http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HollywoodTactics

Pierre Bosquet, regarding the , regarding the Charge of the Light Brigade "It is magnificent, but it is not war. It is madness."

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Let's face it: most writers are not exactly the world's greatest tactical geniuses, so whenever a war's going on, expect a lot of dumb decisions from tacticians. To pour salt into the wound, these tacticians are sometimes explicitly said to be tactical masterminds. Such tactical blunders and bad ideas include:

This is often used to add drama to the story. After all, a story about an army performing a last-ditch attack against a superior foe is more dramatic than the same army slaughtering the other one because it forgot to defend its flanks. Alternately, it could just be because it looks cool. On the flipside, artillery barrages, Gunship Rescues, the mechanical speed and precision of a Cold Sniper blowing heads apart all have a macabre beauty if you're an observer, not a receiver. Furthermore, an Enemy that can defeat a Badass Army acting competently and using its advantages to the fullest comes across as much more dangerous and respectable than one that Curb Stomps a bunch of barely-trained, poorly-equipped conscripts.

Some critics see Hollywood Tactics as evidence of evil "Hollywood's politics" insisting that the military is always bad/wrong/evil. The concurrent claim that they tend "to be averted in the works of writers who actually served in the military, or even have significant military experience, including (among others) John Ringo, David Drake, Tom Clancy, and Robert A. Heinlein", which however sees these authors' pro-military if not militaristic bent as more important than their actual military experience (Heinlein served five years in the peacetime U. S. Navy before having to retire due to tuberculosis, Clancy did not serve at all due to bad eyesight). It should be noted, that military experience does not guarantee immunity from proposing terrible tactics and strategies, as for instance a lot of the literature produced about "the coming war" by retired and active military men before World War I demonstrates. And in real life even the best generals can use self-defeating tactics on an off day, even Robert E. Lee had his Pickett's Charge.

Sister Trope to Standard Hollywood Strafing Procedure. Supertrope of Onrushing Army. When played for laughs, this is General Failure.

Examples

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This Philips Carousel spot , which includes, among other things, police looking out the windows after a suspect while several other suspects are firing weapons right outside the door. Don't even try and figure out a sequence of events where police have somehow penetrated past several of the criminals, and have had time to summon SWAT, but don't have a secure perimeter.

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

Captain America: The main character is supposed to be the greatest battle tactician in the Marvel Universe, often leading teams of heroes into battle. Usually, he simply shouts "Hit them hard and fast" before a fight and that somehow translates into perfect battle tactics. In the early days, he would also tell The Avengers to switch opponents if they were involved in one-on-one battles. Not only is this not a good idea since it opens the heroes up to getting hit in the back but the villains should be able to hear him anyway.

Fan Fiction

Played straight, averted, and inverted at the same time in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Draco's army is based on tight formation and classical wizadry warfare. Hermione's often goes into more basing her entire strategy off of one single action or plan that either wins or loses the battle. Harry goes a route of mass chaos and randomness to throw off the other two. However, each army is usually well run and have well thought out strategies.

Film

Literature

The Wheel of Time: Using Hollywood Tactics is a good way to die in the series. Mat won a One Sided Battle when 10,000 soldiers made a charge against him, and his army all knew how to use crossbows. The result is that while Mat lost some people, he killed the entire enemy army. Dumai's Wells at the end of the sixth book, where the enemy army's Zerg Rush tactics were defeated in a very bloody fashion. And the Aiel are basically the Zulu, from the ridiculous running speeds to the spear-wielding and war chants down to the page relevant tactics: split the army into four divisions, one to pin, two to the flanks, and a reserve. Rand himself tends to employ Hollywood Tactics at times, with similar results. He's usually self-aware enough of his poor strategic skills to let his generals make the battle-plans, but when he's being stubborn like in the battle with the Seanchan in Path of Daggers expect a bodycount in the thousands.

