The_Capt

Right and pretty soon someone is going to put a little angry/hungry brain on each one of those cluster munitions. Of Russia is hooped, question is how bad and where is the off-ramp if such a thing even still exists? Next war is what I am worried about because Russia is also going to figure all this out, eventually. China probably already has.

Hmm, well it was a matter of time until someone called Russia on its whole “I will take us all to hell so we can shout at the Devil together” BS.

So we should help them by projecting enough energy into the environment it can be seen from space? High energy solutions are problematic as they then need more high energy solutions to keep them alive. And no one has solved for a 155mm PGM round, or HIMAR coming in at Mach 3+. The fundamental flaw with some US (and most western militaries)thinking is that they are trying to citadel their existing structures and treating UAS/unmanned as something to be managed. This was the overall strategy for ATGMs (detectors, smoke, manoeuvres, combined arms and finally APS), which was never really tested en masse but that did stop us from assuming that these ATGM counters would work. Worse, we assumed that these counters would continue to work as ATGM tech marched on. As the Russians have found out 1) next-gen ATGMs are incredibly hard to “manage” in fact for some they really can’t be and 2) UAS in combination with C4ISR are changing the fabric of the battle space. This is not manageable, it requires some deep rethinks on how military power is projected in the future. Strapping high energy lasers on everything and then trying to do Bn TF manoeuvres just like we did in Iraq is going to lead to a really, really bad day…and to be honest most people in the biz know this already. Protecting legacy systems will be required but it will only buy a narrow context of advantages in a narrower set of employment. Point defence systems need to be just that “point” as in last minute “holy crap some got through” not “queue the Disco Star Wars soundtrack and start burning holes all over the sky”. It is the other layers of the bubble that will need to be developed along with new types of organizations and TTPs. But if I know military thinking we will see a 90 ton tank with so much crap slapped on it the damn thing won’t be able to stay upright. Then we will have to do same with logistics and suddenly a viable BCT will weigh roughly as much as Pluto…because gravity does not care about your feelings, cap badge, investments or budgetary profiles

That may work but kinda kills manoeuvre warfare. Unless you could pre-position ahead of an advance. I mean better than nothing but it is not the solution. It may be part of a broader system solution in what is going to become a pretty rapidly evolving rock-paper-scissors space to my eyes. Oh and just noticed no human in the loop? That will drive the lawyers nuts.

There is a point on the circle where the far-left and far-right meet and this is pretty close to it. The mechanics are the same, connect a whole bunch of phenomena, many of them that are in isolation of each other - e.g. homelessness and MKUltra. Then tie them together with logic strings to create a unifying construct - in this case Western Satan. The problem is that 1) many of these phenomena are in fact disconnected as there are no star chambers just people being mean to other people - the red scare violations of human rights is not in the same bin as lynchings. 2) the fact that anyone has access to these historical examples and can openly cite them is proof against a massive oppressive western regime that spans generations, and 3) completely misses all the good and right these western systems have done, worse dismisses it as social background radiation when in fact it was the main effort. This method is a sort of reverse social contrasting because all one is seeing are the lynchings, CIA plots, cop shootings and homeless. If one stares at that long enough it is easy to believe that is the core and not indeed the background radiation of macro-social evolution in the western world. There are societies where these sorts of activities were far more central to maintaining order and control as has been noted. They do not complain about police brutality and cite internet stories to back them up in North Korea because they are living in a truly brutal dictatorship. I have worked defence and security my entire adult life - there is not massive conspiracy led by the far [insert villain] trying to control you through a weird Goldberg-esque complicated scheme. There is a government trying to keep 300+ million primates wired for fear response from killing each other. While at the same time trying to keep the other 7.7 billion scared primates from either killing you, or each other too fast. The good news is that this “sinister and highly corrupt system” has essentially worked. We are better off now than we have ever been in history. Do not believe me? Google stuff like child mortality or literacy, or healthcare. You wanna talk “big unfair prisons” do some research on the 19th century legal system. People are not “seeing the matrix” in spite of nasty government control, they are seeing it because of government protections - as imperfect as they may be.

As was noted before Ukrainian victory must include engineering a Russian defeat. This is tricky. I strongly suspect that the US is working very hard to engineer a just-soft-enough landing for Russia in this war. So what looks like waffling or weak knees is more likely simply due to the fact that for the US there is a lot more on the board than simply kicking Russia’s bum nice and hard - that one is already pretty much covered. There are other less absolute dimensions to this thing.

