How Effective Were Civil War Rifles?

The armies of the American Civil War fought (mostly) with muzzle-loading rifles.  The expanding Minie ball allowed muzzle-loaded rifles to fire at the same rate as smoothbore muskets.  Rifled muskets had existed for hundreds of years previously, but rifling required a tight seal between bullet and bore to work and so loading a rifle meant hammering the bullets down inside instead of just dropping it.  The Minie ball fell freely down a rifle barrel, then expanded against barrel grooves when fired.

This made bullets more accurate.  How much did this contribute to the bloodshed?  In Battle Tactics of the Civil War, Paddy Griffith proposes that it made little difference.  Griffith’s overall thesis is that the Civil War was the last of the Napoleonic wars, not the first of the modern wars.  Regarding the alleged impact of rifled muskets, he basically makes the following claims:

1. Increased length of battles, not improved weapon effects, drove casualty rates.  Civil War soldiers didn’t die in such large numbers because rifle fire was more lethal, but because because they fought longer.

2. Documentary evidence, while sketchy, suggests that the actual engagement range of Civil War rifle infantry units was no higher than of Napoleonic smoothbore infantry, and this fire was no more effective (see above).

3. Whatever the theoretical capability of Civil War rifles, soldiers lacked either the training or experience necessary to exploit it.

Chart from Griffith’s book comparing the Civil War to the unquestionably “modern” WWI and Napoleon’s campaigns.

These assertions might be true.  The rifled musket didn’t need to significantly improve the killing power of infantry fire to have a tactical effect.  I believe that above any improvement in killing power, rifles enabled Civil War units to deliver suppressing fire effectively in a manner that was not possible with smoothbore muskets.

Griffith’s Assertions Are Not Ridiculous

I have this rifle, an M1903, sighted at 100 yards.  I fire at a target 400 yards away.  Based on intuition, how far does the bullet fall below my sight?

Small UAS & Supply Constraints

Just as firearms require ammunition and vehicles require fuel, small unmanned systems (SUAS, even if the “A” does stand for “air”) require electrical power.  This allows us to make some predictions about the capabilities and tactics of small units with SUAS.

Tradeoffs & Alertness

SUAS and their power supplies have weight and volume.  Since the capacity of any transport (including soldiers’ own two feet) is limited, either future SUAS will take up currently “extra” capacity, or they will replace something currently carried.

Soldiers can eat their boots, but tanks need gas.

General George S. Patton

Like fuel and ammunition, unit leaders must recognize SUAS operating time as a finite commodity to be expended for tactical effect.  A unit equipped with multiple SUAS platforms will not have them all on at the same time for the same reason they don’t keep their soldiers awake, run vehicles, or fire machine guns 24 hours a day.  Generally, a unit’s SUAS will either be “inert”, “alert”, or “engaged” — offline while the unit is either not threatened or covered by another unit, minimally operating to maintain awareness and detect threats, or at maximum capacity to neutralize a threat.  This is exactly analogous to existing tactics and not difficult to understand.

The default “alert” SUAS will most likely be a fixed-wing flier, since these provide the most efficient power to operating time ratio.  Ground vehicles (SUGS?) could have an even higher ratio since they wouldn’t need motor power when not moving, and might be an option for static units or to absolutely minimize aerial/EM footprints.  However, they’ll be slower and easier to hide from.  Note that the RQ-11 Raven is probably too large for a true light infantry platoon and certainly too large for a squad.

Get used to this thing.

Limitations

The tradeoff problem is most pronounced for light infantry.  In general, these men carry as much as they can and not a pound less.  Any “excess” load capacity ends up filled by extra ammunition.  How much and what sort of ammunition a light infantry company, platoon, or squad ought to give up in favor of SUAS is an empirical question, but I highly doubt the answer is zero.  Most likely, the lightest units will mostly use SUAS for detection and rely on external assets to kill, as they do now with artillery.  Since the detection capability of SUAS-equipped units will increase, the ratio of infantry to “artillery” will likewise increase.

The future is so bright for carrying heavy shit, you don’t need eyes to see it.

Armored units also have a problem.  First, the effective movement and weapon ranges of armored fighting vehicles are higher than light infantry, so their “small” unmanned systems will generally be larger.  A SUAS with a 5-km range is of limited use to a tank that can already see and shoot nearly that far, and is more likely located in unrestrictive terrain.

