Let’s imagine that you are in a average European country like Poland, Belarus, Austria, Finland,etc, so reasonably modern tanks, ifv’s, atgm’s and so on, but nothing too crazy. Your country gets in a war with a country with a similar army size and tech, so no asymmetric warfare, you are enlisted and you can somehow get to choose on what position you’ll fight in, what would you choose and more importantly, why?
By position I mean automatic rifleman, sniper, mortar team, machine gunner, driver,etc. You can’t choose your rank, you can only be a regular soldier, you also can’t be in the air force or navy.
If you choose a non-combat position like a driver, mechanic, doctor,etc, then write a second combat one as well.
When I was in Iraq, I knew an Iraqi guy who had been a driver for a general during the first Gulf War, they were one of the first cars out of Kuwait when the shooting started.
For a combat position? Then go with artillery. Puts you off the front line. The larger the caliber of the weapon then the farther back from the front you’re likely to be. But even a small caliber mortar man gets to be out of sight of most fire.
One of my brothers used to be an artillery officer. He thougt that they were prime targets on the basis of being seeminly taught that eliminating the other side’s artillery, directly or indirectly (by calling for airstrikes, for instance) was a priority.
Mechanics aren’t really a combat position, so I only mean those that actually fire from weapons and only ground forces, no air force/navy crew and stuff like that.
I agree with running coach, sniper seems like a pretty nice position, but only if you are surprising the enemy, once the battle gets hot, the sniper will probably be one of the main targets, so I’d rather be on a howitzer or at least mortar.
The worst position is maybe the machine gunner, it is a powerful weapon, but it would probably be the first target of the enemy.
I suppose drone pilots don’t comply with the spirit of the OP despite their direct combat involvement.
I’d guess serving on a submarine would give decent survival odds. A lot would depend, however, on the nature of the conflict; as in how important control of sea lanes is to the two countries in conflict.
Snipers die a lot, too. They may be trained to “hide and survive” but they’re favored targets.
The problem posed by the OP is that “combat position” is not a clearly defined thing. It’s more of a sliding scale, and so the better your chosen profession qualifies as a “Combat position,” the more danger you’re in.
I had a related problem in that with most modern wars and weapons there really isn’t the “in the rear with the gear” situation you had in say WW II. With Persian Gulf I and II you saw hits well outside the main combat areas; enough so that most troops considered everything basically a combat area as best they could.
And the OP stated two similar sized European/Eastern European countries. Finding a safe base/place in something as large as the United States is one thing - in a country like Austria not so much. Think of two Kentuckys slugging it out. There may be spots but it isn’t a sure bet.
Well, nothing is a safe bet, but being in the rear with the gear in a conventional war is a WAY safer bet than being an infantryman on the front.
Between D-Day and the surrender of Germany, front line Allied infantry regiments had casualty rates above one hundred percent - that is, the average American, British or Canadian infantryman position was filled by an average of slightly more than two different guys, due to at least the first guy being killed, captured or badly wounded.
The casualty rate for, say, artillerymen (which is a combat role) was assuredly NOT one hundred percent. Now, in that case that might not be a good analogy; Allied artillery overwhelmed German artillery, and was almost always free of threat from aircraft. In an even matchup of two modern states that might not be true. I’d still probably rather be an artilleryman, though.
I don’t think that chaplain is that safe of a job. They have to be present to administer last rites and have been singled out as a preferred target on the assumption (right or wrong) that losing the chaplain could demoralize the entire unit.
I’ll go with “front line interpreter” if that’s a real job. You get brought in to talk the enemy into surrendering once they are surrounded. And you get a loudspeaker so you don’t even have to show your face.
Answer to the question depends a lot on the nature of the war.
I was an enlisted USAF computer programmer, back when computers were pretty much large boxes of electronics in climate-controlled machine rooms. Hence, I was the prototypical REMF: my typical hazard exposure was spilling hot coffee on myself. :smack: No Purple Hearts were in the making where I served.
But the computers I was working with were in large headquarters operations, during the cold war. I could step outside and imagine the crosshairs laid out on the ground where the Soviets would be aiming their fractional-megaton warheads.
In that war, the end-of-the-war scenario we don’t seem to be under now, I would have been one of the first to die. From perfectly safe and comfortable, to part of a cloud of fallout, in the time it takes for a trans-polar ballistic trajectory to complete.