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Combat Pragmatist/Real Life: Difference between revisions
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* Snipers in general either are this trope or on the receiving end of this trope. Many snipers try to have a consistent pattern when killing the enemy, such as shooting the first in line, to make no one want to lead a patrol, to ruin enemy moral. Of course, snipers are often attacked with artilerly barrages.
* The normal form of combat between tribal peoples is a function of thievery or assassination. When they fight honorably they have elders waiting to call it off if things get to hot. In other words it is a duel or a tournament rather then a battle.
** More complex societies with professional (feudal) or bureaucratic armed forces are no exception. Armies are effectively giant siege trains designed to occupy cultivated land and cities. To do that you have to be capable of fighting face to face as well as reducing strongholds and holding them (even if you decline to do these things on this or that occasion) and there is no getting round it. But no sensible army gives up [[Hit and Run Tactics|the basics]] though they might relegate that to scouts and spies and other specialists.
* One reason frontier warfare is so brutal is that people are fighting for their own purposes rather then those of their governments. That is they are interested in direct possession of land, portable property, mates, slaves, etc.
*# Not serious. Low-risk petty raids, especially cattle rustling, or what amounts to skirmishes between neighbor gangs venting steam and showing off. Nobody is interested in fighting to the death or wants to wind up in a vendetta, so it's mostly limited to hit-and-run and warning shots. Occasionally someone is killed, but this may go on indefinitely with less than one fatality per fight on the average. The rest of time these groups may trade (one variant was described as "the townies cheat the nomads, the nomads steals back in raids about as much"), and neither wants the relations to sour too much.
**Likewise rulers are interested in controlling realms not in personally farming them. And corpses [[Captain Obvious|can't pay taxes.]] While soldiers are just fighting either because it is a job(for privates) or because it is the [[Family Business]](for officers especially aristocrats). Thus the reason they fight comparatively honorably is that it is in their interest.▼
*# Dead serious. The level of actual armed conflict varies greatly with circumstances, but the goal is to uproot or annihilate an opponent. Often goes on forever, until the third party intervenes, and/or ends in a genocide (or rounding up the survivors and selling them into slavery somewhere far away, which also removes them permanently).
▲** Likewise rulers are interested in controlling realms not in personally farming them. And corpses [[Captain Obvious|can't pay taxes.]] While soldiers are just fighting either because it is a job (for privates) or because it is the [[Family Business]] (for officers especially aristocrats). Thus the reason they fight comparatively honorably is that it is in their interest.
**And equally when that tacit agreement wears thin it is sometimes because of an import of concepts from the frontier like race paranoia or "living space" or whatever.
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