantry". All infantry use vehicles when they need to, including armored vehicles when appropriate. I guess that's an important part of the modern flexible army. --------------------------------------------
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Re: winter conditions | |
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by n7axw » Thu Jun 18, 2015 10:29 pm | |
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I don't have any experience with this sort of thing, but I would imagine that while infantry are transported from point a to point b much of the time, they are still trained to use shanks' horses (marching) when needed and that the occasion when that that is called for still happens by. Don When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: winter conditions | |
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by Tenshinai » Sat Jun 20, 2015 12:53 pm | |
Tenshinai
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In heavy snow, ski-troops is about the only thing that can move at all. Armor gets stuck. Next step down is specialised vehicles, like snowmobiles and things like the: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandvagn_206 which has extremely low ground pressure, about the same as a skier. (an example of what is really heavy snow, just for comparison, i read an article a few weeks ago about a place in Norway, where they had to cancel opening a ski resort because of too much snow, just about none had melted from winter snowfall, and then early June they had an extra 3-4 meters snowfall in just a weekend, ending up with a grand total of around 15-16 meters, which after a winter of selfcompression still means 3-5 meters of hard snow(but far from hard enough for a tank to move on top), and while this is a bit extreme, 2/3s of that isn´t http://www.akaskidor.se/artiklar/nyhete ... r-sno-juni you can check the pictures, pretty awesome looking ) Medium snow, still ski-troops that rule, most vehicles can move, but getting stuck is VERY common and easy, and heavier tanks are clearly disadvantaged, you want low ground pressure AND low total weight. There´s also the issue that standing still with vehicles, if you don´t take care you risk melting snow and then having it freeze up again, worst case, it can freeze up the tracks completely in less than an hour. And of course, most military vehicles rely on lubricants and stuff that rarely agree completely with severe cold, and especially not with cold and wet climate, like what you can find up here in Sweden and Norway, and to a lesser extent in Finland and Northern Russia. Once you´re down to "light" snow, half a meter or less and decently compressed, possibly with a sturdy frozen crust, tanks and armoured vehicles do become quite useful, in fact mechanized warfare can actually be more effective on this than on summer terrain. As long as the troops don´t get too much frostbite or freeze to death at least. Gunship helicopters and ground support aircraft can be extremely effective, but thick snow also means any troops not on the move have a very easy task in hiding from them, even PIR can be camouflaged against very well when you have unlimited building blocks everywhere. What it means is essentially that air support cannot(or at least damn well SHOULD not) operate as normal, because then they´re going to end up having manpack SAMs shoved up their tailpipe on a constant basis, coming from places where they can see nothing but snow, and with surprise comes a severe increase in SAM deadliness. Basically, air support can do lots of damage at best, but can be totally uselessly smacked down themselves at worst. And oi! Swedish not Finnish!
Yes and no, infantry is what can be used "normally", but for vehicles, well that´s what you have engineering troops for.
Hehe, the name of the linked Bv-106 is the Hägglund Bv-106...
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
That´s why winter warfare is usually about stealth and raiding rather than fullscale assaults. Machineguns and lighter mortars as well as AT and manpack SAMs are no real problem if the troops are well practised enough, but heavy mortars, .50 MGs etc, once you start hitting those sizes, their effectiveness is just not justified compared to the trouble of moving them.
Amusingly enough, due as much to USA rejecting the Arctic treaty as Russia trying to find ways to push its own claims further as part of the treaty. ###########
Pipedream. Soviet equipment was overall better suited for winter warfare than that of NATO. In NATO, winter warfare was something you trained and equipped some troops extra for, in USSR winter warfare was mostly just "normal". They learned that lesson from the Finns in the Finnish winter war. In fact, if you look at analysis done by BOTH Soviet and NATO people in the 80s, USSR had by far the best chances of winning a conventional war in Europe during wintertime. Also, seriously, Murmansk? Your two options to GET THERE is from Norway or by ship. Getting there on ship is suicidal, all it takes is one single Soviet SSK being nearby and *poof*, and USSR always kept a couple or more of them in the area. And from Norway in winter? It would be a slower suicide, but pretty much suicide all the same. The terrain there is bad enough in summer even without the fixed defenses the Soviets put there, but in winter, i would simply refuse an order to try to attack Murmansk from there, because such an order would be on the level of the most stupid "rush up from your trenches and chaaarrge" orders during WWI. The defenses that covered Murmansk is the kind where a platoon could stop a battalion, even in summer. Winter is a magnitude worse.
Swedish weapons, AK-4, AK-5, M/45 etc has a larger triggerguard, allowing normal use even with decent gloves or mits, because you really don´t want to remove it completely.
Oh yeah... One of the reasons the defender is often extra advantaged in winter warfare. ##### As have already been said several times, overall the main theme is definitely "it depends". |
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Re: winter conditions | |
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by Tenshinai » Sat Jun 20, 2015 1:01 pm | |
Tenshinai
Posts: 2893
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Not nearly as much as you might think. And like i mention in my previous post, snow is a wonderful thing to play with when you´re doing camouflage. If opposing troops are welltrained for winter warfare and in camouflage, modern sensors are going to be as much of a disadvantage as an advantage, because the opposition can exploit ways that you can bypass them while those using them relies on them to not "fail". Exercises in north of Sweden in winter have shown this repeatedly, with troops actually managing to go straight through "defenders" unseen just by good use of terrain and the abundancy of snow. Because the defenders thought that having their modern sensors cover everywhere from multiple directions was good enough. It´s since been made a standard caution in the winter training, both how to avoid modern sensors, and how to use them without allowing yourself to be fooled by relying too much on them. As long as "your side" knows what sensors an enemy has, snow can be exploited as a major advantage. |
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Re: winter conditions | |
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by SWM » Sat Jun 20, 2015 10:42 pm | |
SWM
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To clarify, when I said "infantry use vehicles when they need to", I meant "infantry use vehicles when vehicles are needed or appropriate." I was not implying that they use vehicles all the time. --------------------------------------------
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Re: winter conditions | |
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by Louis R » Mon Jun 22, 2015 10:00 am | |
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I think you're confusing 'NATO' and 'US'
understandable: the Yanks do it all the time
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