The more critical problem is that of crew load.  Fighting a tank requires all of the crew’s attention; they don’t have any to spare for SUAS.  While automation and control might allow this in the future, the problem is nontrivial.  These two issues have frustrated attempts to integrate SUAS into mechanized and especially tank formations so far.  In the short term, any integration of unmanned systems into armored units will probably require the use of a separate, dedicated control vehicle.  In the long term, designers will have to start paying as much attention to crew load and systems integration inside fighting vehicles as in aircraft.

Motor-rifle type units (such as “Stryker” brigades) are best suited to take advantage of SUAS.  They have ready access to electrical power and transport.  Designers clearly anticipated something like this requirement in developing modern troop carriers, which can readily serve as mobile control stations.

Tactical Electronic Warfare

EM emissions discipline will become both more important and more complex.  The likelihood of initial enemy contact being made on either or both side via identification of SUAS will be high.  Small-unit commanders and soldiers should know the significance of enemy small unmanned platforms just as they now know the significance of other types of enemy equipment.

A stopgap solution, gluing lots of antennas to a completely roadbound vehicle.

Mature SUAS will be well camouflaged and probably most easily identified through detecting their control and communication links.  The ability to detect EM emissions across a broad spectrum will become as important even at the platoon if not the squad level as image intensifiers and near-infrared are now.  Tactical electronic warfare units that specialize in detecting, spoofing, and obstructing these emissions beyond the capability of line combat units will return.  The resulting arms race between tactical unmanned systems and electronic warfare will contribute to the unsuitability of amateur/civilian UAVs in combat.

Conclusion

Motorized infantry stand to gain the most from small unmanned systems because of their manpower and transport capability.  Light infantry have limited payload, and current armored units are too specialized.

Officers should get used to viewing SUAS operating time as a supply constraint, and  establish standard readiness postures for stand-down, baseline, and stand-to use of these devices.

Electronic warfare will become more important at all tactical levels.

How Small Drones Will Be Different

A remote-operated aircraft flown into a target while the operator watches not only isn’t something new, but it’s already been done in volume and found wanting.  An apparent attempt to assassinate the President of Venezuela by such means last month didn’t work.

Some guy scraped up after an attempted murder-by-drone.

A drone that can fly at 200mph for three kilometers, operated over an ECM-hardened control link, and delivering a 5+ lb armor-piercing explosive warhead has existed for ovr fifty years now.  The AT-3 Sagger came, made its impact, and we all moved on.  Visually flying your remote-controlled aircraft into a target is called Manual Command Line of Sight, and it’s not used for anything important (more discussion here).  Small autonomous systems will change the battlefield, but flying a much smaller payload onto a target over a less secure control channel than primitive missiles is not going to be how it happens.  Hit probability and kill probability are low, with high vulnerability to electronic countermeasures.  Taping a grenade to your kid’s toy helicopter won’t going to give you the edge you need to win on tomorrow’s battlefield.  The characteristics of such a line-of-sight weapon compare poorly to the currently dominant line of sight personal weapon, the rifle.

Anyway, what will change?  The important factors are availability & control.

Nuclear Deterrents Probably Don’t Work the Same for City-States

Because decapitation strikes are too easy, or at least too dangerous.  A large country can mitigate this threat through dispersal of strike/retaliation capability, and by building early warning systems.  However, early warning only really works reliably when a strike can be detected a substantial amount of time (“a few minutes”) before it takes effect.

This is the logic behind bans on orbital weapons (de-orbiting weapons given less warning than ballistic weapons) and on the mutual withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Cuba and Turkey at the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  This is also the game theory logic behind countries like South Korea and Taiwan effectively outsourcing their nuclear deterrent to the United States. In The Dead Hand, David Hoffman quotes Zbigniew Brzezinski as saying that after detection, initial cross-checking, and message delay, the President has about seven minutes from launch to impact of a Russian (Soviet) ICBM to decide whether or not to order retaliation.  That window might have gotten slightly larger since the 1980s, but not by much.  The United States’ (and other existing powers’) nuclear strike capability is sufficiently dispersed not to be neutralized by local subterfuge, and highly likely to survive a a first strike.  This further reduced the likelihood of a launch on false-positive early warning.