jasoncawley@ameritech.net

I agree with the last fellow, the left hook is the way to go. The ground looks open, but that is deceptive. Most of the terrain is out of the covered arcs of the big pillboxes. I consider it a waste to arty that concrete pillboxes. Drop 105mm arty on the infantry gun as soon as you locate it. You can also drop 105mm arty on the middle of the town if you like; that will prevent lateral movements by the defender's infantry reserves. Use the 81mm mortars for large smoke missions, in front of the pillboxes. When you are operating on the left flank, one big smoke mission in the open ground in front of the concrete MG pillbox can wind up nixing almost all the defender's LOS lines to your attacking force. Do not send more than 1 platoon down the right side. You can run out engineer squad over to them, though, if you like. Work them closer, to the forward edge of the woods positions on the right. You will probably get into a firefight with the defenders over there. Dump mortars on them. Clear the dasiy-chain mines off the road with the engineer squad sent over to that side. The other platoon on the right, white set up area, leave in reserve behind your center. There is a sort of gulley, or rather you are behind the crest of the ridge, and there is also some tree cover and a few buildings. The buildings are best vs. humans, because they are more likely to dump arty on you back there. Send most of the engineers and the red-set-up area infantry platoon, and the Sherman 105s, up the left flank. Use the road and reach the large farmhouse. Bring an FO with you, one of the 81mm guys for example. Ride the MGs and flamethrower teams of the back of the tanks. The zooks just have to keep up. Set up the MGs and the FO in the top floor of that tall inn. You will take fire from a bunker as you cross the wheatfield; engage it with the Sherman 105s, inching them closer. Close enough, and with their big shells, it is not hard to silence a bunker just made of logs, rather than concrete, and the MG isn't going to do anything to them. Keep the infantry ahead of the tanks, though - you do not want any faust suprises. Then you run into the infantry flank guard for the German right. Well, you've got 2 platoons, tanks, 81mm to dump on them, and MGs up in the farmhouse to match their MGs back in the bunkers. You should win the firefight. Keep the flame teams and the zooks teams out of harm's way while this is going on - you will want them later. Once you rout the flank platoon and 86 that log MG bunker, you are around the flank. Go after the concrete MG pillbox with the engineer platoon and the flame teams, from its blind right side and rear. (The flame teams then wait until you tackle the town, if they are alive). Send the regular infantry with the zook teams east to the road, behind the town, while putting off-board 105mm arty on the town. Keep the Sherman 105s behind the infantry again, let them spot for the tanks. Blow up any German reserve infantry that goes for your infantry from range, with the Shermans. By now the fight will all hinge on where he sends his reserves, some infantry and of course der cat. But if you've done it right, your right flank platoon will have opened the road to town, the left flank route will be open, and you will have killed at least half of his on-map infantry and the left flank pillboxes. You may have to smoke the 75 box again when your reserve tanks are ready to go, so don't use all of the 81mm on the FO left in the rear/center too soon. You get a whole platoon of tanks, a platoon of infantry, and you left a platoon of infantry behind the jump-off point. Load 'em up, smoke that 'box, and ride. His tank cannot defeat so many tanks at once. If you've done it right, the forward zook teams will restrict his options on where the tank goes, too. Too much infantry pours into the town, and his infantry there can't stop them all - you will lose a few tanks certainly. The thing to understand is that the Germans have lots of men, but they are spread out in single platoon positions and they can't really support each other effectively. The heavy weapons do interlock their fire, but once you start unraveling them from your left rightwards, they are not so terrible anymore. You should be able to kill his infantry in many-on-one engagements, one platoon at a time, starting from your left again. As a final word, remember to use lots of smoke...

If the entire attacking force can "overwatch" the entire defending position, then you can "scout" with old ladies using walkers. But such a "defense" position is pretty darn dumb, and rare (outside of unusual terrain locations, like deserts, and even in that case it isn't that simple because deserts are neither completely flat, there is dust and haze, etc). Defenders want locations in which the body of their force is hidden from LOS - reverse slope deployments or generalizations thereof. Scouting would not be an issue at all, if regardless of formation, every important weapon in the attacker's force could fire at any defender's location. The fact that terrain breaks up the battlefield into regions of differential sighting, is the whole reason such things matter in the first place. So I hardly think your "example" says very much. Sure, aim every gun at the defender's head, then send grandma (or an empty truck) up to say "boo" (an old gamey item from Panzerblitz BTW). This is not difficult. It is hardly an attack, or a battle. But it will not work when the Germans have their line of SMG squads one layer of buildings back in the village, and 5 meters lower, with the crestline within Panzerfaust range. Then grandma dies at the crest line, nobody else has LOS to the shooter, and the artillery rounds fall among stone buildings with little effect. That doesn't mean many-few recon may not still work in that more realistic case. It well might. But it will not work simply because "the whole force is in overwatch", by a wave of the magic wand, because the ground is flat as a pool table and the defenders somehow hadn't noticed. To actually overwatch the areas that a forward, scouting unit can see and thus be seen from, generally requires manuevering forward oneself, often quite close to the scouting unit. And one has to decide which one, or by reserve placements, which ones after how long a delay (with the number of choices going up with the delay). But one certainly does not have the option of being in overwatch locations for every scouting unit at once, with the entire force. If one did, then the scouting would be practically unnecessary, since by construction the whole force can already see everything.

