Pincer movement

So you're proposing that two forces comprised of the same type of infantry meet and that one is inferior in numbers, and you're hoping that splitting the inferior force into a double envelopment will give them the win? You do gain an advantage by hitting the less-protected flanks but are also taking a huge rush by dividing your already outnumbered forces to deploy against a clustered foe. Even if you did pull it off there's a good chance your victory would be phyrric in nature. You'd be better suited to withdraw your inferior force and regroup in an entrenched position with restricted access a la Thermopylae

>you're hoping that splitting the inferior force into a double envelopment will give them the win?

yeah more than hoping i was asking from inexperience, also my question is, is there any scenario in which flanking by two equal forces make sense.

You're actually going to need three equal forces because if there's nothing in front of them to fix their position they can just turn against the flanking maneuvers and turn each away simultaneously because superior numbers. However splitting your already inferior force into thirds almost ensures that the frontal attack unit will get steamrolled so your flanking units better hit hard and fast and strike deep, hoping that the suddenness and intensity of the attack causes the troops of the larger force to route, because if it turns into a pitched battle there's a pretty good chance you're fucked.

>strategy
Strategy is a different thing from tactics and operational art of war.
What you are talking about is tactics.
>equal
>inferior
In order to do something like double envelopement with inferior forces you'd need high-quality and mobile troops, or at least some advantage which would prevent your superior opponent from just steamrolling your weakened main force.
For example if enemy attacks your prepared defensive positions, or something impedes or slows down his progress.
But most importantly you'd need a somewhat incompetent enemy, because if he enjoys superior numbers there's few reasons why he wouldn't try to flank you instead of just going in dumb. And

oh i get it, if youre fighting an enemy with superior numbers hed be flanking you instead of you flanking him, thats the gist of it, right?

>Pincer movement

This is now ugrob thread.

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Poor man he must be stained by the bottle of red paint that broke next to him, he will have to buy new clothes.

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Pretty much, if it's a competent enemy.
Also, flanking can fail on operational level, leading your enemy to try and disengage and fight on better terms. For flanking to succeed you need to fix your opponents forces so they can't disengage easily.
Can you please fuck off and create your own thread so you can sperg it out with fatniks and butthurt belters?

>Does anyone here know whats it called when the opposing army notices you're attempting to flank him and reacts
Refusing a flank.
Operation Uranus and the envelopment of the Wehrmacht 6th army.

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Soviet forces were superior though, and they pretty much faced Romanians which they chewed up easily.

It was accomplished at the battle of Marathon. Granted that was a battle between light infantry and archers against heavy infantry.

the spartans were the heavies?

Yes. Persian army was made up mostly of archers. One out of every 10 Infantry was a front ranker with shield, the other nine were archers. The Persians also had a large number of very effective cavalry, but were unable to deploy from their ships before the Athenians attacked.

Greeks had heavy bronze armor, alas opposed to lighter cloth or leather worn by the Persians.

Read up on differences between Eastern and Western armies. Europe generally used heavily armored but slow melee troops, while Eastern armies were made up of faster lightly armored soldiers.

>Read up on differences between Eastern and Western armies. Europe generally used heavily armored but slow melee troops, while Eastern armies were made up of faster lightly armored soldiers.
lol sounds like age of empires irl, so silly

isn't there a benefit with mixing it up. Like if you have 100.000 guys, why make half of them archers and half them light infantry, why not be creative and have 1/5 archers 1/5 crossbows 1/5 light infantry 1/5 heavy 1/5 cavalry, that way you can make them work in complex way complementing each other. I literally dont get why no one thought of this, like why make all of your guys the same unit except for making tv shows about that time period easier to produce?

Because the more specializations you have, the more complex training becomes.
Instead of having two training regimens for infantry and skirmishers, now you have 5 regimens to maintain and you need competent veterans amd staff for each branch.
Your logistics get more complex as well. You need different equipment for each type of troop.
Not to mention losses you take won't be proportionate so on a long campaign your troop mix will get lopsided.

