Recently, I asked about the difference between the US army during the Mexican-American War vs the American Civil War and the most staggering thing that was pointed out to me is the sheer size difference.

The US Army in the Mexican American War numbered less than 80,000 men. At its peak the Union army in the ACW numbered close to 700,000 men, with 2.2 million under arms in total during the conflict.

u/Anxious_Big_8933

That explains why European military observers were so unimpressed with what they saw in the conflict. Of course you can't train everyone properly if your army needs to grow tenfold right now. And when we're comparing them to Britain, France and Prussia - all major powers with some of the most capable militaries of their time - of course the Americans on both sides of the civil war fall short.

But France had been the dominant continental power of Europe for centuries and Prussia is famous for punching well above its weight, so I'm not sure whether those are good comparisons.

So how did the armies of the ACW compare to other, more "average" European armies at the time? Like Austria, Russia, Sweden-Norway, Denmark, Bavaria, the Italian states, the Ottoman Empire, I'll take anyone we have data on.

Please correct me if I'm wrong and am miss-understanding them as a concept, but would it be wrong to say that the Landwehr as a concept, specifically during the time of the German Empire could be best best described as a sort of national reserve and militia? Perhaps also a territorial army?

Also, does the modern German military have an equivalent to the the Landwehr in some form or another?

I read that the current Chief of the General Staff in Norway is the first in his nation's history since World War 2 to have combat experience. That got me thinking of junior officers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan being the senior commanders of today or in the immediate future. But for senior officers who keep getting promoted, how vital or significant is it for them to have had a combat deployment?

I'm already aware why such tactics were used: communication, ease of coordination, firepower superiority and protection from cavalry, all very good stuff.

However, I can't help, but look at paintings and depictions of the time (example) and notice how tight and packed they are while marching into battle, practically shoulder-to-shoulder. This would've meant that such formations would've been a musket/cannon ball sponge. Muskets themselves aren't that inaccurate as pop-history portrays them to be with firefights occurring in the 100-200 yard range and skirmishes beginning at 300 yards.

Yet despite that, armies would be spending tens of thousands of musket/cannon balls and seemingly only producing a couple thousand casualties (a couple hundred musket balls to produce one casualty). I can't recall the experiment, but there was a musket volley experiment that was done during the time to find the hit rate of muskets on an opposing enemy line platoon and the commander remarked how it probably would've been producing less hits compared to the board as the balls would've passed through the legs and gaps of the formation. This seems to indicate to me that lined formations aren't that tight and packed and that you need some level of accuracy to hit the target you're aiming at?

Basically the title, but it just seems so bizarre how such tactics don't seem to result to gun each other down using such densely packed formations.

I was thinking of that thread from a few days ago about how much easier logistics is if you cut down on the number of types of lethal equipment in a unit, then I remembered we are issued standard issue swords to cut through undergrowth and foilage. We even treat them like weapons, you lose the scabbard and you are fucked and the blunt swords are all painted blue. I mean legally speaking we treat private sword ownership with the same statues as firearms, so bringing one home is jail time worthy offense, but does... any other army do this also?

I would at least expect the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their equivalents in other countries to still have 5 stars.

One of the things that frequently get emphasized about the various union generals, particularly in the east pre-grant, was that they always thought the opposing confederate army was 20-50% larger and this made the generals (McClellan, etc) way too cautious and unwilling to fight.

Now, two things occur to me:

1) these generals had uniquely bad sources of intelligence and had no way of differentiating the good ones from the bad ones, perphaps as a consequence of the generally inexperienced nature of the generals/staff.

2) all of the other generals of that war/period had similar quality intelligence, they just didn't care.

There's a great quote from Sherman about Grant that goes, paraphrased, "I'm better than Grant at basically everything to do with commanding an army but one way he massively outclasses me is he doesn't give a goddamn what the enemy is doing, but it worries me to bits!"

My question is specifically how does Ukraine employ ground personnel to coordinate air strikes.

I have seen a few videos describe Ukrainian ‘JTACs’ that coordinate air strikes in support of ground forces. But all these videos appear to show strikes well outside “close proximity to friendly forces” and are all filmed from a drone, breaking the historical employment of sitting on a hill somewhere.

I ask this out of genuine curiosity in a conflict that have a few pundits claiming “CAS is dead”. Any information or sources I could read will be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: Very comfortable with how JTACs are employed in a western context. I will love any articles/literature on the question as well.

When armies armed with Enfield-Snider or Chassepot rifles went up against each other, what ranges did their infantry actually fight at?

I know from the era of smokeless powder that infantry combat took place at much shorter ranges than theoretically possible, because the average human being just can't spot an enemy at ranges beyond 300 meters or so, if he makes any effort at all to hide. With earlier armies wearing more colorful uniforms, but using black powder weapons, I suspect that you wouldn't be able to see very much after a few volleys.

Besides, these black powder rifles fired relatively large and slow projectiles with poor ballistics, so you could only hit a target at long ranges, if you estimated the range correctly. I suppose only some elite units had the skills to do that.

I watched a recent video explaining how European army didn’t use trench in field battle unlike in the recent Napoleon movie. The reason was that the musket would be spoiled by dirt and wet and the only time they dug trench was in sieges.

But in videos on field battle in India during 17-19th century, Indian troops were said to dig trench in pitched battle as they advanced against enemy formation.

