Would necromancers be useful in modern warfare?

>Barren, corrupted wasteland
Not every necromancer runs around casting descecrate every 100 or so yards.

Eh, the magic isn't that dark. The skulls being the part of our uniform is just a nice touch for damaging enemies' morale.

Summon an impressive amount of zombies/skeletons, have them dig underground to the enemy's position. Don't forget to attach a large amount of explosives.

Depends on so many factors that your question is meaningless.
Do you really think all "necromancers" in all fictional settings are interchangeable, with the same abilities, limits, costs, risks and learning curve?
You could make up a setting where a necromancer can only speak to ghosts and has fuck-all to do with physically raising the dead, and it would be equally valid because it's fiction.
You could make up a setting where a necromancer casts spells like a D&D 3E wizard with infinite spell slots, and it would be equally valid because it's fiction.
Define your terms.

What the all the ritual sacrifice and cannibalism?

Imagine if you could use Speak with Dead to talk to the victim of a political assassination and they could straight up tell you who did it

Suddenly, the government institutes laws to mandate that all deceased citizens be cremated within minutes of death

I think airplanes and artillery would do the same job much faster and more effectively.

In any serious war both sides are going to have no problems using any methods, including necromancy, to win, regardless of which side is "good" or "bad".

psyops and very crude alchemy to fortify our leaders inteligence

Wait, since when do necromancers eat people?

If rape is worse than murder, could you raise Raise the Dead on rape victim survivors?

Interrogating dead soldiers.
Sending spoopy soldiers in low visibility areas to fool the enemy into thinking you're mobilising there
Banishing enemy spoopy soldiers

Skeletons would be great for counter-insurgency.

You could have millions of tireless sentries constantly patrolling around an occupied city without incurring any ongoing logistical cost. ISIS couldn't do shit if there was a skeleton on ever street corner, outside every home, etc. always watching all the time.

I know, right?
Like, imagine if they used some sort of sorcery to create a cloud of choking horror that made people drown in their own fluids?
The fuck kind of army would use that and still think of themselves as good guys?

You could have an inside man at all times

Rape is worse than murder because sometimes, murder is a justifiable action. Rape never is.

>deployed in some 3rd world shithole
>come across mass grave from previous war
>JACKPOT!

That makes no sense and has nothing to do with the thread. Presumably, you mean "cast" Raise the Dead, but okay, let's assume for a minute rape is worse than murder.

Would Cure Common Cold work on the plague? No, you say? Then why the FUCK would Cure Common Cold work on starving to death? Even if one is demonstrably worse than the other, these are entirely different categories of injury you are trying to compare.

Stuff zombies full of explosives
Send the undead on jobs where breathing is optional, digging tunnels, underwater sabotage, hell you could drop shitloads of mustard gas and let zombies clean up.
Air drop disassembled skeletons over occupied zones, less weight would allow you to drop more troops per payload
Resurrect enemy troops to demoralize combatants
Have them do repetitive manual labor like loading artillery, digging trenches, sweep for mines
Load zombies up with ballistic armor and have troops that resist practically all attacks short of explosives
guard POCs, undead don't need to eat or sleep
Have them carry cargo/supplies across dangerous terrain like deserts and swamps without consuming any supplies themselves.
If we have zombies that make more zombies you can destroy cities and infrastructure by turning the populace
Ghosts can haunt enemy troops preventing them from sleeping and generally ruining their focus
Curse your own troops so they rise as revenants after being killed in combat

You're not gonna win any allies or good will, but you'll win wars

>is the ability to turn a readily available resource into an efficient army/terror weapon useful in war
take a guess

They're both equally bad because murder is an unjustifiable killing. Killing someone can be justified, people do it every day in wars and executions or even self-defense.

If it's murder it's not justifiable by definition, dumbass.

Has anyone read the mortal engines book seires? The stalkers they build from dead soldiers can be seen as scientific necromancy in a post apocalyptic age, tiny tiny tiny amounts of past memory remain but they are pre programmed super soldiers, and arguably the main quartet series is about of them learning morality, gaining sentience and telling stories about the heroes and events he has known.

what kind of bullshit logic is this

>we have the moral high ground in debate, but because we use the negative elemental plane we are wrong

power is power, and power is neutral

Power isn't always neutral in fantasy settings. Baron von Fuckula's Zombie Generator that raises dead across the mile that requires a Kiloorphan shoved into its power core monthly is pretty objectively evil, but for the most part, yeah this.

