Information (the correct amount at the correct time to the correct person) is the key.

Heinz Guderian is called the father of Blitzkrieg and the German tank forces, but really, he cribbed off others and didn’t really invent the doctrine.

What he DID do, as a former signals officer, was to ensure that as quickly as possible, all German tanks had a radio, and that as soon as possible, all tanks would have a transceiver, so as to not only receive orders, but pass information up the chain from the lowest level.

During the battle of France, most of the German tanks were Panzer I and IIs, the French theoretically had superiority, but they had an exaggerated fear of interception and electronic warfare, and virtually prohibited the use of radio, which was a very large factor in their loss of the war.

And the Chinese and Russian stuff works so well and 100 % of the time. They are ten feet tall as it was in the days of the Cold War and we the USA are weaklings.

Seriously–When you can direct your land mines to find and attack your enemy’s tanks, why bother with your own gun-armed expensive asset? Have the little creepy-crawlies wandering the battlefield, looking for targets, get approval, and then get comfortable under an enemy tank. Even smarter? Let the self-directed landmine go home with your enemy and wait to detonate until it’s in the middle of a refuel/rearm site or even the enemy motor pool…

I don’t know where we’re actually going–Nobody does. I think the era of “Big War” is essentially over, and what’s coming up is going to look a lot different. Mass and logistics are going to play a part, but the reality is that a chunk of that is now irrelevant.

The first inklings of this came in Iraq: The “insurgents” were using things like washing machine timers, cell phones, and a bunch of other stuff they re-purposed from civilian industry. Nobody on our side recognized what was going on until well into the IED campaign, and the EOD guys were doing post-blast analysis on the IEDs themselves. We’d already let in ship loads of washing machine timers and such-like, thinking that they were being brought in to repair the backlog of consumer white goods that hadn’t been replaced. Literally enough timers were brought in that the Iraqis should have been running assembly lines for household appliances, which they weren’t. And, our guys down in Basra who were running customs had no clue…

Things like that? Yeah; that’s the way war is going to be going for the next century-plus. On the one hand, we had all these guys in EOD going “Where the hell are they getting all these timers from…?”, and on the other, we had the guys in Basra monitoring the customs end going “Wow, that’s a lot of washing machine timers…”. Information known; pertinence and relevance not seen until too late to fix or do anything about.

It’s just like small arms; I don’t see any “revolution in technology” coming along for the basics, like the weapons and cartridges. What’s going to be the game-changers are things like the Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence pieces, that the military terms “C3-I”. The problem is not the killing of the target, anymore, but the identification of it, and the direction of the fires at it. I wager that the 5.56mm/7.62mm combination we have at this time would be perfectly adequate going forward, it’s just that we need better sights and better coordination between our combatant elements.

The fact that our “Big War” elements are increasingly vulnerable? Yeah, that’s a problem. But, the reality is that there’s an awful lot of stuff we could be doing down at the rubber-on-road level, and which need to be done. UAV assets integrated into the squads, and the whole host of enabling technologies need to be kept on top of and integrated as they come on-line. At some point, running an infantry squad is going to be as complex as what a fighter pilot does now, and will have about as many moving pieces. Mass armies at that point are going to become ridiculous and likely too damn expensive to procure for.