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:
“O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its head o’ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife—”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art—that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods.... Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)