Henri

In a recent thread on the US contribution to maneuver warfare, somewone asked for a definition of maneuver warfare. I responded that it was something like the use of fire and movement to dirupt, dislocate and destroy the enemy, and others posted their own definitions.But this is not satsifactory, andI went back to the books. Before I go on, I think that this is an important issue for Combat Mission - whether or not the principles of maneuver warfare can be applied in this game -but this is another issue for the moment. It is interesting that both Lind ("Maneuver Warfare Handbook") and Leonhard ("The Art of Maneuver") do not manage in their books to give a definition of what maneuver warfare is, although they define a lot of other terms like push-pull reconnaissance, Boyd cycle, mission order, obejctives and so on, and describe in some detail the elements of maneuver warfare. As the two above authors point out, Maneuver Warare is a term which has led to a lot of confusion among experts, so it is not surprising that non-experts are confused. it is a lot easier to say what it is than what it isn't. for example, according to Leonhard, although the US military in the 70's adopted the concept for its Airland Battle Doctrine, it bifurcated back to attrition warfare concepts, only the Marines sticking to the ideas. Well I'm not going to attempt to define here what more knowledgeable authors too hundreds of pages to explain; but I WILL give two criteria for recognizing what maneuver warfare is not: it is not movement for movement's sake, although movement is usually involved, and it is the incompatible with attrition warfare, whether or not this kind of theory advocates pitting strength against weakness as does maneuver warfare. let me finish with an example of why attrition warfare is difficult to accomplish in Combat Mission; in a maneuver warfare context, a commander would not say "Capture Hill 302 in order to prevent the enemy from using highway 101 to cross the river". Instead a commander would say "Prevent the enemy from heading toward the river using highway 101 re Hill 302". Although the difference might appear minor, it is not, because in the second case, the sub-commander feels no compulsion to hold the hill, rather he is told to focus on the objective, whetehr or not the circumstances require or allow to hold Hill 302. It is easy to see that all wargames based on achieving victory by capturing specific objective flags throw a major monkey wrench from the start on any simulation of maneuver warfare. Unfortunately, with the present status of AI, I can't think of any wargame that does not have this major defect. One unfinished one is "crisis", but there is no sign of a final version, and another is "Road to Moscow", which seems unlikely ever tosee the light of day. so Combat Mission is no worst than other wargames in this respect, but it is also no better... Henri

If not the best, the most entertaining in my view was "Patton"; who else but George C. Scott could play that man? My intellect says the best is probably Cross of Iron, but my heart say Patton.And for gritty realism, nothing beats "The Naked and the Dead" to leave a bad taste in one's mouth; God, I still feel like shooting that bastard Aldo Ray after 20 years... As for Private Ryan, its opening scene is a classic and unbeatable gut-wrencher, but God, for anyone who knows anything about the history of the fighting in Normandy, it's almost unbearable. Spielberg is a great moviemaker, but in my view, the cinematic tricks in this movie are just too visible, especially for anyone who has seen his first movie, "The Duel", where he showed his mastery of the closeup (it was an accident, the movie was originally shot for TV), which is what he used to good effect in Private Ryan. However I understand that for those who break into tears at the sight of an American flag and who think that it was the sacrifice of US soldiers that won WW2, this could be the greatest war movie of all time. Henri

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Keith: I happen to have an electronic copy a famous speach that George Patton gave to the American troops of the Third Army the day before the Normandy invasion. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Small wonder that Eisenhower decided not to land Third Army on the first day! Henri

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by ciks: But what is the right way to use scout cars (Jeeps, Greyhounds and White Cars), maybe someone can tell, how this was done ir WWII? I played "A Day in the Cavalry" and usually lost half of my jeeps and some Greyhound to mines and PanzerShrecks in the first battle.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Man you don't know the can of worms that you open with this question. To avoid restarting a long discussion (check out the 500+ message thread on gamey tactics), let me just say that recon with vehicles in Combat Mission is suicide: if you go slow, because of the one-minute delay between orders your recon unit will be killed almost as soon as it spots enemy units because it usually does not react immediately and just sits there or keeps moving towards th enemy, and if you use fast-moving vehicles for recon you will be accused by some of using "gamey" tactics (and your vehicle will b e killed quickly anyway). So basically recon vehicles are practically useless in the game, and I have never had one that survived the first few minutes of a scenario. This has been explained away by some who claim that in the game, it is assumed that the recon has already been done, which is ludicrous since at the outset one usually has no information at all about the location of enemy units. In my view, the use of recon vehicles in the game is one of the most unrealistic aspects of this excellent game. Henri

