The_Capt

You know this is what I can’t get past either. Up until now Putin has been pretty careful and demonstrated nuance and sophistication in his strategies. The list of successes is quite long, all based on careful manipulation of narrative, subversive tactics and a brilliant divide and conquer effort aimed at the west, US specifically. Georgia, Estonia, Crimea, Donbas v1.0, Syria, the Arm-Azer conflict, democratic interference and even in far flung corners like Africa Russia has been pulling off a string of wins by getting inside our calculus and leaving us in the west unable to decide what to do. Then suddenly Putin wakes up one morning and says to himself, “hell let’s see if all out war will work”…? Does not add up. Further, what is the crisis worth risking all this? Some say Ukraine entry into NATO but it was not like they were having the induction ceremony this week. There was plenty of rumbling in the west to slow roll Ukraine entry for this exact reason. So why the sudden need for extreme escalation? From a political and strategic perspective this does not make a lot of sense. The risks are very high, the long term costs also high, so what is the pay off here? It is too easy to say “he is crazy”, but he has not demonstrated this level of irrationality before. It like there has been a glitch in the Matrix. I am sure they will be trying to figure this one out for some time.

If Russia employs tactical nuclear weapons, or even chemical...I am going out back to dig a deep hole.

Indeed. I am afraid that despite the human tragedy my professional curiosity keeps getting the better of me. I think we will be unpacking this for years as conventional peer-on-peer fights are very rare in the wild in the modern era (let's hope they stay that way). Three biggest issues with Soviet doctrine of "military mass on multiple fronts, then reinforce success" was momentum, C2 and logistics. Momentum is in the wind but it looks like not a lot of urban combat so far so the Russians are keeping it moving. As to C2, reports from 2014 demonstrate that Russia appeared to have taken a more western approach to C2 but again we will be unpacking that for some time. Logistics has to be what is keeping the Russian commanders up at night right now. That is a really tough logistical problem with really dynamic lines of communication and very hungry lead sabre elements. That, and not a lot of reports of mass Ukrainian surrenders - I am sure it would be all over the internet if there were, but these are early days - so enveloped units are continuing to fight or de-aggregate into a hybrid warfare model. Neither of those two options are good for long lines of communication. Russia has to be pulling for a short sharp war here, the west is hoping for the opposite and the Ukrainians are caught in between. I am not sure how widespread the arming of civilians is right now but that is a sign the Ukrainians are considering digging in hard.

Well the issue here appears to have become not even about the Ukraine itself but the broader declaration of war on "the system" by Russia. Russia is send a message to the international audience, and international community is sending one back. From a western perspective this need to hurt badly in order to deter further actions by any autocratic nation who is looking to step outside the system. So from that point of view that the west will "fight to the last Ukrainian" is a very real thing. Problem is I am not sure even if Russia fails gloriously and is driven back to it own borders I doubt it will carry. Why? Because those ready to step outside the system have all seen the only consequence one must face is angry rhetoric and "sanctions". This is the endgame of a process that has been happening for at least 20 years, the world forming up into "us and them" spheres. I am not sure what the Ukrainians "should do", that is really up to them and the failure to arm/support them well enough to demonstrate sufficient resistance threat is on us; our deterrence through denial or punishment has fundamentally failed in this case. In this regard Putin has already won a victory. What is clear though is that they are really pissed and this war has become less about policy through other means and has become personal, as they all do. Vietnam in '79 is not a good analogy. It had already defeated the US in a grueling war and "commies killing commies" was hardly an international issue at the height of the Cold War. Ukraine is an independent and recognized sovereign state with a functioning democracy which has just been invaded by a global power on grounds that are so thin as to border on childish...very different.

And this is political warfare in the 21st century.

Ah, now that is using the ol noodle. Play the backfield and i.s.o.l.a.t.e. This is all tricky because the "sum of all fears" here is not some weird WW3 scenario - which is plenty scary but more remote - it is a Russia goes all haywire (again) when someone puts a bullet in Putin and we have a possible collapse of a nuclear power (again). Last thing anyone needs is a nuclear weapon enabled Russian Civil War.

