Apocal

One thing I overlooked in this post: by time the fall and winter rolled around, heavy was already in theater, along with massed air. Javelins wouldn't have mattered much because we had enough combat power to outright smash any serious, sustained Iraqi attempt to cross the border.

The Iraqis operationally made some decent cheese moves, including sacrificing their best RG division to enable the rest to escape from Kuwait, it was tactically where they were just completely hopeless... but tactically ineptitude is a trait they share with the Saudis. Sacrificing a couple of partially motorized infantry divisions to fix the 82nd Airborne in their positions and using their Republican Guard heavy division to smash the Saudis is just the sort of thing they'd do. It would be atrociously set-piece and limited duration (the Iraqi general staff could plan a workable operation, but anything longer than three or four days would come to pieces as reality drifted from the intended execution) but it would definitely bleed anyone under the guns white in the process. That's how they won against the tactically superior Iranians, by applying the old Korean saying, "Big cannons defeat small cannons and many cannons defeat few cannons." And we didn't have much airpower in the region when the 82nd first touched down; it was about four weeks after they were in place until the mass of aircraft truly started arriving in-theater. That probably could have been expedited a bit and maybe stopped a total rout if the 82nd was getting mauled, but the issue would have been in doubt.

A low trajectory round might fuze much earlier than expected and detonate over your troop's head. And back in Vietnam they still had a bunch of long-range gun-type field artillery units and naval gunfire that flew at particularly low angles compared to howitzers.

Probably not; Saddam's forces had enough artillery of the right kinds to suppress most of the Javelins paired with tanks and terrain that comfortably out-ranged them and enough long-range MRLs that trying to get light infantry out of contact (or into contact) would mean risking getting them smashed by DPICM. Assuming they were competently handled of course, but the US leadership wasn't particularly glib about Iraqi capabilities at the time, so they still would of **** bricks at the idea of a single paratrooper division squaring off against between six to twelve attacking Iraqi divisions with no reserves except the Saudi national guard to call upon. Even if the 82nd was defeating the corps directly attacking, there would be no such guarantee the units on the right and left weren't falling the pieces, leading to a situation where the paratroops are standing tall but fall apart during a retreat.

It depends. You can deconflict in such a way that aircraft are employing their weapons safely while rounds are impacting. As long as they aren't crossing the G-T line, they're OK.

Yeah, I always wondered that too. You might only have five or six minutes before artillery/mortars make their presence felt against a competent defender, how much ground can you realistically traverse? A bog standard battalion shoot might blanket a 500m x 250m box with fragments. What if the defenders are under overhead cover and willing to call those airbursts down on their own positions? Even assuming you do win, what keeps the opposition from hammering the **** out of the position? Even worse, hammering your force if it needs to withdraw? It seems like the assumption is that the firepower fight is decisively won before light infantry are committed to the fight. Foot-mobile formations are always slower than heavy forces, regardless of size, especially when you're talking tactically. Operationally, they at least have the advantage of not needing tens of thousands of gallons of fuel, but you're not really shrinking the logistical footprint so much as shifting the weight around since firepower arms like aviation and artillery get leaned on harder, thereby eating more throughput themselves. Even planning light infantry operations is a meticulous process, whereas heavy-types tend towards very short planning cycles. Taken from "Where is the Light-Heavy Organization in the Army's Future" "The heavy companies led and attacked to seize key buildings and intersections while the Air Assault Infantry Company trailed and then cleared a large objective consisting of a city block with many government buildings and Ba’ath Party Headquarters. The tanks rapidly seized their objectives and shortly thereafter the Air Assault Infantry began clearing its objective. It seemed to the Task Force commander that the Infantry were moving at a snail's pace and as the day progressed he became more and more agitated waiting for them to report that their objective was clear and secure. At about fifteen hundred hours he got very upset when the Air Assault Infantry company commander reported the objective was clear and secure and that the company was going to go to ground for an hour to rest and rehydrate. The Task Force commander had identified many more point targets thathe wanted the Infantry to clear and he, of course, wanted them cleared now rather than later. The Task Force commander linked up with the company commander and a ten-second visual inspection of the company showed him why they needed an hour to rehydrate and rest. They were worn out. The Task Force commander had traveled about one hundred kilometers in the past five hours checking out every aspect of his zone, though he was hot and dusty, he had ridden one hundred kilometers, standing comfortably in his turret. The Air Assault Infantry had probably traveled two and a half kilometers in the same time, however, they had been running, walking, and crawling that distance as they cleared their objective."

