Opposing Combat Philosophies

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Noel: Well, all force and no style, just like usual, huh?

Sophia: You seemed to be handling the unnecessary acrobatics quite well on your own.
—Claymore

Some folks think that offense is the best defense; if you kill the other guy, defense is irrelevant. On the other hand, if you plan to fight tomorrow, or the day after that, you'd better have some contingency plans in place to protect your attackers, heal the wounded, and prepare for a possible retreat. Which do you go with?

When you've got two or more groups with two or more ways of winning the battle, you've got Opposing Combat Philosophies. One general prefers to obliterate the enemy with long range bombardment, while the other prefers to send in the infantry to really shut up the other side. Or, in a fantasy setting, the choice between magic, which is astoundingly powerful but takes decades to perfect, or melee combat, which is easier and faster to master. These differing philosophies can be found between the heroes and the villians, or between opposing factions on the same side.

See also Ace Pilot, which includes a section on various piloting styles.

Examples of Opposing Combat Philosophies include:

Anime & Manga

  • In the world of Lyrical Nanoha, Midchildian tactics generally focus on defensive barriers and long range Beam Spam, while the Belkan Knights first introduced in Season 2 prefer to get up close and personal with the enemy to overwhelm them with superior strength and aggresion. The heroes eventually incorporate both approaches.
  • Similar to many fantasy works, the evil Marmo hordes of Record of Lodoss War are focused entirely on offense, with most goblins and werewolves going into battle with nothing but a dagger, scythe, or similar villian weapon. On the other hand, the Holy Knights of Valis routinely carry shields into battle, and Parn's party alone has 3 people capable of healing: Deedlit the High Elf, Slayn the Wizard, and Etoh the Cleric.
  • In Claymore, as illustrated by the page quote, Noel uses her agility and She Fu, while her rival Sophia prefers a brute force approach.
    • A broader division is between Defensive Warriors who have superior regeneration abilities and Offensive Warriors who can develop devastating special attacks like Jean's Drill Sword or Flora's Windcutter. In universe it has been theorised that the mentality of the Warrior in question is what determines their type; those who win by surviving against all odds vs those who simply cut the enemy down to ensure victory.
  • Negi is asked to decide between combat philosophies at least twice so far: first between being a standard battle-mage who relies on his partners to run interference, giving him time to chant devastating attack spells, or a Magical Swordsman, who enters the fray directly. He chooses the latter, like his father before him. Later, he has to choose between The Power of Friendship, again like his father, or The Dark Side as taught by his Master. He goes with the dark side.
  • During the One Year War, The Federation utilizes general-purpose technology, while Zeon's units tend to be specialized for the terrain they are deployed in.
  • During the Golden Age arc of Berserk the nations of Midland and Chuder/Tudor had different armies. Chuder seemed to favor brawny Mighty Glacier units that were themed after huge animals, Black Rams, Whale Corps, Holy Purple Rhino Knights. While Midland preferred lightning fast units, most successfully the Band of the Hawk, and had white everything. White Dragons, White Tigers ect.
  • Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple has this in two forms. The first is between fighting styles. "Dou"-type martial artists fuel their skills using aggressive emotions like rage, while "Sei"-types usually stay calm and collected. Despite what that may sound like, Dou-types no more or less likely to be evil than a Sei-type is to be good.
    • Later on, another set of opposing philosophies appear in the forms of Katsujin-ken and Satsujin-ken. The former, as practiced by Kenichi and his masters, is to fight without taking life if at all possible. The latter are of the belief that martial arts are meant to be used for killing one's opponents. Unlike the above, this does tend to mark the line between Good and Evil in the series.


Fan Works

  • Often seen in Harry Potter fanfiction, where Dumbledore is frequently cast as an extreme proponent of the "better to die than to kill" school of thought who opposes (or even actively sabotages) efforts to allow the Order of Phoenix, the Aurors or British wizards in general to use lethal force against the Death Eaters. To be fair, this does seem to be the philosophy he has in Canon, but fan writers have been known to turn it Up to Eleven.