Inheritance Cycle: Eldest has a whole bunch of tactical mistakes, including: Firing trebuchets in the middle of a fighting crowd. Flaming ballista bolts. And again in Inheritance. For instance, the Varden launch an assault on Dras-Leona to cause a diversion so that Eragon can open one of the city gates. By attacking that very same gate. Naturally, this means enemy forces regroup there, blocking Eragon's way and forcing him to fight at three against hundreds.

Subverted in Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan: humanity is able to beat a Martian invasion because Martian 'strategy' consists of light weapons and infantry, announcing their position over radio to the militaries of Earth and stretching their armies to attack every country at once. The book portrays this as terrible planning on the part of the Martians... until we learn that actually, Rumfoord had deliberately made them use terrible tactics, in order to make them easy to beat, yet still seem like a scary enough enemy to encourage the nations of Earth to co-operate .

. In S. M. Stirling's Emberverse novels, gunpowder and electricity suddenly stop working, forcing the characters to painfully re-learn medieval military tactics. A more specific example: in A Meeting at Corvallis, Sauron-wannabe Norman Arminger ignores pointed warnings from his subordinates and, instead of picking off the various factions opposing him one at a time, launches a massive three-pronged attack that instantly unites everyone against him and ends in general retreat.

The Novelization of Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars has this in spades. Among the most egregious examples of tactics in the book is a scene where a Juggernaut artillery walker attacks a Nod machinegun emplacement. Does it use its cannons to bombard it from a distance as artillery emplacements are supposed to? No. Does it blast the emplacement directly with its cannons? Nope. It charges the emplacement and steps on it. Aside from the obvious stupidity of doing that, what kind of idiotic commander puts his artillery close enough to the enemy that it can step on their gun emplacements? Especially when the Juggernaut only has legs because it is supposed to stay out of the line of fire in the first place?

on their gun emplacements? Especially when the Juggernaut only has legs because it is supposed to stay out of the line of fire in the first place? Discworld: The books in general have explained that the Sto Plaines generals are more concerned about becoming famous for their battles than winning them. They refer to the result of battles as "Glorious Casualties" and their tactics are explained as sending their army against the opposing one and counting the resulting losses; if they won it was a nice bonus. In Jingo, Lord Rust appeared to be an avid student of these tactics. He seriously intended to re-enact the strategy used by his nation in a famous battle, simply because it was a glorious battle - ignoring the fact that the strategy he was planning to use was used by the side that lost. He defends his decision based on examples from other famous battles, ignoring his aide's comments that in said battles, the winning army was A) larger than the other side's, B) better equipped/experienced than the other side, C) extremely lucky, or D) entirely fictitious, as the battle came from a children's story. It's a good thing that Vimes showed up and aborted the battle... Conversely, the book introduced the reader to the famous general Tacticus, whose book Vimes reads at some points. Tacticus is considered a very dishonorable general by Ankh-Morpork's nobility, simply because he not only won battles but managed to keep a large part of his army alive in the process, mainly by avoiding this trope. Sergeant Colon also talks about his time in the armies. He mentions one commander who made them form up in arrows to march on the enemy, as that's how they were depicted in his books. In the book Pyramids the Tsortean and Ephebian armies are lining up to face each other, and both sides build a load of wooden horses and hide in them. Averted in Eric, when the besieging army builds a wooden horse, and when the defenders are all gathered around it waiting for it to open, they sneak in through the back door.

Averted and played straight in Codex Alera. The Alerans, being the descendants of a displaced Roman Legion that ended up in another world, use classical Roman tactics, particularly the famous, highly-disciplined shieldwall. These tactics are, however, adapted to make greatest use of the Alerans' control over their furies, with specialist formations within the Legion made up of troops who are best at a particular discipline. Firecrafters are used as siegebreakers, metalcrafters and earthcrafters are used for shock attacks, woodcrafters serve as scouts and snipers, etc. The biggest problem that the Alerans have is that their overreliance on furies, coupled with an extremely conservative mindset that breeds arrogance ensured that the Alerans forgot many mechanical principles and thus tended to discount enemy technology that doesn't rely on furies. When they encountered Canim troops with "balest" crossbows, they were utterly unprepared for how powerful they were, and the idea of using seige engines instead of furycraft to bring down walls or fight massed enemies never occurred to them until Tavi and his mentor uncovered ancient catapult plans and sent them to Bernard, who did build them to fight the Vord .