double

The 101st Airborne had trouble doing this even against light opposition in Iraq. They were supposed to be securing the highway and towns that made up the 3ID's supply lines but needed (and received) tanks for the actual fighting. Even then, they didn't have enough firepower on hand (three or four companies of Abrams) and found themselves snarled up in some nasty fights in built-up areas that the 3rd Infantry Division had smashed their way through without even slowing down. The other major light infantry centric operation was a sideshow; the 173rd Airborne Brigade dropped onto an airfield already held (and marked by) friendly-forces then stayed mostly static while calling down gobs of airpower to beat up Iraqis that were going out of their way to not inconvenience them. The major Iraqi formations in the north had already largely disintegrated and the brigade's presence didn't draw any defenders away from Baghdad. It was a sop to the original war plan that envisioned the 4ID coming from Turkey. Overall it wasn't exactly a grand showing and one big reason the original plan of having light infantry take Baghdad was scrapped in favor of just sending heavy forces in. edit: I guess taking Umm Qasr kinda counts, but there were tanks involved there as well, so I'm not sure how much credit is due. Even facing only lightly armed militias in Fallujah, tanks (and other forms of protected firepower) were the big winners: "By far the best two supporting arms used were tanks and CAAT. Tanks and CAAT were the infantryman’s best friend. The battle would have been incredibly bloodier if it hadn’t been for tanks and CAAT. The tanks were able to provide a 120 mm direct fire weapon on the spot of any contact within a matter of minutes. The thermal sites were able to pinpoint exact position of snipers and then effectively neutralize them within seconds. CAAT was able to use its M2 .50 caliber machine guns and Mk19 grenade launchers to breach as well as destroy buildings were fire was received from. CAAT also helped the squads by clearing the buildings that lined the street in their lane. The infantry should never attack in MOUT without tanks or CAAT." CAAT = Combined Anti-armor Team, basically the infantry battalion's heavy weapons -- TOWs, MK19s, 50cals -- mounted on Humvees and operated as mixed sections. In the remainder of the AAR, they are very clear about the necessity to employ combined arms in built-up terrain, relying on firepower arms as primary killing tool, rather than sending infantry to clear buildings the hard way. This is consistent with every other AAR to come out of urban fighting in the last four or five decades. Massive amounts of airpower and moving at a snail's pace while praying you don't get caught out anywhere.

It wouldn't be at a drop of a hat. Those Cold War-esqe overflights are basically the saber-rattling, directed towards the NATO-bloc to say, "We're still here and we still have nukes." At any rate, they don't have to actually do it, they just have to suggest they will and given that NATO no-sold any intervention in the Ukraine close to a year ago, I think the threat was taken seriously enough. Maybe the Russians are bluffing, sure, but nobody wants to risk it over the Ukraine. Meanwhile, with a slow-burn insurgency ongoing, Ukraine is never, ever, ever getting into NATO, which was the Russian's goal right from the start.

What makes you think it wouldn't? The Russians slapped our ally in the mouth in 2008 and keeping Ukraine in their sphere and out of NATO has been one of their key foreign policy objectives for the last fifteen years or so. At least. They've been pretty clear that it's something they're willing to nuke people over and we're not, world influence or not.

Yeah, they do.

To help with that, I don't start splitting squads until they are "up" and in action. And not always then, particularly for units that are just giving supporting fire along linear terrain like hedgerows, short walls, "outside-looking-in" on a building, etc.

In the fall and winter? Sure. In August, in standup fights between Russian mech and Ukrainian army? Not even a close contest.