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by CavScout: I guess I ask again what do people mean when they say "maneuver warfare"? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> That is a good question, and whole books have been written about it; essentially it is the use of fire and movement to disrupt, dislocate, and destroy the enemy. In involves something called the "Boyd cycle", where one opponent forces the opponent to react faster than he is able to, which often leads to his position falling apart of itself (dislocation). It usually involves the so-called "indirect approach", which for example involves attacking an enemy's supply lines or rear areas in order to make his front-line troops unable to fight effectively. In its modern form, it usually involves finding weak spots in enemy lines, breaking through there with deep armor penetrations behind enemy lines creating havoc by threatening weak but important units such as headquarters, artillery batteries and supplies, not to mention the threat of surrounding and isolating front-line units. The perpetrator of maneuver warfare is really fighting his enemy's MIND, where the most effective disruption and dislocation ideally takes place. In the Blitzkrieg, when the French began to see German units racing behind their supposedly invincible front lines, they became totally disoriented and unable to make the fast decisions that the situation warranted (Boyd cycle), with the result that their whole military establishment collapsed upon itself in total confusion. Only De Gaulle among the French understood what was going on, but he did not have the resources to act efficiently to restore the situation.The French High Command, feet stuck in the cement of obsolete military ideas, might as well have been on another planet. The British at that time were not much better.None of the Allies had a doctrine in place to practice or counter this kind of warfare, and the Germans went through them like a dose of salts. Henri

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by ScoutPL: I would like to put up a post and not have it misconstrued and twisted around into an argument I never made. But then I'm prone to wishful thinking... <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> There are a number of different issues here, which can lead to confusion; I don't think anyone, especially me, is trying to attack you in any way. Some of the discussion does not distinguish between the use of maneuver warfare, strategy of the indirect approach, combined arms, and their uses in modern and WW2 combat.All of these issues are related, but they are not equivalent. If one considers the more general issue of the genesis of maneuver warfare, which dats back to Sun-Tzu, through Hannibal, past Napoleon,Stonewall Jackson, R. E. Lee, Liddell-Hart and Guderian, to name only a few,the discussion can get pretty convoluted. It seems to me that the main issue for this discussion (as given in your title for the thread) is the origin of the ideas of maneuver warfare as used in combined arms combat in WW2, best exemplified by the German Blitzkrieg. There is little doubt that Fuller and Liddle-Hart and De Gaulle, who are generally credited with putting forward the ideas of maneuver warfare in terms of modern combined arms warfare, owed a lot to their forebears including some American Civil War Generals and others, but there is also no doubt at all that their ideas were not adopted by the British and the French until after the German Blitzkrieg.It was the Germans who recognized the promise of those ideas and who translated them into the practical tactics that we know.The Soviets had also developed somewhat similar ideas, but the Stalin purges of the thirties killed the most brilliant developers of those ideas, and early in the war, the Soviets did not have the overall means to coordinate such attacks successfully. So when some people disagree with your statement about US influence on this question, they (or at least I) are speaking only of the IMPLEMENTATION of the surfaces and gaps theory to modern warfare concerning the combined use of tanks, artillery, infantry and other weapons. I don't have my books here, but I will give quotations from American experts showing that the US military (with the exception of the Marines) at least until very recently did not have a doctrine corresponding to pitting strength against weakness in the sense of the indirect approach, but rather in the spirit of Clausewitz, which is mostly incompatible with this approach. From my own experience, when one starts a thread that is expected to be a bit controversial, he should expect a hot but mostly civilized discussion, but the nature of forums is such that there will always be a few people who get impatient and who lapse into what can be construed as personal attacks. It is difficult to resist responding to every such attack (I speak from experience), but it is probably best to ignore them and to respond only to those that keep the discussion on an intellectual level. Henri