Literature

  • In the Drizzt novels, Entreri believes in fighting without emotion, while Drizzt thinks his passion improves his fighting. Entreri gets way too into proving he's right, going to enormous trouble to set up a death match between them after several fights in which outside factors interfered with the result, and completely loses control of his anger during the fight. Drizzt meanwhile, is mostly just annoyed that he won't let it go, and after beating him points out that this fight didn't prove which of their styles was better either.


Sports

  • Boxers can be very broadly divided into 3 types: out-fighters, swarmers, and brawlers. Out-fighters are long range punchers who use distancing and strategy to control the fight. Swarmers are short range fighters who prefer to get into point-blank range and unload with torrents of body blows and uppercuts. Finally, brawlers are power punchers who rely on sheer physical strength to devastate their opponents, often at the expense of speed and skill. In a case of real life Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors, it is generally believed that out-fighters defeat brawlers, brawlers destroy swarmers, and swarmers overwhelm out-fighters.
    • For examples of each fighting style: Ali was an out-fighter, Rocky would be considered a swarmer, and Drago (from Rocky IV) would be a brawler.


Tabletop Games

  • The Warhammer 40,000 Universe is large enough to accomodate a dozen or more tactical styles, but the most obviously opposed systems are between the Tau Empire, which prefers Wave Motion Gun style attacks from astronomical distances, and the Orcs who specialize in getting within 100 meters and opening a can of More Dakka.
  • Same goes for its counterpart Warhammer Fantasy ranging from armies with solid blocks and no ranged attacks except magic (Chaos) to armies consisting nearly exclusively out of skirmishers (Woodelves).
    • But next to that there is also a very philosophical divide between the fluff-players, who build their armies to reflect the setting and emphasize the quirks of their specific army, perhaps with certain self-imposed limitations, and the so-called "power gamers" who only focus on maximizing the win chances of their army without much care for the setting. Can also been found in Warhammer40000. Differs from normal Munchkins that it is a actual philosophical question how to prioritize winning in the battle.
  • In BattleTech, the factional combat philosophies weren't that sharply distinct when it was simply the Great Houses fighting. When the Clans came, though, their philosophy favored individual actions and the glory of single combat with their foes, so whole units would break down to a dozen one on one battles...where the Inner Sphere forces tended to be Combat Pragmatist and would do 'dishonorable' things like having an entire company of 'Mechs focus their fire.
  • In Traveller Intersteller Wars, the Terrans focus on maneuver and the Vilani on their numbers and logictic capability. However the Vilani underestimate the Terran threat and the Terrans are able to gain resources by conquest and economic hegemony over vast areas of the Vilani Empire until they have an even match.


Video Games

  • In Final Fantasy XIII, there is something of an unspoken difference in combat styles between the two warring factions. Fighters originating from Cocoon, such as Sazh, Hope, and the female PSICOM operatives, focus on buffing allies first, then going into battle. On the other hand, fighters from Gran Pulse, namely Fang and Vanille, have natural Saboteur capabilities for weakening enemies before applying the killing blow. The reasons why you would need to weaken opponents first become apparent once you visit the lowerworld and have to deal with brutally powerful behemoths, wyverns, and city-sized Adamantoises.
  • Gallente ships in EVE Online are designed around their close-in high risk, high damage fighting philosophy. Their old enemies, the Caldari design their ships around long range, low-risk sniper tactics.
  • Exemplified well by the Faction Calculus within StarCraft, where the Protoss field extremely expensive, but extremely capable units, the Zerg named one of the most famous RTS Tropes of all time, and the Terrans fall flexibly in-between.
  • Command & Conquer games also employ a good Faction Calculus. The Allied Nations, Scrin and USA employ precision weapons and strong air power, China, GDI and Soviet Union use lots of tanks, while GLA, Japan, Nod and Yuri utilise gimmicks, speed and versatility.
  • In Homeworld 2 the Higaaran race tends to field smaller numbers of individually more capable, flexible and expensive spaceships, and almost all of their ships have some sort of weapon mounted, even on auxiliary ships that really are not meant for direct combat. Their larger ships are even capable of handling almost every combat role by themselves, at least in small engagements. Their opponents the Vagyr, on the other hand, have larger groups of cheap ships which are each specifically meant for one narrow task, relying on outnumbering the enemy and using combinations of different ship and squadron types to meet specific tactical needs.


