Ex-Military here.

Seems not much has changed. Unless you’re a Tier 1 or Special Forces, you don’t spend all that much time on marksmanship either.

Maybe 5-10% of actual training time goes to marksmanship. The rest of it is infantry skills. Squad level movement, field craft, field defenses, cover and concealment,urban ops, the list goes on. These are the things that win wars, not a 3rd Prestige COD pro.

Well, in the sense that knowingly going somewhere that’s likely to host crowds of people trying to kill each other is pretty stupid, sure.

They only had a range of like 50 yards. Split your troops up and they can’t aim at the same point because they wouldn’t all have the range to hit it.

On a vast featureless plain, yes. But you won’t be overly surprised to learn most battles were fought over some form of terrain, and not a mathematics textbook.

Case in point, the Germans had an automatic “rifle” if you still (machine/Gatling gun), before the allies in WW2. Guns of the era were far more accurate than the muskets used during older conflicts like the American civil war, but were far from automatic; to my best understanding of it, most were barely semi-automatic and had very limited magazine capacity, often only a handful of round at most. This was a massive step up from the single shot muskets used in previous battles but would not stand up to modern versions of the same which are often more accurate, can fire at much faster rates, and can have a lot more ammunition per magazine.

Looking at schematics of current era rifles, the designs seem so primative compared to the intericacies of other common modern items, like computers and smartphones, but still, even this level of technological advancement was far out of reach of the people from that era. The technology really took off when we started using jacketed self contained rounds, which were easily changed out by mechanisms rather than having to do so by hand (such as with a revolver versus a more modern semi automatic pistol).

I understand why firearms are kept so primative compared to our current level of technology, since they are required to have a high level of reliability and resilience to interference, maintaining a fairly simple mechanism rather than a more complex electronic firing mechanic is preferable. So called “gas powered” weapons have been proven to be effective, reliable and resilient.

I know that more complex systems are used in weapons like missiles and drones to great effect, at the cost of reliability, more or less. The fact is, if you lose a drone or missile which has been launched or controlled many hundreds or thousands of miles away, you’ve only lost equipment. That’s not ideal, but it’s better than losing your personnel who represent hundreds or thousands of hours of training, and cannot be replaced on an assembly line. Simply put, human assets are a limited resource in any conflict, so the fewer losses to manpower, the better the outcome regardless of all other factors, since a new drone or missile can be created in a week or a month (even six months or more) which is less time than it takes to make a new person, allow them to develop to the point where they can capably hold and fire a weapon, then train them… A process that can take upwards of 20 years or more.

In previous eras of battle, there was no choice but to put lives on the line for battle. No alternatives existed, and in the cases of field battle, alternatives still don’t exist for man to man combat.

I appreciate the quotes from the doctor. It’s nice to see them in the wild. I personally don’t believe armed conflict can accomplish anything productive, and should only be used against those who will use it against you (aka, for defense). In the current era, we have the technology to discuss and resolve conflicts without violence, whether through peace talks via telepresence, or over more common communication technology, there’s few places where communication isn’t possible. Every effort should be made to solve things diplomatically, and only failing that, should force ever be considered.

We’re at a point in warfare where we can seriously damage the survivability of humans on Earth, and doing so through warfare seems like a foolish thing to do. Especially if the reason for such conflict is something as idiotic as land ownership or material goods. Global trade has made such things unnecessary. We should be focused on moving forward to an era of peace and cooperation, since society is no longer bound by the trappings of the old empires, where food and land scarcity was significant and having more airable land was critical to survival. We should be pooling resources to bring better living to all peoples of the world. Yet, some are still stuck in the old ways of grabbing power by any means necessary.

And I’m off topic again. Oh well, it is what it is. Maybe some day we will learn that we don’t have to fight eachother for the ability to survive.

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The colonial campaigns didn’t have an organized or well equipped enemy

Speaking as someone who has archery experience, it’s a lot more skill oriented and has a lot more variance in field combat. The shots, while they can be quite fast, are not nearly as quick as a bullet. The skill with firearms tends to be with long range shooting. At short range, you can point and shoot and generally hit something. Even at 50m, a minimal amount of training is required to get to be accurate at that range especially with newer weaponry.

This may or may not factor in, I don’t know, I’m not a history buff really, I know technology more than anything.

Personally I feel like the most contributing factor is that a bow is a comaritively fragile weapon. Most firearms are metal with wood grips. The core of the weapon is metal, and comfort aspects of it are wood.

Compare that to the requirements of a bow, where every part, aside from the riser (where the grip and sights are) needs to be flexible. The limbs, which are the upper and lower arms of the bow, need to bend and flex to provide the reaction force to fire the arrow, the string needs to be very flexible, but strong enough to handle the weight of the draw. Every part moves, bends and flexes as the weapon is drawn and fired. That flexibility introduces a lot of risk in terms of damage on a highly dynamic field of battle. At one time we had no alternative, and bows when weilded by trained archers, were a formidable force compared to the alternatives, which at the time were mainly knives, swords and shields.

