jhungary
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It seems like all my article are now base on some random comment fired away in the forum. This time in a form saying that a mere 900 men (2 battalions) can be used to fulfill any role of Amphibious Warfare need for a thrid tier country @Beast. Well. I did not go into an argument with him, well, I did not do anything but laugh off this comment, however, that got me thinking, how many men were needed to complete an Amphibious Assault? And how actually did Amphibious Warfare were fought??
History of Amphibious Warfare.
Believe it or not, seaboarn assault does not just exist after inudstrialisation, on the contrary, they did exist as part of ancient warfare, which have root to trace back to Roman Time.
However, back at that time, seaborne assault was used for nothing other than show of flag, actual fighting or assault is not as common as now, what they basically does is that one side landed a sizable troop on the enemy shore, and by doing so, they can either proceed to engage (Where the actual fighting start) the enemy, or the enemy would submit without getting into a fight.
Perhaps the earliest famous account of actual seaborne "Assault" is done in battle of Marathron. Where the persian put freshly assaulted troop into action against ancient greece, but still, the assault took 5 days to form, that is the time needed back then to organise troop and have them form up, in days, not hours.
As the world started to industrialise, so did the equipment of war and that change the face of warfare forever. Now a more Assaulting and Defending of beachhead is operated as part of a more normal operation, the denied access of beachhead give birth to modern Amphibious Assault warfare. Before then, it was merely a mission to tranport troop from one end to another, but now, the place you land have become the first place to fight and die for the respective sides to either establish a foothole or repluse an foreign invasion.
Still, the reason to fight have change, the ultimate goal have also changed, but the way to conduct this type of battle remainly largely the same after the industrialisation. From the American Civil war to Second Schleswig War, from landing in Fort Sumter to the Assault of Dannevirke. The way to fight remain unchanged, the progress of technology, however, have forced a dramatic change to the warfare and its doctrine, the invention of automatic weapon, armoured and aircraft, in just 40 years, amphibious warfare changed from a simple ship deliver infantry ashore to a combine form of combat and eventually evolved into one of the most complicated form of warfare, if not the single most complicated.
This article, we will foucs on the modern amphibious warfare and we will dissect the tactics evolvement throughtout history and the tactics and doctrine in a step by step explanation.
What is Amphibious Warfare
Modern Amphibiious warfare are all combine arms warfare, the exact nature of Waterborne Troop mean at least a Sea component and a Land component would involve in any given Amphibous War. But in recent years, as the technological advance accompanied the new face of warfare, the Amphibious element were not only limtied on Seaborne warfaree anymore, as early as WW2, the immense use of Air Power made the traditional 2 dimension Amphibious Warfare into a 3 dimension Air-Sea-Land war.
Case Studies 1: Battle of Marathon
Arguably the first ever fought with the modern amphibous warfare definition. Fought in 490 BC where the Persian launch an full scale assault on the Greek beach of Marathon.
In most battle during those days, the agressing armies usually uses Naval power to transfer unit to fight a land battle, where most "Landing" were unopposed and battle fought in that era were almost always a set piece (Both sides agree on a time, place and date for a battle) The naval unit can be seen as the extension of Army and their role is limited to Troop Transport, Troop support and Logistic.
What Battle of Marathon is different than most battle of that era was that Persian have also started planning a "Planed" invasion from Marathon to Athens, however, the Greek reaction is bit different than the one that usually conduct. They attacked at the moment the Perian Line is roughtly formed.
Tho the battle take 5 days after the actual landing to start, however, the time it took to move a massive armies into formation (25,000+ men and horses) would generally take days, if not months. In fact, the cause of start of battle can sometime be interpreted as either Persian is being redeploying their cavlary or they actually have attacked the greece before their cavlary were fully unloaded. Hence in both case, the war started in the middle of a "Landing"
The outcome? Since this was not anticipated, the Persian only unloaded and formed the light infantry, mostly MIssile Troop. Head on against the Greek Heavy Infantry, the Phalax Formation. Infantry at that time take shorter time to form, and thus deploying them and forming a line would be a lot faster than any horse or siege weapon used in war. And if you try to mesh light infantry against Phalanxs, there are only one way the battle can go, and that's the Greece Pushing the persian back at sea.
