Modern
After the introduction of firearms, the use of the cavalry charge as a common military tactic waned. Infantry shock action required the holding of fire until the enemy was in very close range, and was used in defence as well as attack. The favorite tactic of the Duke of Wellington was for the infantry to fire a volley and then give a loud cheer and charge. The culmination and downfall of the infantry charge was at World War I, when masses of soldiers made frontal, and often disastrous, attacks on entrenched enemy positions. The machine gun made this tactic a futile one and only with the invention of the tank did shock tactics once more become viable.
During World War II the Germans adapted the shock tactics to modern mechanized warfare. The Blitzkrieg was a shock tactic based on tanks which gained considerable achievements during the war and was afterwards adopted by most modern armies.
The US tactic of Shock and Awe at the Second Gulf War is a shock tactic based on a combination between land and aerial warfare.
Read more about this topic: Shock Tactics
Famous quotes containing the word modern:
“Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the naïve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest.... Statesmanship ... consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“... it must be obvious that in the agitation preceding the enactment of [protective] laws the zeal of the reformers would be second to the zeal of the highly paid night-workers who are anxious to hold their trade against an invasion of skilled women. To this sort of interference with her working life the modern woman can have but one attitude: I am not a child.”
—Crystal Eastman (1881–1928)