Apocal
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Posts posted by Apocal
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@Apocal
As for how Desert Shield would have gone done with Javelins, I think we could pulled it off (only if we had the then-fictional Javelin though). Iraqi moral is not, er, world renowned, (heck, they even managed to make the M1A1 look bad against ISIS), so I think the first few companies disintegrating from missiles that literally fall out of the sky would have sent them into retreat. And it is my understanding we had significant air support in the region, so we could have suppressed some of the Iraqi artillery. But yeah, you are right about the flanks - I wouldn't have much faith in the Saudi National Guard, so the 82nd could have been surrounded and eventually destroyed as it ran out of ammo. This is all conjecture - I may not be giving the Iraqi Republican Guard enough credit (I mean, they did actually launch counterattacks in Desert Storm, albeit short lived and futile ones), and I may be hyping up the FGM-148 up just a tad too much. .
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.
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But my question is this - in the pre order for battle theres a line that mentions VT fuzes ARE NOT to be fired where the trajectory would take them over friendlies. Why? Would the high canopy elevation in spots cause random airbursts? Were VTs that unreliable 23 years after invention? Did the heat do something to them...?
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.
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ah yes well attacking would be an utter disaster unless terrain utterly favored the attacking light infantry so their havs could be rained down. and still itd be a mess. i meant more in your speedbump scenario. Saddam driving on Kuwait fall/winter '90 has a vastly different ending with javs imo. without them i can see the airborne units really being ground up and nearly wiped out air support or not...
you also misunderstood me i meant US light infantry WOULD be the exception because even countries with javelins besidesbthe US dont have them in the numbers needed.
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.
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ah so when in game you see helos or aircraft doing strafing runs while 155mm fire is coming in this is really actually unrealistic?
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.
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My concern about light infantry on the modern high intensity battlefield is, how are you ever going to get away from the enemy artillery fast enough? Whether you're attacking, defending, or just in transit on foot? That question was raised in my mind at Ft. Irwin, where my platoon was once suddenly 'killed' by artillery.
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.
I would argue the use of light infantry has only increased as time has gone on and global COIN and false flag operations grow in intensity and scope. In conventional warfare you still need a group of foot mobile commandos to seize key points that are unreachable by larger, slower moving formations.
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."
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Light Infantry in the offensive -
I'm not an expert, but I'd expect they'd be used to clear out built up areas. Need that forest/city block/canyon cleared? Send in some Light Infantry. Yeah, they'll take losses, but it sure beats the hammering mech and armor could be subject to if they went in. More importantly, while Light Infantry are clearing out that town, our Armored Brigade can be slicing through the Russians lines of Communication, or immolating their reserve force. Basically, in the offensive, Infantry get to do the dirty work of house/hedgerow clearing while freeing up maneuver battalions, to, er, maneuver and destroy the enemy. If your really audacious, you could use your airborne units to seize bridges and other key areas ahead of your advance, a la Operation Market Garden, but as history has shown, that can be quite risky.
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.
Fighting lightly armed militias is their strength. They are every effective and survivable in that role. Give the enemy lets say BTR-82As, plenty of arty support (without air power and MRLS being able to destroy them before they do too much damage), modern body armor and equipment, you've got a problem on your hands.
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.
So knowing that defense with light infantry isn't much different in the big world from our way of doing things. (we just let the enemy into our depth and then chop them to pieces) what about attacking. How about using infantry, like paratroopers in offensive operations. How would light infantry and airborne units be used in large scale offensives. I'd rather hear more about the NATO side of things as I'm somewhat familiar with the way the russians do their tricks.
Massive amounts of airpower and moving at a snail's pace while praying you don't get caught out anywhere.
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U.S. concentration on the Middle East and the war on terror in general, has given Putin some impetus to think that he can do what he wants to former Soviet Republics, because NATO and the U.S. specifically are too busy fighting jihadists and are too overwhelmed to counter his aggression with real military solutions. As far as being willing to nuke people at the drop of a hat, this to me sounds like a lot of hot air and empty threats. There would be no future for Russia to seriously damage countries with economies that are the only thing propping the Russian one up at the moment.
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.
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Would all this be happening if our current "Administration" had not decided to withdraw U.S. influence from the world stage?
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.
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And you see the tracers in- and outbound for cannon fire. Do bombs have a tracer?
Yeah, they do.
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Bil - well I am not surprised that you can command a reinforced company successfully with 2-4 man counters. I'd be surprised if you had any trouble do so, actually (lol). You could probably teach tactics at the same time and write running commentary on the action. Bully for all of that, seriously. Me, I like commanding units that small for a platoon or two. Give me four or five and I start getting sloppy (leaving squads unsplit, missing things, not getting the relative LOS relationships right because there are too many for me) etc. Call it personal bandwidth. And no I can't just be happy with slapdash for the sake of playing time efficiency - as I am sure you will understand. For me the answer is keep it smaller. This is admittedly mostly an issue with infantry heavy fights - handling half a dozen tanks isn't a chore in either version of CM. As some have said, different players will have different sweet spots as to scale preference. I just think for a lot of players, it is on the lower side of the scale for CMRT - platoon to company, rather than companies to battalion. FWIW.