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by IntelWeenie: While on the offensive, they developed what was later called the "Operational Maneuver Group" which is basically an exploitation force. Its sole mission was to tear up enemy rear areas after a breakthrough by other troops. It was to be fast moving with a fairly short logisitcal "tail", the idea being that they would carry most of their critical supplies with them and capture the rest (to maintain momentum). A decent example of this in WWII is Peiper's Kampfgruppe in the Ardennes. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> True, and a Soviet example as early as Autumn 1941 is the actions of Katutov's battle group deep behind German lines, where the best-known action was the ambush and quasi-destruction of the 4th Panzer Division on the road to Moscow. Before the war, the Soviets had developed their own theory of deep penetration under the aegis of Lobashevsky (I forgot the exact name), who was killed during the Stalin purges. In the initial stages of the war, the shortage of competent officers due to the purges made it impossible to apply these methods in a consistent manner except for a few exceptions such as Katutov's battle group, but as the Soviet military gathered experience, they began to be able to do it better and better (not to mention their observation of German methods -as Manstein once said after a bad experience, "They are learning fast!"). As early as the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, the Soviets showed that they had mastered the tenets of maneuver warfare and of deep penetrations. Contrary to popular misconceptions, the two total forces were about equal in numbers (about 1 million on each side), and the Soviets were aided by a number of catastrophic mistakes on the part of the German High Command. As the later Operation Mars showed, the Soviets DID on occasion over-extend themselves, but contrary to cold-war stereotypes heralded by cold war politics, the Russian Army was not a mindless juggernaut who used overwhelming human wave attacks to win the war. In the two most critical battles of the war (Stalingrad and Kursk), the forces were evenly matched in numbers. Yes, the Germans might have won if they had acted differently, but they didn't and they lost, and the Soviets won by using their forces more effectively. Henri

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by ScoutPL: The development of the AirLand Battle doctrine of the 80's is just another permutation of an American tradition. NOT a German innovation.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> You have posted a great description of maneuvr warfare and its history. However there are a few points of contention. It is generally recognized (even by the Germans) that the basic ideas for modern maneuver warfare and Blitzkrieg came from the British (Fuller, for example), but it was the Germans who saw its potential and exploited it first.Most American specialists also credit the Germans for originating the ideas. Your claim that the US Army has continually been using the concepts of "strength against weakness" runs directly contrary to writings of some of those who are considered the top experts on these questions in the US. Leonhard in his book "The Art of Maneuver" castigates the US Army for basing its airland battle doctrine on concepts contrary to the idea of "strength against weakness", as does Lind in his "Maneuver Warfare Handbook". Lind DOES give credit to the Marines for adopting the tenets of maneuver warfare, which he attributes to the fact that the Marines expect to often fight at a numerical disadvantage. So if you are going to claim that the US military is the initiator of maneuver warfare concepts, you are going to argue with practically every writer about the subject since WW2, and if you are going to claim that it has been the doctrine of the US Army since WW2, you are going to have to argue with Leonhard and Lind as well as with other writers on the subject. This is not to say that for example US Civil War Generals and some WW2 Generals like Patton did not use the concepts of maneuver warfare, which in their essence date back at least to Sun Tzu; but to claim that the modern concepts of maneuver warfare is an American invention flies in the face of conventional wisdom and therefore requires a lot of evidence. Henri

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by David Yomtov: Try telling the Russians that massive infantry charges are "gamey"! <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Try telling Rommel! He wrote from France in 1940: "The method that I have devisd of driving into the enemy with all guns firing and not holding fire until they are already knocking out my tanks has worked magnificiently.it costs us a lot of ammunition, but it saves tanks and lives. The enemy have not found an answer to this method yet. When we come up on them like this, their nerves fail and even their big tanks surrender." David Irving, The Trail of the Fox, p. 54. Later Rommel devised a simimlar tactic using a whole division! Rommel was the master af adapting tactics to fit the situation, and he did not feel constrained by whether or not his methods conformed to someone's idea of what proper tactics consisted of (they usually didn't, and he was roundly criticized in France by some colleagues for his unorthodox tactics). Henri

Great AAR Claymore! Hey, you used "gamey" tactics, you map-edge-hugging fast-scout-reconning non-respecter of arbitrary house rules! Henri