There is a benefit and they did mix it up. In fact sometimes they mixed it up so much it was a logistal nightmare.

fair enough, but has anyone ever tried it? doesnt that aproach have some kind of benefit?

example me please

>that way you can make them work in complex way complementing each other. I literally dont get why no one thought of this

reality isnt some total war game, kiddo.

most armies consisted of a majority of conscripts/levies with a core professional/mercenary military class. equipment and training standards varied greatly between the conscripts, who farmed when they werent fighting, and the professionals, who were paid to train and fight year-round.

>like why make all of your guys the same unit

because for centuries a bunch of guys with sharp sticks was the standard.

Am I retarded for not understanding why pincers and flanking are so effective? Is it just a matter of being able to more effectively bring your force to bear when you allow them to flank? Like you’re using each guy at one time instead of a few?

I mean they really aren't any broad front defense in depth strategy will counter it, cutting the pincers off from the main body and enveloping the main body in a pocket for the slaughter

If you have a force that is facing a front enemy and you have the ability to suddenly make him fight to the sides two, and hopefully even his rear, most of the guys who were in an organized line facing one direction will probably fall in disarray as many of them wont know where to point. Hopefully your enemy will die deciding if he must look to the front or to the side rather than killing one of yours

There are a lot of reasons.
People can only face one way at a time. Large groups are hard to organize. Information is slow to move. The Lanchesterian square model. The man you see isn't the man who kills you.

Tbh its best understood physically, computer programming, video gaming kids who have never been in a fight won't get it the way people of the time did.

>Am I retarded for not understanding why pincers and flanking are so effective?

go to a gay bar and try standing alone without covering your butt with your hands. then you will truly know the fear of pincer attacks and flanking.

Imagine you are fighting two people, but they aren't both where you can see. One is in front, one is behind you. You can only guard against one, the other gets a free kill.

It gets worse and slower with bigger groups.

A lot is just about attacking where your enemy doesn't expect it or hasn't prepared for it.
>Your line suddenly enveloped from both sides
>Cavalry charging your back before you could even properly turn around
And remember how fragile morale really was, how little a soldier could know or see about the battle. Breaking just part of a line would often be sufficient to cause a general rout.

>Lanchesterian square model
Note that this specifically applies to ranged combat only.

Ok, so half of you are assuming that flanking means a force is outnumbered, that isn’t necessarily the case. If two forces have numerical parity, or a larger party is encircled, how does flanking translate to a more effective use of forces on a basic level? Like cannae for instance?

>I literally dont get why no one thought of this

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Unknown unknowns.
Why? 5x different groups = 5^2 = 25x harder to organize.

More complexity is really bad. You lose the battle before you begin, because making anything work is now 25x harder.

See
Your flanked force is fighting at lower efficiency because it generally isn't prepared to fight the enemy flanking it. Add to this the effect of morale where an advantage at a small point can cause enemies to rout and exponentially increase your advantage, and it becomes really powerful.

Birds eye RTS are a cancer on understanding strategy.

The individual foot soldier could see only a few meters around himself, and not to his rear. Even generals on hill had problems. Overcoming these sight and communications issues was more than a problem. These issues defined the world of war.

Really, do try total war games some time, they're not perfect but they're a pretty good attempt. You'll see that many tactics revolve around outmaneuvering or a concentration of power to basically cause local unfair fights.

>Birds eye RTS are a cancer on understanding strategy.
but surely is somewhat accurate when refering to modern day strategyy with satellite and gps and shit

So, in other words, it’s not that the encircling forces fight more effectively, rather the ability of the encircled to respond to their besiegers becomes significantly less effective?

