What's the point in waves of attacks? Why not just send all you're soldiers at once?

What's the point in waves of attacks? Why not just send all you're soldiers at once?

ask /k/

Same reason boxers don't go in throwing haymakers. It telegraphs your strategic intent and it is a total commitment that leaves you open a single stroke of misfortune.

>hey look hans! the british are sending all their army in at once!
>Hans: thats a nice big army they have there! all in one spot! hey Gunther! call artillery! tell them they can win this war in volley!
>Gunther: sure thing Hans! hello artillery?

to mitigate losses

bullets go through several rows of soldiers

shells can annihilate large chunks of your units

you need mass of maneuver

Define "at once."

For alot of reasons.
Say the enemy concentrates more on his left flank than his right, and youre now heavily outnumbered there. Suddenly youve gotten yourself encircled.
Say things start to go bad and you dont want to risk anymore lives. Too late, youve already committed everyone.
Say morale takes a pitfall and suddenly all your forces are in retreat. Send in the reserves to steady them? Nope, none left, have fun getting slaughtered.
Loads of reasons, most of them centering on the fact that you dont know what the enemy will do. Committing all of your guys forces you to go all or nothing, and presents a non mobile mass thats easily navigated around to the enemy. You would have no control over whats going on at the front, beyond what you started with, and no way to reverse misfortune.

Pretty much this plus in the off chance you do make any break throughs into the enemy line you've got no fresh troops coming up from your rear to exploit that gap because they're all spread out across a broad front and already engaged with the enemy

Congratulations on making the dumbest post in a thread full of dumbest posts.

>the british

I guess you mean the Americans?

A number of reasons.

Perhaps the simplest, especialyl in modern warfare, is logistical inability to send everyone in at once. Your picture is from the D-Day attacks, and Overlord's first day transported barely 5% of the troops that would be in the theater come July.

Secondly, and a far more universal issue, is that

A) It's very hard to maneuver troops once they're engaged

B) You very often don't know where the weakest point in an enemy's position is right at the outset.

If you send everyone in at once, and they're all embroiled in firefights, and you discover a weak point at the enemy's line over at point X, you'll have to get some of your people to disengage under fire, reform, and move towards that point. If you had some forces in reserve, it's a much simpler matter to send those guys over.

Furthermore, in modern warfare, you often simply don't have the space to commit everyone at the first push. The distances involved in modern rifle fights means that packing your men in tighter than a certain point usually just means they'll get slaughtered, and if you only have so much space to work with at the beginning, you might not be able to commit everyone.

when you make a defensive position you prepare for exactly that. when you attack a defensive position you try to make their preparations fail, but that isn't guaranteed to happen because you don't know how they've prepared.

so you apply whatever superiority has convinced you to be on the offense and send men to guess/look for their openings. then you either break through those with the initial force to make space or deploy the rest based on the information.

>Everything i learnt about WWII i learnt from watching saving private ryan

What if you fucked up in your planning and now all your forces are dead? Better to send some to test the waters before jumping

Room

Why?? Its perfectly logical. You just made a retarded thread

because real life isn't like age of empires.

Found the Amerifat

>What's the point in waves of attacks? Why not just send all you're soldiers at once?
Because soldiers take up physical space and you may not have enough space for all of them to fight effectively, not to mention that they need to be organised somehow.

/k/ would start talking about nogunz and how the 50 cal is the best machinegun ever made and the m-16 is the best assault rifle.

But that's factually wrong.
The best rifle is probably the m14, or the AK47.
Faggot.

It throws away any chance of switching strategy or exploiting your enemies faults

>What's the point in waves of attacks? Why not just send all you're soldiers at once?

Same reason the Germans didn't have everyone available at the beach, instead keeping reserves well behind the front.

Shame Britain had the same number of beaches on D Day, and made better progress than the Americans

But the reason for that is it failed miserably against Operetion Avalanche.

>Not the Mosin Nagant
step it up cyka

Mosin nagant what- it's not one fucking rifle you tard

Because you'd be putting all of your eggs in one basket. If you fuck up once during your massive, all-out assault, it's game over. It's generally a better idea to tire out the defending enemy and win via attrition whenever possible. Normandy is actually a great example - the Allies used misderection tactics to trick the Nazis into think they'd be landing somewhere else before launching the attack so reinforcements would be delayed, allowing them to defeat the Germans holding Normandy via attrition and staggered phases of assault. If they'd just thrown all their eggs in one basket and tried one massive assault, they probably would've failed, given how few of the initial landing parties actually managed to achieve their objectives. It would also be physically impossible to shove every soldier into the beach at once given the sheer volume of troops and shipping involved, but I digress. Massive all-out attacks are idiotic unless you're vastly outnumbered and it's your only chance to make a breakthrough.

The Americans contributed the most troops and had the highest number of casualties overall you fucking idiot.

probably because one of the beaches the Americans assaulted was the most well-defended beach in Normandy by a long shot

neither is the "AK-47" or "'M16"

t. Shart

I'm French actually, so I know better than you
Brits ran away like pussy in 1940 and then hide on their island
Americans saved us from the nazis

Pic related, France honoring American heroes
You'll never see anything similar for britshits

This. This is the reason why hannibal crushed the Romans at Carrhae, Rome committed everything, banking on wildly out numbering hannibal and had nothing left when the carthaginian cavalry drove the Romans cavalry from the field and the noose tightened around them.

Lol blames britain when the french had one of the largest standing armies in the world on the onset of world war 2 10/10 would white flag again

Any unit organisation would cease to exist and there would be less adaptability. Also having forces clumped together would probably raise the casualty rate

>completely ignoring what he said
wew britbong

That is absolutely not what the essence of Cannae was.

I guess that's why there's that giant, permanent memorial at Pegasus Bridge, right?