. The battle tactics used in The Malazan Book of the Fallen series aren't necessarily bad; they'd probably work pretty well if used by Real Life generals during ancient times. However, in their world, magic exists, and it can be just as powerful, if not more powerful, than any modern weaponry, something which most generals seem completely unprepared for. Most of the time, marching their soldiers across the countryside in large formations just makes them sitting ducks for High Mages, who can kill hundreds with a single sorcerous blast.

The Starfist series contains several blatant examples, particularly with the issue regarding uncombined arms. For example, tanks are not used because they were rendered "obsolete" because of "Straight Arrow" anti-tank weapons that essentially consisted of a one-shot unguided missile launcher/kinetic kill weapon - essentially a high-tech AT4 or RPG fused with an anti-armor rifle capable of penetrating tank armor. While such a weapon would be effective against tanks, all it is realistically providing is a reliable, relatively short-ranged anti-tank weapon portable by infantry. Realistically, it would cause a significant shift in armored cavalry tactics (use of more infantry screens, less use of armor in built-up terrain, etc), but not a complete decommissioning of the entire armored cavalry branch. The whole notion gets quite savagely lambasted here. The general impression given by the Starfist books is "light infantry are better than everything" which has decidedly never been the case since World War II, but the books are insistent on the infantry in general and the Space Marines in particular being the very best. Artillery and aircraft and armored transport are present, but all the combat boils down to foot infantry fighting enemy foot infantry. The aforementioned issue with tanks is just one symptom of a sort of antipathy the books have in general toward the idea of modern, mechanized warfare. The real galling part of it is that somehow, the Straight Arrow manages to obviate the very real, pressing infantryman's need for heavy mobile support weaponry. The availability of potent anti-armor weaponry won't take away the fact that the troops on the ground are going to need firepower support when faced with strong, dug-in opposition. But the light infantry don't have any support weaponry beyond man-portable gear, despite the fact that flying, missile-armed drones are available in the setting. One would expect to see cheap, teleoperated, tracked or wheeled drones with support weapons, design to be compact and lightweight (and above all else disposable) to be used to support the infantry in response to the Straight Arrow, with armored vehicles serving as a mobile cavalry outside urbanized areas where they can use their extreme range to bombard targets from outside an Arrow's range.

Guy Sajer's supposed autobiography The Forgotten Soldier chronicles the author's passage from the rear-echelon supply services to the front lines with the elite German Grossdeutchland division. He describes training for the elite storm infantry as the worst sort of lunatic training with recruits being worked for thirty-six hour periods and only allowed, at most, six hours sleep in every two days. Men are regularly killed in live-firing exercises and those who refuse or want out are chained up like dogs and eventually shot for refusal to obey orders.

In the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the character Hile Troy is hailed as a military genius by the people of the Land (and he was also a brilliant tactician on Earth), but his battle plan is terrible. He relied on only one scouting party to gather intelligence, and even if everything were to go according to plan, he would march his army hundreds of leagues to a canyon in the lower land to ambush the enemy army. Meanwhile his army would be tired and low on provisions, so the enemy would have to be vanquished in a only a matter of days. If the enemy chose not to take Hile Troy's bait in the canyon, then the land would be defenseless with Troy's army holed up at Doom's Retreat. And just like the real world, the best case scenario is not what happens, rather Lord Foul's army is too big and his scouts are delayed in delivering intelligence to Hile Troy.