Read more about Battle of Marathon on my Battle Report here:
Battle of Marathon 490 BCE
The aftermath of the Battle of Marathon point out to one thing and one thing only, But even as the Persian lose about 5000 to 10000 soldiers for that one simply revelation, we can still see the same revelation happens over and over again in the next 2000 years. The revelation is, an Assaulting Armies is ALWAYS at its weakest when they are unloading. A triat that no one seems to be able to shake even for an operation fought in modern time with modern technology, and that is the foundamental building blocks with Amphibious Warfare.
How Amphibious warfare was fought??
The goal of any amphibious warfare is and always will be push off the defending garrison and establish control, or "Fronts" so that your own armies can invade or liberate a foreign land. When you have to talk about how Amphibious is fought, the way is surprisingly straight forward.
You will win an Amphibious War if you feed enough man to overcome a garrison. The what is easy, the How, however, is extremely complicated. Well, in a perfect world, what you only need to do is to push enough troop over the enemy coast, and you put more in number so you can overcome their defence, but, that does not mean you only need to have more than enough troop than your enemy, say if the defender only have 3000 and you have 6000 troop, that does not automatically guarantee you a victory.
The How, lies in 2 different principle. Which is;
How do you gain advantage to compensate your troop damage race (Lanchester's Law)?
How do you support the number you need for an Assault?
Lanchester's Law dictate that the factor of force concentration would be the square ratio of the unit between the attacking force and the defending force.
For example : If there are 5 enemy divisions defending an area and you attack using 2 divisions, the ratio would be 5^5 : 2^2 which mean the engagement ratio would be 25 : 4 Which mean for every 4 soldiers/units you lose, you will need to decimate 25 enemy soldiers/units
Here on in, I will skip to the graphical presentation of the damage race based on Lanchester's Law (Simply because Unless I gave you a detail lecture on the issue, you would probably not going to understand why and I am not going to give you that lecture, it will takes months.....)
The curve is the comparison of damage factor versus Lanchester's law, where you have an unit advantage over an numerical advantage, however, the more damage an unit deal can compensate the Lanchester's ratio by it's own factor (As with the curve shown above) and thus alter the outcome of a battle.
Problem is, How and What govern the Damage Race? That is the 500 thousands dollars question.
Traditional Wisdom suggested a good defensive parameter would give the defender 1 : 3 advantage to the aggressor, however, traditional calculation suggested a complete air dominance will give the attacker 2 : 1 advantage and complete Naval dominance will give the attacker another 2 : 1 advantage. The number also altered by some other, albeit trivial factor as well, such as terrain, distances the attacker have to cover or even weather. At the end of the day, there are no fixed formula to calculate the exact troop needed for any given operation, as all operation have all kind of different operational parameter, the beach may be longer in this landing and shorter on the other, the weather may be good on this on but not the other, you may have more air asset in this one then the other and so on.
On average, history tells us 2 attacker to 1 defender is needed in an average amphibious assault with air and sea dominance. 4 to 1 or 5 to 1 if you only have Air or Sea dominance, and 10 to 1 if you have neither.
Now, you know how many men you would probably need, now it's about time to talk about the second requirement, the logistic support.
Again, even if you have 6000 soldier at hand, that does not mean you can support all 6000 and bunch them in a ship and ship them to the frontline. How many troop you have does not literally translate to how many troop you can use. Logistic and support are always put the invading force in a serious physical restraint.
As you can imagine, most amphibious landing require the landing force to land on a narrow passage of a beach, the longer the landing beach you have, the more disperse your force will get, there is a balance of concern between how large the "frontage" you want, which translate to more troop you can land at any given wave, to the force concentration, which mean how much force you want to be allocating in one single exit on any given wave.
If the beach is too long, you will then have to disperse your troop evenly along the line, which translate to a weaker frontage, however, if the beach is too small, that translate to not enough troop to support a location at landing, ie not enough depth.
To be able to sustain an landing, the width of the landing beach, or the line you want to draw on the enemy coast have to be clearly defined. It can neither be too long or too short. On average, a single division of men can defend a 2km frontline, what you want is to compact the division and make them land evenly on a 1 Km front.