>Kiloorphan
that isnt a real unit and you know it

Yeah, alright, but kilokitten just wasn't giving me the bite it needed.

In a homebrew setting some of my friends and I wrote the necromancers are basically magic doctors. Having WWI tech, you can imagine how their experiments work. They're honestly working to protect their soldiers, but hey, a skeleton jumping into a tank track can be more useful than a live soldier shooting it with small-arms.

On the battlefield? No. In warfare logistics? Hell yes. Necromancers wouldn't win battles, but the support of the incredibly cheap, perfectly loyal, and literally tireless labor could win wars with an actual army of the living waging the battles.

Extremely useful.
Imagine swarms of poisonous zombie insects and small animals that can crawl anywhere.

>have them dig underground to the enemy's position. Don't forget to attach a large amount of explosives.
Tunnel warfare was an actual strategy in ww1.

Engrave bullets with necromantic runes, so that when a person is shot, their blood serves to power the spell and animate their skeleton when they die.

>on the battlefield
>several dead enemy soldiers suddenly get up and start attacking their fellows

How is that not useful on the battlefield?

Well here's the trillion dollar question.
Can the undead use guns?

I doubt zombies can use guns.

a age of decadence inspired setting
"magic" exists but the world lost all the knowledge of it

That wholly depends on setting.
In many classic fantasy settings, undead can be intelligent enough to swing swords and fire bows. Guns are not much more complicated for the end user than bows.

Yes

even if they cant, they can still get an unsuspecting soldier- and unlike humans they dont die of organ failure or damage

you either destroy them or they keep going

The strongest cause of death in modern combat is explosion. Somewhere around 80% of all combat deaths are unpreventable, which means multiple missing limbs or vital organs and major blood loss. How the hell are those zombies going to be any threat when half their body is gone?

because sombies are powered by dark magic and not muscle- same as skeletons

missing organs dont matter, you either destroy the body enough that it becomes a mush or you dont kill it

Zombies don't care about vital organs or major blood loss. Shrapnel is a healthy case of those deaths, and missing limbs are less common than you seem to think.

And besides that, they don't need to kill enemy soldiers, they just need to injure them. Mines are useful not because of their capacity to kill ,but because of their capacity to injure, because that ties up manpower into trying to get them patched together before shipping them home.

You're right, I was thinking too small. Even if that guy's legs are half a football field away, that's what a necromancer can solve with a bit of extra magic. And I don't know why I was harping on organs and blood.

But assuming we're all talking about a tactical-level necromancer, what size element should they fit into for combat? Would it be like one necromancing team per battalion or more like one company per brigade? Because something like the former could be costly, while something like the latter could be stretched too thin.

They don't need muscles to move, silly. They're powered by necromancy. These are not your zombie apocalypse virus zombies. These are undead, puppets of dark magic. They get up and start moving because the necromancer's heinous powers command them to.

And god help you if the setting allows for the creation of incorporeal undead. How are you going to hide your secrets from a ghost?

>Would necromancers be useful in modern warfare?

Of course. They wouldn't be that great in WW2, but imagine a Vietnam war, or some shithole in central Africa, where the jungle is *also* filled with zombies lying in wait for someone to walk by.

Combat necromancers casting the fastest and cheapest version of raise dead would also be invaluable in a firefight. As soon as you take someone down, he's back up attacking his friends.

>And god help you if the setting allows for the creation of incorporeal undead. How are you going to hide your secrets from a ghost?
Moreover, how are you going to KILL a ghost? They can't be stabbed, shot, or bombed. They can't be locked out. They can't be blinded or silenced.
If necromancy allows for incorporeal undead, they are invincible to anything but other necromancers.

specialized support- in certain field of war they would be useless, in others OPOP

holy symbols and faith

>They wouldn't be that great in WW2
m8- necromancy would have dominated the eastern front

can you imagine a better combat medic? not only are they equipped to deal with wounded like a regular medic, now they can be revived to fight if they're shot fatally

Polish mine detecting & IED hunting with controlled zombies!