In Mockingjay, Beetee discusses videos of how people in the past had all sorts of nifty military weapons, such as jet planes and satellite lasers. Hey, what about those guns that fire really long distances... you know, artillery? That and laying siege to Capitol would have been a better option than sending in waves of men and women to just die needlessly. This is basically the only reason why any notable characters die.

discusses videos of how people in the past had all sorts of nifty military weapons, such as jet planes and satellite lasers. Hey, what about those guns that fire really long distances... you know, artillery? That and laying siege to Capitol would have been a better option than sending in waves of men and women to just die needlessly. This is basically the only reason why any notable characters die. Carrera's Legions has some absolutely horrendous tactics, especially in the training for the titular Legion. Among the insanity is Carrera ordering NCOs to have recruits toss live grenades on their first time on the grenade-throwing range (a tremendous no-no in every single competent military in the world) and even ordering them to "cook" the grenades by counting to three before throwing them, which have four-to-five second fuses. (In reality, this would almost certainly result in the grenade exploding in your hand or face while throwing). He then improvises a tank firing range by having recruits drive out into a bay with power boats and drag targets behind them, and as an afterthought tells the civilian shipping using the bay to clear out. Coupled with other brutal training methods, the Legion ends up suffering 1.5% attrition before it even enters combat, which is a higher loss rate than any First World nation has ever suffered in any war after World War II, let alone during peacetime. What makes this particularly absurd is that the author, Tom Kratman, was a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army, and thus would by all rights actually know how terrible this is, but the book portrays this lunatic casualty rate as desirable.

From the Warhammer 40,000 novels: The Gaunt's Ghosts novel "Straight Silver" has the Ghosts being thrust into a planetary civil war where the governor has insisted on WWI-style trench warfare for the past 40 years. Gaunt frequently voices his displeasure at the use of tactics that have been out of date for nearly 39,000 years and tries to convince him not to waste his men's lives so casually. In the Ciaphas Cain series, the fresh-out-of-the-schola Commissar Forres seems more concerned with driving troops to show their valor and be willing to sacrifice themselves for the Emperor than actual efficient strategy. The 597th Valhallan's commander, Colonel Kasteen, calls her out on this, pointing out that using actual tactics tends to result in higher damage inflicted on the enemy while incurring fewer casualties, which in the long run counts more than just trying to show off one's courage.