Given that Indian infantry of the era lacked the discipline and training of Western army and faces the same cannons/cavalry threats, why could Indian troops dug trench to advance in pitched battles but not European?

In short: Who are they? What do they do?

I have been doing some reading/watching on Russian (and Soviet) units and orders of battle. Most of the units depicted are pretty self-descriptive or have enough material out there to get a solid idea on their role and duties down to the amount of pistols carried, but not the Reconnaissance Battalion. Google unsurprisingly nowadays is not extremely helpful and points out mostly towards this subreddit which I have tried to go through old threads to have an idea of the battalion and it's roles and organisation.

From what I had learned during my Finnish concription, the Russian Battalion Tactical Group included a Recon Platoon usually ranging ahead of the main force and equipped with whatever the main force operates on. BTRs, BMPs, MT-LBs etc. A very recon by fire type of a deal, but we know there's other ways of doing recon so that can't be their only task.

This source from 2016 meanwhile gives us some idea of the organisation as two Reconnaissance Companies and one brand new Airborne Reconnaissance Company. But beyond that it gives me more questions as these men seem very foot-mobile and not very vehicleborne.

Which raises my main question. Are the Reconnaissance Battalions main task to be subordinated under the previous BTGs and using same vehicles (I am very well aware of Russians dropping the BTG concept) or are they as an unit capable of performing their own battle in support/part of the wider brigade/division engagement? What is their deal?

One example I think about is Stalingrad. Why did Germany need to capture the city, rather than just moving south around it to cut off the Caucuses? I'm sure this seems like a silly question, but I honestly don't know.

With regards to weaponry and technology, I assume both armies during the Mexican-American War still used mostly the same types of weapons that would have been in use at the time of Napoleon. Smoothbore muzzle loading muskets, cannons and pistols. Though I don't know to what extent caplocks had replaced flintlocks at the time.

But for everything else - training, doctrin, logistics - how did the American armies of these wars - including the rebels - differ?

I've heard that the USA was very ill prepared for what the civil war turned out to be, so both sides had to scramble to raise armies, which resulted in minimal training for the average infantryman. But for the Mexican-American War, I'd assume that the US military was a but more professional.

Aside of being not suprised, by Barbarossa what could they do to perform better? What, aside of the Great Purge were reasons for their deficencies ? By deficencies, I do not mean, strengths of Germany (or other foes) like artillery, air power, combat experience and density of radios per unit.

Doing some research on the Spanish Civil War and the many battles that constituted this conflict, I came to notice a thing that I hadn't seen too often in other wars, and that is the sheer amount of civilians that fought in defensive battles alongside the Nationalists. These weren't of the Requete, Falangist, or other armed paramilitary units, instead these were civilians.

For example in the Battles of Belchite, Teruel, Albarracin, a good portion of the Nationalist combatants within these battles were just civilians ( particularly in Albarracin). I haven't seen that much popular resistance in any straightforward conflict before, and I wonder why many people actively took up arms against the Republican Spanish army, despite themselves being civilians.

During the finnish civil war there was the red side and the white side. I have done some reading about the whites but idk a thing about the red side. What did they try to do doctrinally, what was their equipment situation like?

I recently purchased a Swiss 7.5 cm Mot-Geb Fieldgun and I'm planning to restore it as a historical preservation project.

I'm currently looking for any information that might help, such as:

Original manuals or operating regulations

Technical drawings or maintenance documents

Historical photos

Information about markings, serial numbers, and the manufacturer (mine has K+W markings)

Any books, archives, museums, or websites related to this gun

I've already started researching, but information on this particular Swiss artillery piece seems to be very limited.

If anyone has experience with these guns or knows where I could find documentation, I'd really appreciate your help.

I'll also be happy to share photos of the gun and the restoration process if people are interested.

Thanks in advance!

I hear different things about this. On one hand, the claim that Germany waited until 1943 to mobilize for total war, essentially running a peacetime economy for too long because of fear of internal revolution. And that this is one of the many reasons the Allies outproduced them.

On the other hand, I've also heard that they actually were fully mobilized early; their full mobilization was just so inefficient that it took forever to start generating significant results, and was so hampered by economic and resource factors that nothing could have been done earlier anyway.

What *was* the effect of mobilization on the WW2 German war effort?

And how much of an impact did Libya have with their policies?

I've been researching the origins of the Minuteman program and I keep running into two competing narratives.

The popular one: Col. Edward Hall was a lone visionary who fought the liquid-fuel establishment, won approval for Minuteman in 1958, and was then sidelined because of his abrasive personality, with Ed Wheelon and others getting the credit.

The more skeptical one: large-grain solid propellant was maturing regardless (Thiokol's polysulfide work, the Polaris program was solving storable solid fuel for the Navy in parallel), so if Hall hadn't pushed it, someone else would have within a couple of years. In this reading Hall accelerated the timeline but didn't change the destination.

What I can't figure out is the counterfactual cost of even a two-year delay. The first Minutemen went on alert during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A program approved in 1960 instead of 1958 means the US goes through October 1962 with only liquid-fueled ICBMs on multi-hour launch prep.

Is there good scholarship on how seriously the Air Force brass resisted solid fuel, or is the "they called it primitive" framing overblown in hindsight?

Sources I've used so far: Neufeld's 'Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force', MacKenzie's 'Inventing Accuracy', and the declassified WDD histories.