The likelihood of a tool like a bow becoming damaged in the field (a limb breaking, a string breaking) whether through regular use, or intentionally by the enemy, or even by negligence, in stepping or sitting on the bow, is not trivial. Factor in that when a bow is at “rest” it’s still under tension, and you can be hurt by the string or limb breaking unintentionally, especially if you’re in the middle of a draw, and the difference is pretty clear in terms of operator safety. With a gun, whether a musket, rifle, or something else, generally you have fairly think iron or steel containing the discharge of the weapon. While misfires are still possible and the consequences of a misfire can be much more severe, they’re far less common. I’ve seen people shatter arrows, sending fragments of the arrow shaft into their hand and requiring significant medical treatment; on a battle field, if you get a bad arrow that splinters when you try to fire it, which wouldn’t be as uncommon as you’d like, then that Archer is out of combat for weeks or months. It’s far less common for a firearm to have a similar catastrophic failure. Again, not impossible, just far less likely. It’s far more likely to have a firearm jam or misfire in the sense that it fails to fire, than for it to fire in such a way that the operator is injured. There’s small issues with the safety of an operator when it comes to firearms, beyond the obvious of shooting yourself, such as getting bitten by the slide (common on modern pistols), or impact injuries from not bracing properly for a weapons kickback. But given the limited amount of propellant in a bullet, it’s far less likely to “blow up in your face” so to speak.

Given operator safety, and the relative ease of training (at least compared to archery), and the consistency of the performance of the weapon, operator error is effectively reduced to loading and aiming the weapon. The effects of operator errors is also reduced.

Factor that in with the lethality of firearms versus archery, and the accuracy, especially at long range, where an archer would need to factor in wind and gravity, at far closer range than a rifleman would, and the advantages are now far outweighing the negatives of firearms.

The benefits of archery is generally in the ability to reuse ammunition, the relative silence of the weapon, and the light weight nature of the materials used in archery. It’s a good way to hunt and fight, but when it’s compared to even (relatively) primative firearms, it doesn’t really have the ability to compete. Most even better than average archers don’t usually loose more than an arrow a second on a good day; once jacketed rounds became common and semi automatic rifles and firearms became commonplace, even a relatively poor rifleman can release more than one shot per second. So for shooting speed, either train for thousands of hours to become an expert archer, or pick up a revolver and squeeze the trigger as quickly as you can.

Firearms are simply better, easier machines to deliver projectiles down range in almost every comparison.

The Comanche were some of history’s finest horse archers and it required the invention of the repeating rifle to end their supremacy of the plains.

There could have been a much stronger Spanish influence on the plains of North America had the Comanche not been there to turn their empire back.

You’ll likely see bows and arrows in just about any movie that has Native American tribes as one of the belligerents.

Yes, “The Imitation Game” Is one of my favorite movies ever, and I don’t even like bio films. I highly, highly recommend watching it; Benedict is brilliant in it.

Well, you can, it’s just a stupendously bad idea; but it also depends on the encryption used.

To take an example from my own expertise, WEP, or “wired equivalent protection” (ironic name), was based on a temporal cipher. Which means every transmission would rotate the encryption to avoid any kind of eavesdropping. WEP specifically had a lot of flaws that were found and it’s now basically useless due to the design of how it initialized the exception (also know as initialization vectors or IV’s), but the idea behind doing that was sound.

Modern SSL, or more specifically TLS scription frequently uses AES keys. It’s all well defined by PKI, so I’m really not going to say anything new here, but it uses a large (usually 2048-4096 bit) static, but asymmetric key pair, where one side can decrypt the information encrypted by the other key, and vice versa. In secured HTTP, this is used to generate a session key, which is usually much shorter, commonly AES-256 (256bit) which can both encrypt and decrypt the same data, aka a symmetric key. The client downloads one of the keys from the key pair from the target site, known as the “public key”, which is used to encrypt the seed for the AES symmetric cipher, and send it to the site, which uses the other key, known as the “private” key, to decrypt it and start the symmetrical encryption session.

The key is thrown away after a timeout, or at the end of the season, whichever comes first. It’s done this way with computers because the asymmetric keys are generally very computationally intensive, while symmetrical keys are far less computationally intensive. They’re also less secure due to the relatively short length of the key.

Asymmetrical keys usually have a validity of a year, and symmetrical keys generally have a validity measured in hours (actual length may change from connection to connection).

When it comes to the radios I’ve worked with, AES is a valid option for encryption. And using an AES key with the radio, both sides generally get the same key (a symmetric key), so you can subscribe as many radios to the same channel as you need. Again, symmetrical keys are generally fairly short, so swapping them out regularly is required.

If a bad actor gets ahold of the AES key in use, or can otherwise guess/brute force the key, they can eavesdrop.

