Bil Hardenberger

...and this is exactly how they should be used in an environment like this. The Ukrainians have thus far been pretty adept at setting up the environment for a breakout battle.. best seen in the offensive around Kharkhiv in September-October.  Brilliant use of armor.. it was not on the front line but was used for penetration and breakout once the light infantry had prepped the battle-space.
There is definitely a place in my mind for the Ukrainian Army to use western MBTs and IFVs to immediate and startling effect.. will they lose some? Of course... but there will then be a mismatch that the Russian army, even with their ATGMs will find very hard to deal with... as long as we give them enough to actually be effective.. 20 or even 50 of one type will not be sufficient. they need hundreds.
Bil

...and this is exactly how they should be used in an environment like this. The Ukrainians have thus far been pretty adept at setting up the environment for a breakout battle.. best seen in the offensive around Kharkhiv in September-October.  Brilliant use of armor.. it was not on the front line but was used for penetration and breakout once the light infantry had prepped the battle-space.
There is definitely a place in my mind for the Ukrainian Army to use western MBTs and IFVs to immediate and startling effect.. will they lose some? Of course... but there will then be a mismatch that the Russian army, even with their ATGMs will find very hard to deal with... as long as we give them enough to actually be effective.. 20 or even 50 of one type will not be sufficient. they need hundreds.
Bil

...and this is exactly how they should be used in an environment like this. The Ukrainians have thus far been pretty adept at setting up the environment for a breakout battle.. best seen in the offensive around Kharkhiv in September-October.  Brilliant use of armor.. it was not on the front line but was used for penetration and breakout once the light infantry had prepped the battle-space.
There is definitely a place in my mind for the Ukrainian Army to use western MBTs and IFVs to immediate and startling effect.. will they lose some? Of course... but there will then be a mismatch that the Russian army, even with their ATGMs will find very hard to deal with... as long as we give them enough to actually be effective.. 20 or even 50 of one type will not be sufficient. they need hundreds.
Bil

...and this is exactly how they should be used in an environment like this. The Ukrainians have thus far been pretty adept at setting up the environment for a breakout battle.. best seen in the offensive around Kharkhiv in September-October.  Brilliant use of armor.. it was not on the front line but was used for penetration and breakout once the light infantry had prepped the battle-space.
There is definitely a place in my mind for the Ukrainian Army to use western MBTs and IFVs to immediate and startling effect.. will they lose some? Of course... but there will then be a mismatch that the Russian army, even with their ATGMs will find very hard to deal with... as long as we give them enough to actually be effective.. 20 or even 50 of one type will not be sufficient. they need hundreds.
Bil

...and this is exactly how they should be used in an environment like this. The Ukrainians have thus far been pretty adept at setting up the environment for a breakout battle.. best seen in the offensive around Kharkhiv in September-October.  Brilliant use of armor.. it was not on the front line but was used for penetration and breakout once the light infantry had prepped the battle-space.
There is definitely a place in my mind for the Ukrainian Army to use western MBTs and IFVs to immediate and startling effect.. will they lose some? Of course... but there will then be a mismatch that the Russian army, even with their ATGMs will find very hard to deal with... as long as we give them enough to actually be effective.. 20 or even 50 of one type will not be sufficient. they need hundreds.
Bil

They grow up so fast... we really need to get off our *** (ahem) and finish up that DLC.   

They grow up so fast... we really need to get off our *** (ahem) and finish up that DLC.   

Two years end-Apr, Bil.  CMCW is a teenager now, demanding a new DLC it can drive around and show its friends.

I recently purchased this game and am thoroughly enjoying it.  It's something new and exciting to me.  I've only played WWII games prior for the past umpteen years, well along with War of Warcraft.  I am pretty sure this will result in me putting all my WWII games on the back burner if ever to return.  The new TO&E, advancements in and of equipment and tactics is just overwhelming and so interesting and to be honest quite exciting. On a sad note however, it seems now that I have the modern wargame bug, I will be buying CMBS as soon as the next patch comes out just to see what all is new in it since the jump from WWII to the Cold War was so great, I can't imagine the jump to the present-day improvements.  
 