To my chagrin, I discovered what is an invulnerable defensive position for infantry: it infantry in a house behind a stone wall. I lost almost three platoons attacking two enemy squads in two adjacent houses in such a position. I hit them with fire from two tanks, two machineguns, a number of halftracks and advancing infantry. I eventually routed them, but my attacking force was decimated. Henri

I don't think the problem is too many tanks being killed by artillery, I think the problem is too many tanks being immobilized or suffering gun hits from artillery. Henri

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Rossdaddy: I think what we should have done was have him surrender. (I don't know why I didn't think of that.)<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Unless the situation is totally lost, one would not normally surrender, which gives all the points of his units to the enemy. If one still has a lot of units, although the game is lost, a cease-fire is in order assuming that all the victory flags have been taken by the winner. Otherwise, the winner will have to go after the retreating opponent, which might well give him a bloody nose if the latter is retreating into covered terrain and the winner is coming at him over open terrain. Anyway, in WW2 there were no "levels of victory", so one should noit over-emphasize the level of victory given by the game. Henri

Since you are on the defensive, you need to have a plan, and you r recon should fit that plan; if yhour plan is to fight a stationary battle, the purpose of recon is to determine where the attack is coming from. On the other hand, if you are planning a possible counterattack, then recon should identify enemy strengths and weaknesses (be forewarned that a pre-emptive counter-offensive Fionn-style is not for the tactics-challenged ) The Fionn-style recon you have done is more appropriate for an advancing platoon, which is probably not your case. But now that you have done it, use it to the best advantage. On the defensive your most critical choice is whether to fight a holding action or a flexible defence; the latter is difficult and can be suicidal if the terrain behind you is not suitable for defence (open terrain for instance). in a flexible defence, you might deploy your infantry in two parallel lines, and after one line absorbs the first contact, it withdraws behind the other one. This wears down the enemy and maintains your strength. However timing can be critical, and because of teh one-minute delay between orders, you can find your units retreating too late and being cut down by the advancing enemy. At this level of advice, tghe best advice is probably to try to guess the enemy lines of advance, to prepare killing zones with crossfire at probable spots, to use your artillery as suggested, and to be ready for anything. Henri

BTS has made it clear that programming SOP (standard Operation Procedures) for this vrsion of CM would be just too much to ask, and they are probably right. However, I certainly hope that it will be done for the next version. TacOps has shown how it can be implemented, and in my view that implementation is almost flawless and should serve as a model.for example, you can tell a tank to stop and pop smoke if fired upon, or to run away, or to stop and hold, whatever. The one-minute pauses between orders leaving the AI to improvise is probably the greatest cause of lack of realism in CM right now, although a heroic effort has been made by the programmers to make the AI as smart as possible. Let's face it, no AI can use the overall information in a complex situation to make a smart decision the way a human can, because the BIG weakness of AI in ANY kind of endeavor is its inability to properly take context into account.This means that behavior that is quite proper in a given context is atrociously stupid in another. some may object that the human, having information from all units, has an unrealistic amount of information, and the answer to that is that the game can be programmed so that the units will not always follow the SOP, depending on morale and such things. Just don't expect all this in a patch... Henri

Although for the most part the discussions are fairly civil, there is a rather high level of intolerance here about opinions that the game has problems of realism. BTS freely admit that the game is not perfect, but Steve insists that such things are "bugs" that can be corrected by programming. Now Steve is the designer and has a right to his opinion and I guess that he SHOULD lean a bit on the defensive side, but he has a coterie of defenders who take it upon themsleves to attack any suggestion that could be interpreted as an attack on the game, sometimes resorting to questionable debating techniques distorting the views of those who disagree with them. That is why today I began a thread on the war-historical usenet forum about the unrealistic aspects of the game. I said that starting such a thread here would be tantamount to yelling "God does not exist and the Pope is a sodomist" at a Papal audience at the Vatican. I have no idea if thre is an organized effort to stifle criticism, but I can understand how one could get the impression that there is. Henri

I would guess that in this case, Wittmann was killed by a bazooka or other infantry explosives. Henri

I have had contradictory experiences with air power. In one pbem, when I bought a Jabo, the opponent's sole force cnsisted of 5 ubertanks. In two passes, the jabo failed to scratch a single one. However, over the weekend playing Fionn's AAR scneario as the Germans, when the opponent's Jabo showed up, it got THREE passes, and when it had finished, it had immobilized two of my three remaining tanks and gun damaged the other, and killed or immobilized FIVE halftracks loaded with infantry! Needless to say, my attack, which was going fairly well, took a turn for the worst... Henri

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Big Time Software: Well, you have been arguing pretty consistantly against the speed change, in this thread and I think another one, in spite of the fact that there was a rather frank and detailed discussion a few pages back about realistic offroad speeds. This was the point when you brought in some out of context quotes to argue against reducing the speed. So I am not sure how it is you could have missed a discussion that you were in fact participating in. Steve<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I have REPEATEDLY said that I don't object to programming changes to make the game more realistic, but that I do object to "house rules".Show me a simple statement by me where I said the contrary. Cripes, how many times do I have to repeat it? So please stop whipping a dead cat and attributing to me positions that I do not defend.How many times have I repeated "The game is what it is"? If we do have some differences, it relies on what is or is not possible in the real world and on whether or not "house rules" need to be followed BY ALL players (broken record)! This reminds me of the story on how to train a bull: first you hit him between the eyes with a 10-pound hammer -that is to get his attention. Do I have your attention? I DO NOT OBJECT TO PROGRAMMING CHANGES TO MAKE THE GAME MORE REALISTIC! Henri

AA guns were used as antitank weapons in WW2, particularly the well-known 88, which was the most deadly AT gun available. It is true that once their effectiveness against tanks was recognized, specific mounts for AT work were designed for 88s used in this fashion. Whether or not they were used often against infantry I am not sure, despite what the move "Private Ryan" suggests. I would presume that quad 20 mm guns would have been particularly effective against soft-skinned vehicles, assumning they could survive very long in the direct line of fire, but I really am not sure. Unless your opponent complains, I would not worry about it. Henri

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Big Time Software: If anybody wishes to debate this, I suggest either finding a source that quotes exact MPH on very carefully described terrain, or alternately taking a modern Jeep off road somewhere and seeing how fast you can go without flipping over (something Jeeps had to be worried about). Steve<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I have said on a number of occasions that if the speeds of any vehicle are not historically correct, then they should be corrected, and I don't know anyone here who disagrees with that; I HAVE expressed reservations about slowing them down more than that with the specific purpose of discouraging so-called gamey tactics, on the grounds that it could unbalance scenarios in favor of the defender in some cases. Some people HAVE suggested doing the latter, although Steve seems to be saying that they will correct ONLY to make the speeds realistic (i.e. to correct a "bug"). I don't have a problem with that and as far as I know no one else does, so I don't know why it is brought up all the time. As for Steve's statement that he "suspects" that Popsky's jeeps were only used in stationary ambushes, I don't have any documentation, so I can't really say since I don't have any documentation on the question, but I suspect the opposite...Popsky's tactics must be documented somewhere. Henri

OK, I found the problem: when I downloaded them with Netscape navigator, they crash, but when I downloaded them with Explorer, they work OK, so it is a Netscape compatibility problem. Ten to one the programs wre made with Explorer. Unfortunately I don't know how to fix it so they will download with netscape; I have both Netscape and Explorer on my system... Henri

All of those scenarios crash the game; anyone have any success running them? henri

Jeff, My apologies, I guess I read the long thread a bit too fast and missed your reference to the study. Username, My apologies toyou too; since your message is the very ast one before mine, it is my impression that it was not visible to me when I wrote mine, since I had been on the site for some time and your message predates mine by about an hour. Anyway, I'm glad to see that people here are aware of those studies. I wonder if BTS is going to do anything about it. I would add that tanks are also much too susceptible from near misses by light artillery. I don't question that a 250 mm shell on the top of a tank could kill it and a near miss could disable it, but smaller caliber artillery should have much less effect. Unfortunately this is hard to quantify. henri

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Bruno Weiss: Excellent! Exactly what I've been looking for. Vic Morrow... Man I wish that show was back on Cable here. I grew up watching that. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> It's on the Canadian History channel every day at 5 pm. Henri