How Close is 'Close Combat'?

[JMA]

And do we still need to do it?

As a young infantry officer I was trained that my job was the focused application of violence in order to impose my will on the enemy. That would involve a number of things, including, ultimately, the prospect of close combat - including the use of the bayonet if necessary. I was taught this because ultimately in order to impose my will on the enemy, the enemy needed to feel that I was better than him and that I could, man for man, beat him. It might not be a fair fight, but it would be a fairish fight. It was was about moral superiority not in the sense of the justness of the cause, but moral superiority in that there was no wriggle room to escape the fact that one had been beaten.

IMHO your training was absolutely correct. The role of the infantry is to close with and kill the enemy. At some point this may involve CQB and even hand-to-hand fighting. If your attack has been properly planned and gone off without a hitch the infantry should arrive on the objective as soon as possible as the fire support has lifted so as to get at the enemy physically before they they are able to recover from the "shock and awe" and violence of the fire support. While a bullet will do nicely there just maybe occasion where in the absence of a bayonet you may have to stick the muzzle of your weapon in his eye.

So yes the enemy need to know you are going to do them. That the air strike or artillery is merely the beginning of what is going to be a very bad day for them which will end when some raving maniacs will arrive to administer the coup de grâce.

Yes and the message to the enemy is that when the Brit paras arrive in their area or the US marines or the US airborne or whoever they need to start to make their peace with whichever god they worship.

I would add this.

This training is as much aimed at providing soldiers with the skills to deal with this final and most physically violent and courage testing phase of the attack (which we used to call fighting through the objective) as it is to prepare the men emotionally for this possible ordeal sometime in the future. I'm not sure that there is anything that focuses the mind of a infantry soldier more than when he receives the command "fix bayonets". For this he needs to both physically and mentally prepared.

History often shows that when the other side does not feel itself beaten then it comes back again (the Germans were defeated in WW1, but did not feel that they had been beaten in the field for instance). The Afghans have never felt themselves bested.

In my war they kept feeding the cannon fodder over the borders because they had not been beaten and did not know that their comrades where being killed like flies. Later when the external camp attacks became the norm they were happier to be pushed over the border as they believed that their chances of survival were higher in small groups internally than concentrated in large camps externally.

So what I saying is that those who were not in an action where they were defeated would probably believe that they could do better than those who were. Like I'm sure there were many Japanese troops who wondered why they had to surrender when they and their unit had not been defeated in any battle. I'm sure some Germans felt the same. There is no doubt that in the case of Afghanistan there is a case of selective memory.

The massacre of Elphinstone's Army achieved through treachery having first promised safe passage in early 1842 was followed up later that year by comprehensive defeats being inflicted upon the Afghans by the British as reprisals.

Two lessons should have been learned from this by the British. One, never trust the word of an Afghan ruler/politician and when dealing with tribal people when you defeat them you need to do it in a style like they did to Elphinstone's Army, showing no mercy.

So with typical selective memory the Afghans choose to remember only the massacre of Elphinstone's Army and not their subsequent comprehensive defeats at the hands of Generals Nott and Pollock.

The western way of war now appears, certainly from the reports I hear from Afghanistan, to be risk averse, casualty intolerant and reliant on firepower - often of the PGM type. We no longer seem to be willing or able to get close to the enemy.

I agree, but believe it is more due to the fact that the West does not know how to fight the sort of warfare needed to inflict a comprehensive defeat on the Taliban (for whatever reason). Its all a bit like bring a frog to the boil, where had the Brits been told that they would suffer 600 odd casualties in Afghanistan on the period of the intervention they would have taken the whole thing more seriously that they did. (We have been through this in other threads where the whole tiresome Afghan tour thing had to be fitted in between the serious business of guarding palaces, trooping the colour and doing training in Canada or Kenya.)

Th current situation has arisen from a start of "without firing a shot".

I maintain that had the Brits gone into this knowing that they were to take casualties on this scale they would have extracted digit and done the business (as they have proved they can time and again in the past). Of this i have no doubt.

If accordingly the enemy feels that man for man he is stronger, braver and better then us - can we ever hope to win?

So, how close is 'close combat' nowadays and how important is that we should get closer?

Not only is it necessary to close with and kill the enemy but also critical to pursue those who escape with single minded intent. The kill rate is critical. (We have also been through this before elsewhere when talking about body counts and verifying the actual kills that there is not even the desire to sweep through the area after an air strike to count the dead and collect weapons of war.)

So yes half of the trick in this type of warfare is to close with and kill the enemy while the other half is to hunt down and kill the survivors. Soldiers who don't have the stomach for this type of work should rather join the police force. (with respect to the many fine men serving in police forces all over the world)