Apocal

Yeah, our only house-rule was no turn 1 or starting area bombardments and he'd claimed that light mortars were useless. This was real-time so it wasn't exactly like we'd wasted hours or days setting it up either. edit: I just remembered one thing I did, that I didn't consider really gamey, but my opponent at the time did. QB, turn-based attack, I'm defending as Airborne, he's got with Waffen-SS of some flavor, I put a pretty robust minefield over/around one of the VLs and my foe ate a lot of casualties clearing an undefended VL. I think he lost the better part of a platoon and one of those recon car things. He was fairly irritated, but I didn't think it was especially gamey; like, if there are mines over the VL, odds are dude hasn't put anyone there, right?

I'm guessing this is the part where people come down and tell you to delete this thread or call you out for trolling?

How are you guys employing your snipers? I might be messing up because I use them as a scout team on the offense and in place of missing MGs on the defense.

I am not and have never been in the Air Force. I don't even like the Air Force as an organization and think most of their big war ideas are ****ing retarded.

Maybe not shoulder-launched but there are thermobaric TOW warheads in real-life. I'm not sure if those are in the game though.

I agree, I'm just saying that isn't a big-war USAF thing. And those are CIA drones bombing people in Pakistan, for the most part. USAF big-war stuff is all orientated around China; if it can't defeat A2/AD threats, it's a non-starter for seriousface air war. And the increase in the size/influence of the drone community drives the air war centric types (to the extent they still actually exist anyway) up the wall. http://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/oct/17/balkans Not exactly a closely-guarded secret. And the USAF didn't decide to hit the embassy; when the CIA calls in a hit, the military chain of command isn't involved. I don't know why someone decided communications with their army were a target worthy of consideration instead of just sticking to economic targets that brought pain to the population, but decisions of that nature are well above my paygrade. As for being an act of aggression, uh, yeah, that tends to happen when you actively aid one side during a war. Aircraft did a lot better during OIF since there was mostly clear weather, it is a pool-table flat desert across much of the country, for CAS we had observers telling them where to exactly where to drop and, for interdiction tasks, an opponent that obliged our aircraft by actually trying to maneuver large units on the map instead of sticking all their real gear inside of barns and leaving them there until the war ended. Oh, and we had JDAMs on literally everything by then, which are pretty much the ultimate in customer service: the only thing you can screw up are the coordinates or fuzing. And the USAF is pretty good with CAS when told where to hit and what to hit them with. Marine air's lack of blue-on-blue is as much an artifact of some of their aircraft being objectively horrible at CAS (Harriers, not even once) and there being far, far more Air Force aircraft in the CAS business. I think Marine Hornets have only performed around 12% (or less) of the CAS missions in Afghanistan and Harriers somewhere south of 5%. The friendly-fire incidents are exceptional, especially when compared to the bad old days of having slow-moving, good visibility aircraft... that strafed and bombed the living **** out of friendlies on such a regular basis some squadrons would work over the same (friendly) unit more than once in a single operation. And still wildly over-claimed the number of tanks they knocked out.

The bolded portions contradict each other. The Chinese Embassy was struck because it was being used as a retrans station for Serbs. That isn't a conspiracy theory; it wasn't even a huge secret at the time. And the improved optics are still deceived by stuff like laying plastic bags over the middle of a bridge or building a 1/4 scale model of a tank and running electrified copper wire through the edges. Pilots are fooled by this stuff too, because it wasn't like the few sorties that dipped under the weather to put Mk1 eyeball were accomplishing anything of note either.

No, since the weapons being used in Eastern Ukraine would (85% or more) be right at home during the late Soviet-Afghanistan War period.

We spread out. As lethality increases, the density and intensity of action decreases and the ability of any one action to be decisive goes down. Additionally, there is an established trend for the lethality of combat to disproportionately borne by machines, rather than men, as combat power is increasingly reflected in fielded technology rather than bodies. That isn't to say that no one will ever have one seriously bad ****ing day during a peer fight (plenty of people have had seriously bad ****ing days during counter-insurgency, after all) but it probably won't be as bad for your basic trigger-pullers.

This is a good method for keeping people honest when it comes to map-edge hugging.

I haven't noticed snipers being particularly effective at anything but scouting. edit: outliers aside, of course. I had one sniper who plugged three TCs in a single match. It was amazing.

I once bought an incredibly gamey force: loads of mortars during an infantry-only ME, various calibers, dropped most of them (pre-planned) five minutes into the game on every reasonable approach to the VL. I don't think even twenty of his men made it within LoS of the VL. It was pretty lopsided.