>most armies consisted of a majority of conscripts/levies with a core professional/mercenary military class

No haha youre thinking about the middle ages which is a very specific example both chronologically and geographically.
>because for centuries a bunch of guys with sharp sticks was the standard.
where? how?

i love it how you have no fucking idea, not even a basic notion, of what youre talking yet you take the liberty to call him "kiddo"

yes.

lets expand to the modern day for too.

you are a soldier taking cover behind a wall protecting you on one axis. you can't run out of cover, or you'll die, but you can shoot back, with low risk of death.
now suppose a second enemy is shooting at you from a perpendicular direction.
you can't run away, or the first man will kill you. all you can do is die helplessly. and because you're focused on the front enemy, you probably won't even know, not that it would make a difference if you did.

whatever kiddo

but nowadays soldiers surely have some high tech gadget that probably looks a lot like some rts or at least a videogame that tells them their position and the enemys. I mean i have gps on my cellphone american soldiers surely have next level shit.

speakign about that, is there like an official US military smart phone (both for combat and outside of it) they dont use those big suitcase with phones still or do they?

I never understood why the opposing army just doesn't turn

>but nowadays soldiers surely have some high tech gadget that probably looks a lot like some rts or at least a videogame that tells them their position and the enemys. I mean i have gps on my cellphone american soldiers surely have next level shit.

lol

but seriously, what if the enemy is wearing a UAV jammer, like a tinfoil hat, or is using the Cold-blooded trait with suppressed UMP45?

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Because an army, particularly an ancient one isnt a well oiled coordinated hive mind. Each soldier is a very irrational human being that by some combination of social manipulation and survival instincts is forced to go into an extremely stressful situation and avoid fleeing which is what every cell of his body will demand him to do right until the moment confrontation is no longer avoidable.

So it's stressful enough to run to the front and know that you are about to wave a stick at some guy who will try to stick you first, but at least you can control it, and you can clearly see and confirm the state of the line as a whole, meaning that

Are you for real?

Yes, there are fancy gadgets, and radios. But they aren't magic wall-piercing god eyes and they don't make armies a hive mind. Flanking becomes a little easier to do, and a little easier to counter. The basic principle of being able to fight back vs being killed without being able to do anything is still the same on the physical level. And the basic principle of taking lots of hard work to organize humans without things going wrong is still there too.

(cont) meaning that you could see with your very own eyes that your sides were defended and you could focus on one particular direction. If you have the faint notion that you could be attacked from the sides, or much worse yet, from your back, you wont know where to look, and youll need to be super confident in your mates not to look back constantly, and all it takes is one that does it and it will snowball into a mess of confused soldiers that dont know where to face. Meanwhile the enemy whos flanking you each of them know perfectly well were to face and dont have that disadvantage

yes im for real i wnat to know if they use smartphones in battle or what

Because it takes time for the info that they are being flanked to spread, time for the group to realize, time to react, and time to finish reacting, and completely finishing reacting will be impossible since the enemy is already stuck in.
Since this is being done by lots of tired, angry, confused individuals in a roar of sound and cloud of dust, who aren't acting as one piece of software, it will take longer than the time the flanking attackers need to do a lot of damage.

They've had displays in trucks since the 1990s and radio-linked phones since 2010s, although usually only leaders have them.

>yes im for real i wnat to know if they use smartphones in battle or what

mostly for shitposting on this taiwanese shadow puppet forum and recording the occasional a-10 gun run

but like, nowadays, with all smartphones technologies and shit dont htey have like a special buffed hard resistant army smartphone?

like, what youre in the field and you see something important but since youre not a leader you have to see if a sandnigger will lend you his phone to tell command?

you have to be 18 to post here

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Yes.
You're in groups m8. So your team of 4 or squad 12 is all in voice and hand signal range of each other. And they watch each others backs. Then the squad leader has a radio networked to his commander and the other squad leaders in the platoon, the platoon commander is linked to his coy commander and the other plt commanders, and so on up the chain.

First world armies have computerized GPS and phone displays to link to their radios. But it's not really necessary because unless you're an idiot, you can do 95% of the same stuff with a paper map and voice radio.

but if you get separated from your squad leader you suddenly lack a capability that every civilian has and could be solved by you having a cheap light piece of plastic in one of your pockets?