Western Animation

  • In Xyber 9: New Dawn, Renard focuses more on ground based combat, Tatania's forces attack from the air. Also, he's more likely to just dump infantry on an area than she is.
  • The Various Bending Styles on Avatar: The Last Airbender, has two pairs, first, the Airbending style is all about "being the leaf" relying on fast movements, lots of doging, and using non-lethal techniques in general , In Contrast Earthbending is all about staging your ground "Beging the Rock", hitting hard and using the terrain(Literally) to your advantage, on the other site, we Have Firebedning, wich is all about Overwhelming their oponents with Raw Power(Okay they where the most technologically advanced of the nations, but their figthing style IS focussed on direct confrontaion) while the waterbending style focuses on flow of moves and redirectioning thee energy of the enemy, the Avatar being the Kung Fu Jesus Master Of All elements has to master them all, but is still know that they usually have problems mastering opposed of the one they initially started.


Real Life

  • Traditionally, the more agile United States Marine Corps were sent in as shock troops to annihilate enemy forces, while the more powerful but sluggish United States Army would then hold the captured territory. However, recent operations have blurred this division of labor.
    • Particularly special forces in the US Army have blurred the line. However, this is a result of a changing tactical environment (think World War 2 compared to Iraq War 2). The Marines are still the premiere "hit hard, cripple the enemy" forces, but the Army is catching up, though they generally use "hit hard, destroy the enemy" tactics instead. The Marines are also backed up by the Navy, which has both fighter-bombers and medium range tactical missiles, which is a rather large advantage. The Army, on the other hand, has much more artillery.
    • Those philosophies have been discarded as the US military has opted for integrated "joint-force" operations in almost every engagement, utilizing the strengths of all branches, together.
    • There was a real and well documented case of Opposing Combat Philosophies within the US Air Force during the late '40s and early '50s between Gen Curtis LeMay, who wanted manned nuclear bombers and lots of them, and his detractors who included President Kennedy, Secretary of Defense McNamara, US Army Gen. Maxwell Taylor and many, many others.
      • This mirrored an earlier case of OCP between WWI and WWII where Billy Mitchell, desperate to secure money for his nascent Army Air Force, basically went to war with the US Navy, intending to cannibalize their funding. He put on many highly-publicized tests to try and demonstrate that bombers made the Navy's battleships obsolete.
  • During the Cold War, the US and Soviet navies had very different doctrines on defeating each other in the event of war, and this affected everything from their tactics to thier ship designs. US Ships were designed with better survivability, fewer but more reliable weapons, more comfort (the term being relative here) to support longer times at sea, and their fleets were centered around their aircraft carriers and depended heavily on air power, which they would also use to support troops inland. The Soviets, on the other hand, built more ships than the US with more but less reliable weapons, and shorter endurance. They couldn't match the US's surface and air superiority so they concentrated on building better submarines and anti-ship cruise missiles which could strike from afar. They figured that the major fighting in a hypothetical World War III would be in Europe and so they wouldn't have to outright defeat the US Navy, just deny it the ability to effectively resupply its forces in Europe.
    • It's not that the Soviets expected their navy to loose; they had good reasons for choosing to specialize as they did. Submarines during the cold war and after it are not what they were in WWII. The nuclear variety is capable of silently stalking beneath the waves for months at a time, virtually undetectable, and very well armed. Should have the Warsaw Pact navies engaged NATO's, chances are that all of the surface fleets would have been reduced to radioactive scrap metal by nuclear weapons, with submarines actually having the best chances of survival. Even in non-nuclear combat, many experts during the period came to the conclusion that NATO's surface fairing fleets would not last long when faced with wolf packs of Soviet submarines (though NATO still had its own subs, just less of them).
    • Soviet air superiority doctrine was centered around one-pass-kills (fly at high speed past your target as you kill it) to significantly decrease interception time (the MiG 31, for example, is one of the fastest planes ever built, but can't turn worth a damn because it didn't need to). US air superiority doctrine eventually evolved to more measured approaches and extremely long range missile shots while avoiding dogfighting.
      • The Soviets included a considerable amount of air defense weapons from army level down to battalion, while U.S. Army AirLand Battle doctrine operated under the assumption that the Air Force would be able to keep the skies clear of enemy aircraft and therefore had less resources devoted to air defense. On that note, Soviet air superiority was based upon surprise air attacks on airfields, and tanks on the enemy's airbase, rather than straight PVO-type interception. For the Soviet Navy, the submarine and anti-ship missile-centric fleet was out of choice and their view of cost-effectiveness, not inability. For endurance, the Soviets looked at readiness in a different way, which is exemplified that Soviet sailors identified themselves with fleets rather than ships.
    • Come to think of it, this is basically the competing philosophy between major land powers (USSR in this case) and major sea powers (USA) which repeats itself through history. Earlier examples included England (sea) v. France (land), England (sea) v. Germany (land), going all the way back to Athens (sea) V. Sparta (land).
  • The German Army's mastery of maneuver warfare (swift, coordinated, simultaneous assault with infantry, artillery, and air power) was its greatest advantage at the start of World War II. The allied forces, prepared only for the attrition warfare tactics of World War I, were left beaten, bloody, and desperate to catch up during the opening years of the war.
    • After awhile though the British focused on a strategy of emphasizing naval supremacy, imperial intrigue, subversion and what John Keegan once called,"Attrition by Attenuation.