25mm armor-piercing rounds should reliably penetrate the side armor of a T-90A from anything under 1km or so, assuming they don't hit ERA. The rear armor might as well be tissue paper though. Granted, it isn't a lot on a per round basis, but the Brad puts out a lot of rounds, so those little chances to do critical damage add up fast. The carousel autoloader works from any angle. And yeah, it does have moderately worse sensors (at least the T-90A, the gap is narrower with the T-90AM) than the top-tier American stuff. Excaliber -- the 155mm-based GPS-guided rounds -- are pretty accurate. The PGMM (120mm mortar round) is something akin to precision-lite. It's basically a fairly cheap guidance kit placed on an HE round. Still incredibly lethal to troops though, even with a low round count.

Gaddafi wasn't weaker than he was in the late eighties, early nineties, when everyone important hated his guts except the Soviets. And extremist elements mostly steered clear of Libya unless they had a pressing desire to get their fingernails ripped out by pliers. They only came in numbers (but very many) in the aftermath of the civil war because there was no longer a functioning state.

It isn't like he hadn't put down rebellions before. Probably wouldn't have gone into stalemate like Syria; as incompetent as Ghaddafi's army might have been, his mercenaries were not and when paired with even marginal amounts of armor they were consistently facerolling the rebels whenever they met. The rebels were down to their last stronghold when airpower caught those armored columns on the road and routed them. Obviously we've gotten pretty good at finding people trying to be sneaky, so Libyan attempts to pull off what other people do fell flat and we just bombed the living hell out of everything they had. It was a complete one-eighty and very close to the eleventh hour as well. As for the idea that no one would have taken up in his stead; one of Ghaddafi's favorites is running the capital and the largest, most productive slices (not that it's saying much) of the country. But since the resulting ethnic cleansing campaign against Ghaddafi's tribesmen and people that look like the mercenaries was brought to an end by him, we're not going to raise a fuss about it. End result is Libya is essentially under the old management, except they don't own a monopoly on force or a functioning state any longer and can't even theoretically abide by Ghaddafi's anti-terrorism and intelligence-sharing agreements any longer. Not that they are particularly inclined to do so, since, y'know, we bombed them.

If they wanted to grab the rail line, they could have; they'd gutted pretty much the best of the Ukrainian Army at that point in a standup fight every bit as lopsided as the South Ossetia War. Instead they withdrew back across the border and pretended the whole thing didn't happen.

The 105 anti-tank rounds had inferior penetration and the Soviets had better armor. Doesn't matter if you can put the round on target further away if it won't do anything to the tank's armor when it gets there...

The by-and-large media silence on Libya gives lie to this statement.

Most of their skill-set is not applicable to CMBS though; you're not going to see specialized insertion/extraction techniques, there is no personnel management system for you to simulate "growing" an unconventional force around your A-team or showcase the team medic's skillset outside of battle, Blufor can always talk to other Blufor so no language/cultural specialization necessary, you can't capture or use enemy weapons so the foreign weapons proficiency doesn't matter, there is no operational layer or supply system so you're never going to see the benefits of superior fieldcraft on the ability to field a force with austere logistics, etc. You're basically left with the direction action stuff, but even those either involve a lot of picking battles carefully because a dozen dudes getting into a gunfight is something that can go tits-up in a heartbeat or overwhelming amounts of support and backup for those same twelve.

I can only speak for myself, but I enjoy not having to attempt to fix Iraq's problems while dodging roadside bombs and needing a gatling gun to avoid getting a rocket with my dinner.

    Oh oops, I thought warrior was the second-lowest difficulty, not the middle one.

I'm not so sure about this. Perhaps Battlefront changed things for the better later on, but I noticed in CMBS that when a sabot went through the CROWS on an Abrams, only the CROWS was disabled. And this was consistent. Obviously CMRT is not CMBS, but there is a reasonably high degree of fidelity in the hit decal/damage arena for CMx2. That being said, there is some definite wonkiness as well, with tracks being disabled by upper hull or turret hits.

Supporting fires like mortars and artillery are much more responsive when you play Warrior versus Elite/Iron. There is a world of difference between 105s taking six minutes to smash a TRP and those same 105s taking two minutes. I don't know if that is applicable in your case, but it is something of which you should be aware. I think you can get 81s or 75mm pack howitzers on a TRP in a minute flat, but I'm not totally sure of that since I haven't played Warrior in a few years.

They can use ships to supply it, at a modestly higher cost, sure, but perfectly doable.