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.
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I don't think you should underestimate how bloodied Russia has gotten in this war. Ukrainian artillery has been a scourge, including use of Tochka-U tactical missiles (1,000 lb conventional warhead). I saw it described this way, the Russians don't trust the locals so they tend to set up bivouacs away from population centers... which gives the Ukrainians a nice convenient target. One account (of several) spoke of 500 casualties from a concentrated Tochka-U strike. Ukrainians claim to be able to achieve accuracies down to 8 digit coordinates.
In the fall and winter? Sure.
In August, in standup fights between Russian mech and Ukrainian army? Not even a close contest.
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1st question, how accurate is this? Can a 25mm chain gun penetrate the armor of a T90? I recall a story where a Bradley during the Battle of 73 Easting, went over a rise and came face to face to a T72, shot their chain gun as they went into reverse, but was too close to use their TOW. A second Bradley came to its rescue and killed the Iraqi tank with a missile shot. That being the case how could my Bradley do so much damage to a modern MBT? Also the crew from both tanks were put in panic mode from this action.
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.
2nd question, is how the auto loader on the T90 works. Can it load from any angle or must the gun always point to the front as it does in the T62/64 series of tanks? Also it seems to me in the game that the sensors in the T90 is slower to pick up targets than the US armor and IFVs. All in all though, despite the T90's being massacred in this battle, they seem to be on a par with the US tanks in regards to defensive strengths and killing power of its main gun.
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.
Missiles and artillery are the kings of the battlefield with the aerial drone the queen, overseeing all. However when it comes to precision strikes, especially from 120mm mortar systems I wasn't very impressed. I had expected near 100% accuracy, but out of 8 precision rounds between 2 mortar carriers, only 1 hit home, striking the rear deck of the tank, without immobilizing it. All hits where near misses on stationary tanks, but a miss is a miss when destruction should be guaranteed? Anyone know how effective precision artillery is?
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.
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Eh. Ghadafi was weaker than ever, and even if he'd won this one it'd only be seeding the roots of the next one. That also ignores the sort of extremist element that wound up in Libya anyway. A slappy fight between ISIS wish they could be, and the Libyan Army (another oxymoron) is at least one of the more likely outcomes.
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.
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More likely than not it'd just wind up looking amateur hour Syria (which is pretty much what it's doing now anyway!).
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.
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About grabbing the rail corridor after Crimean annexation, I think we should assume that Russia thought it was going to be easy, a done deal by the end of the summer. No more difficult than Georgia in 2008. That's how most protracted wars start, one side or the other grossly underestimates the difficulty of the undertaking. Looking back in hindsight you can scarcely believe the original projections that were made.
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.
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im curious. using the m1 as an example it originally used a 105mm rifled L7 cannon, later adopting a 120mm rheinmetall 120mm. why? aremt rifled guns more accurate?
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...
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Completely understandable. IMO should have never went there in the first place, but as the famous saying goes "you break it you own it".
The by-and-large media silence on Libya gives lie to this statement.
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No. At best that gives you a rough equivalent of a Ranger battalion. Special Forces use unique equipment, org structure, and skill sets.
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.
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This isn't a Foxnews or liberal vs conservative wedge issue. This is a united front against Obama's handling of the Middle East.
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.
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This is not correct. Warrior level also has the realistic timing for artillery etc. See page 28 Skill Levels. It is Veteran level that has the shorter times.
Oh oops, I thought warrior was the second-lowest difficulty, not the middle one.
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There was a thread about this kind of issue some time ago. The conclusion seemed to be that regardless of where the hit occurs, it's treated simply as a 'front hull penetration' (in your case) and the damage or lack thereof is random.
What I mean is a penetration on the driver's hatch is no more likely to injure the driver than a penetration on the far opposite edge of the front hull, as far as the game engine calculates it.
Given that, two hull penetrations failing to immobilize the vehicle is a bit unlikely but still is something we will see from time to time.
And yes, the specificity of the hit decal location ends up deceiving us in our expectations about damage.
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.
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I've just recently started playing H2H games. I usually play Elite vs the AI and consider myself experienced at that level. The guys I play now wanted to play on Warrior level as that was their comfort level. But it made me think. Could it be so that I have more of an advantage of playing Warrior in comparison to the disadvantage they would have to play Elite? Would they stand a better chance and level the playing field (I'm not saying I'm winning easily
) playing Elite, even though it is a level higher than they are used to?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.
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All along I've thought this Ukraine war wasn't ideological but strategic. Its useless to annex Crimea if you don't also have absolute control of the main rail line that supplies it.
They can use ships to supply it, at a modestly higher cost, sure, but perfectly doable.
) playing Elite, even though it is a level higher than they are used to?
Light Infantry on the modern battlefield
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
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.