In the first half of World War Z, every single armed force of the world (save for Israel and... that's all) holds the Idiot Ball until the world gets really screwed. Armies make bad decision after bad decision that caused the apocalypse. This reaches its peak at the Battle of Yonkers when... let's just say we're gonna need multiple bullet points with detailed footnotes to even begin scratching the surface here. This is one of the crowning examples of the trope. They don't bring enough ammo to deal with all the zombies that come, despite knowing the capital importance of that battle. note This is Handwaved as the military being overconfident, but it goes against the normal US military doctrine which says that There Is No Kill Like Overkill , that is also used as a PR strategy ("Shock And Awe") as well as for serious warfighting. They blatantly waste the little artillery ammunition they do have by firing full salvos at a few dozen scattered zombies in the van, while completely ignoring the gigantic horde of zombies in plain view less than half a mile behind them. note This is entirely contrary to sound artillery doctrine, which is to aim large salvos at the center of large concentrations of enemy and not at their outermost leading edge or at small isolated groups. The formation used is straight out of the Hollywood manual. The military entirely ignores available high ground and sets up their fighting positions at the lowest point on the map, without so much as placing even lookouts or snipers or artillery observers on nearby high points. While the military does perform with minimal competence in setting up at a natural terrain chokepoint, they then entirely fail to have the combat engineers erect fortifications or clear lanes of fire to best take advantage of that chokepoint. Likewise, all of their strength is laid out essentially in a single line with no defense in depth, minimal or no interlocking fields of fire, and no reserve element held back to reinforce against penetrations as needed. note The military state of the art had advanced beyond this kind of tactical layout before the end of the Bronze Age. The Assyrians understood the concept of holding back at least some elements in reserve in order to have them available to reinforce vs. enemy breakthrough or exploit sudden opportunities. Also, in a classic Hollywood Tactic, the artillery does not fire very far (if at all) outside of visual range, despite MLRS having a maximum range of approximately 30 miles. And a minimum range of several miles. The military doesn't have even a rough order-of-magnitude estimate of the number of zombies they're actually facing. This despite having every form of aerial and satellite recon potentially available and facing, well, zombies, who don't actually hide or have the ability to attack anything outside of arms' reach — especially not anything flying. For some reason, most tanks are given sabots, anti-tank non explosive weapons useless against large crowds of humanoids, instead of the much more logical antipersonnel munitions appropriate for that case. note This is particularly egregious because in recent history the Army was ready to design an entirely new ammunition type for the Abrams main gun for use in Iraq (optimized for use against obstacles and improvised fortifications), rather than choose to use sabot for a job it was not good at. They dig foxholes and use an infantry static defense backed by stationary AFVs, instead of using a mechanized defense and maneuver warfare. note Foxholes are used as protection vs. gunfire and artillery, two things zombies have absolutely none of. In addition, pinning themselves down in foxholes entirely negated one of the two greatest advantages that humans have over zombies, their superior mobility. Likewise, apparently no provisions were made for a fighting retreat if necessary. note The fighting retreat is the classic tactic used by a smaller mobile force with excellent ranged capability when confronted with an advance by a much larger but slower force with poor ranged capability if there is nothing at the battle site itself that needs to be defended vs. capture, i.e., the exact tactical situation being faced at Yonkers. This is a tactic that was old before the Persian Empire was young, and yet apparently they've never heard of it. The zone the army fought on wasn't checked against hostile, letting zombies pop out, attracted by the sound of gunfire, and attack the lines of soldiers from behind. note Failing to provide for flank guard and/or rear guard when laying out fighting positions is an error as fundamental as holding onto the grenade and throwing the pin instead of the other way around. The military has standard procedures for maintaining at least some kind of watch on flanks and rear for units all the way down to a single fire team (four men). Sweeping an area for concealed enemy units before setting up camp on it is even more basic than that. And yet the military at Yonkers, despite being present in at least brigade strength, fails to do either effectively. While air support of at least some kind is present, it is both grossly inadequate in strength, composed of the wrong type of aircraft, carrying the wrong type of ordnance, and assigned to the wrong mission. note They sent advanced high-performance multi-role fighters instead of dedicated ground-attack aircraft like A-10s or B-52s, they used long-range stand-off weapons intended for killing single tanks miles away instead of area munitions intended for killing large groups of infantry right beneath you, and what helicopters were available were apparently all tasked to the job of carrying news media as opposed to, y'know, shooting at the enemy. Also, no close air support is even started until the zombies are already danger close, instead of the Air Force bombarding them the whole way in. note Given that a good B-52 arclight strike could have destroyed most of the zombie horde before it even reached Yonkers, this is another one in the 'inexplicably idiotic errors that even Private Dumbjohn could have figured out was a bad idea, yet an entire room full of generals somehow failed to' category. Running the other guy over with your armored ride was an old idea when Alexander the Great was around. Many military vehicles, when sealed, would be utterly impervious to World War Z zombies. The troops never think to use their vehicles as weapons or to force a breakthrough. note (Zombies in this book mindlessly attack the closest human and try to break through or surmount any barrier stopping them. They would throw themselves at the vehicles to no effect. Modern tankers would realize their enemy had no means of conducting anti-tank warfare immediately. This leaves them inside a 60-ton invincible behemoth that can move about 45 mph. Modern fighting vehicles would be able to run down zombies, break through a position, or otherwise provide immense advantages.)



Live Action TV

Tabletop Games

Theater

In Arms and the Man Captain Bluntschli explains to Raina why her husband to be, Sergius, was totally insane to take his entire division and charge straight into a nest of entrenched machine guns. It turns out that the attack worked and won the battle for Sergius's side but that was only because the machine guns were sent the wrong ammunition.

