I suspect you’re projecting a lot of your personal beliefs on whatever you think I’m saying - I’m pointing out that a major casualty event in an extremely pivotal moment in a major US war was decided by a defending force in a city assault, which is what the parent article and quote is commenting about . I’d love to hear where in the parent comment you think is “hating” on Lee, unless you take the position that pointing out facts is “hate.” surely one can point out historical facts without writing an essay on military tactics on every other battle that happened during the civil war - surely you could agree?I am well versed on this subject and would love a debate. curious you don’t mention fredericksburg because that would actually support whatever point you think you’re making.

Meanwhile going unacknowledged is Lee&#x27;s defense of Richmond &amp; Petersburg where he successfully innovated trench warfare 50 years before WW1, where we won&#x27;t talk about the Battle of the Crater.But hating on Lee is still one of the strongest virtue signals we have. So you&#x27;ll continue going on about Pickett&#x27;s charge, Lee &#x27;hagiography&#x27; and the Lost Cause mythos.

Only worked because armor was so dominant and anti armor wasn&#x27;t there yet.

Just because the defense is stronger doesn&#x27;t guarantee it will always win. Take two sports teams with different levels of skill, for example. In a single game, the team considered weaker can pull off a surprise win. However, over a span of several games, the stronger team will usually pull ahead.In war, various factors, like the element of surprise, can allow the offense to temporarily overcome an inherently stronger defense. In 1940, the Germans quickly overran the French by catching them off guard tactically and strategically. The French couldn&#x27;t adapt their defense quickly enough and suffered too many crucial losses early on.Next year, the Soviets fared even worse than the French initially; but due to geography they managed to survive two crucial years and, at Kursk in 1943, they showed how a well designed defense could stop cold even the best German tanks. The French themselves had a similar experience in WW1: after initially surviving for two hard years, they gave the German attackers a very bloody nose at Verdun.

The Blitzkrieg isn&#x27;t a great counterpoint since the objective is to avoid frontal attacks on heavily defended positions, which is how the Germans did actually manage to get France. Using a blitzkrieg against a hardened position is doomed to failure.The WWII invasion of France was so successful because they struck through the undefended Ardennes, rather than frontally attacking the Maginot line. In that sense the Maginot Line was actually a success, since it prevented a direct invasion of France from Germany, and forced the Germans to attack through other countries.

Even more modern example: The little green men who seized Ukraine.

Good point. For a counter point, the German Blitzkrieg helped them get France in WW2.

&gt; Military theorists have long described the defense as the strongest form of war, and current doctrine agrees.Indeed - one of the first wars fought with modern rifling, the American Civil War, had General Lee learn this lesson in a very hard way on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, in a failed infantry assault known as &quot;Pickett&#x27;s Charge.&quot;[0]Lee mistakenly attacked a position that was very easily defensible by Union artillery on faulty theory that it would be weakened due to a (failed) artillery barrage that happened previously. The Union correctly predicted Lee would attack there, and he sent over 12,000 men in a futile assault that resulted in 50% casualties in less than 1 hour, one of the bloodiest hours of the entire war.[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pickett%27s_Charge" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pickett%27s_Charge</a>

(2022)The date is important because it was written before the Ukraine-Russia war&#x27;s use of drones ramped up. The article doesn&#x27;t mention drones (UAVs) afaict - how to use them in attack and defense, how to protect yourself - which is today a major omission.

I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;ve even seen the real potential of drone warfare on the battlefield, yet. Right now their guidance is very crude, little more than the adaptation of consumer FPV technology. Once US&#x2F;RU&#x2F;CN have had time to develop the technology, build up the manufacturing and logistics, and give them AI automated target selection, it&#x27;s going to completely change the nature of warfare IMO.Instead of dropping tons of expensive guided bombs and shells, attackers will drop tens of thousands of cheaper small anti-personnel hunter-seeker drones that can not only seek out human targets but wait in low power mode for a target to appear if it can&#x27;t identify one at first. It&#x27;ll make most kinds of static installations and defenses untenable. Units will have to constantly be on the move and camouflaged, and avoid giving up all kinds of life signs like sound&#x2F;gunshots, thermal, RF comms, etc. The smaller drones will be able to help larger drones with targeting any armor they can&#x27;t handle themselves while acting like free flying land mines.I agree that it&#x27;s a software problem. The Slaughterbots video [1] is already six years old and all of the pieces to make killer drone swarms were already there (just not as miniaturized as the video). Now there&#x27;s data in Ukraine about how well individual drones work; AI is getting better and better; the compute is getting cheap enough to just slap on a drone; SOTA single use aluminum air batteries can already enable drones with much longer flight times than consumer batteries. All the pieces are there to make a nightmarish weapon that changes warfare as much as the machine gun, land mine, or air support.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ecClODh4zYk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ecClODh4zYk</a>

