Apocal

I can't find a single reliable source claiming that the Ukrainians got their equipment out. Mind linking yours?

Well, NATO already explicitly passed on Fulda Gap in Reverse over the Ukraine and Russians have just stopped just short of outright declaring direct western military intervention would mean safeties off their nukes, so that won't be happening.

Funny you should use that as an example: those ships were covered by local air defenses (Sea Harrier's weren't present for the first attack) but Argentinean aircraft still managed to deliver their ordnance successfully and escape unscathed for the first raid. In the second raid, the ships were covered by aircraft and -- while the RN still had a landing craft sunk -- at least managed to shoot down three out of the four A-4s involved. Meanwhile, another ship, a frigate with Sea Cat missiles, was off on picket duty, attacked and struck with four bombs. The only reason the ship survived was due to improper fuzing, otherwise it would have been a flotsam surrounded by fuel oil. I don't know why you would use this as an example of what happens without SHORAD; they had adequate coverage, it just didn't make a damned bit of difference.

Things would have to be going incredibly, ridiculously over the top wrong for someone to successfully blow all 2000+ of tactical aircraft into irrelevance. And if they did so, there isn't a battalion-level air defense system in the world that would stop them from rolling us, given the limitations on those systems. The fact that these systems actually work and consistently down aircraft in CMBS is about the most unrealistic thing in the game. There is very little realistic or simulation-like about CMBS' depiction of air defense.

There is nothing bizarre about it. It only seems bizarre on the relatively level playing field of Combat Mission.

Because losing air superiority is an actual thing that will lose a modern war. Getting a handful of companies bombed sporadically will not. Stinger (like all man-portable and short-range AD) is out-ranged by modern aircraft delivered weapons. You're literally talking about how you'd like a security blanket on tracks, for all the good it would do.

Heavy cavalry as the battlefield shock arm didn't disappear during or immediately after the Hundred Years War. The English at the time weren't exactly organized that way, but that was an attempt to wage war on the cheap rather than a trend towards cavalry's battlefield obsolesce. You'll note the French won that little scrap after creating their compagnies d'ordnance. Speaking more generally, heavy cavalry adapted to compensate for the technology of firearms by adopting firearms themselves, with riders adopting firelocks early but really hitting their stride with wheel-lock pistols; they'd wade into the melee with like a half dozen of the things. Alternatively, you could find the same with fortifications and artillery; while castles themselves were brushed aside, the solution wasn't no more fortifications once the artillery train became standard, it was building better fortifications (star forts) that were capable of resisting artillery. And those continued to be important in warfare for another four hundred years. I just use this digression to say that the overlap between coexistence and obsolescence is generally a large one. And that is assuming someone (anyone) tells me how exactly the infantry lugging these super-ATGMs around are supposed to counter artillery and machine guns that ended their practical battlefield dominance a century ago...

They love Putin for perfectly understandable reasons totally divorced from any understanding or misunderstanding of "humanist freedom": he turned the economy around and restored a sense of national dignity. It isn't exactly a secret that the majority of the current Russian middle class owe their position in society to Putin's massive increase in the mid-level state bureaucracy, nor is some uniquely Russian love of totalitarianism the reason they cheered when we he ended the Chechen War decisively in Russia's favor and it is should obvious that breaking the effective political power of the oligarchs was going to be extremely popular after the loot-fest of the nineties.

The Serbs managed a few sorties against the Albanians during Allied Force and the occasional transport helo milk-run to shoot down a Predator. Other than that, not many seem to want to test aircraft on it.

Not all of them, no. If they were capable of slipping past all the sensors, then we wouldn't be able to put a weapon on them anyway, so who cares if you have air defense on the ground or in the air; it would be useless anyway. But IRL, the idea is that aircraft can carry the weapons necessary, in meaningful amounts, wherever they are needed, without having to "overstack" every battalion with enough short-range air defense to knock down a realistically sized helo force sent to interdict or attrite them.

The USAF alone still has over 1400 fighters dude. The Navy and Marine Corps bring another 500+. THhs number doesn't include the ANG either, so we're good on continental defense.