Bearing on mind that my understanding of this encryption is based on my experience with commercially available civilian radios. Radio units used for encrypted military or government likely has superior encryption types and methodologies compared to what I have access to, and using temporally bound ciphers would not be an impossibility. When the cipher is regularly changing automatically, in the case of a temporal cipher, breaking it becomes far more unlikely and may prove impossible with current technology since you wouldn’t be able to collect enough information during a keys lifetime to reliably predict what the next cipher will be (unless that information is encrypted using the in-use cipher).

To me, it’s conceivable to use a rotating cipher based on a temporally changing seed which only the radios which have been programmed with the temporal seed would be able to determine, similar to how TOTP works (the six digit codes from apps like authy or Google authenticator), which would be used to generate the next key based on the current time and the temporal seed. No over the air transmission of the ciphers would occur. You could break each key individually by brute force, but doing so would consume an insane amount of computing power and time, making such an effort extremely impractical.

I’m not fully up to date on what ciphers are in common use in commercial/military radios, since I am not a professional radio operator, nevermind one that would require such elaborate encryption.

The fact remains that while extremely impractical, to the point of being insane to try, almost all digital encryption can be brute forced. WEP was broken by a handful of fundamental issues in the original design. Modern WiFi encryption is usually vulnerable to someone basically using a table of guesses to find the passphrase (also known as a rainbow table). Even without all that, deciphering any encrypted bitstream only requires an understanding of the cipher in use, and enough time and effort to try every permutation possible of the cipher key.

Given that cipher keys are quite long, at least 256 bits, even with a very powerful computer, or cluster of powerful computers, it would still take a very long time to brute force the code. Nevertheless it is possible.

It’s insane to try, but it’s still possible.

You can brute force encryption however modern encryption methods makes it so it’d take longer than the heat death of the universe. The whole reason why DES isn’t used and why it’s recommended to set your RSA key length to 2048 bits is because some kid with a couple of GPUs can run hashcat and brute force your key. But hey it’s still a viable attack vector because companies keep won’t learn.

The thing is that you actually CAN brute force modern encryption. It’s just that this process will take thousands if not millions of years. The analysis of encryption safety is based on mathematical prediction on how long it will take to crack the data. But all and every encryption method can be brute forced.

The American Revolution was won in part because the Americans more often “adopted Native tactics”

The American Revolution was won because Britain was fighting a real war against France, Spain and the Netherlands. And those countries basically used the US as a cheap way to distract the British.

Not really. The American Revolution was still fought with the same Napoleonic tactics used by the regular army. The irregulars might have adopted more guerrilla methods in the frontier, but they weren’t widely adopted.

Reinforcements from the French army and navy won the war. The French Revolution followed shortly after.

And IIRC those Napoleonic tactics were still used in the American civil war and beyond. The “big Napoleonic blocks” led to trench warfare in WW1.

Coordination is essential to any military action. The better you can coordinate your actions, the greater the objectives you can achieve.

When your ability to coordinate is limited to the distance that people can hear a drum or a trumpet, you’re not capable of coordinating across any area larger than a few city blocks. You’re a sitting duck against any massed troops, unless you also mass enough troops to stop them from marching right through you.

Small unit tactics are largely ineffective against massed troops until the invention of the telegraph, 30-40 years after the revolution.

From what I recall from my history classes, one of the most critical battles of the American Revolution was won because a bunch of red coats were slacking off and taken by surprise. So while the use of guerilla tactics was an important factor in victory, sheer dumb luck also played a major role.

Sort of. My understanding is the Revolutionary War was won by causing enough attrition (disease and deserters) among the British that they decided it wasn’t worth it. Washington lost more battles than he won, but he mostly focused on supply lines and whatnot, so he generally caused enough damage to be successful. American soldiers could resupply locally, the British had to ship it in, and Britain wasn’t super invested in keeping the supplies coming.

The colonial army fought in the same manner as the British. The British just had awful leadership and were preoccupied with other things. The battle of bunker hill set the tone of the war from the start if you want to look it up.

You couldn’t easily reload one of those bad boys while prone.

They did do this sometimes. The Patriot isn’t so great for this

Didn’t the first row kneel so the second could shoot over their shoulders?

I guess I was basing my comment on novels, such as the Sharpe series, rather then actual history.

They’re talking about urban fighting, I imagine fighting on an open field is quite different.

Worked well in WW2…

When it comes to comparing muskets to modern weapons, people get weird. They compare field-performace of muskets to the seller’s catalog for modern weapons.

Soldiers back then got about 0 hours of marksmanship training, unless they were in whatever the country’s version of Light Infantry was, so the average soldier was a horrible shot. So when people talk about the accuracy of muskets, they’re mostly saying “Lots of soldiers would miss with this weapons”.

Modern weapons are, if you fire from a table on a clear day, at least an order of magnitude better, and soldiers are signficantly better trained at shooting. And yet, the vast majority of shots aren’t even remotely close to hitting. Nobody says things like “The accuracy of an M16 is 0.002%” due to the vietnam war taking 50.000 rounds for a kill, but this is basically the same thing.