To my mind that is kinda in that political warfare space (every sphere has its own terms). Unless you are talking a cyber WME vs Russia, but I think if they were going to do that they would have already pulled the trigger. I think in the cyber and subversive zones the west has been totally caught flat footed. You want Putin to bleed heavy and maybe even lose? Conduct "non-attributable" cyber attacks on Russian C4ISR while they are in mid-operation (I actually pray to god we do). I have no doubt the west has the capability, it is the will to go there that was missing. The primary fear was one of "escalation" but I think that stinky barge has sailed.

Not sure what "over" looks like here. I mean it could be a partitioned Ukraine with Russians holding Eastern and the capital, of course they then have a very pissed off Western "Free Ukraine" with a steady flow of weapons and fast-tracked application to join NATO. If we are talking full control of the entire state right up to the Polish border, well I am betting that will take a much longer period of time, if ever, so long as the Ukrainians decide to keep on fighting an insurgency. Although, I would be lying if I did not confess to a very high level of professional curiosity at to how this is going to go down on the conventional side. What we know is likely in two weeks: - Russia will be a diplomatic and economic pariah. - NATO will be seriously re-invigorated now that it has a "real" adversary to point at. - Europe will be politically united, or at least as united as it gets. Not sure how long it will last. - US will likely "take the gloves off" in the political warfare arena. So far the west has been pretty much defensive in this space but I am betting some old-school options are going to come back on the table. Any other ideas?

The only angle I can think of right now is that he has somehow managed to penetrate the Ukrainian military and government and has cut a drug deal behind the scenes. However, beyond being insulting to those Ukrainians who are currently dying for their country, this also raise the obvious question of "why do a full scale invasion act?" I mean if he had sway inside the Ukrainian government why not pull that lever and stage a coup from the inside a la Crimea? Cruise missiles and massive rocket bombardments do not demonstrate a sophisticated political warfare approach. So unless Putin has been dozing through the last 30 years of western misadventures or simply has been smoking his own supply and thinks "I will be different" because I ride bears on the weekend, this dance makes no sense. This is the chapter Clausewitz never got to; "war is sometimes just plain dumb".

Not even close. Iraqi Freedom in 2003, had about 310k and couldn't control a country with roughly the same population but 200k sq kms smaller. And Iraq wasn't getting MANPADs and Javelins from outside allies. So the insurgency gets ugly, Russian security forces get bled, and then the inevitable retribution gets broadcast on the internet. Russia cannot bail because its propped up regime likely will not stand without support, it is personal now (sound familiar - Afghanistan). All the while the economic sanctions squeeze. So back to, "how exactly does Putin think this will end?"

I wish that this was all this was. The "winning" international order, established after WW2 and outlasted the Soviet version, was a deal that we all agreed to, for the most part. "The rules" were pretty simple, a community of nations will work to create stability and make money. Sure we still have rogue states and random a##holes, but they were on the margins. All the great powers largely agreed, particularly after the end of the Cold War to a "deal" that they would all behave like grown ups. The problem was that the global pecking order did not sit well with some but we thought we could manage that. And the rules got bent sometimes, we even tried to live with that. This breaks the system at a fundamental level. Russia has opted out, and Russia is not North Korea, or Iran, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. Or more bluntly, a global power with enough nuclear weapons to push us into a civilization re-set, just went rogue and dared the rest of us to do something about it.

Well that is the question isn't it? I find it hard to believe that a man as cagey as he honestly believes: 1. He can have a short sharp war with another state that is now supported by the EU and NATO. 2. Conduct a clean regime change that the Ukrainian people will actually accept. 3. Pull back, re-normalize and go back to selling gas to Europe. So what is the plan here?

Wow, is that a Tsushima reference? Respect.

Funny how all the pro-Russian narrators have suddenly gone silent, but I am sure they will be back. Internet is lighting up now. Here are some cruise missiles from those 17 "tugs and tenders" out in the Black Sea. Whelp, whole new ballgame now folks.