So I suggest that humans at war are a 3rd order chaotic system.  Harari posed that there are 1st and 2nd order chaotic systems:  1st order are built on a lattice of non-linear variables which all have a possibility effect at a macro level - eg the weather.  2nd order are 1st order chaotic systems that can react to predictions, they are self aware - eg economics.
I put forward that humans at war are another order of chaos beyond 2nd in that in warfare we can and will react to imagined stimuli before they actually occur.  We remember future.  In this the input (stimuli) variables are not only non-linear, self-aware and adaptive, generation is also done in the virtual space of human imagination.
So this goes beyond being able to predict how an opponent will react to a prediction, it is being able to predict with accuracy how an opponent will generate and react to internal predictions and then react again to when those self-generated predictions collide with reality.
In CM playing against a human, we do this all the time.  Bil H knows The_Capt always overreaches so he is going to react to that stimulus before The_Capt even hits the start button.  But Bil H knows The_Capt knows he knows and will factor that into this battle as well. The_Capt meanwhile thinks “Ah this time I will overreach, Bil will never expect it because I always do it!  Ah crap!!”
So trying to build a Predicto2000tm to take into account all that and sustain any level of accuracy is impossible right now. Instead we rely on subjective assessment based on how well the assessor understands the opponent.  “Getting inside their heads” is not just a cute term, it is literally what we are trying to do.  Once we do that analysts are then looking for behavioural cues that verify or shift their framework of the opponents framework, and they are doing this constantly.  This goes beyond “what are they doing?”  It goes into “what are they thinking?  And “what do they think we are thinking?”  Here things like cultural boxes and background on doctrine and training are important as it gives some lines of the box your opponent is within.
Finally, behavioural analytics are getting better at predicting what a single person will do based on historical data.  Cambridge Analytica and the OCEAN model and all that.  But we are not talking one person, we are talking thousands to millions of people reacting to what each other is doing and thinking while trying not to get killed.  Anyone of which may have a real impact on outcomes - the sniper who decided not to kill Washington at Brandywine or all of Harry Turtledove. That problem set is way outside the abilities of artificial intelligence or machine learning or whatever.  Human analysts are not able to do it with high levels of accuracy but they are the best we have and highly trained/experienced ones can create advantage.
I suspect if we ever develop a computer able to conduct accurate hi resolution predictive analytics in warfare, we will have already broken economics, democracy and dating, at which point war as we understand it may not even matter as we will have to redesign the entire human social enterprise.
 

Not trying to disrespect any of the great scenario designers here. I've played my fair share of AI battles. the NTC campaign had great AI. I just think at the end of the day, Combat Mission is best played against a human opponent.
Verdenne and Victory was great! I really liked that both sides had an objective to attack and there was a lot of room to manuever. I was worried at first (playing the axis) that I only had five panthers but they won every tank duel they faced. I think the scenario does a great job of teaching you to fight for every bit of intelligence. I even resorted to dismounting kubelwagon drivers in forests just to get hearing contacts to know where his tanks were moving.

Glad you enjoyed To Verdenne and Victory - that was one of my two scenarios for CMFB.  I wouldn't be so down on computer controlled AI - I think there are some titles where it suits quite well and I'm mainly thinking Cold War here.  If you want a more realistic experience of what it would be like to be on the end of a Soviet Battalion attack then a well-designed AI plan put together by someone who has a thorough understanding of how a Cold War Soviet battalion would attack delivers that better than a human player who will likely employ tactics that they know to have the most optimal effect.  @George MC pulled this off very effectively under @Bil Hardenberger's tutelage in the NTC campaign for Cold War.  Nonetheless, there is no doubt that humans are more challenging opponents and at the end of the day, so long as you're enjoying the game, that's all that matters.