Another question is how big of a unit you can support, as logistical concern, how much you can support an invading armies were directly proportional to how many men you put in to support the war effort. This is again depending on the armies itself, you can find out more about logistic support on my article here
A brief view on Combat Logistic Support
to be continue...
History of Amphibious Warfare.
Believe it or not, seaboarn assault does not just exist after inudstrialisation, on the contrary, they did exist as part of ancient warfare, which have root to trace back to Roman Time.
However, back at that time, seaborne assault was used for nothing other than show of flag, actual fighting or assault is not as common as now, what they basically does is that one side landed a sizable troop on the enemy shore, and by doing so, they can either proceed to engage (Where the actual fighting start) the enemy, or the enemy would submit without getting into a fight.
Perhaps the earliest famous account of actual seaborne "Assault" is done in battle of Marathron. Where the persian put freshly assaulted troop into action against ancient greece, but still, the assault took 5 days to form, that is the time needed back then to organise troop and have them form up, in days, not hours.
As the world started to industrialise, so did the equipment of war and that change the face of warfare forever. Now a more Assaulting and Defending of beachhead is operated as part of a more normal operation, the denied access of beachhead give birth to modern Amphibious Assault warfare. Before then, it was merely a mission to tranport troop from one end to another, but now, the place you land have become the first place to fight and die for the respective sides to either establish a foothole or repluse an foreign invasion.
Still, the reason to fight have change, the ultimate goal have also changed, but the way to conduct this type of battle remainly largely the same after the industrialisation. From the American Civil war to Second Schleswig War, from landing in Fort Sumter to the Assault of Dannevirke. The way to fight remain unchanged, the progress of technology, however, have forced a dramatic change to the warfare and its doctrine, the invention of automatic weapon, armoured and aircraft, in just 40 years, amphibious warfare changed from a simple ship deliver infantry ashore to a combine form of combat and eventually evolved into one of the most complicated form of warfare, if not the single most complicated.
This article, we will foucs on the modern amphibious warfare and we will dissect the tactics evolvement throughtout history and the tactics and doctrine in a step by step explanation.
What is Amphibious Warfare
Modern Amphibiious warfare are all combine arms warfare, the exact nature of Waterborne Troop mean at least a Sea component and a Land component would involve in any given Amphibous War. But in recent years, as the technological advance accompanied the new face of warfare, the Amphibious element were not only limtied on Seaborne warfaree anymore, as early as WW2, the immense use of Air Power made the traditional 2 dimension Amphibious Warfare into a 3 dimension Air-Sea-Land war.
Case Studies 1: Battle of Marathon
Arguably the first ever fought with the modern amphibous warfare definition. Fought in 490 BC where the Persian launch an full scale assault on the Greek beach of Marathon.
In most battle during those days, the agressing armies usually uses Naval power to transfer unit to fight a land battle, where most "Landing" were unopposed and battle fought in that era were almost always a set piece (Both sides agree on a time, place and date for a battle) The naval unit can be seen as the extension of Army and their role is limited to Troop Transport, Troop support and Logistic.
What Battle of Marathon is different than most battle of that era was that Persian have also started planning a "Planed" invasion from Marathon to Athens, however, the Greek reaction is bit different than the one that usually conduct. They attacked at the moment the Perian Line is roughtly formed.
Tho the battle take 5 days after the actual landing to start, however, the time it took to move a massive armies into formation (25,000+ men and horses) would generally take days, if not months. In fact, the cause of start of battle can sometime be interpreted as either Persian is being redeploying their cavlary or they actually have attacked the greece before their cavlary were fully unloaded. Hence in both case, the war started in the middle of a "Landing"
The outcome? Since this was not anticipated, the Persian only unloaded and formed the light infantry, mostly MIssile Troop. Head on against the Greek Heavy Infantry, the Phalax Formation. Infantry at that time take shorter time to form, and thus deploying them and forming a line would be a lot faster than any horse or siege weapon used in war. And if you try to mesh light infantry against Phalanxs, there are only one way the battle can go, and that's the Greece Pushing the persian back at sea.