Couple really good papers: https://www.tradoc.army.mil/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/From-Active-Defense-to-AirLand-Battle.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1083634.pdf And of course there is personal experience. They were still teaching a form of this to us back in the late 80s and early 90s as AirLand Battle and manoeuvre warfare doctrine did not really start to inculcate the Canadian military training system until the mid-90s. We still were doing KZs and defence in depth belts. I can recall one computer ex (thsi thing called JANUS, which probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and had the computing power of the old Pentiums) where we did exactly as the video above describes. And then gleefully watch the Soviets charge headlong into the KZ, even the last vehicle who would have seen the burning hulks from miles away, charged directly in like a lemming. Over 30+ years one lesson we still keep learning is that "the enemy is not going to cooperate".

Of course, I must humbly withdraw my concern. You are clearly an expert in maritime warfare, which war college do you teach at?

Not sure if it was intentional. When I built the Soviet Campaign, I pretty much started with the US defence position (in all but mission 4) based on the KZ concept. The fact that there were hidden approaches just sort of happened, but I guess it would be true of any defensive position. What is more telling is that I am watching players go "nope" at the obvious KZs while the entirely of US Active Defence doctrine was for the Russians to "not do that". The Soviet Campaign is hard, by design, but based on US doctrine a that time it should be unwinnable, which it clearly is not. Mission 2 - Eiterfeld was pulled directly- well the map was- from a US Army wargame they had sent around back in 1979 (Bil got a copy): dkreview.pdf Here you can see the obvious KZs in the center of the map (we pulled up the South side a bit but it pretty much matches). However, players as Soviets keep taking Hill 446, which is simply not "the plan". My sense is that Active Defence would work very well if you are fighting a zombie horde but living intelligent human beings, even ones with a centralized and templated doctrine are probably going to go "nope".

Not going to weigh in here on @Free Whisky's tactics I will leave that to the rest of the group. I so want to highlight somethings that jumped out at me though as I watched this excellent AAR. First, CM is really unique, or at least one of very few, in that it is a game about 'managing chaos' or in this case "surviving chaos". Free Whiskey had a plan going in, it met an opposing plan and not a small amount of just random acts of tactical turbulence in that collision. Second, clicks per minute are not going to save you. In CM, it more likely that "re-thinking per minute" or re-strategizing (e.g. 4 Plans) faster and better than an opponent is going to carry the day. Points 1 and 2 are in constant dynamic competitive motion, forcing players to constantly make decisions. These are what makes CM realistic, in many ways beyond its contemporaries; not the vehicles and weapon systems, they are the means to the end. I play other wargames (I can hear the gasps) and in a lot of RTSs it is about clicks and strategy is very attritional (i.e. how fast can I throw more stuff in that direction). This is not to say they are not without merit, and they can get the blood pumping but one does not get the same "combat chess on a ship deck, in a storm" feel. So when I look at what Free Whiskey did right, I see a lot of adaptation of "the plan" and improvisation with limited resources in the face of an opponent under the same conditions. His ability to re-think and adapt with what he had (e.g. Toothless) is the real stuff and frankly what led him to a solid draw. "But how could he have won there Capt?". No idea, in fact in this QB, on that map, maybe there was no way to win. But I do see those skill sets that need to be nurtured and enhanced that will lead to more wins than losses. I also see bottle madness as the red god laughs his ass off, and that is simply outstanding.

I am still waiting for @dbsapp to show up here and tell us it is all "fake news", at this point I am actually hoping he is right...

Outstanding. "Speaking of post-mortem heroes..." is one of the best lines I have heard yet.

Yes, problem was we corrected some versions, including titles which cause duplication. Simply delete the older versions and you are good to go. Most edits were to the briefings because there were comments on grammar and writing. So we hired a professional writer and they scrubbed every briefing and title. There are still a few errors, I am sure but a lot less than before. A few scenarios got minor in-game edits as well but these were minor tweaks here and there. Enjoy.

Not sure what the offensive “bad taste” element is here but it is very realistic. This stuff happens all the time on exercises and we develop all sorts of methods to try and control it. The lesson here is that spotting in a buttoned vehicle RL is much harder than a lot of people believe.