Modern pods still can't see through clouds, tarps, plastic bags, marijuana fields, glass, etc. That's just the way IR works. The deception effort was good, but by the later stages, we'd twigged onto the fact that their fielded forces weren't being hurt by the strikes (because they were dispersed and sheltered; IR can't see into a barn either) and shifted to hitting fixed economic targets... and still had limited success there, due to clouds interfering with every aircraft's sensors and altitude restrictions in place for the campaign. JDAMs worked fine though and that is why pretty much everything was wired for JDAM in the 2-5 years after Allied Force. As for a source on cloud cover being the biggest factor, the first-hand account of Black Aces High: During the fifty-five days of Allied Force, there was fifty percent or worse cloud cover seventy percent... The statement highlights how weather, specifically bad weather, was perhaps the Serbs' chief weapon during the Kosovo War. Clouds obscured the enemy, hiding targets from planes and satellites and allowing troop and vehicle movements to go unnoticed... Bad weather and the quick changes in temperatures it could cause could also diffuse the infrared, temperature-generated picture on the LANTIRN scope, further degrading the aircraft's ability to bomb. They'd probably have called it off if suitable air wasn't available. Christ knows they certainly do it often enough. Anyway, issues with an aircraft the size of an A-10 not being able to hang out overhead for 90 minutes at a clip aren't really a "problem," just natural tradeoffs. And the USAF is addressing that limitation, in spades: their UAV force has grown to like... three times its pre-war size or something like that? And even more are coming online? Generally your FAC or JTAC will radio them a (conservative) line to shoot. Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEVgBCTVLws

They actually are IR, just a different band of the spectrum. The new pods still cannot see through solid overcast such as that was found above Kosovo. The clouds were the issue with finding targets, since manned aircraft had the altitude and route limits in place and Predators kept getting shot down when they ducked underneath. Krasnovian? Anyway, I agree missiles are preferred, but fact is gun runs get called down a helluva lot closer than Mavs and 500lbs. bombs dude. As for the rest of the "B-1B sucks" **** you keep saying, they were covering an event for well over an hour; what other fixed wing does that? I mean, if you can get Reapers, cool, but you know damned well how hard it is to get those pulled and everything else gasses out after like 30-45 minutes. Where was this?

Targeting pods wouldn't have helped over Kosovo, the ones we use (even now) can't see though overcast. And I never said SDBs are magical. But the idea you want to use the larger bombs in a TIC is just nuts; nobody wants to call for a 500lbs. bomb when some bad guys initiate contact from <100m. That's insane. The A-10 uses the exact same pod as the B-1B. And nobody considers the B-1B ideal for TIC situations (since those are frequently close enough to require gun runs rather than any kind of bomb and the B-1B has no gun), but their tasking in that situation was to cover an exfil and were the only aircraft in-theater with the loiter time to cover the whole event without breaking away to refuel. The USMC only has one FAC per battalion (on-paper) as well. And it has the hard-and-fast requirement for the guy talking to the aircraft to be a wing aviator himself. Although there is one difference here between common USMC and other service's practice; the Army lets non-aviators call for rotary-wing CAS, the USMC does not.

I've never had that experience with Marine air. They showed up overhead just as clueless as anyone and we fed them the same information; generally dumbed-down in the form of "yes it is clear, bomb this grid ref" rather than "we are doing this."

In my experience and from actually looking through the Iraq and Afghanistan AARs, the USAF has done as well as any other service that uses fixed-wing aircraft when it comes to CAS. And their focus has been (or was, it might be shifting back now that the wars are over) on delivering CAS. They've stripped out a lot of their more advanced training to replace with relevant stuff for the conflicts; the same way the Marines replaced CAX with Mojave Viper and the Army shifted from a conventional war fighting at NTC to counter-insurgency exercises. They'll probably return to air superiority, strike, etc. just like the Army is going to shift from counter-insurgency back to conventional warfare. .I never said the A-10 was useless. It certainly is old though, not sure why you deny that. That weapon was developed and fielded because dudes on the ground wanted an option available between a Hellfire and a 500lbs. JDAM w/ delay fuze. It doesn't actually advance the USAF's core missions otherwise, since they've had perfectly functional glide bombs that are a) bigger and longer-ranged since well prior to the SDB being introduced. Huh? Neither the A-10 nor any Marine fixed-wing air would have done any better in that situation. The troops quite literally called a strike on their own position during a TIC and got it, no questions asked, no answered questioned. As an aside, it'd be nice if you would answer my questions about this enhanced situational awareness Marine aircraft receive from ground troops via radio.

