Everyone who had at least a tangential relation to the army service or the defense industry has heard about the "time of life in battle" - of a soldier, a tank, a unit. But what is actually behind these numbers? Is it really, going into battle, you can start counting down the minutes until the inevitable end? Oleg Divov successfully portrayed the ideas of the time of life in battle among the broad masses of military personnel in the novel "Weapon of Retribution" - a book about the service of "Ustinovsk students" at the end of Soviet power: "They are proud: our division is designed for thirty minutes of battle! We have it in plain text: we have found something to be proud of! " In these two proposals everything came together - and pride in their deaths, and the transfer of a misunderstood tactical assessment of the unit's ability in time to the life of its personnel, and the rejection of such false pride by more literate comrades …
The idea that there is a calculated lifespan for individual units and formations came from the practice of staff work, from understanding the experience of the Great Patriotic War. The average period of time during which a regiment or division, according to the experience of the war, retained its combat effectiveness, was called the "lifetime". This does not mean at all that after this period the entire personnel will be killed by the enemy, and the equipment will be burned.
Let's take a division - the main tactical formation. For its functioning, it is necessary that the rifle subunits have a sufficient number of fighters - and they leave not only killed, but also wounded (from three to six per killed), sick, wounded to the bones of a leg or injured by an armored personnel carrier's hatch … had a supply of the property from which the bridges would be built - after all, the supply battalion would carry everything that was necessary for units and subunits in battle and on the march. It is required that the repair and restoration battalion has the necessary number of spare parts and tools to maintain equipment in working / combat-ready condition. And all these reserves are not unlimited. The use of heavy mechanized bridges TMM-3 or links of the pontoon-bridge park will lead to a sharp decrease in the offensive capabilities of the formation, and will limit its "life" in the operation.
Destructive meters
These are the factors influencing the viability of the formation, but not related to the opposition of the enemy. Now let's turn to the estimation of the "life in battle" time. How long an individual soldier can live in a battle waged with the use of one or another weapon, with the use of one or another tactic. The first serious experience of such calculations was presented in the unique work "A future war in technical, economic and political terms." The book was published in six volumes in 1898, and its author was the Warsaw banker and railroad worker Ivan Blioch.
Accustomed to numbers, the financier Blioch, with the help of a unique team he assembled, consisting of officers of the General Staff, tried to mathematically evaluate the impact of new types of weapons - magazine rifles, machine guns, artillery guns with smokeless powder and high explosive charge - on the types of tactics of that time. The technique was very simple. From the French military leadership in 1890, they took the battalion's offensive scheme. We took the probabilities of hitting a growth target by a dug-in shooter from three-line rifles obtained at the test site. The speeds with which the chain of shooters moved to the beat of the drums and the sounds of horns were well known - both for the step and for the run, which the French were going to switch to when approaching the enemy. Then came the most common arithmetic, which gave an amazing result. If from a line of 500 m 637 infantrymen begin to approach a hundred entrenched shooters with magazine rifles, then even with all the speed of the French impulse, only a hundred will remain to the line of 25 m, from which it was then considered appropriate to switch to bayonet. No machine guns, which then passed through the department of artillery, - ordinary sapper shovels for digging in and magazine rifles for shooting. And now the position of the shooters is no longer able to take the six times greater mass of infantry - after all, a hundred who ran half a mile under fire and in a bayonet battle have little chance against a hundred lying in a trench.- ordinary sapper shovels for entrenching and magazine rifles for shooting. And now the position of the shooters is no longer able to take the six times greater mass of infantry - after all, a hundred who ran half a mile under fire and in a bayonet battle have little chance against a hundred lying in a trench.- ordinary sapper shovels for entrenching and magazine rifles for shooting. And now the position of the shooters is no longer able to take the six times greater mass of infantry - after all, a hundred who ran half a mile under fire and in a bayonet battle have little chance against a hundred lying in a trench.
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Pacifism in numbers
At the time of the release of The Future War, peace still reigned in Europe, but in Blioch's simple arithmetic calculations, the whole picture of the coming World War I, its positional deadlock, was already visible. No matter how the soldiers are trained and betrayed, the advancing masses of infantry will be swept away by the fire of the defending infantry. And so it happened in reality - for specifics, we refer the reader to the book by Barbara Takman "August Cannons". The fact that in the later phases of the war the advancing infantry was stopped not by the arrows, but by the machine gunners who had sat through the artillery preparation in the dugouts, essentially did not change anything.
Based on Blioch's methodology, it is very easy to calculate the expected life of an infantryman in battle when attacking from a line of 500 m to a line of 25 m. As you can see, 537 out of 637 soldiers died or were seriously injured during the passage of 475 m. the life time was reduced when approaching the enemy, as the probability of dying when reaching the boundaries of 300, 200 m increased … The results were so clear that Blioch considered them sufficient to justify the impossibility of a European war and therefore took care of the maximum spread of his labor. The reading of Blioch's book prompted Nicholas II to convene the first peace conference on disarmament in The Hague in 1899. The author himself was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
However, Blioch's calculations were not destined to stop the coming massacre … But the book contained a lot of other calculations. For example, it was shown that a hundred shooters with magazine rifles would incapacitate an artillery battery in 2 minutes from a distance of 800 m and in 18 minutes from a distance of 1500 m - isn't that so similar to the paratroopers artillerymen described by Divov with their 30 minutes of battalion life?