Super interesting and excellent overview. I wish it came out about a year earlier, would have saved us some research time. In CMCW, we are really talking about the seam between these two concepts as Active Defence was still in play but Starry's thinking was beginning in inculcate the US Doctrine (he had just been V Corp Comd). So for example the US Campaign is a narrative of what Active Defence would have looked like as the US player bounces backwards against the Soviet hordes. Other lateral forces (3rd Armd) even swing over as per doctrine in the campaign. If the player makes it to the end, they essentially get a proto-AirLand scenario of a deep counter-strike, as opposed to what Active Defence dictated (i.e. park here and wait). The Soviet campaign is the mirror opposite and demonstrates the weaknesses of Active Defence. Despite the difficulty (and it would have been high in RL) the Soviet player always has the initiative up to Battle 4, when a US counter-attack occurs - again emergence of maneuver as oppose to KZ-centric. Further, the Soviet demonstrate the real flaw in Active Defence, in my opinion - the Soviet "bot" concept. Active Defence relies almost entirely on the Soviets not maneuvering below Div level and that is one helluva weak assumption. We have had a lot of discussion (and some noise) on how nuanced Soviet C2 was or was not and some of it was likely reality and some US/western wishful thinking. I do believe that at a tactical level MRR and below the empowerment of tactical commanders was low, they were really pointed at something at told to "go at it" but I do not believe that at the Div level the Soviets were going to stick to the US template in Active Defence of conveniently marching through 3 KZ layers. Based on what I have seen Soviet operational doctrine was far more nuanced than that. So in the Soviet campaign we see the 120th MRR actually shift deep objectives, from Lauterbach to Alsfeld. Alsfeld was originally the objective of the 172 nd (see game manual); US Active Defence has no room for Soviet MRRs shifting dynamically but I do not believe for a second they would not. If the Soviets shift the line of main effort the entire house of cards of Active Defence falls apart. Back in the day when we were doing tactics training we were still doing pre-set KZs and in gaming the Soviets would obligingly drive straight into them and die...very nice for us, tea and medals all around. Soviets may have had a largely conscript Army that trained to mass-template standard but these were real people with brains and, as far as WW2 demonstrated, could improvise very well. So the points on US/western biases have some validity, we needed the Soviets to be a mindless horde to fit our plan and not necessarily their own; there is truth in this. In reality the 79-82 timeframe was a collision of bad assumptions on both sides. US - active defence, Soviets - tactical and operational fluidity with very centralized command and control. Frankly after designing, building and playing the game, and watching numerous other do the same, I really have no idea how this whole thing would have turned out. Some days I think - "no way the Soviets would have run out of gas in the first 48" and others " the US were totally screwed". We knew this was a bit of a sweet spot but the depth of this weird little window into the Cold War continues to surprise me.

Heh, we call it "agency vs formation". Last time big dumb mass 'worked' was the 19th century and that is really abstracting the realities on the ground but large formations blasting each other, with the one who could hold its mass the longest winning is the "provenance of this idea" and historically it held some water [aside: on retro-grade doctrine, happens all the time. Militaries has shown they can un-learn incredibly well. For example, the Romans revolutionized "smart mass" in comparison to its peers and the "mass agency" of the warrior cultures they faced in conquest but many militaries forgot the "smart" part later. Thanks to education and liberalization (damn you literacy), the idea that we can simply send 18 yrs old into a slaughter in formation kinda died in WW1 (with notable exceptions). So in WW2 we see variations on "smart mass" theme which carry over into the Cold War. The issue between the Soviets and western forces of NATO seems to be "how smart does that mass really need to be?" and here we have a spectrum, and a lot of speculation. NATO leaned towards, smarter = better, Soviets (at least as far as mainstream sources note), "just smart enough, because we are really smart at operational level" [note, CM is Bn and below, but for the Soviet-o-philes out there I suspect advantage for them lies in their operational doctrine, not tactical]. So what? Well Gulf War was a demonstration of the collision of these two principles and it appears, to even the most cynical eyes, that "smart wins out". This would be why every modern military on all sides, Russian, Chinese, you name it, moved away from dumber mass and towards buzzwords like "information dominance" and "decision superiority". The COIN-Hell we have lived for 20 years even demonstrated that we were the "dumb mass" compared to really empowered insurgents. So here we are, everyone trying to be smarter even in the unmanned space. This is where "CM should model virtues of centralization" kinda sticks in the throat because I am not sure there is any proof there was any. Why? Because human beings of late 20th century, even those Soviet kill-bots, were nowhere near the same as human beings of the 19th century with respect to agency/awareness and ways of war must adapt to the medium they are within and in this case that medium is the people.