Driving around blazing at the sky and giving one’s position away leading to PGM artillery killing you….check. Logistical nightmare…check. Better than nothing until C-UAS = other UAS…check. Does it solve for UGS…no check.

Cloning. And then start a war with them…clone wars….(snicker).

Can’t get too far into it but that ball has moved quite a bit since back in the day. Let’s just say that Int staff are armed with more than talc and Stadlers these days. Personally I can barely keep up.

Oh definitely. I think we are past corrosive here, at least in the finish. One could argue the UA has been conducting corrosive warfare all winter on defence - and Oryx lists seem to support this - and the spring offensive is more egg cracking. Ukraine needs a big win and Russian defence sector collapse again as a min (they pulled off two last fall). The RA seems prime for it. I doubt they really can do c-moves quickly and are so beat up in some sectors that they are relying on obstacles in some sort of weird mass-force multiplication sense, but warfare is moving past all that or at least how we understood it to be. We wont have to play "Who do We Eat First" for much longer I think.

Some interesting tidbits in there. The RA is clearly pretty banged up in some areas. The employment of Spetsnaz as front line infantry is particularly telling, however employment of SOF in those whole war has been different. Spersnaz are supposed to be the Russian military Tier 1 guys. Simply sticking them on the line as infantry is pretty odd. Based on their assessments of RA line strength Russia has pretty much burned itself out over the winter. If the UA is sitting on 9 fresh and fully gunned up Bdes this spring offensive could be a real barn burner. Looking at the map I am honestly wondering if the UA is not going to go for the Dnipro river crossing assault. Risky and tough to secure but the RA is extremely thin and broken on that front. This is likely due to risk-creep around the river obstacle. The RA looks pretty weak on the far east of that line too.

This does assume that the RA can swing those guns to and from Close and General support quickly (building on your note #1) Based on what we saw at Severodonetsk last summer RA fire planning seems pretty linear, which may lean more the way Steve added it up. In fact I would bet good money that have plotted out rigid sector fire support that is pretty static compared to western doctrine. RA C2 has not shone in this war, I have my doubts as to it somehow stepping out of the phone booth now. Of course the UA should help this along where they can.

If this is true then they have shifted forces dramatically into this area. If we recall the intel leak on force density there was nowhere with greater than about 250 pers per km. So in order to focus this force size the RA will have had to bleed off other areas of the line a LOT. This is also a pretty dangerous concentration easily seen by the UA. There must be other areas of the line that are basically abandoned. So the RA clearly got the message on the “strategic land bridge”. My bet is the UA will attack elsewhere to pull that density away and then attrit them as they try to relocate.

How about just following the LOAC and letting people surrender without beheading/shooting/sledgehammering or whatever messed up thing the RA/Wagner did this week?

Exactly. Take any battlemap and put a Soviet tank platoon in a position about 1000-1500m out. Then blindly drive US forces right through their field of view. You are going to wind up with a bell curve of how quickly the US force get spotted - some early, some late. Now unbutton the Soviet tank platoon. Now move it closer. Move it farther. Change the crew experience. Change the tank. You are going to wind up with a bunch of bell curves. So the actual question for the developer is “where is the middle of the curve?” If the curve is indeed “They never see them, not once 10 time out of 10!” in a context where they should be closer to 50-50. Well then we do have problem. But having actually run a lot of tests like these, I know it is not the case. We constantly tweak and provide feedback on where that bell curve should be. So when a player comes on the forum frustrated with an experience the next question has to be “well what was the context and where would it fit on all those curves?” Big problem in this case is we are not given any in game ranges or data - how far, what conditions, which Soviet vehicles and how many, what crew experience? For example if this was a single buttoned T-62s with green crew at 2000ms, we’ll just forget it. That tank was not designed to engage at those distances and is basically looking through a straw at those ranges buttoned. In the end a lot of the frustration about CM centres on the fact that the game models tactical friction too well. Humans in combat do incredibly dumb and counterintuitive things - it is the stress. So when your stupid tank goes the wrong way around trees, that is not a bug it is a feature. It is brutally realistic. The trick is learning to succeed even in the face of all that unscripted chaos. And for some it is a major draw, others well maybe not so much.

