Ancient soldiers with ancient tactics would lose their shit when the first few rounds started to cut them down and go though their armor and shields like soft cheese.

1000m is pretty doable against tightly massed formations, that's what volley fire was invented for. The British fought colonial battles on worse terrain using single-shot Martini-Henri rifles against bows and spears (and also some stolen guns) used by native armies. Troops with ARs would be fine and a rifle platoon has enough squads to keep a rotation going so the men don't get too worn out over 3 days of fighting. 

Do their rifles have M203s or M320s? I think the psychological effect of rifle fire would wear off due to fear of their emperor.
I would say M16A4s with ACOGs and start the party at max range. Minimum of 60-120 marines working in shifts. If there are 60 marines in each shift, and they are disciplined, there is potential for 1800 enemy casualties per mag change. Don't know how fast first wave can close 800m gap, but it would be slower for each subsequent wave as they trip over the dying.

Come first night fall, send out a few recon marines with NODs to set claymores up for next day.

Day two, vaporize first wave and see if they have a will to fight after that.

Rules didn't say no nvgs. The first night the Persians rout.

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Tactical nuke. Duh. 

More would be killed from the mad rush to run from the deities on the hill with the thunder sticks then actual bulets themselves.

Firing into the front line and the ranks about 100 yards behind them oughta cause maximum chaos.

Shooting up soldiers from a highly mystical/ religious society?

Lol

This is 480 BC.


A Company Sized unit in full rattle would look like a hoard of space demons pointing their spears as Persians dropped for no apparent reason.


Be over by lunch. No one wants a demon infested piece of land.

What's your definition of the word primitive?

Forget AR's, snake, nape & arty all the way.

How the hell did people from thousands of years ago mobilize hundreds of thousands of people for battle?

Ive always thought figures like this were pretty skeptical

I'd go a step further and put money on a MEU establishing a medium size country.

Conscripts, allies, mercenaries along with the main army made up the whole force.

87, duh.

one Marine to challenge Xerxes to a public one-on-one crayon-eating contest.  Victor gets the throne of Persia.  

I'll put my money on the Marine.

If they all had M27's, easy day. AR's....IDK.

Okay, but how did they even feed that many people to keep them ready for battle?

Maybe I'm wrong here, but it just seems that many people, thousands of years ago moving around would be a pretty big deal

I could perhaps see a few thousand moving around without a large issue. It just makes me wonder how many of these stories were hyped up and passed down through word of mouth and each time the enemy force got bigger and bigger.

Since we're playing the range game here, what did the persians have for artillery? What was it's effective distance?  Would it give them a fighting chance?

a lot of their supplies were carried on ships that hugged the coast, IIRC.*



*as in, IIRC from my studies.  I wasn't actually there.

That was really, really dumb.

I suppose.

Ive just always been highly skeptical of those figures.

I mean it takes a fuck ton of resources to keep a 100K soldiers fed.

Perhaps I'm not giving our ancestors enough credit

A squad would do.  Without going too far into LaLa land (anthough putting Marines at Thermopylae is pretty far inside those borders), the Persians would have retreated from the sound of 8 rifles (assuming squad leader is directing fire and not firing himself).  That much unfamiliar noise and 100 Persians dead in about 5 seconds would have sewn enough confusion to turn it into a rout quickly.  If the Marines let them get within 100m prior to firing they'd have time for a mag change and picking off stranglers to reinforce the message and put the Persians on their boats.

Max range of their archers was under 200m.

Modern historians are skeptical of Herodotus' figures too.  The logistics of supplying them was a nightmare.

Well I did look it up a bit to refresh my memory of the battle

Apparently the original claim was a million.

I still find 100-150K hard to believe though

Maybe its because I just cant fathom looking out into the distance and seeing 100K enemy combatants. That's like mobilizing my entire city to fight a battle, but thousands of years ago

More interersting question would be, how would 1 marine do against 1 spartan in hand to hand combat.

Several thousand,  marines are over rated.

fixed.

The better question might be - would it be easier with a few Vickers guns, and how many.

