Greentext

They only had a range of like 50 yards. Split your troops up and they can't aim at the same point because they wouldn't all have the range to hit it.

Ex-Military here.

Seems not much has changed. Unless you're a Tier 1 or Special Forces, you don't spend all that much time on marksmanship either.

Maybe 5-10% of actual training time goes to marksmanship. The rest of it is infantry skills. Squad level movement, field craft, field defenses, cover and concealment,urban ops, the list goes on. These are the things that win wars, not a 3rd Prestige COD pro.

When it comes to comparing muskets to modern weapons, people get weird. They compare field-performace of muskets to the seller's catalog for modern weapons.

Soldiers back then got about 0 hours of marksmanship training, unless they were in whatever the country's version of Light Infantry was, so the average soldier was a horrible shot. So when people talk about the accuracy of muskets, they're mostly saying "Lots of soldiers would miss with this weapons".

Modern weapons are, if you fire from a table on a clear day, at least an order of magnitude better, and soldiers are signficantly better trained at shooting. And yet, the vast majority of shots aren't even remotely close to hitting. Nobody says things like "The accuracy of an M16 is 0.002%" due to the vietnam war taking 50.000 rounds for a kill, but this is basically the same thing.

They did do this sometimes. The Patriot isn't so great for this

You couldn't easily reload one of those bad boys while prone.

The American Revolution was won in part because the Americans more often “adopted Native tactics”

The American Revolution was won because Britain was fighting a real war against France, Spain and the Netherlands. And those countries basically used the US as a cheap way to distract the British.

Coordination is essential to any military action. The better you can coordinate your actions, the greater the objectives you can achieve.

When your ability to coordinate is limited to the distance that people can hear a drum or a trumpet, you're not capable of coordinating across any area larger than a few city blocks. You're a sitting duck against any massed troops, unless you also mass enough troops to stop them from marching right through you.

Small unit tactics are largely ineffective against massed troops until the invention of the telegraph, 30-40 years after the revolution.

From what I recall from my history classes, one of the most critical battles of the American Revolution was won because a bunch of red coats were slacking off and taken by surprise. So while the use of guerilla tactics was an important factor in victory, sheer dumb luck also played a major role.

Not really. The American Revolution was still fought with the same Napoleonic tactics used by the regular army. The irregulars might have adopted more guerrilla methods in the frontier, but they weren’t widely adopted.

Reinforcements from the French army and navy won the war. The French Revolution followed shortly after.

And IIRC those Napoleonic tactics were still used in the American civil war and beyond. The “big Napoleonic blocks” led to trench warfare in WW1.

When a movie knows how stupid it is, it can get away with anything.

Wanted knew its own stupidity to five decimal places.