AmmoSgt
Posts: 1002
Joined: 10/21/2000
From: Redstone Arsenal Al
Status: offline
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Zero , "Combined Arms" like the term "decimate" has both a Classical military meaning, and a civilian common meaning. In the civilian common meaning you are absoultely correct , Armies have been mixing troop types in battle since before they standardized the Mk1 Mod 0 Rock , sometimes out of necesity, sometimes out of choice, sometimes accidently, sometimes on purpose. However the Classical " Combined Arms" Tactics, in the Military sense, came out of the Lousiana Exercises that the US Army conducted in the late 1930's and the Development was further spured by the German Blitzkrieg successes early in WW2. It is argueable by some folks that the first actual use was in the Grand Chaco War , but I see the Grand Chaco as more an early use of Psuedo-Blitzkreig style due to the scope of the forces involved.
The interchangablity of the civilian and military uses of the term occasionally lead folks to misuse the term in many ways and it often causes otherwise good students of military tactics to assume it is just a general term, and a deeper study of the sublities involved get sidetracked.
Just as many folks were suprised by the effectiveness of the Air/Land battle doctrine first used in Desert Storm over past Wars, and the massive changes caused by small things like effective fire while maneuvering with the M1 series Tank over past abilities to fire and maneuver of Armor. Radio and Command and Control doctrine facialiated by the superiority of FM over AM and the mass produced dry cell battery in WW2 made a whole new level of battlefield responsiveness possible. Combined Arms in it's most proper military sense was the doctrine that exploited and drove the development of near real time battlefield C&C with local response and recon being fed up the chain con- current with larger scale plans being fed down the chain of command. The resultant effectiveness is fairly easy to see. Compare German losses while using Blitzkreig C^1 type tactics while attacking massively prepared defenses( technically a Set Piece Defense, a C^0 situation) at Kursk in July 43, and German Losses using the same basic C^1 concepts with suprise against a much weaker and unprepared opponent in the Ardennes in December 1944. The Flexibility and communications of C^2 compleately made up for the lack of extensively prepared positions , the Germans took about the same losses, all things concidered, and their opponents took much lighter casualties in the C^2 situation. Argueably there are great differences between the two battles in many ways, but the similarity in the intial attack results, shallow thwarted offensive progress , inability to sieze key town/road junctions , and Germany's inability to shift forces to sucsessfully exploit oportunity vs the Americans ability to quickly shift , reinforce, and exploit on the same terrain and in the same weather should demostrate the combat multiplier of C^2 over C^1.
The term Combined Arms is used now to describe a multitude of situations , however the term itself was coined to describe the US Doctrine of flexibility and Command and Control, and in my humble opinion simply assuming it is a general term and not a specific doctrine misses the whole point and robs the person who does not realize this of a golden opportunity to study a truely revolutionary concept.
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"For Americans war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill is a luxury like Mah-jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary periods, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which
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