It is not in the least.
There is one very big caveat to this that everyone is glossing over- who is developing the targeting packages, and with what?
The risk of escalation is not so much weak-kneed western resolve it is trying to avoid direct acts of war between the US and Russia. Of course Ukraine can hit legitimate military targets in Russia, particularly if they are part of this “special military operation”.  And the nuclear escalation equation is also part of all this but the spin here is that the US is avoiding direct involvement in this war because then it turns the war into something else.
For the same reason the US is not conducting airstrikes, they are pretty cautious with their ISR data. So Ukraine get ATACMS or whatever - whose data are they using to hit the right targets in Russia?  If the UA fires blind they could wind up hitting a civilian neighbourhood, which is going to harm their cause - and I get the unfairness as Russia pound civilians in Ukraine but as we discussed before one warcrime does not justify retaliation warcrimes.  And there is the risk that a Google Earth long range fire hits something Russia does take seriously enough to escalate over.  
For those in the “Russia is full of crap on escalation, always” camp - ok Tex, what is the Russian red line then?  Would a NATO ground invasion of Russia set them off?  If you answer is “yes” - ok, let’s walk it back from that and in your professional opinion tell me when to stop. A direct strike on Russian political leadership?  A strike on Russias nuclear arsenal?
 If your answer is “no” - please leave for a bit because you are no longer part of a rational conversation.
Regardless, we are back to “where is the ISR coming from?”  If the US or any other western nation is developing targeting data or packages for direct strikes on another nation it is an act of war.  Imagine if Russia or China was a third party in a conflict and was providing targeting data into a western nation…ya, that. I am pretty sure the US ISR architecture is tying itself in knots to avoid being pulled into Russia right now.  If the UA can use their own ISR - and I suspect HUMINT is being employed - good on them and please don’t do something dumb. However, Ukraine is a free independent nation defending itself with its own resources.  The US developing data and packages on Russian targets, in Russia, is an escalation on our end - a pretty serious one. It definitely shift to strategic offence which is a pretty severe line to cross just because we will feel better.  Further, it may not shorten this war, it may lengthen it.
The single biggest fear in the west is that Russia will widen the conflict and directly strike out at a NATO nation.  Why? Because we would have to respond, NATO is too big to fail.  If Russia calls our bluff and we do directly respond the whole thing gets crazy fast. Now Putin has justification for broader escalation and that is a train we might not be able to get off.  Further it may split resolve in the western world - I am not sure how keen the rest of Europe is on dying for Ukraine. The evil truth is that Ukraine may be more important to Russia than it is to the West when we get into that sort of calculus…maybe.
The US president was pretty clear and I agree with him - the second this conflict widens into the western sphere, pulling NATO in, we are talking about WW3. And that will involve strategic nuclear escalation because it is all Russia really has left in the bag for a conflict of that scale.  We might get lucky and Russia blinks and someone shoots Putin in the head before it comes to it - but that is a hope, not a plan.

Hey guys, I am putting the finishing touches on a campaign that focuses on the Russian VDV landings at Hostomel Airport on February 24th and 25th of this year, during the opening days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I could use some play testers to play through the missions and offer feedback to help me polish this up for release.

The campaign features a 1:1 detailed scale map of the full airport and portions of the surrounding towns (Ozera, Blystyvytsia, Hostomel), a map of a town called Sosnivka that I thought would make a nice ambush location northwest of the airport, a map of the crossroads at Berestyanka, which you'll likely recognize from satellite imagery of the infamous 64km long Russian column from early in the war, and several custom flavor objects created for me by the incredible @Lucky_Strikeand @JM Stuff

If you are interested in helping, please leave a comment below or DM me. Thanks in advance! 
-TheFriendlyFelon

 

Add continuous harassing indirect fire, some wounds that go untreated due to lack of medical support and the odd tac UAV pooping HE on your head.  

I have avoided predictions in this war but I will make one here - the RA is really screwed this winter.  Their logistics issues are going to turn into stuff like disease and cold injuries in the winter that their medical system will not be able to deal with. Troops are going to be faced with lighting fires or freezing to death so ISR is going to light them up.  Looking at the weather in Kherson for example - https://weatherspark.com/y/97401/Average-Weather-in-Kherson-Ukraine-Year-Round  And you have the worst possible conditions - cold enough to freeze you to death but also warm enough to get you wet - and then freeze you to death.
Winter warfare is hard - like “wishing you were dead” hard.  It is ridiculous without proper logistical support and regular troop rotations.  Fog eating snow might just turn into ice shattering the RA and the UA driving over their frozen corpses.  If the RA has a division of elite Siberian troops left in the pantry, now would be the time to use them.