This means roughly getting the enemy to overstretch rather then outlasting a massive bloodfest; Risk players will remember the difference which is between two big piles running into each other and waiting until there is only one army in each province. This strategy in fact resembled the Napoleonic Wars more then World War I and depended on the inherent efficiency of maritime transport.

Some theorists at the time suggested the railroads had made this strategy obsolete but that proved not to be the case not least because a railway schedule can be ripped up by a raiding party tearing up tracks while ships have no need for tracks and if the ships themselves can be hit by raiders, so can the trains. Perhaps more to the point, railways cannot penetrate enemy territory very well because the enemy can always destroy or mine his tracks as he retreats or simply build them to a different gauge in the first place, like Russia did. Whereas ships having no need for tracks can go wherever there is water deep enough for them.

      • The three main allies in World War 2 had mutually opposing combat philosophies and had to make compromises to get anything like coordination. The Russian's combat philosophy was set for it as a war of attrition in Eastern Europe by the fact that it was faced with invasion and Hitler's atrocious policies left no option even unconditional surrender besides the most horrible war ever fought. Russians often accused Americans and British of fighting the war with Russian blood and one can understand this feeling from ordinary Russians who did take most of the casualties of the war but it comes off ill from Stalin who had been trying to do exactly the same thing in the early stages of the war(not to mention seeking a jackel's share in Eastern Europe) and then tried to hurry up the Overlord invasion by using the Americans and Britishers conscience as a political weapon. Furthermore Russia seems not to have understood naval warfare or how difficult it was to get a substantial army ashore in Europe.America focused intensely on an almost Teutonic dedication to finding the Schwerpunkt(decisive point in German)and begrudged every asset sent to what it considered a secondary theater or diversion, or more disparagingly a "sideshow." Britain as mentioned above urged investing more in such secondary theaters partly from emotional reactions-it had a Kiplingesque romanticism about sideshows and a tradition going back to Elizabeth I not to mention fear of fear of another Somme-but also partly because it thought good could come from such investments and in any event a landing in France was impossible at the time.