World War III? Better not
The works of those military specialists who were preparing not for the prevention, but for the successful conduct of the war, from the cold war to the hot World War III, were not widely published. But - paradoxically - it was these works that were destined to contribute to the preservation of peace. And so, in narrow and not inclined to publicity, the staff officers began to use the calculated parameter "lifetime in battle." For a tank, for an armored personnel carrier, for a unit. The values for these parameters were obtained in about the same way as Blioch once had. They took an anti-tank gun, and at the test site they determined the probability of hitting the silhouette of the vehicle. One or another tank was used as a target (at the beginning of the Cold War, both opposing sides used captured German equipment for these purposes) and checkedwith what probability will a shell hit penetrate the armor or the armored action will disable the vehicle.
As a result of a chain of calculations, the same lifetime of a unit of equipment in a particular tactical situation was derived. It was purely a calculated value. Probably, many have heard of such monetary units as Attic talent or South German thaler. The first contained 26 106 g of silver, the second - only 16.67 g of the same metal, but both never existed in the form of a coin, but were just a measure of the account of smaller money - drachmas or pennies. So a tank that will have to live in an oncoming battle for 17 minutes is nothing more than a mathematical abstraction. We are talking only about an integrated assessment, convenient for the time of adding machines and slide rule. Without resorting to complex calculations, the headquarters officer could determine how many tanks would be needed for a combat mission, during the execution of which it was required to cover a particular distance under fire. We bring together the distance, combat speed and life time. We determine according to the standards how many tanks in the ranks should remain at the front width after they pass through the hell of battle. And it is immediately clear which unit the combat mission should be assigned to. The predicted failure of tanks did not necessarily mean the death of the crews. As the driver-mechanic Shcherbak cynically reasoned in the story of the front-line officer Viktor Kurochkin "In war as in war", "It would be lucky if Fritz rolled a blank into the engine compartment: the car is kaput, and everyone is alive." And for the artillery battalion, the exhaustion of half an hour of the battle, for which it was designed, meant, first of all, the use of ammunition, overheating of the barrels and retailers, the need to leave positions, and not death under fire.how many tanks in the ranks should remain front-width after they pass through the hell of battle. And it is immediately clear which unit the combat mission should be assigned to. The predicted failure of tanks did not necessarily mean the death of the crews. As the driver-mechanic Shcherbak cynically reasoned in the story of the front-line officer Viktor Kurochkin "In war as in war", "It would be lucky if Fritz rolled a blank into the engine compartment: the car is kaput, and everyone is alive." And for the artillery battalion, the exhaustion of half an hour of the battle, for which it was designed, meant, first of all, the use of ammunition, overheating of the barrels and retailers, the need to leave positions, and not death under fire.how many tanks in the ranks should remain front-width after they pass through the hell of battle. And it is immediately clear which unit the combat mission should be assigned to. The predicted failure of tanks did not necessarily mean the death of the crews. As the driver-mechanic Shcherbak cynically reasoned in the story of the front-line officer Viktor Kurochkin "In war as in war", "It would be lucky if Fritz rolled a blank into the engine compartment: the car is kaput, and everyone is alive." And for the artillery battalion, the exhaustion of half an hour of the battle, for which it was designed, meant, first of all, the use of ammunition, overheating of the barrels and retailers, the need to leave positions, and not death under fire. The predicted failure of tanks did not necessarily mean the death of the crews. As the driver-mechanic Shcherbak cynically reasoned in the story of the front-line officer Viktor Kurochkin "In war as in war", "It would be lucky if Fritz rolled a blank into the engine compartment: the car is kaput, and everyone is alive." And for the artillery battalion, the exhaustion of half an hour of the battle, for which it was designed, meant, first of all, the use of ammunition, overheating of the barrels and retailers, the need to leave positions, and not death under fire. The predicted failure of tanks did not necessarily mean the death of the crews. As the driver-mechanic Shcherbak cynically reasoned in the story of the front-line officer Viktor Kurochkin "In war as in war", "It would be lucky if Fritz rolled a blank into the engine compartment: the car is kaput, and everyone is alive." And for the artillery battalion, the exhaustion of half an hour of the battle, for which it was designed, meant, first of all, the use of ammunition, overheating of the barrels and retailers, the need to leave positions, and not death under fire.meant, first of all, the use of ammunition, overheating of the barrels and recoil units, the need to leave positions, and not death under fire.meant, first of all, the use of ammunition, overheating of the barrels and recoil units, the need to leave positions, and not death under fire.
Neutron factor
The conventional "time of life in battle" also served the staff officers successfully when it was necessary to determine the period of combat effectiveness of the advancing tank subunits in the conditions of the enemy's use of neutron warheads; when it was necessary to estimate how powerful a nuclear strike would burn out enemy anti-tank missiles and extend the life of their tanks. The tasks of using gigantic capacities were solved by the simplest equations: they gave an unambiguous conclusion - a nuclear war in the European theater of operations must be avoided.
Well, modern combat control systems, from the highest-level ones, such as the National Defense Control Center of the Russian Federation to tactical ones, such as the Constellation Unified Tactical Control System, use more differentiated and more accurate simulation parameters, which is now being conducted in real time. However, the objective function remains the same - to make sure that both people and vehicles live in battle for the maximum time.
Author: Mikhail Vannakh