You could literally fire a million rounds and still be in spec. Emplaced indirect barrage fire was literally designed to deal with human waves, as seen in WWI

Spartan led Greek force of 4,000 guards held the pass of Thermopylae that the Persians needed to get past to invade Greece proper.

We have to remember that while the Persian soldiers themselves might not have understood what it would be like fighting Greeks (because most had never even saw them), the Persian leadership knew what was going to happen, they just didn't really believe it. Who is working with the Persians? None other than the exiled former king of Sparta, that dude is giving a play by play account of how the Greeks fight, how the Spartans fight, they still fucked it all up. Xerxes basically blows him off. Luckily there is no disgraced former Marine that works for the enemy, Jim Webb was too busy on book tours.

A Marine Platoon could win the day, but not alone. Greeks will be there with them, but as a supporting effort only. If nothing else, I want my guys eating hot meals before and after and the Greeks will provide that, no fucking MREs for us.

Here is why I'd do with my platoon armed only with M4s and ACOGs.

1. We all dress like Greeks and stage our weapons and body armor (we'll need them to possibly resist arrow storms) at the pre-staged firing line. The goal is to get them to deploy as if they are fighting hoplites
2. Distances will be marked in 100 meter intervals, with accompanying range flags for wind.
3. All weapons will be properly zeroed at a location many miles away, far enough from Thermopylae, and no Greeks can watch (cant risk a Ephialtes incident). The makeup of the ad hoc squads I'm creating will be based on past shooting ability. The better will shoot further, the worse will get less challenging marksmanship duties.
4. I don't plan to show them the full might of what we're capable of the first battle, just give them enough to break and run. Why spoil everything if we might need to engage them a second time?
5. Xerxes has to die. He's the mission. The proud fucker is going to plant his throne on the side of the mountain just outside bow shot range of the Greeks (300-500 meters away) so he can watch the battle in comfort, while he is shaded, fanned, and given wine and blowjobs. I'm going to interrupt his OODA Loop using a barrage of 5.56 from the best shooters in my platoon shooting from supported positions at known distance and they will light his ass up. I want his ass riddled in bullets and I want his whole army to see it happen. I want them to think Zeus just openly killed their Emperor.  
6. Targeting Xerxes initiates the battle. At that point we will not wait for the enemy to charge our line, we will light them up at max effective range. I don't want panic pushing them into close combat with us, I don't want the pressure from forces in the rear pushing those in the front up closer to us. I want them nowhere close to us. I plan to utterly destroy their morale, cohesion, and I want them to think they've just been attacked by their Gods. I want them to have room to run. The battle isn't about defeating cannon fodder, I don't give a fuck about them. If the Xerxes plan works we already won the war, by chasing off the Persian infantry we also won the battle. So fire into them with intense sustained fire until they break and then we cease fire and start high fiving one another.
7. At this point we break contact, we leave our initial fighting positions, shed our bullshit Greek dress, then take cover in pre-established camo'd fighting positions along the side of the road to the flank of the point element of the Spartans. If the Persians want to keep playing, they will still think the Greeks were responsible for what happened (only those who don't think the Gods did it). So if and when they charge, my guys, now in camies, face paint, and inside their fighting holes, will x-ambush the barbarians and give them a nice rogering from up close and then let the Spartans loose on the surivors to do their thing.
8. I'm also going to have a squad pulling guard on the hidden goat trail. If any Persian force uses it, their point element gets annihilated in near ambush with rapid rate of fire, the rest turn and run away.
9. Battle is over, war is won. Me and my guys get the pick of whatever booty we want. We get our own weight in gold. Supposedly the whores from Athens, the Hetaira, were quite good so they are brought out to us riki-tik. After we fucked and drank our fill, we take our gold and go back to the future. Where we'll probably have to start prepping for some gay ass IG inspection.

* We might be Marines but there is no fucking way I'm risking mine or their lives on those rickety ass boats. So no triremes or naval engagements for us. Besides, with Xerxes dead the throne is in jeopardy and they will be lucky to get across the Hellespont intact.

They literally spent ten years planning and staging everything, they even placed massive supply dumps a days march away from one another up until they were in "enemy territory."

The huge element here is the element of the unknown to them.