Americans had to be honest something of a John Wayne syndrome and accused the British of either not wanting to fight or fighting just for their sordid Imperial interests. The British on the other hand felt that they were just wanting to fight smart. Basically the Brits thought they were clever and the Yanks thought the Brits to clever by half. Conversely Americans thought they were focused and realistic and British thought Americans bullheaded. Somehow or other compromises were made. For the most part Russia just fought it's own war and there were few joint ops. Between America and Britain the compromise was roughly to keep the pressure on steadily in the British style and then shift as soon as resources were amassed for a massive invasion of France.

  • The Crusades has examples of this. The Europeans prefer heavily armored knights, while the Arabs and Turks prefer lightly armored but still heavily armed horsemen. In terrains with not much room to maneuver the knights are deadly, but in open terrain, especially at the desert, the light horsemen can wreak more damage.
  • Until quite recently there was a remarkable variability in this due to terrain, economics, ideology and what not. This may have gotten less so in modern times; most countries seem to try to imitate European style. Except for guerrillas which are the other main combat philosophy of the modern world.
  • The strategies each side of the American Civil War employed during most of the war. The Confederate strategy relied on a series of decisive victories in pitched battle that would quickly force the Union to the negotiating table once they lost their stomach for war. The Union strategy (mostly) involved attrition and the control of key locations, knowing it would be able to outlast the Confederacy in any prolonged conflict due to their industrial superiority and population advantage. The dual Union victories at Gettsyburg and Vicksburg during July 1863 illustrate the success of one strategy (the Union gained complete control of the Mississippi River, further tightening the noose around the Confederacy) and the failure of another (Lee banking on a decisive victory on Union soil and being utterly foiled, resulting in a decisive tactical and strategic defeat the Confederacy could not recover from.)
    • This appeared on the Union side for much of the war, represented in the persons of General George McClellan and General Ulysses S. Grant. McClellan, Father to His Men through and through, was always cautious, losing several battles and even more opportunities because he had overestimated the strength of the Confederate forces. Grant, on the other hand, was willing to press the North's advantages for all they were worth, including the advantage of manpower, in order to bring a faster victory. The result was the sacking of McClellan and (eventually) the appointment of Grant in his place as commanding general of the Army.
  • This came to the fore during the Second Punic War on the Roman side. With Hannibal smashing one Roman army after another in Italy, Quintus Fabius Maximus came to lead a new Roman army to oppose the Carthaginians. Fabius used his army to shadow and harrass Hannibal, refusing the open battle Hannibal desired and all the while reducing Carthaginian morale, numbers, and supplies. However, this strategy was time consuming and the Romans wanted to smash Hannibal once and for all, so he instead placed the aggressive Gaius Terentius Varro in charge. He gave Hannibal an open battle, outnumbering him nearly 2-1....and had his army annihilated at the Battle of Cannae. In the end, Fabius was proven correct, since he knew that Hannibal would never have the manpower or resources to ever try and capture Rome, and knew Hannibal grossly underestimated Roman resolve.
  • The opposing ground forces during the Cold War in Germany. NATO's philosophy was to have individually highly capable, but expensive chess pieces whose loss could be crippling. The Soviet/Warsaw Pact, on the other hand by comparison, was deliberately limiting the capability, initiative and equipment of each individual chess piece, and instead investing a large percentage of its effort in raising a breed of grand masters who could play chess well, understanding and accepting the natural limitations of each piece. In other words, a rank of bishops and rooks against three or four ranks of pawns.
  • Martial Arts is often divided into "Hard" and "Soft" categories; usually accepted as using force directly or redirecting an opponent's force.
  • US Admirals Spruance and Halsey had differing philosophies with Spruance normally being more cautious and Halsey more aggressive. Halsey was able to sanitize Formosa of enemy air power before the Second Phillipines Campaign but on the other hand he was out of place at Leyte Gulf. On the other hand, Spruance in the two notable times he refused pursuit might have been justified for at Midway there were still large forces waiting in a potential ambush while at the Marianas, covering the invasion force may have saved lives, the Japanese naval air force was crippled in any event, and first class airstops on Saipan/Guam/Tinian would blanket the area and make sure that the Japanese navy would never come back.
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