CRAM and CIWS are for point-defence; it would be very expensive to cover e.g. 100 miles of international border using those systems. Because drones are steerable, they can fly between the gatling guns and on to their target. Of course, if the target has point-defence, that won&#x27;t work!In Ukraine, it seems that a lot of the defender&#x27;s drones are hybrid surveillance and attack, so they don&#x27;t know what their target is at launch. You can&#x27;t point-defend a trenchline. I think the Russians are relying on jammers. Broadband jamming must require a lot of power (and presumably impairs their own comms); narrowband jamming requires knowledge of the attacker&#x27;s frequency.CRAM&#x2F;CIWS generally consists of several weapons systems, and a command centre with the radar, communicating by radio. So those defensive systems are also exposed to jamming, which could be achieved by a high-altitude drone; these systems aren&#x27;t designed to shoot things at 20,000 ft., although many of them can have a SAM system strapped on.Anyway, I suspect that drone-antidrone warfare is going to come down to a radio arms-race; i.e. jammer vs. anti-jammer. And you can defeat a jammer using beamforming.

I&#x27;d argue it&#x27;s still the same, there&#x27;s just a tech accessibility difference between defense and offense. When they are equal, defense still tends to win out but it&#x27;ll take a bit for the access to catch up.The counter for drones will be the proliferation of CRAM&#x2F;CIWS and APS. Currently there exists cheap, publicly available (and commonly heavily open sourced) tech stacks for drones but the same is not the case for CRAM&#x2F;CIWS and APS. But fundamentally the systems that can effectively kill artillery shells, mortars shells, rockets, and missiles in flight will be able to kill drones as well. There are some differences (such as that drones tend to fly lower&#x2F;slower) but fundamentally the tech applies the same.And to be entirely honest this proliferation is almost entirely a software problem. Of course the existence of public hardware designs is important as well but getting effective sensor integration, detection, targeting, tracking, and response at a low enough latency will be bottlenecked by access to high quality domain specific software.

We&#x27;re seeing massive use of drones in the UA&#x2F;RU war. I wonder how those change these points?

be the language model you want to see in the world

I want a tool that I can use to feed it a block of text or a URL to a website and it will give me an LLM and a text prompt that would yield said text&#x2F;website.I decided to ask ChatGPT 3.5 about what a Westpoint Academy instructor would have to say about defending a city and defensive tactics beyond those commonly known and the answer was not nearly as interesting.

Those have been part of the common language of city defense since at least Operation: Desert Storm in 1991, and in regular use for as long as sieges (and therefore cities) have been a thing.One of the ways to win a war without winning a battle is to make winning so morally costly to your enemy that their own troops balk at the doing. Its not a super effective method, and usually fails (propaganda tends to win in that particular game of rock-paper-scissors), but it can certainly be effective as a delaying tactic, or as a method to damage your enemy&#x27;s morale.There have always been statespeople and military leaders who argue that human shields are unsporting, but the main pressures on military strategy are evolutionary, rather than ethical. Thus, if its horrific but it works, it must not be that horrific. More broadly, arms races typically amount to &quot;we believe the other side has the technology to commit X atrocity. We therefore need the same ability to commit that atrocity, else we appear weak&quot;

It&#x27;s weird that you are trying to say without saying that Hamas provoked the war he&#x27;s talk about. Israel has been at war with Palestine continuously since it was founded.

I said as much in response to another (rightly) dead post:Human shield tactics are basically as old as permanent settlements, because forcing your enemy past their own ethical limits has always been a tactic of occasional effectiveness. Its basically how insurgencies work against technologically and numerically superior opponents, and this has been true for millennia.And for just as long, there have been military and political leaders describing it as cowardly or unsporting. But again, the state of the art of military tactics is a catalog of what works, not what&#x27;s ethical. The practice of war itself is, by and large, unethical. If it didn&#x27;t work, they wouldn&#x27;t keep doing it. Speaking entirely for myself, I don&#x27;t ever want to be in the mental state to say &quot;its ok for the SWAT team to shoot through the hostages; its their fault for going to a bank that could be robbed in the first place&quot;.Absolutely, the party that provoked the war in the first place is in the wrong for the attack that provoked it. But that doesn&#x27;t give the side prosecuting the war carte blanche to respond as brutally as they please.

but it&#x27;s a wall built and patrolled by the opponent that is preventing the population from leaving the combat zone

PSYOP&#x27;s are the most powerful and most used weapon in the U.S. arsenal.

Defending the city: An overview of defensive tactics