Christopher Ross wrote:Interesting. So to train them to fight in formation like that is probably a similar amount of time to train them to simply be good general fighters?
That'd be a huge over-generalisation. It doesn't help that the term "good general fighters" is quite nebulous--is it supposed to mean people with merely good individual fighting skills, or competent soldiers with a balance between group and individual skills, or something else entirely?
The best we can say is that a minimal-but-adequate level of proficiency in both individual fighting and formation tactics could be achieved in just a few months of intensive practice, but this will be far from the end of the soldier's training since, this way, most of that "training" will be on-the-job with a rather high attrition rate from both combat and noncombat losses.
It would be... strange if solid metal armor came back in use amongst infantry.
It's not that strange, really. World War I trench raiders sometimes wore steel breastplates to protect themselves from fragments and hand-to-hand weapons. Soviet combat engineers in World War II also made use of pistol-proof (or nearly so) steel cuirasses in urban fighting. And of course, while the solid ballistic plate inserts provided to 21st-century infantry in the most industrialized nations are more often made of ceramics rather than metal, they nevertheless represent a large-scale return of solid-plate armour to the battlefield.