Hey at least we are citing sources now so that is a start. So all the sources in "part one" really support what we already saw going in, Soviet doctrine stressed centralized control at the tactical level. The strengths and weaknesses of this system may be debated but essentially there appears, from a western assessment at least, that there was little to no empowerment at a low level in Soviet C2. So what? Well this is not as much about "giving fire orders", which I would be surprised if the Soviets did not do, even if it was adoctrinal when they came under fire, this is about peer to peer passage of spotting information. When one is advancing in a Cbt Team or some combination thereof the ability for eyeballs in the same tactical sub-unit to talk to each other is key. So this is tank 1 telling all tanks in the platoon "I see something over there". The US C2 system allows for inter-platoon communications and has developed sophisticated procedures to allow one group to communicate directly with the another below the platoon level on the platoon net. I do not see a lot on the equivalent occurring in the Soviet system. Now some may say, "well the Soviets will do it under fire anyway (i.e. 'extreme')" but it does not work that way. If you do not train for it and develop sub-systems of information flow then when the shooting starts you wind up with total chaos. In fact the Soviet idea what "we can all wait til the shooting starts to talk" is pretty risky but even then the only people doing the talking are company and platoon commanders. One will get more centralized control but you lose a lot in the peer-to-peer space and slow things down with respect to targeting. That US "squawking" you mention is actually really important. Now to "part 2 - Soviet were really using radios". That video is something but I am not sure I would put much more stock into it than I would a western training film. These sorts of things tend to be idealized versions of how things are done, as demonstrated at 21:55 (just after the guy in the hole uses a radio) with the Soviet officer bravely marching, head held high, into the middle of a firefight. Written sources, well now we have something, but as Grey_Fox mentions a lot from WW2 which makes me wonder if the Soviets did not have much more democratization of information flow during the war, which for some reason their doctrine tried to scrub out. In that link, that is Cold War era, again comms all seem to pretty much flow up in a nice tight system with no mention of lateral flow; however, it does speak to the idea that a squad (assuming it doesn't have the one-way R-147P) can pass information to platoon. I assume these comms are open and in the clear every call is a "charlie-charlie" so peer squads are privy to it, this is a sub-unit C2 system. The website is unclear on when and where this system fits in (it mentions "80s") and the authors are guys I really want to talk to as they have veterans from the era. So maybe the organic C2 system was much better than western assessments, nothing here is a slam dunk but that site does sow a seed in the mind. As to the "up side", ya not really buying it. Over the last 40 years the limits of centralized control at a tactical level and advantages of decentralized have been aptly demonstrated (e.g. Gulf War). The US/western system does allow for direct calls to all units (we called it the "charlie-charlie") but it is the sub-systems built in that allow for empowered use of that information that appears to be the fundamental difference in the C2 systems, again matters of degree here. The only spin I can think of is that the Soviets mastered their system and somehow took it to a whole new level that allowed it to transcend the friction and chaos of warfare. I am not sure that the Soviets believed "a battalion still something a commander can directly control" to be honest, if they had they would have invested a lot more redundancy around that commander. My sense is that a battalion, in the Soviet thinking, was a piece of ammunition and their operational method of warfare was to fire it for effect and then load another one behind it. So "control" only had to be just enough. The US and west had a very different philosophy. In game, these are soft factors. We have run tests that show 4 tanks can spot better than one, the question was can 4 US tanks spot better than 4 Soviet tanks, with C2 as a factor in that advantage/disadvantage (i.e. horizontal)? Whether this is a factor in vertical targeting is an interesting question, never tested that. In conclusion, this does open up the door to the idea that we have fallen into a western bias trap in the assessment of Soviet Cold War tactical C2. I suspect that adjusting troop quality can amend this in game right now but I would definitely like to see more from actual veterans of the era on how their sub-platoon and Coy C2 actually worked. If we can get enough of that, then perhaps a revisit of some soft factors in-game is required.