Skirmishers are infantry or cavalry soldiers stationed ahead or alongside a larger body of friendly troops. They are usually placed in a skirmish line to harass the enemy.
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In ancient and medieval warfare, skirmishers typically carried bows, javelins, slings, and sometimes carried light shields. Acting as light infantry with their light arms and minimal armour, they could run ahead of the main battle line, release a volley of arrows, slingshots or javelins, and retreat behind their main battle line before the clash of the opposing main forces. The aims of skirmishing were to disrupt enemy formations by causing casualties before the main battle, and to tempt the opposing infantry into attacking prematurely, throwing their organization into disarray. Skirmishers could also be effectively used to surround opposing soldiers in the absence of friendly cavalry.
Once preliminary skirmishing was over, skirmishers participated in the main battle by shooting into the enemy formation, or joined in melée combat with daggers or short swords. Alternatively, they could act as ammunition bearers or stretcher-bearers.
Due to their mobility, skirmishers were also valuable for reconnaissance, especially in wooded or urban areas. During the gunpowder era, a skirmish line could discover the extent of the enemy front line.
In classical Greece, skirmishers had low status. For example, Herodotus, in his account of the Battle of Plataea of 479 BC, mentions that the Spartans fielded 35,000 light armed helots to 5,000 hoplites yet there is no mention of them in his account of the fighting.[1] Often Greek historians ignored them altogether.[1] It was far cheaper to equip oneself as light armed as opposed to a fully armed hoplite – indeed it was not uncommon for light armed to go into battle equipped with stones.[2] Hence the low status of skirmishers reflected the low status of the poorer sections of society who made up skirmishers.[3] Additionally, "hit and run" contradicted the Greek ideal of heroism. Plato gives the skirmisher a voice to advocate "flight without shame," but only to denounce it as an inversion of decent values.[4] Nevertheless, skirmishers chalked up significant victories, such as the Athenian defeat at the hands of the Aetolian javelin men in 426 BC and, in the same war, the Athenian victory of Sphacteria.[3]
Celts did not, in general, favour ranged weapons. The exceptions tended not to include the use of skirmishers. The Britons used the sling extensively, but for siege warfare, not skirmishing.[5] Among the Gauls likewise, the bow was employed when defending a fixed position.[6] The Celtic lack of skirmishers cost them dearly during the Gallic Invasion of Greece of 279 BC, where they found themselves helpless in the face of Aetolian skirmishing tactics.[7]
In the Punic Wars, despite the Roman and Carthaginian armies' different organizations, skimishers had the same role in both: to screen the main armies[8]
The Seven Years War and American War for Independence were two early conflicts in which the modern rifle began to make a significant contribution to warfare due to its advantage in range and accuracy over the smoothbore musket common among professional armies of the mid-18th century. Many of the men provided by the American colonists in both wars were frontiersmen serving in the militia—the Continental Army itself during the latter conflict was largely made up of such irregular troops—participating in skirmishing tactics by firing from cover rather than the open field engagements of the day, largely influenced by Colonial experiences fighting natives. The character of Natty Bumppo in James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Last of the Mohicans was notably called La Longue Carabine by the French due to his skill with the long rifle common among the Colonials.
During the Napoleonic Wars skirmishers played a key role in battles, attempting to disrupt the main enemy force by firing into their close-packed ranks and by preventing enemy skirmishers from doing the same to friendly troops. As the skirmishers generally fought in open order they could take cover behind trees, houses, towers and other obstacles and as such were harder targets to hit with small arms and artillery fire, though this made them very vulnerable to cavalry. While muskets were the predominant weapon at the time, the British Army experimented with rifles which though slower to reload were more accurate and had a longer range of effective fire. In the American theater, American riflemen again contributed to British casualties but now had to contend with revised British light infantry tactics.
A feature of these wars was a trend to training line troops to adopt tactics that until then had been used only by skirmishers.[9]
The treatise, New American Tactics, by General John Watts de Peyster advocated making the skirmish line the new line of battle, a revolutionary idea at the time.[10] During the American Civil War, it was common for cavalrymen to dismount and form a skirmish line to delay enemy troops advancing towards an objective (for example, the actions of the Federal cavalrymen on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg).
By the late 19th century, the concept of fighting in formation was on the wane, and the distinctions between skirmishers and heavy infantry has now disappeared. The Soviet Army, however, had lighter BTR-equipped motorized rifle regiments fighting on the flanks or secondary sectors of a motorized rifle division on the offensive, while heavier BMP-equipped motorized rifle regiments would fight in the division's sector of main effort.