This. And in Valley of Ashes I had a moving Soviet T64 spot and engage a static M60a3 in a wood line at 2+ kms. This does not prove or disprove anything beyond the fact that stuff on the end of either spectrum can (and will) happen. The problem the developers have is that these wild situations are what players remember. They do not remember the other 80% of the time when engagements happened pretty much as one would expect. And then once a bias sets in it becomes all one sees. So in beta we have run a lot of spotting tests and the US spotting abilities are superior in the main, pretty much as they were in RL. Always room for improvement, but no, “Spotting is not broken”…this is a conversation we have had many times.

They have been talking about this for years. Beyond cooking one’s own soldiers in their own juices, its practical application on the battlefield is really limited. SOF and elements of recon maybe, but large infantry units become unpractical very quickly and gain little advantage for the cost. NVGs and radars still work to pick up large bodies of infantry and the logistics of keeping a bunch of soldiers in space suits is just crazy. And it does nothing for the real targets of thermal, vehicles.

Next they will be asking for Alaska back. So when someone says “Revisionist Power” this is what they are talking about.

One also has to consider the timing and environment of the day. On Killing was published right at the rise of the liberal humanist wave of the late 90s. Rousseau was fully in charge because we had won the Cold War and a new order was going to happen...thousand points of light. I think it lasted even through 9/11 with Pinker and that gang. This war will probably put it that whole thing bed for at least for awhile.

That theory has a lot of issues. First off, there have been questions as to its overall validity and application in WW2 itself. Did it take into account the PTO or non/low-US theatres such as Burma? Was the phenomenon isolated or more generalized? Then there is context. In WW2 you had masses of US “citizen soldiers”. These were people who had been living normal lives who got suddenly pulled into this war en masse. Was the phenomenon of “not shooting” endemic to them alone? While forces that had been in the war longer or more intimately involved in their own countries did not see this happen. For example, I sincerely doubt members of the French Resistance or partisans in Eastern Europe were avoiding lethal force at a high rate. Did US forces in combat see their “murder aversion” change over time? Warfare throughout history demonstrates that it gets pretty normal to kill, pretty fast. How does this phenomenon stack up against other wars in history? Am I to believe that Roman legions were only “stabbing to kill” 20% of the time? How about the Mongols? Then the modern era. We suddenly went from high percentages of not shooting to kill to murderous lust from WW2 to Vietnam? I know in modern wars that we did not see mass aversion to lethal force - quite the opposite, we had to rein it in. So what changed? Was it sugar, tv and video games? Or was the initial study flawed? From my own experience. 19-20 year old kids amped up an adrenaline - scared and angry at the same time, will go from “0 to Murder” in seconds and sleep soundly that night. It usually only takes one person to start shooting first and then the rest jump in. The challenge is to get them to stop shooting, or get them shooting at the right thing. That is why we spend so much time training them. I have never seen a widespread phenomenon of an aversion to apply lethal force, from any side, of the wars I have been involved in. Finally given our biological make up, this theory also does not compute. All primates (with only one or two exceptions) are murderous brutal little monsters. Our closest evolutionary relatives are some of the most vicious creatures in nature. The idea that mankind was somehow blessed with a higher morale standard is laughable given our history. We impose a lot of programming and frameworks just to get us to not kill each other in a peacetime setting, let alone open warfare. I am not sold on the whole idea to be honest.

I think it is a whole lot like waiting for an op. Sitting around and trying to fill the time as you sit on your ruck. Weapons are spotless, you can see the map when you sleep and redraw it from memory. Radios and gear have been checked twice. Some guys play cards. We played a game where we tried to figure out the order of who we would eat in the troop after a plane crash - Alive has just come out a few months before. So here we all are. Waiting for the UA to cross the start line. We have talked thru the scenarios. Keep checking social media etc. The kooks come round every now and again but even they don’t seem as into it. We have kinda done German/Euro Bashing Day to death. US Bashing Day isn’t even that fun - I mean we have to go back to freakin Guatemala in ‘54. So, ya, it tracks that we drift OT. So who do we eat first?

Dude, c’Mon. There are a lot of factual errors here. Afghanistan in the 80s? You mean support to the mujahideen? Ok, technically I guess. A lot of these were proxy actions during the Cold War against Soviet influence (would like to see that list with the same very liberal metrics). Some of these like Iraq ‘91 were UN coalition operations. I mean I like US-bashing day as much as the next guy but this is not credible research. It is starting with a premise and then working back to try and shape facts to prove it. Yugoslavia in 99-00? It wasn’t even a country by then, it was a bunch of fracture states. Serbia, maybe, because the world was a so much better place with Milosevic in power?

