Revolution Revulsion
This is Steven Petrick posting.
I remain perpetually stunned by what passes for competent action on TV.
One of the episodes of "Revolution" had our heroes holed up in a store while the villains attacked from outside.
This was apparently a very unusual store, as a single sniper on the roof was able to hold off the bad guys. The situation was so bad, that the bad guys resorted to the tactic of sending one man at a time into the sniper's field of fire in order to run the sniper out of ammunition.
We are assured that Miles, the former Marine among the heroes, is responsible for the training and discipline of the bad guys.
Apparently from what I saw he is both a complete idiot and a charter member of brainwashing school of training.
As I have commented before, while I can understand the Monroe Militia being armed with muskets, I cannot fathom why they would not be rifled muskets. If you can make muskets at all, you rifle them, and there is no deep dark mystery on how to make a Minie ball, so the rate of fire of rifled muskets is no slower than regular (un-rifled) muskets and accuracy is on a par with modern rifles.
The upshot is that if you are trying to break into the store (and by some strange quirk of geography it is impossible to approach from the sides or rear of the building so that you must advance through the sniper's field of fire), it is perfectly feasible to place accurate suppressive fire on the sniper's position while your assault team rushes the building and breaks in.
The assault team can approach dodging, making the sniper's job more difficult (hard to try to track a running, and dodging, man when other men are shooting at your exposed head and shoulders).
Tactically, if there is one sniper and you have X number of men, it is better to have all of them rush the sniper's position then send them one at a time to be killed. All of them rushing the sniper means a better chance of getting close enough to hit him with an unrifled musket, and fewer men killed over all then allowing a constant one-shot one-kill strategy in order to run the sniper out of bullets. Sending one man at time (particularly if you were not providing any covering fire) simply ensured that the maximum possible number of your men would be killed.
That is a recipe for mutiny and fragging the officer who came up with that brilliant plan.
It also is a superb demonstration that the people who do these shows have no concept of how things really work and just how stupid they believe soldiers really are as they assume soldiers would, like the unthinking automatons they know them to be, would rigidly obey the orders and run out to their deaths as the 10 men before them did.
I remain perpetually stunned by what passes for competent action on TV.
One of the episodes of "Revolution" had our heroes holed up in a store while the villains attacked from outside.
This was apparently a very unusual store, as a single sniper on the roof was able to hold off the bad guys. The situation was so bad, that the bad guys resorted to the tactic of sending one man at a time into the sniper's field of fire in order to run the sniper out of ammunition.
We are assured that Miles, the former Marine among the heroes, is responsible for the training and discipline of the bad guys.
Apparently from what I saw he is both a complete idiot and a charter member of brainwashing school of training.
As I have commented before, while I can understand the Monroe Militia being armed with muskets, I cannot fathom why they would not be rifled muskets. If you can make muskets at all, you rifle them, and there is no deep dark mystery on how to make a Minie ball, so the rate of fire of rifled muskets is no slower than regular (un-rifled) muskets and accuracy is on a par with modern rifles.
The upshot is that if you are trying to break into the store (and by some strange quirk of geography it is impossible to approach from the sides or rear of the building so that you must advance through the sniper's field of fire), it is perfectly feasible to place accurate suppressive fire on the sniper's position while your assault team rushes the building and breaks in.
The assault team can approach dodging, making the sniper's job more difficult (hard to try to track a running, and dodging, man when other men are shooting at your exposed head and shoulders).
Tactically, if there is one sniper and you have X number of men, it is better to have all of them rush the sniper's position then send them one at a time to be killed. All of them rushing the sniper means a better chance of getting close enough to hit him with an unrifled musket, and fewer men killed over all then allowing a constant one-shot one-kill strategy in order to run the sniper out of bullets. Sending one man at time (particularly if you were not providing any covering fire) simply ensured that the maximum possible number of your men would be killed.
That is a recipe for mutiny and fragging the officer who came up with that brilliant plan.
It also is a superb demonstration that the people who do these shows have no concept of how things really work and just how stupid they believe soldiers really are as they assume soldiers would, like the unthinking automatons they know them to be, would rigidly obey the orders and run out to their deaths as the 10 men before them did.
posted by Federation Commander at 1:51 PM
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