That would be like us today fighting some advanced race that just thinks and you drop dead.  You would have no idea how to counter it, no chance to circumvent it, no time to figure it out.    Like magic all your little friends next to you will just drop like flies and you're not even sure if your armor is helping or harming, if your weapons is helping or harming, and not even sure if running away is possible.



The tech would confuse them so much that effectively only a handful of guys would be able to do enormous damage.

Just need a team to support this and the damage would be imaginable.

Someone get this guy a chicken dinner.

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This old cartoon comes to mind ...



A.W.D.

Only if they let the Persians get within bow range

I think for sheer psychological effect, party like its 1969 with 106mm.

Its not going to be a 3 day battle against hordes if you start dropping HEAT rounds in at 1500 yards, followed by APERS at 300ish. 

Supposedly the Persian fleet supplied the provisions for the army and the army was bound by the coastal route. The transport fleet needed screening from the various Greek navies but its size was so immense that most navies fled south.  It wasn't until Salamis that they had the big showdown.  Best account is from Rogers who wrote a book on Greek Naval Warfare.  Rogers was an admiral and knew about currents, tides, flow and ebbs and talked about how the Greeks who were more familiar with those waters used it to their advantage against the Persians.

A couple points to add:

- Persian fleet was partially responsible for logistics after crossing the Hellespont, which is why when they were defeated at Salamis a massive portion of the Persian Army was sent back home, they couldn't support it anymore. Previously, before they'd invaded Greece proper, up to and a bit after crossing the Dardanelles, Xerxes' army had been using a number of massive supply depots staged during the ten year prep that his father Darius had actually started (the invasion was a foregone conclusion after Marathon). Afterwards, the Persian army received direct support from Greek peoples who'd allied with them (like Alexander I of Macedonia and many others). Once the Persians started encountering resistance (just before Thermopylae) they became reliant on the fleet for supplies. This was a primary reason for the battle of Thermopylae, it was there that the land force of Leonidas was supposedly to stop the ground element while the naval side of Themistocles was supposed to stop the Persian fleet. Both failed, but even so it was a dangerous time for the Persians because every day stopped was a day their supply line was dwindling.

- Most of Persian fleet were Greeks, being Ionians, Rhodians, with the rest mostly coming from various Phoenician city states of the Levant, all of whom were well known in history for their excellence in seafaring and naval matters. Only a very small portion of Xerxes' overall army was actually no shit Persian, and that includes almost none of his navy (the Persians were not a seafaring people, they were horse lords).  Salamis wasn't a victory of sea currents, it was a trap where an "escaped slave" gave bullshit intel to the Persians who fell for it hook line and sinker.

Thanks for posting, never read extensively about Chosin Reservoir. Good to know.

Fuck that, they'll just climb up the bodies, like that scene in World War Z.



Modern weaponry's main advantage is range. Hitting them at range, make the Orcs shit themselves and start killing their own officers versus coming into range of our weapons. If they do get close, hammer them with final protective fires to break the assault elements.

To add:

The best way to piss off a Chinese nationalist online is to refer to what they did in Korea as a human wave attack, they get incredibly defensive and try to explain what it really was, as if it was some genius level tactics that Sun Tzu would have jacked off to.

It was called the "Short Attack." A small assault element, fireteam, squad, platoon would use their Ancient Chinese Secret +10 stealth point skills to ninja infiltrate at night to within feet of the American defensive line, past the OPs somehow, completely undetected without NODs or a diet heavy on Vit A, and then they'd toss their shitty Soviet offensive handgrenades with a 33% dud rate, and then attack that one sector while on line while running and screaming and blowing bugles. If the first attack was beat off by everyone dying (and they usually were), the next line goes, then the next line, then the next line. Attacking in echelon, on line, numerous echelons. What does this look like?

Waves

Party finally livened up!  

Now we are at war!

One with a lot of ammo

One, if that Marine is Mitchell Paige.

One.

Give him a 249 with a Trijicon or Elcan and piles of ammo and spare barrels then put him on the highest ground with a view and he will mow down tons of them.   Plus the effective area target on the is like 800 yards or so isnt it?