Read more about Battle of Marathon on my Battle Report here:
Battle of Marathon 490 BCE
The aftermath of the Battle of Marathon point out to one thing and one thing only, But even as the Persian lose about 5000 to 10000 soldiers for that one simply revelation, we can still see the same revelation happens over and over again in the next 2000 years. The revelation is, an Assaulting Armies is ALWAYS at its weakest when they are unloading. A triat that no one seems to be able to shake even for an operation fought in modern time with modern technology, and that is the foundamental building blocks with Amphibious Warfare.
How Amphibious warfare was fought??
The goal of any amphibious warfare is and always will be push off the defending garrison and establish control, or "Fronts" so that your own armies can invade or liberate a foreign land. When you have to talk about how Amphibious is fought, the way is surprisingly straight forward.
You will win an Amphibious War if you feed enough man to overcome a garrison. The what is easy, the How, however, is extremely complicated. Well, in a perfect world, what you only need to do is to push enough troop over the enemy coast, and you put more in number so you can overcome their defence, but, that does not mean you only need to have more than enough troop than your enemy, say if the defender only have 3000 and you have 6000 troop, that does not automatically guarantee you a victory.
The How, lies in 2 different principle. Which is;
How do you gain advantage to compensate your troop damage race (Lanchester's Law)?
How do you support the number you need for an Assault?
Lanchester's Law dictate that the factor of force concentration would be the square ratio of the unit between the attacking force and the defending force.
For example : If there are 5 enemy divisions defending an area and you attack using 2 divisions, the ratio would be 5^5 : 2^2 which mean the engagement ratio would be 25 : 4 Which mean for every 4 soldiers/units you lose, you will need to decimate 25 enemy soldiers/units
Here on in, I will skip to the graphical presentation of the damage race based on Lanchester's Law (Simply because Unless I gave you a detail lecture on the issue, you would probably not going to understand why and I am not going to give you that lecture, it will takes months.....)
The curve is the comparison of damage factor versus Lanchester's law, where you have an unit advantage over an numerical advantage, however, the more damage an unit deal can compensate the Lanchester's ratio by it's own factor (As with the curve shown above) and thus alter the outcome of a battle.
Problem is, How and What govern the Damage Race? That is the 500 thousands dollars question.
Traditional Wisdom suggested a good defensive parameter would give the defender 1 : 3 advantage to the aggressor, however, traditional calculation suggested a complete air dominance will give the attacker 2 : 1 advantage and complete Naval dominance will give the attacker another 2 : 1 advantage. The number also altered by some other, albeit trivial factor as well, such as terrain, distances the attacker have to cover or even weather. At the end of the day, there are no fixed formula to calculate the exact troop needed for any given operation, as all operation have all kind of different operational parameter, the beach may be longer in this landing and shorter on the other, the weather may be good on this on but not the other, you may have more air asset in this one then the other and so on.
On average, history tells us 2 attacker to 1 defender is needed in an average amphibious assault with air and sea dominance. 4 to 1 or 5 to 1 if you only have Air or Sea dominance, and 10 to 1 if you have neither.
Now, you know how many men you would probably need, now it's about time to talk about the second requirement, the logistic support.
Again, even if you have 6000 soldier at hand, that does not mean you can support all 6000 and bunch them in a ship and ship them to the frontline. How many troop you have does not literally translate to how many troop you can use. Logistic and support are always put the invading force in a serious physical restraint.
As you can imagine, most amphibious landing require the landing force to land on a narrow passage of a beach, the longer the landing beach you have, the more disperse your force will get, there is a balance of concern between how large the "frontage" you want, which translate to more troop you can land at any given wave, to the force concentration, which mean how much force you want to be allocating in one single exit on any given wave.
If the beach is too long, you will then have to disperse your troop evenly along the line, which translate to a weaker frontage, however, if the beach is too small, that translate to not enough troop to support a location at landing, ie not enough depth.
To be able to sustain an landing, the width of the landing beach, or the line you want to draw on the enemy coast have to be clearly defined. It can neither be too long or too short. On average, a single division of men can defend a 2km frontline, what you want is to compact the division and make them land evenly on a 1 Km front.
Another question is how big of a unit you can support, as logistical concern, how much you can support an invading armies were directly proportional to how many men you put in to support the war effort. This is again depending on the armies itself, you can find out more about logistic support on my article here
A brief view on Combat Logistic Support
to be continue...
Last edited:
