Michael Emrys

I wanted to point out how you are both saying similar things here. Squarehead is correct in saying that some (though I must admit it was a minority in the US at least) viewed the success of Desert Storm as proof that massed Soviet artillery would have been less of a decisive factor than originally feared. The basis for this was the ease that Coalition forces destroyed the (very large) Iraqi artillery corps in Desert Storm.
Quick background, the Iraqi military had a lot of hardware in 1991. Not only did they have the 4th largest army by manpower in the world at the time, but they had the hardware (tanks, artillery, both tube and rocket) to back up that manpower. Many Coalition commanders were worried that entire battalions would be annihilated by Iraqi artillery concentrations, and is part of the reason why anticipated casualty figures were so high. 
However in practice, while the Iraqi's had the hardware, they lacked the training to properly employ the hardware. Much of the Iraqi artillery was destroyed by aircraft and counter battery fires, and the Iraqi artillery that was able to fire generally failed to hit anything. Again, this was not a fault of the hardware, or amount of hardware they had, but a fault of poor training (this includes tactics, techniques, procedures, all that).
Now, for the same reason that some in the West underestimated Soviet artillery based on Iraqi performance, some in the West are now overestimating the capabilities of Russian artillery based on Ukrainian performance. I am not saying that Russian artillery is ineffectual by any means. However, I would point out that just like the Iraqi military in 1991 was a bad indicator of Soviet military capability, the modern day Ukrainian military is a bad indicator of NATO militaries today. 
The Ukrainian military, especially during 2014, was a small, ill equipped and trained force not ready for any type of real conflict. Their equipment was mostly vintage Soviet. In a way comparable to the Iraqi's in 1991, except this time in 2014. Point being, the equipment was old, dated and poorly used. 
For the same reason that the Soviet military in the 80s would have performed much better than the Iraqi's did in 1991, NATO militaries would perform much better against Russia in the 2017 conflict depicted in BS. 
By the way, this applies across the board; tank combat, infantry combat, urban warfare, artillery, electronic warfare, etc. 
This is not now, nor will it ever be true. The idea that a small well trained/equipped battalion of 400 men can do the job of 4000 is a myth as old as warfare itself. While everyone likes the story of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, they also forget that there were over 6000 other Greeks there as well, and even when the Spartans remained as the rear guard, another 500-1000 Greeks stayed with them. 
In modern times, the same myth persists. Partly because the idea of small special forces teams wiping out entire armies "Commando" style has been so romanticized, and partly because many nations are seeking further ways to reduce defense spending while still clinging to the idea that their tiny military can still hold it's own in a real fight. The fact remains that the most important "force multiplier" is mass.
This is exactly correct. A "battalion tactical group" trying to act as a brigade is a very good way to get a battalion destroyed in short order. One can get away with it in a low intensity, static and frozen conflict like what is currently happening in Eastern Ukraine today, but it would collapse in a matter of hours in the larger conflict depicted in Black Sea. 
Completely agree. 

Which must be hand crafted by blind monks in a Tibetan mountain lamasery, the location of which nobody is very sure of.
Michael

Sounds like your wife found interesting ways to spend her time while you were in front of your computer.

Michael

Do you mean better rations and more cigarettes for the troops?

Michael

Do you mean better rations and more cigarettes for the troops?

Michael

And in fact, in single player games, the AI defender cannot bombard the attacker's setup zones at all. Not sure what the deal is for a human defender against the AI, but even if it is allowed I would not consider it as quite cricket.
Michael

ISTR that the Japanese troops in Malaya had bicycles, which is part of the reason that they took the peninsula so quickly.
Michael

You medieval English aristocrats are all the same: drunk as a monk.

Michael

I read somewhere years ago that the leadership of the army was agreed that if the French had not accepted the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the army would have arrested Hitler. I doubt that he would even have made it to trial, and if he had it would have been a quick one that night before a military tribunal and a firing squad in the morning.
About all the Germans had for a show of force was a few battalions of border police and it is even uncertain that they would have even resisted an incursion by the French army. If true, this was probably the most serious blunder by the Allies of that whole decade.
Michael

I think he did. He gets blamed for a lot that the Baldwin government did and left for him to deal with. I don't want to get into this in the length that it truly deserves, but to some extent it wasn't so much anyone's fault as it was just an impossible situation. What with the Depression and the economic wreckage following WW I, there wasn't a lot of money to be spent. It was easy for Churchill to stand on the sidelines and say that more needed to be spent on defense when there were other things needing to be funded too. Things unfolded in such a way as to make it look like Churchill was right all along. But that whole game of rearmament chicken could have gone the other way. Hitler came very close to utterly crashing the German economy in order to cover his bets and got through by the skin of his teeth. From that point onward, the German economy stayed alive on transfusions of loot taken from conquered nations. If the Allies had called his bluff over the Rhinelands, even more than Munich, the game would have been over.
*sigh* Ah, might-have-beens!
Michael

What the hell is 'snak'? I understand that English is a living language which means that it continues to evolve, but I am far from convinced that its evolution should be in the hands of idiots. Not that I mean to say that BG is an idiot; in most things he has been reasonably sensible. But whoever was responsible for this particular barbarism should be locked up without access to the internet and fed only bread and water until he or she has come face to face with the error of his or her ways.
Michael

What the hell is 'snak'? I understand that English is a living language which means that it continues to evolve, but I am far from convinced that its evolution should be in the hands of idiots. Not that I mean to say that BG is an idiot; in most things he has been reasonably sensible. But whoever was responsible for this particular barbarism should be locked up without access to the internet and fed only bread and water until he or she has come face to face with the error of his or her ways.
Michael

It starts with Tarawa and Makin (seeming miraculously to be in both places at once), and goes through Okinawa and the Kamikaze threat.
Michael

Hell, there is stuff from WW II that is only grudgingly trickling out now. Information is a weapon and gets freely used as such.But there is a lot of stuff that is still under wraps, not because there is any strategic reason to keep it there, but because nobody is still alive who knows it's there.
Michael

By coincidence I came across this last night. 
 This is not the process I had reference to in my earlier post, but I still found it interesting and informative and relevant to this thread.
Michael

By coincidence I came across this last night. 
 This is not the process I had reference to in my earlier post, but I still found it interesting and informative and relevant to this thread.
Michael

Bye-bye. See you on the other side of the globe...in maybe 150,000,000 years.
Michael

Quite a few years ago I was watching a documentary on slo-mo technology when they showed something that really got my attention. It was a film of a 17pdr shot in flight and the way they went about filming it was rather ingenious. Instead of trying to film it with a single high speed cine camera, they used a series of still cameras set up along the trajectory of the shot and then edited all those photos into one continuous movie lasting several seconds. The thing that struck me was how dramatically the shot wobbled in flight. It was well known that the APDS round had poor accuracy, and here was the reason before my very eyes. Eventually the discarding sabot separation problem was solved yielding today's DS rounds tack driving accuracy. I notice that the 76mm round in the linked film wobbles a little too, but nothing like as much as the 17pdr I saw.
Michael

Nice shot but unlikely in the extreme. It's true that the four vehicles were thin skinned and the SU-85 was a high velocity AP of considerable power, but aside from their armor, there was other stuff, like engine blocks, guns, etc. that would have deflected the round if not stopping it entirely.
But what the hell, you sank a hole in one. Enjoy your fabulous luck while it lasts.

Michael

I wish I still had them. All in all, they were the most fun I ever had with a joystick.
Michael

A twenty tile radius at one km sounds a bit much for me, but half that might be okay.
Actually, I feel like the anxiety over sound placement is a bit exaggerated. Sound placement was a regular phenomenon during battle; the bigger the bang, the more accurate the placement, other factors such as wind direction and volume being equal. Also, the more rounds fired from a given location, the more accurate the placement is apt to become. That's why in an ambush it was desirable to fire a few shots and then displace to a second location and then perhaps to a third.
Michael

So all your posts come via ouija board then?
Michael

Most creative post of the week. +1
👏
Michael

Most creative post of the week. +1
👏
Michael

Most creative post of the week. +1
👏
Michael