Left - WWI photos, right - Bakhmut, present days

 

Winter is coming

I think history will reflect favourably on Biden.  He has effectively lead the western response and the sharing of intelligence on Russian intentions prior to the Feb invasion blunted any surprise.  The courage and determination of the Ukrainian people have been an inspiration.  They have earned their place in the drivers seat of their self determination.
Zelensky, at least to this external observer, has been a great leader. He has been relentless in his pleas for support to the world.  He is held in high regard amongst the public.
 

Well guys, at last I got this!  Symbolically in the day of Kherson liberation ) 
Thank you @Kinophile for this initiative and enough "family diplomacy" in resolving of sudden obstacle on "last mile" 😀
Thank you @Battlefront.com - Steve, your "bribe" ) will be worked out ))))
Thank you all, who donated anonymously
Thank you, all other, who just have been reading and support our country - first two months were some nervous and psychologically hard, so this my 24/7 "marathone" here was giving me some emotional relief. 
 

24 hrs change

I doubt it's the biggest strike, just a particularly bigger one than usually shown on social. 
+View from one of the trucks involved :
 
 
 
 

I suspect we now know EXACTLY how long it takes to relad, aim, and fire something. Plus flight time for the missile.

{Apologizing for a very long post up front - proceed at your own risk}
Ok now we are getting somewhere.  There is ample evidence that in 2014 the RA surprised the world in that it did not actually suck, there is your citation above and then from the references I posted:
"The Ukraine conflict has been described as “World War I with technology.”11 One aspect that stands out in the Ukraine conflict is the Russian employment of indirect fires. Combining separatist and regular BTGs, Russia has effectively degraded Ukrainian military forces with long range artillery and rocket fire. Russia’s preferred concept of operations has been to keep its fires units at a safe distance, while relying on drones, counter-battery radars, and other intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets to target over the horizon.12 The observed combination of increased range and precision tracks with a general trend noted worldwide, particularly with multiple rocket launchers. As a result, Russia has on numerous occasions successfully blunted Ukrainian operations while avoiding significant casualties. Ukraine, on the other hand, is estimated to have suffered 80% of its casualties from artillery fire.13 The increased lethality has required fewer rounds, yet Russia has also demonstrated that it retains the ability to mass large volumes of fires when necessary."
"A defining feature of Russian fires has been their speed. Ukrainian units report that once a
Russian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is spotted they may receive artillery strikes within
minutes."
https://nsiteam.com/social/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/NS-D-10367-Learning-Lessons-from-Ukraine-Conflict-Final.pdf

 

These by Karber - there is no grey area here and plenty more which we could fill pages with.  Yes, the Russian proxy forces did suck but these were not Russian "hybrids" by any stretch, it was not until summer '14 thru winter '15 that RA conventional forces got fully in the game, and even then highly constrained because - denial.  Once those conventional forces got into the game they appeared to largely dominate the battlespace and a series of major reversals on the UA ensued.  
This surprised the hell out of everyone - I was in FD at the time - because exactly as you note "Russia has been sucking" at conventional war since the end of the Cold War, from Chechnya thru Georgia.  Suddenly this yokel military was doing things that we could not do, particularly with integration of tactical fires.  But...and it is a big "but" (tee hee) even Karber saw some holes that point to the fact that all was not sunshine and roses on the RA side:

Ah ha!  To my old eye this speaks to 1) lack of PGM integration and 2) a rigid system that can deliver very fast but lacks agility to switch on the fly.  So what?  Well in the intervening 8 years the UA adapted to highly dispersed and more mobile warfare.  There is a lot more out there on how in 2014 the Russian's did not suck tactically and even hints they got their act together operationally - but nowhere near enough for 2022.  Finally the results also speak for themselves as the outcome of the war was clearly a Russian win - even with only gaining half of the Donbas, the Russian failure was translating a tactical win to a strategic one.  In fact it appears that Putin simply "post-truthed" the entire thing and called it a strategic win, when it was not.   We could fill a lot more forum space on this but in the end Ukraine was not cowed and subserviently accepting Russian dominance, they pivoted heavily to the west - we started our training missions there then - and conducted major military reforms exactly because they had suffered battlefield defeats.  It is on Putin and Russia for 1) giving Ukraine the breathing room and 2) convincing themselves of their own superiority.  Both factors led directly to the debacle of this war.  In fact Putin likely set in motion the very reasons for this war - a westward facing Ukraine looking seriously at NATO.
So rather than playing "Russia Sucks" and "No It Doesn't - UA rulez" because it is frankly going to get us nowhere lets have a conversation on what the real issue is in the early assessment of this war and why it went largely wrong.  I offer it had nothing to do with "Russia Sucks" or "Russia Rulz" and everything to do with two key factors in the analysis - context and scaling, the pitfalls of effective military assessment. (that is right folks, the deep truths are very often the least sexy).
So the primary issue with pre-war assessments - and I am talking for both the west and Russia - as far as I can can tell is that they took the tactical performance of the RA in 2014 1) out of context, 2) failed to properly understand the challenges of scaling and 3) applied very poor alignment of that scaling.
So what is The_Capt talking about?
Well context is the first daemon people did not slay.  Karber glanced off it and many cautioned against directly translating the phenomenon of 2014 over to this war but it looks like everyone did it to some extent anyway. 
In other work we studied global pandemics for various reasons, the fact we were in one being the primary, and we found that pandemics are not unlike wars when looking at macro and micro social constructs.  It causes similar tensions, vertical and horizontal, and reaches deeply into human psyche.  But that is not my point here, the major conclusion was that pandemics are like wars in that each has commonality between events but also is each unique in its context.  There will only ever be one COVID-19 pandemic.  In ten years COVID could take a twist to the left and do its gig, but the context will be very different.  Primarily, it would occur in a post-COVID 19 world.  The trick in pandemics and wars is being able to identify what is a trend and what is an isolated phenomenon, and how we do this is through careful analysis of context.  
So the 2014 war was very small by the standards of this one.  Russian involvement at the strategic level had major issues - one of which I just explained up there.  Russia demonstrated acumen in strategic subversive warfare - and frankly I have read and heard plenty that we probably over estimated this as well - however, they had no strategic follow through and displayed a lot of poor assumptions and biases both going into and out of 2014.  It was no strategic masterpiece and we should have expected a strategic mess in this war as this was a visible trend from way back to Chechnya.  Further it was made unfixable largely due to political interference.
Next, there were signals that at the operational level the RA was still operating under an old ruleset.  My take away from Steve's posted citations was likely problems with the RA logistical system and the lack of operational enablers.  The Russian issues with operational level of warfare were not really that evident but there were plenty of indications that all was not perfect either.
Tactically, we have already discussed at length but here is where context left the building.  Ok, so 4000 RA conventional troops summer '14, which is what? about 3 BTGs? - managed to score some pretty impressive points against a military that was clearly not prepared for what they brought.  But this does not immediately translate to the entire RA, nor does it mean the RA could do this at a different scale.  Assessing tactical success or failure without context is nearly useless - we learned that in places like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan the hard way.  Further onto the real punchline - tactical success or failure without full understanding of scaling is not useless, it is dangerous as hell.
So scaling can go up or down, and the major failure in understanding this war from a lot of the experts was the assumptions on scaling the RA in both directions.  First there was taking the tactical performance in 2014 and upscaling it.  It was a huge leap, and frankly pretty amateur for the pay grades of some of these experts, to take the observed RA tactical "wows" and upscale them through the operational level to the strategic. The level of complexity and investment to make those "wows" happen on a larger scope and scale, let alone synchronize them is a challenge for the US military who is spending the most on military capability in the history of our species (ok, and before the Prussian, Mongol and Spartan lovers jump in...per capita exceptions accepted...gawd, I hate all you so much).  It was an enormous leap of logic to think that Russia would walk out of phonebooth as a super-military able to do something the US and western allies would think twice about - the upscaling challenges were (and are) frankly humbling.
