I always hear about the advantage of getting the high ground in battle. What are the advantages? Rolling boulders on the enemy?
Yes, in part. Rolling, pouring, throwing, and shooting things down is advantageous over trying to do any of that up. Plus you have the advantage that none of it is liable to come back down on your own head.
I, however, have always assumed that the point was to be able to see farther, which can save you from sneak attack.
In modern warfare, there may be some advantages to communications equipment, but I suspect that’s minimal.
I should have said that my question is specifically in reference to modern warfare despite the boulder thing.
In that case, I would guess the main reasons are surveillance, ballistics, and communications, probably in more or less that order.
Gravity is your friend… as is a keen point of observation!
you can see further , and your artillery can shoot further , also its harder for infantry assaults on high ground (see Hamburger hill in vietnam war)and Casino in Italy , that was very high ground and was held for days
however close air support can get you easier and if you have no close airsupport and no means of breaking out of an encirclement siege you can starve to death / die of thirst
but also if you tanks are on the slope then they are at higher risk since the top armour is pretty thin and this is exposed to the enemy more , also if tanks have slight over hang on the high ground slop they leave the very lightly armoured bottom exposed which is very bad
also artillery you may have on the hill is affected more by the wind requiring more precise aiming
I see someone mentioned tanks, so I’ll work with that. In armored warfare, the high ground is usually bad. Yes, you can see better – this works both ways, you can be seen better as well, often much more so. If you’re at the top of a hill then, when viewed from below, your vehicle makes a silhouette against the sky, which is a bad thing, of course. On a battlefield where you can shoot anything you see, and anything you shoot is probably dead, exposing yourself like that is a risky proposition at best. Tankers are advised to ‘move like water’, moving through valleys and depressions to keep their firepower concentrated, their force concealed and their scan area focused.
Rises and ridges can be useful as the Earth makes a great shield…but you don’t really want to be on the highest hill around. In addition to everything above, that’s also going to be the first place the enemy looks, where they maneuver with respect to and probably where any pre-plotted fire support is intended to hit.
All the stuff about the advantages of ‘taking the high ground’ is really an oversimplification, and one that’s been steadily losing validity as technology progesses.
no u have to disagree , tanks are quickly being made obselete as they cost a good few million each and are massive targets to hit and are vunerable to Close air support in the extreme and infantry , these days with
infantry portable SAMs and ATGMs tanks aren’t needed as much thr fire power of the main gun on tanks can be carried on a infantry man’s back and infantry can also take major attrition and need comparatively little way of support when compared to tanks , also infantry are all terrain and are compartively cheap rifle 12 months training food + ATGMs x 100 = one or two tanks
I’d have to disagree with you about tanks. Maybe infantry can be better equipped and perhaps for less than a comparable amount of tankage, but you still need to transport the infantry.
Tanks, especially the top-shelf MBTs like the Abrams, are capable of striking hard and moving fast. the Abrams especially is capable of firing on the go, can see at night or through smoke (though smoke can futz up targeting lasers) and can top 60mph on a paved road with the governors removed (read about it in some first-person accounts of the Gulf War, where some tankers scared the hell out of a Saudi driver by keeping pace with the guy’s truck on a highway).
Infantry can’t really do all that yet–not all at once.
infantry fighting vehicles can do that , things like the bradley , though they are used together with M1 tanks to support them , tanks always need to be backed up by infantry
be it mechanised or or airmobile
else some well camoflaged guy with a RPG-7/9 stands up after the tank has gone past and kills the tank with a rear shot , tanks certainly aren’t obselete but their importance on the battle field is becoming less and less , and eventually they will not be used in major battles since close air support gets better all the time not for a while but soonish
Ah, another “tanks are obsolete” remark. Sorry, mechanized warfare is here to stay and will only become more and more important as technology (and thus mobility and firepower) progresses. As long as there are mechanized forces there is a need for a mechanized ‘trump card’. On top of that, there will always be a need for cavalry…the ability to strike fast and hard anywhere you want, whenever you want. Even airmobile infantry can’t compare with the speed and strength of combat vehicles and the tank is the ultimate combat vehicle.
A troop squad with one or two ATGMs (which may or may not even be able to defeat a tank) or, even more laughably, just RPGs, has nowhere near the firepower, much less the mobility, of a tank. Sure, if the conditions are favorable and a situation comes up that they can exploit, yes, conceivably one man can destroy one tank. This hasn’t changed much since WW2. It can be done, but it’s not easy or reliable, nor is it a good way to live long. Flip it around, in favorable conditions, one tank can defeat a hundred or a thousand men, and forty or more vehicles. A tank -is- battlefield dominance. They’re not invincible, but they never have been.
It sounds nice to bandy around the idea of air strikes and yes, air strikes can be very effective when they’re implemented. But the reality is that there is not enough aircraft to be everywhere at once, nor are they as flexible. You cannot hold ground with an aircraft. The cost of a tank, crew and related expenses is nothing compared to that of a combat aircraft, pilot, munitions and support.
The only true limitation of the tank is terrain. Always has been, always will be…you just plain aren’t going to get a vehicle with the go-anywhere capability of foot soldiers. But in the areas where they can roam, tanks are by no means obsolete, far from it. A more interesting argument is if the heavy tank is obsolete. Perhaps a small profile, countermeasures, extremely high maneuverability and situational-awareness-enhancing technology is better protection than superheavy armor. The pros and cons of that make for interesting debate.
This sort of thing was generally more important in the old days of warfare than today.
But a few reasons:
Observation. Clearly, you can see a lot more on the top of a hill.
Movement. It’s slower/harder to move up a hill than down. Giving the attacking infantry a generally rougher time, and making them slower.
Exposure. A soldier on the ground at the bottom of the hill has MUCH more of his body exposed than one lying mostly behind a ridge at the top of the hill.
Ballistics. Ranged fire, to some extent, tends to work more favorably with gravity “at it’s back” instead of going against the grain, so to speak.
Artillery. It can be a real bitch to effectively hit men properly positioned on a hill because of the arcing ballistics of artillery. Only applies in certain situations.
Interdiction. It’s easier to harass a given area’s supply lines when one holds the high ground in an area, allowing them to cover more of it through direct fire.
Anyway, that’s just a handful I can come up with now.
well just some worse case scenarios yer see , RPGs have gotten quite powerful over the years it may not kill the tank but it could certainly knobble some of its instruments
there were examples in vietnam before ATGMs like the TOW were introduced on the cobra where the pilot only had FFR
and although he didn’t kill kill the tank , he fired plenty of rockets at it , and disabled it by killing the crew with shock , this may or may not apply to beasts like the M1 , but ATGMs certainly are getting powerful (things like the Javelin which loft themselves to hit the thinner top armour)
and hell wouldn’t it annoy you to have your $2.5 million dollar tank + crew get killed by a $50K missile? ,