Video Games

Webcomics

Cry Havoc mainly averts this, but plays it straight when it comes to psychers. Their psychic powers can make them virtually bullet proof, and allow for some very hollywood-esq tactics including a one (wo)man Zerg Rush against dug in opponents. The rest of the time, the dogs of war and rebels use real tactics such as suppression, maneuver, misinformation, combined arms, and ambush reaction.

Parodied in this Sluggy Freelance strip (or at least it parodies Video Game tactics, anyway). Torg: Alright, we'll need some of the townsfolk to chop down trees, mine for gold, and set up solar collectors in case we need to build more troops. Do we have any dragons yet?

Val: Why are the cute ones always insane?

Sluggy Freelance strip (or at least it parodies Video Game tactics, anyway). Here's how to conduct a battle if you're an Orc chieftain in Dominic Deegan who is also a Native American. Your warband occupies a hilltop overlooking your enemy's camp. Many of your warriors are master archers, while the enemy tribe has shown no ranged weapons and no defenses beyond teepees. You must carry the day, but you're not counting seconds. It follows that you should lead a charge down the hill and take the enemy by surprise. Keep your archers back, but have them hold fire until the ranks have mixed and the enemy is occupied with your fighters. Then pour arrows into the melee, but only have them hit enemies. Fight nonlethally with your clubs, hammers, spears, and rain of arrows on a ballistic trajectory, since only the enemy chief is evil. Have all of this work until the chief overwhelms you with his magic, then give the order to kill by yelling it really loud in the middle of a battle. Get rescued by two different groups of allies that snuck up on everybody on what is largely a flat, featureless plain. Party down.

Western Animation

G.I. Joe. Just to start, the opening for the movie has COBRA's apparent goal to be destroying the Statue of Liberty. After somehow getting an airship right above it, instead of using a missile or dropping some bombs, they send hundreds of paratroopers (who would be falling all over each other if they're that close) and a couple air vehicles down to set one time bomb at the base of it and they have ships for backup which didn't even try to do anything until they were within about twenty feet of the island and got blown up by Joe fighter planes.

has COBRA's apparent goal to be destroying the Statue of Liberty. After somehow getting an airship right above it, instead of using a missile or dropping some bombs, they send hundreds of paratroopers (who would be falling all over each other if they're that close) and a couple air vehicles down to set one time bomb at the base of it and they have ships for backup which didn't even try to do anything until they were within about twenty feet of the island and got blown up by Joe fighter planes. Transformers sometimes falls into this trap for large battles, especially aerial. For the most part it does squad-based action pretty well, if a bit static. (Thank goodness nobody ever thought to make giant robot-sized grenades a standard!) In the third movie, some prototypes of anti-Cybertronian grenades, usable by humans, show up.

Both Star Wars: Clone Wars and Star Wars: The Clone Wars series display countless, repeated examples of this trope from the Jedi and the Republic in general, despite A) the clones being outnumbered by several orders of magnitude by the Separatist droid army (the latter manufactured in factories across the galaxy while the clones are only produced in a few small cities on one planet), and B) the Republic on the brink of winning the war by the time of Revenge of the Sith, pushing the Separatists to a handful of Outer Rim fortresses. This is despite the clones being allergic to cover and commonly meeting the droids (entirely viable) Zerg Rush tactics with their own, having minimal-to-non-existant armoured or aerial/orbital support, and generally being utterly useless unless a Jedi is around to help them (especially in the second series). The few examples of competency, for example the unbelievably badass ARC troopers in the first series, just rub salt in the wound. The largest example of this is displayed in the first few minutes of the pilot film. Despite the clones having ample cover and artillery support to hold off the large amount of incoming droids, once Anakin springs his 'ambush' (a staggering 5 soldiers), the clones immediately jump out of cover and charge the enemy droids head-on. They predictably get slaughtered.

Real Life