Why did the US invent such a retarded doctrine as "walking fire"?
>hey guys let's advance slowly in a line across the open ground into the entrenched enemy's artillery, mortars and belt-fed MGs
Did it ever actually work?
Why did the US invent such a retarded doctrine as "walking fire"?
No but it worked well as an intermediary between a machine gun and a rifle. Kinda like a, what do you call it, an assault rifle?
>No but it worked well
Wrong. Look up the meaning of terms before you talk shit, mutt.
It's rich that you're telling people to look up definitions when you're too ESL to understand the rest of the post.
Better doctrine than europeans walking into fire instead
Until WWI it was what everyone was using or very similar. The real change in tactic came with armoured divisions being massed. The armies in WWI were massively made by levies, you cannot give them orders that are too complex. Take the current Mobiks, they give them a rifle, they say run and shoot and that's it. Can't expect initiative
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_fire
>18th century
>considered it "ill advised", with the line's progress across the field seen as too slow, exposing the troops for too long to defensive fire.
Old tactic dating back to before WW1. Maybe worked but against a dug in position sounds like suicide.
We look back at WWI today and think of how much stuff they did that seems stupid to us today, but you have to remember that everything was new back then. The machine gun, among other things, completely changed warfare. Nobody new what worked or what was stupid yet because everything was largely untested, there was no historical precedent to look back to. So they tried all sorts of crazy shit to break the stalemates in trenches--they had to, because nobody knew what worked and what didn't yet.
Everyone knew perectly well what a game-changer MGs and bolt-action rapid-firing magazine rifles were. The tail-end of the colonial wars showed that and the Russo-Japanese war cemented it.
>The tail-end of the colonial wars showed that and the Russo-Japanese war cemented it.
You would be correct but you have to remember that a lot of the top brass in the militaries are fucking old retards that hate change. For fucks sake the very start of WW1 you had British troops marching into battle in columns all because a lot of the old fucks still thought that's how you should fight. Hell look how the US were so fixed on staying with the M1 Garand even though it was showing its age during the Korean war.
>Everyone knew perectly well what a game-changer MGs and bolt-action rapid-firing magazine rifles were
You say that but in reality they didn't. British troops and even French troops were still trained to treat their bolt rifles that had magazines as single shot rifles, they weren't allowed to use their magazines unless they had permission from their superiors.
TLDR: Old people are fucking retarded and always fuck up things all because they hate change.
>the very start of WW1 you had British troops marching into battle in columns
Pretty sure we had that stuff knocked out of us in the Boer War if not before. Examples? It was the vaunted German army that got mown down in open order by rapid, accurate British rifle fire at Mons in 1914.
They were still doing cavalry charges in WW1 just to further prove your point as well. Anyone else know that story about some old fucking cavalry commander who still thought cavalry was relevant and some other soldier said calvary is pointless because of machine guns, some big argument of disagreement happened so that one soldier took a machine gun, filled it with blank rounds then shot at the amassed cavalry and was like "there you're all dead" to prove that in the face of overwhelming machine gun fire cavalry is fucking useless.
Yes, some people realized the fact that MG's were game-changers. But the underlying point is that nobody knew how to counter them, or even how to most effectively deploy them yet. The *tactics* didn't exist yet, and were developed experimentally during the war. Walking fire was one such experiment.
>Walking fire was one such experiment.
they really should have asked some video game nerds to wargame better tactics
Found a pic
Knows the terms
refused to research
troll thread
>refused to research
He's setting up a discussion, not requesting the information. Whether walking fire worked or not is more a matter of opinion rather than fact if you ask me, since it's a retarded doctrine but the US actually won that war
>but the US actually won that war
>Did it ever actually work?
Real Walking Fire has never actually been tried.
The 20 round magazine of the BAR was a CIA plot to prevent disruption of the status quo. If the BAR was belt fed, or even if it had a larger magazine like the lewis gun then walking fire surely would have succeeded.
Fire-and-movement tactics are how to cross open ground. Walking slowly across in a line firing from the hip against an enemy in cover is the most fantastically stupid tactic ever devised.
Walking fire is awesome and it should be the doctrine today.