>holy symbols and faith
We'd have to establish that faith has any magical powers at all. Currently, we only have necromancy being ported into the setting of earth.

...

There's literally hundreds of better wizard spells that could obliterate your enemy, no.

But then you could just scry for all the insurgents trough time and space. You could control the future of your nation by killing of people who would eventually oppose you at the right time.

...

Then you'd use necromancy to defend against ghosts.

begone demon

Following this logically, fuck bothering with undead. Why limit your self to requiring a body at all. Assuming your magic in incorporeal, mud golems all the way.

I'm picturing a wounded soldier desperately trying to dig out the bullet before he dies so he doesn't become one of the undead.

Herbert West? He seems older in more ways than one.

War isn't about who is right...war is only about who won

Skelly commander necromancers probably wouldn't be that useful, but I imagine being able to get intel from dead people would be pretty useful.

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>They wouldn't be that great in WW2
Oh really?

Because I'd imagine you could do some pretty crazy shit if you hooked a skellie into a V-1 missile as a sort of un-living guidance system.

Its not that hard, just get the Skelly to drive a SVBIED. Or use them to attack at night, since they most likely wont show up (as well) on thermal imaging gear. Or hide them in graves with their weapons to be raised and sent to attack into the enemy rear lines. Even if they are lousy shots and hard to keep to a strict ROE, they have tons of uses.

Pretty much.

Artillery is why everyone stopped using mass formations.

Absolutely

Intelligent undead are the kings of guerrilla warfare

rattlerattlerattle

Actually intelligent apes are the kings of gorilla warfare

So druids win at modern warfare?

They'd be incredibly effective as a terrorist tool. Summon a bunch of dead in a heavily populated city centre and way h them rampage. Military would be able to take them down fairly easily but they'd be able to drag down a lot of civvies with them before that.

Does no one remember the raising of ghosts etc to defend england in Bedknobs and Broomsticks? Perfectly legitimate use of necromancy in defense of the state.

That was just Animate Armor.

id think they'd be pretty useful depending on what level of memory they retain, like if they could still use weapons, even if hit with grenades they could still crawl into fortified positions a provide decent distractions. raise enough and even the most fortified postions could be left for a few weeks considering we no longer fight wars of attrition and siege this would be extremely effective as long as you have air superiority

Yes but the Geneva Convention puts some dampers on Plague Warfare and Racoon City styled offensives.

I'd imagine Wraith and Shadow styled mass murder sprees would probably have the same laws applied to them on account of the potential to end the world's civilizations or at least putting us in a Final Fantasy Spirits Within situation of spirit-warded cities.

Aaannd...

...folks have definately considered a necromancer's logistical support options, but their ability to create more sophisticated undead varieties so that a handful of soldiers could infiltrate, consume, convert and control a conventional city's defenders has some merits to consider as well, even if there's risks involved in particular weaknesses like daylight operations.

verb
1.
kill (someone) unlawfully and with premeditation.

A man raped my child and ate my wife and I believe that he will do so again. I have no evidence and he will never face justice from the law. If I murder him it is unlawful but arguably justified.

How else can love bloom?

>Detect Evil

Yep. Evil.

Probably pretty goddamn demoralizing.

Ask an enchanter.

Depends on the extent of necromantic powers too much to give a proper answer.

Well, the US army casted Apocalypse from the Sky against the nips and they still consider themselves the good guys

From a legal standpoint, I believe that would be ruled justifiable homicide, rather than murder.

What if you need to do it to stop a virgin being sacrificed to a volcano god and ending the world?

Being able to resurrect and reuse fighter pilots is easily the best application for necromancy in a WW2 setting. Skilled pilots were worth their weight in the lives of at least 30 normal soldiers.

In writing fiction, rape is only edgier than murder because magical realming rape is closer to the rape mindset than writing about murder is.

What am I even talking about though

Send the elf. Then it won't be rape.

Yes, extremely so.

As we all know, dead fighter pilots are typically delivered back to their camp entirely intact. They would never, under any circumstance, be blown across vast battlefields or enemy territories, likely burnt, blown up and smashed beyond recognition.

Neck yourself my friend