I'm not debating performance with you, because the actual performance of USAF air has been pretty much top-notch as far as I've seen while at war. So has Marine air. So has Navy Air. There are mix-ups and mishaps, but friendly-fire issues have generally been ground-side issues since (doctrinally) air only delivers ordnance when and where they say when it comes to CAS, such as the JTAC who gave a B-52 the wrong data for a JDAM strike and got himself (and his team) blown to ****. Or An Nasiriyah, when the A-10s asked (more than once) if the FAC was sure there were only hostile vehicles north of the bridge. Or the latest (I think) example: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2014/09/04/investigation-friendly-fire-airstrike-that-killed-u-s-special-forces-was-avoidable/ "Significantly, the soldiers who were later killed by the airstrike maneuvered up a hill after taking enemy fire without it being understood by the U.S. commander on the ground, an Army captain, or the joint terminal attack controller (JTAC), whose job is to communicate with fighter jets and bombers to ensure the right targets are hit. The miscommunication resulted in other U.S. troops believing that muzzle flashes they saw from the Americans’ weapons marked the location of insurgents, the investigation found. There were numerous other problems. All key leaders in the mission, including the ground commander, JTAC and air crew, thought that sensors on the bomber would be able to see infrared strobe markers. The targeting pod on the B-1B bomber cannot do that, leading the air crew to incorrectly believe there were not troops on the ridgeline they bombed, investigators determined. Troops on the ground directing the airstrike repeatedly told the B-1B crew that all friendly troops were 300 meters away from the ridgeline about to be targeted. The bombs were dropped shortly after 8:24 p.m., and almost immediately questions were raised about whether a fatal mistake had been made. Soldiers at the base of the ridgeline reported that the bombs had hit “our hill,” and survivors scrambled to the site to check. “All personnel were conducting their assigned tasks,” another Special Forces member told investigators, according to a copy of his witness statement included in the report. “I assumed the enemy was maneuvering, but I told my guys to stay put and make sure they had their strobes on. My understanding was that all my guys had strobes on and that the aircraft had identified guys without strobes on. It was clear to me that it had been relayed to aircraft that that there were American elements with [infrared] strobes on.” A member of the Air Force crew, interviewed June 27 at a U.S. Central Command facility at Udeid Air Base in Qatar, said it was hard to communicate with the troops on the ground with radios, but they were clear that the JTAC wanted two bombs dropped on the hill. “The JTAC’s focus on IR strobes was moer [sic] than normal, but I’m not going to question the JTAC in a situation like this,” the B-1B crew member said. “I can hear the stress in his voice and see… the [targeting] pod, so given the comms condition I’m not going to waste precious time questioning the information the JTAC is passing.” This analogy falls apart since, for the last decade or more, the USAF has done nothing but "make hamburgers." It is the only real show in town.

How did the Marine aircraft gain additional situational awareness over USAF or USN aircraft when showing up over the battlefield? How did you establish this so-called "common operating picture" with Marine aircraft as compared to USAF aircraft? I did in fact talk about the time between the aircraft arriving on-station and ordnance being delivered. In case you forgot:

The USAF has been a part of the process in every war since ODS. JFACC (usually USAF, sometimes USN) determines in what manner aircraft are going to be used, sets the ground rules for their use and is the ultimate arbiter of who gets what specifically. The USMC gets their CAS requests filled the exact same way the Army does. And once it has the aircraft, the actual implementation is still the exact same, you have the exact same coordination and clearing agencies, the exact same system of checks and balances, the exact same process for calling down ordnance using (in most cases, exceptions exist) the exact same weapons, etc. The Army gets better results from helos because they are helos, not because the guys flying them wear green to work instead of blue.

Yes, footage from 1991... taken from the exact same model of IR Maverick that was used, in the exact same manner. Eyeball acquisition wasn't used on account of there being too much dust and smoke raised up and the A-10s involved did not have targeting pods -- they used the Maverick's IR seeker in that role. CAS procedures throughout the US military are joint and have been for the better part of at least twenty and probably closer to thirty years now. There was one exceptional period, encompassing all of one battle that lasted a grand total of ten days.

I prefer playing real-time multi-player for exactly the bolded reason; a big part of the skill cap involved is learning to balance micro against macro and reasoning in the face of uncertainty. A player who is less experienced can still pull off a reverse against a player who is more technically skilled, but lets one element override the other or has issues with taking a batch of information (some of which is misleading or irrelevant) and converting that mentally into a picture of enemy intention and disposition.

This is what the imagery from an IR Maverick looks like. Everything looks like rectangles. As a practical matter, A-10s and USMC fixed-wing operate the exact same via the same inter-service ATO, joint CAS procedures, joint agencies, etc. There was one notable difference -- keyhole CAS -- but that was restricted to one battle, well after the end of conventional fighting in Iraq. The USAF is interested in doing the CAS mission; they've had almost anything that could possibly haul a JDAM doing it, growing their UAV force, making sure everything has ground-compatible radios, putting the new pods (the ones that can transmit their imagery directly to forces on the ground) on everything as the money and maintenance availability comes up, etc.

Well, there is nothing in the Iraqi inventory that looks like an AAV from teh ground. From the air, moving faster than 250 knots, most **** just looks like rectangles, especially on a smoke-filled battlefield, which is why they lean hard on stuff like "which direction are they facing/moving?", "are you SURE there are no friendlies?", etc. And in the case of An Nasiriyah, the FAC was basically yelling at the A-10s to hit the vehicles north of the bridge and stop bothering him while he was trying to coordinate other (rotary-wing, IIRC) assets. But in that case of troops-in-contact CAS, fixed-wing is in the customer-service business and the customer is always right, so... Of course, we've fixed those issues now and the only downside is it takes 45-180 minutes to get a bomb on something.

Yeah, I've played Steel Beasts. And operated modern laser-based fire control systems. If you lase a static position, it doesn't do anything to the lead at all, the laser only provides range. The necessary lead is computed based on turret's rate of angular change when the gunner holds his reticule over the target and paired with the (fixed) range number that the laser provides. You can dump lead and engage a second nearby target without needing to lase again, especially when firing flat trajectory sabot.