Now because chaos rules in this universe, it is a bit less of a leap to say badness upscales, I will give you that; however, it is also a risky venture.  Less so for outcomes but it masks a whole lot of the macro-issues, which frankly if Russia ever did solve for, we should be concerned because by definition it will mean they understand their weakness and can learn from them.
So at the beginning of this war, we had a lot of experts who had spent 8 years upscaling 2014 and then failed to down-scale when the war actually happened...seriously?!  A whole lot of wargames and operational research showed the RA in Kyiv in less than a week.  Wargames in the Baltics showed the same Russian blitzkriegs.  So, ok, lets forget that Russian superiority at the strategic and operational level was in doubt even from 2014, failure to downscale and actually test the Russian "wows" against what they were going to be facing at the tactical level (and we had a very good idea what the UA was capable of at the tactical level - we had been training with them for years).  In the business we call this macro-masking, which is where macro calculus fails to take into account micro-phenomenon across a broad range of samples. 
For example, if all the experts had loaded pre-war scenarios into CMBS they would have seen that battlefield friction had gone up significantly.  So if your dice rolls at the operational level say "the RA will advance in three days", well test out that advance across a range of tactical vignettes and lo and behold it did not go so well because it turns out that global ISR advantage, plus smart-ATGMs, plus PGM against what the RA could bring to the party pointed squarely to rethinking those stupid operational dice tables. 
So what?  Well over here in CM land we were looking for other things than those at the macro-table.  The (very expensive) experts with lot of letters behind their names were watching the big red lines on the country map because that is how they played their games.  We were looking at a lot of abandoned Russian equipment - and I mean a lot of very valuable equipment.  We were seeing a steady stream of hi res UAS video coming out of Ukraine on a daily basis when we should not be seeing anything.  We saw RA combined arms fall apart, right along with their logistics as demonstrated by F ech vehicles out of gas and burning re-fuelers.  It did not take a major leap at this altitude to know there was really loud dangerous sounds coming out of the RA engine room, while mainstream was waiting for Kyiv to fall.  However, we also understood upscaling as well.  The effect of the tactical mess spread along most operational axis was consistent - as was the complete lack of operational integration.  Targeting, air support, logistics and the list goes on - the RA was fighting 5-6 separate 2014s, not a coherent and integrated joint operation designed to collapse Ukrainian option spaces.  
So, so what?  Well sitting around and patting ourselves on the back is about as helpful as circle-jerking does for procreation. I think we have established we were, and still are to some extent ahead of the curve - no point dancing a jig on that one.  What we need to do is fully understand what is happening on the ground on this war, what is a trend and what is isolated context.  I am not really interested in what I think I know, I am interested in what I know I do not know.  For example, the old Capt has gone on about mass...at length.  Well if the utility of military mass has shifted, even slightly, the repercussions are profound - one need only study WW1 and WW2 to see why.  Do the principles of war even still apply?  Is conventional manoeuvre warfare still a thing? Is the tank dead? What the hell just happened?  
The point of a highly distributed collective "brain" as we have developed here on this little forum is to try and understand the events better - to inform and create cognitive advantage.  So this is not about sitting around and feeling good watching RA soldier have a bad last day, nor self-validation or promoting/reinforcing echo-chamber; it is about collective learning about war through what is happening in this one...and what better place to do that than a bunch of computer wargamers with far too much time on their hands? 
  
 
 

Night launch of Javelin. Successful
 

Extended version from unlocked account. Russian helicopter flew along neutral zone and after missile hit turned right to own territory. It fell between Spirne (UKR-controlled) and Mykolaiivka (RUS-contolled)
Russian social media shared the same video with claims this is UKR helicopter, being shot down near Kostiantynivka, but this is fake. UKR really lost Mi-8 there, but it reportedly crashed because of technical reasons. Crew allegedly survived. 
Russians claim the helicopter on the video is Mi-8 of older series, which now use only Rosgvardiya and they always have a cover of Mi-24/Ka-52. Army as if uses only newest Mi-8AMTSh and Mi-8AMTV-5 (no). But this can be a chopper of Wagner or Rosgvardiya, here the photo of UKR crashed Mi-8/17 - we can see diffrent terrain with some facility on background

PS. Other Russian TG already confirmed this was Mi-8 of Wagner - 2 pilots dead, 1 injured 
"Due to information we have, this is board of Russian PMC.... Today we lost exellent officers, even they are already retired and do not "employing" in MoD. Fastest recovery to survived one. Ethernal flight, men"