The other big thing about this war is that no one thought it would go this way. Even if Big Mil Contracting had the ability to stage such manoeuvres the community of expertise that could make a prediction that this war would turn out as it did, with high accuracy, is almost non-existent. In fact, most of the experts - both mil and academic - were predicting a pretty short sharp "Russian-win" affair and long insurgency; we definitely saw it through our own lens of experiences over the last 20 years. So unless this profiteering cabal was somehow hooked into some serious counter-thinking, and were willing to bet the political capital they would need to spend on that, well the idea kind of falls apart. It would have been an extremely high risk wager that Ukraine would somehow be a larger western market after a Russian intervention. That gets pretty "out there" very fast. I mean if a company has that level of accurate predictive analytics, why go through the bother of a war? They basically could own any market they want already. No, this was a sad scared little man with way too much power and no real feedback loops. He decided that for "reasons" the time was right to show that he was a still a "big boy" and talked himself into a really bad plan - he has been "digging upward" ever since. His military ran headlong into 21st century warfare, even though this is really a very early version of it, and got crushed pretty badly. It is now all about simply trying to stay in power and staying alive. No star chambers or CIA plots, just people doing "people".

Not touching the COVID one. However, it is really a bit of a myth that the US or any western nation has standing policies where the use of military conflict is considered a tool for economic expansion. The famous action you are talking about was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company Which built on these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars However these were 1) 80 years ago which in North American terms may as well have been the Middle Ages, 2) really did not turn out well as the next 80 years demonstrated in spades and 3) never were conducted on a nuclear superpowers doorstep…for very good reasons. During the Cold War a lot of proxy actions did happen but these were more about containment of the Soviet sphere of influence while outcompeting which was the US primary strategy…and it worked. US reliance on contractors happens for many reasons but I have seen no proof that their “need for employment” is so influential that the US would start a war over them. And before anyone brings up Iraq 03 - I call BS and Hollywood myth again. That whole mess along with Afghanistan did more harm than good to the US in the end. In fact China and Russia have better access to Iraqi oil now than they did 20 years ago. I am sure Halliburton and Blackwater got well but the idea that they managed to convince US political leadership to conduct these ill-conceived ventures does not match up with the facts of the day. The major problem we have with strategic narratives in countries with weaker democracies is that they tend to see US actions through their own lens. As you note, your government did exploit misinformation and likely has levels of corruption. The US is not immune but the checks and balances of good old fashion bureaucracy are much tighter. That and a free press (such as it is) makes engineering something like we have seen in Ukraine pretty hard and very risky. Unfortunately the political divisions within the US are so stark right now that extreme ends of that spectrum will construct fantasies to explain reality to vilify the other side and justify their own.

Well some of on the development team might take a throttling personally, we do have feelings. So what is happening here is that the US Campaign has limited refit/resupply throughout because, WW3. The 28th is under really heavy assault and having pristine vehicles lined up like horse guards for the next battle is not realistic. So this is not a “glitch”, it is built in on purpose. So damage and limited resupply is in effect. Now as to cross loading ammo. Simply not an in-game feature for major weapon systems. It would be realistic to rebalance ammo but really it is a bit of a dice roll right now and you appear to have come up with a natural “1”. This is an abstraction of all the messed up stuff that happens in warfare. Clausewitz called it “friction” and wargamers are notoriously skittish on the idea. Considering a lot of wargames are being a god and micromanaging large forces like a chess game (and if that is something you like, hey go for it) a lot of chaotic friction can really drive them nuts. But it is entirely realistic. You would not believe the stupid human errors that happen in combat - human beings in that situation tend to go that way. So good commanders basically “deal” and keep trying to make lemonade. I get if this is not your personal thing and frankly Cold War is on the spicier end of difficulty - if the US Campaign is making you this angry, you may want to wait a bit before trying the Soviet one. CM is not a nice hex turn based affair. Nor is it a fast and loose shiny RTS. It is likely one of the most realistic combat simulators for Company to Battalion operations. It is so hardcore that at least one western military uses it for training. But is it fun for everyone, not always.