Nowadays our contact fuzes for 155 and 5" have something called an "interrupter" that prevents rain, hail, snow, gusts of wind, etc. from setting them off. I don't remember exactly how long that has been a thing though.

Also, from an air defense perspective, you're never going to stop attacks cold with the stuff you find at the battalion-level and below. It is never massed enough, almost never optimally employed as a weapon system and simply out-ranged by too many systems. The outlier SAM success of all time was North Vietnamese SA-2s from 1965-1966, which achieved an actual kill once in every twenty-five launches. That was perfectly sufficient from an operational attrition standpoint, but tactically, a system with that sort of effectiveness still means you're getting pounded better than nine times out of ten. Additionally, all of this is extrapolated from the game balance decision to simply not include stand-off ordnance: Hellfires and LMAVs can both be launched from the backfield, non-LOS, and from a profile that doesn't require overflight the battlefield. Paveway can be dropped from fairly far away or lofted from low-altitude to gain additional range, with JDAMs doing away with the requirement for a laser designator. The SDB is even longer ranged since it is light, has wings and still perfectly suffices to service most battlefield targets. I don't know about the Russian stuff specifically, but a brief skim of Wikipedia shows mostly comparable stand-off ranges on some of their weapons, so I assume they've done their due diligence with getting longer-ranged weapons in the inventory.

GMLRS too, seen those fired a lot, especially before we got Excalibur.

Stingers exist. What do you call over sixteen hundred fighters in the US inventory?

I'm down.

Nobody is under-estimating the Russians in this game.

Wars just as mean as anything are still being fought bro.

I don't disagree with the general thrust of your post at all, but as I understand it, the limitation on ground forces deployed was port throughput rates, which (especially early in the Normandy campaign) sharply limited how many divisions could be supported in action. I suppose my question is if this was understood and accounted for, thereby providing some rationale for American/British emphasis on heavy bombers based out of England at the expense of fighting troops in Italy, Normandy, southern France, etc.? Obviously, this would not take any shade off Germans for pursuing the same ends.

Arena owns pretty hard guys. It's science. In the first subtitle, I actually miscounted: the APS intercepted a two shot volley, not just one. In total, Arena took down a total of four RPGs before being expended with the tank itself taking two more in the front armor, one in the side reactive armor and a final killing blow struck through the fresh gap in the ERA. The following vehicle wasn't nearly as lucky, knocking down two incoming RPGs successfully, but due to its positioning as it climbed out of a shell-hole, an RPG from the high rear was outside of Arena's engagement envelope and penetrated the top turret. The trailing T-90 had it easy, picking off a sole RPG before going ahead and putting effective fire on two RPG teams in adjacent buildings. What does this mean tactically? For starters, you can still get unlucky, even with the latest and greatest protection. Secondly, there is a hard-limit on how much derp you can survive. Thirdly, that limit is fairly high, with Arena successfully engaging both volleys, one with almost inches to spare. Fourth, armor is just a bit higher on the modern battlefield food chain when so equipped with APS; a single infantry AT weapon does not present the "golden BB" threat it previously did outside of 150-200m or so.

Because the Iraqis were terrible.

The real controversial route would to be give it to the Russians but not the Americans, although I can see why BFC didn't do that. If nothing else, it would knock a bit of shine off the Abrams as apex predator of the CMBS battlefield. A bit, sure. But European battlefield cavalry didn't exactly show itself to be a relevant battlefield arm during the Franco-Prussian War a few years later.

There isn't much difference in practice. Real-time can be advantage, but you need serious situational awareness and micro-skills to make it work. The AI generally isn't challenging enough to justify that much effort though.

Then we fight at a serious disadvantage until it is the case.

The specific man with the laser designator didn't have line-of-sight at the moment you called the mission in, even if the overall team did. It is annoying that they don't handle their micro-positioning in such a way to gain LOS in those cases, since someone in their team obviously can see the vehicle, but the man with the capital system will just cheerfully keep his head down in the grass and stare at a stone wall instead.