Just finished up a long series of posts on military skis. Before that, read this and other posts during research. Now catching up on old business. Some observations, thoughts, and photos from stuff collected during my Military Skis project.
There are troops on skis and specialist skiing troops. Most are troops on skis. A clue is size. Brigades (~3-5k troops), Divisions (~10-16k troops) Corps (~20-40k troops) are formations. Battalions (~1k troops) or Companies (~200 troops) are units and sub units. Units and sub units are typically where specialist functions reside.
It’s really an issue of defense economics and operational flexibility. The cost of equipping and training specialist troops is significant. The larger the number of troops, the bigger the bill. It also costs exponentially more to lift a Division or Corps any distance for training because formations are expected to travel with a variety of add ons (like extensive communications and logistic capability). Maintaining a Division or Corps’ specialty gets in the way of employing them on other tasks.
Armies can afford to do this at the unit and sub unit level only, unless winter or alpine warfare is a major part of their country’s military strategy.*
Having “Mountain” or “Montagne”, or “Montana” in a unit or formation name doesn’t necessarily mean that all the troops are expert skiers. All it means is that the unit or formation has a mountain role — possibly one of many.
Part of it is an equipment thing… no heavy armor, reduced emphasis on mechanization, a degree of independent ops, etc. maybe some lighter field guns for militaries capable of using aviation to drop or sling them up to higher altitudes. Similar to regions where snow pack or soft ground is unsuitable for anything other than a BV206.
In either case, we’re talking light infantry. That means it has to move on foot and fight on foot. So their gear is suited to a broader role than carving, kick and glide. In the case of skis for globally deployable troops, they’re designed for very broad use. There aren’t enough storerooms to stock multiple ski types (fjellski, powder, hard track, etc.) for unit or formation sized forces.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5999
Part of it is an operating environment thing. “Mountain” doesn’t mean “snow”. Not all the time anyway. Very few forces operate at altitudes where there is year long snow. Maybe India and Pakistan (on glaciers) and a few countries like Austria, Italy, Switzerland and Chile (Alps).
But the skiing in these areas isn’t constant due to avalanche risk and weather. The ground in the arctic is either rocky or a bog in the summer months, so no skiing at all. Here is a recent web cam shot from some place called Arctic Bay in Canada. 73 degrees north, so well north of the arctic circle. The white stuff is sea ice… thin and mushy this time of year.
Part of it is a military skills thing. Sure, there’s skiing. There’s also parachuting, navigation, reconnaissance, camouflage and concealment, communications, first aid, weapons handling, marksmanship, survival, tactics, rescue, rappelling, climbing.
Accommodations and meal preparation is a big part of it… seriously. A soldier on the move in snow burns 6000 calories a day. That need to be replenished, along with a huge hydration demand, to maintain body weight. Quite often, it is not. Over time this can impair military effectiveness,
https://www.dvidshub.net/news/446409/fu ... n-frontier
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/6/1638/htm
Recovery requires reasonably good shelter or frostbite and hypothermia become a factor.
Part of it is a youth thing. Light infantry (which is what most mountain troops are) is mostly a young man’s game. Youth imparts an energy that trumps skill. This comes into play when personal loads rise to over 100 pounds and the skiing is not from chalet to chalet, but from bivouac area to bivouac area sleeping in 2-4 hour shifts.
A week of this would be intolerable for most ppl over 40, regardless of their skill level. If they didn’t have a heart attack or stroke, they’d have an accident from inattention caused by fatigue. Young troops just keep going, even if their ski skills aren’t that sharp. They fall, bounce, pick themselves up, and keep going… because they’re young.
Most of this played out during the Russo-Finnish Winter War. The Finns were far better skiers, but not trained experts. They were certainly proficient skiers but this didn’t affect the outcome as much as people think. Their fieldcraft was better, they didn’t get bogged down trying to move armor (the Finns had no armor to speak of and very little field artillery), they knew the ground they were defending (mostly local lads in each area), their logistical lines were short, community support was high, food and shelter well handled (for the most part… though there were saunas, it was pretty rudimentary), morale was great, tactics were considerably better, defensive strategy was sound, political will was resolute etc. in other words, the Finns’ winter warfare proficiency was the result of a great many things
besides skiing.
The most fantastic of the plans for specialist troops on skis was the Swiss Projekt-26 (P-26)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projekt-26, which was a later version of the the 5th (Ski) Battalion of the Scot’s Guards. The Scot’s Guard Si Battalion was created to assist the Finns during the Russo-Finnish War. They didn’t deploy but were re-assigned to be a stay behind force in the event Nazi forces invaded the UK. Their ski training was ancillary. They mostly benefitted from all the military fieldcraft of today’s elite ski forces (camouflage and concealment, sabotage, reconnaissance, small arms combat, etc.).
The popular narrative, including ridiculous Hollywood films depicting expert skiers flying down hills with Tommy Guns blazing, seem to influence how people think about military skiing in general.
The reality is that it’s a means of movement serving the broader purpose of warfare, not warfare on skis. Lots of other skills needed to dominate a winter or mountain environment besides skiing. These can, and often are, repurposed to serve other needs.
http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/12 ... 34.pdf.pdf
* Italy is a good example of a country that maintains a large, well trained cadre of ski troops: The Alpini Brigade, the garrisons of which are located almost exclusively in the Italian Alps. This region largely forms Italy’s only substantive land border (excluding the Vatican and one of two principalities surrounded by Italy). So it makes sense, from a military strategy perspective, for the country to maintain a specialist mountain
formation. This is not the case for most other countries, like the US, UK, etc. which are much more focused on expeditionary warfare of a highly mechanized nature.