The platoon in OP This post covers tactics and techniques for an infantry platoon on the defense in CM, that is given an observation-post (OP) mission ahead of a larger defending force. The role of a line of OPs is to give warning of the approach of attackers, identify their positions and lines of advance, and to hold off small recon elements of the enemy. The OPs are meant to be abandoned, not held, at the first sign of the enemy main body, meaning in CM terms full platoons or companies on the attack. An OP line ahead of the main defense is not always necessary or desirable. But you have to know what it is and how it is supposed to work, to judge when you want one and when you do not. That is what this post is about. The OP mission is best conducted by a dedicated platoon, or two side-by-side in similar deployments on the broad enough front. The command abilities that are most important in an OP platoon HQ are stealth and morale. Snipers, bunker MGs, added LMGs or bazooka teams may or may not be added to an OP line, but it needs regular infantry in platoon strength to be done right. A platoon in OP can be given a secondary position in the main defensive line, but the hazardous nature of the job means you should not rely too heavily on all of the platoon being left to fufill that added role. In the best case, you will still have them, but you can't bank on that. How this secondary position is set up will be discussed below. One might think that a single platoon could provide 7 outposts across its front, from 6 half-squads and the HQ. While this would maximize the number of looker-locations, it is too thin and scattered to be practical. 4 OPs is more like the number a platoon can handle. On defense in CM, every starting location of a defending unit, except for vehicles or units inside buildings, gets an initial foxhole. For an OP platoon, the initial deployment should use this rule to set up both the OPs, and the secondary position in the main line of defenses. For the set up, split the three squads. Deploy two of these in the OPs, two to a squad, left and right hand OPs of left and right hand squads. The spacing and location of the OPs will be covered in the next paragraph. Put the HQ at the secondary or fighting position, at the center of its assigned *front* (shooting positions, not a rear or reserve behind them). Put the half squads from the third squad in two supporting locations close to the HQ, making a cluster of three foxholes close enough to support one another for the secondary or fighting position, all three in shooting locations. The idea is that the platoon will fight from the secondary position, one the real firefights start. Each squad, once re-joined, will have a foxhole assigned to it, while the HQ will have to make do behind them, out of LOS. If one of the squads does not make it back from the OP line, the HQ will use its foxhole. The secondary position should be reachable from the OPs by covered routes, at least covered from likely early attacker positions. It can help to leave only a narrow known route through such cover by filling most of it (at some narrow point) with mines or wire, so that the route back to the secondary position doesn't become a highway into your defense. The HQ is left at the secondary with one squad, not just to make these foxholes available. Right after the start, that squad should be rejoined into a full squad. It should manuever with the HQ. This single full squad plus HQ team, forms the reserve of the platoon while the OP line is still being held. It should move forward from the secondary position it starts at, to a position out of LOS forward and behind the line of OPs, roughly centered behind them, and with covered routes (if possible) to the locations of the OPs themselves, or close to them. The mission of this reserve is to support the OPs when they are in contact, and to waylay small enemy scouting parties. With a full squad and in command-and-control, they will have full morale and resistence to fire effects, unlike half squads. They should also have sufficient firepower to defeat half-squad scouts without much danger to themselves. Often you will have 1-2 OPs breaking contact from a larger enemy force. They are in danger of "breaking" at that moment, from enemy fire or from the effects of "withdraw-run" orders, or both. If they break, they become very vunerable to attackers, who can run right up to them and shoot them without effective reply. On their own, the half-squads do not have the firepower to defend their immediate area against full squads, especially in cover (buildings or woods). So when breaking contact, you want the full squad and HQ to move up in support, as the OPs fall back past them. Then the full squad and HQ likewise withdraw. This also restores the half-squads to command distance, which can lend them HQ morale bonuses and help them to rally. The breathing time can also allow two half-squads to move toward each other and reform into a full squad. You want all of this happening out of LOS of the enemy, but by the time you are breaking contact he is likely to be quite close, only out of sight because of the terrain where you set up the OP line (e.g. farther back into a body of woods he is in the process of entering). You especially do *not* want to move the reserve squad and HQ into LOS of his main body. Understand, they are there to provide a firepower shield e.g. *inside* the woods, behind which the OPs can withdraw - not to try to out-shoot whole enemy platoons across intervening open ground areas. An aside - I am using the example of a body of woods as the LOS block that the OPs set up ahead of. Other LOS blocks can be a crest-line or a village or tall building. The following are "forward" positions for the three types - in the woods but able to see out of them, just behind the crest but able to see over it, in the forward buildings of the village at their centers, forward edges, or upper stories. The following are "back" positions for the three types - far enough into the woods to block LOS out of them, in reverse slope of the crest and unable to see beyond it, in the second layer of buildings, or at their back sides, lower levels, or behind the building rather than in it. The OPs start in "forward" positions, the HQ and reserve squad manuever in "back" positions, which the OPs withdraw to when breaking contact. The reserve squad tactic tends to work because the first enemy to penetrate to the "back" positions, if he is pressing close enough to threaten to overrun the OPs, will generally be a single squad. Which, at such close range, you can outshoot and pin down with the reserve element (squad + HQ). Effectively, the enemy "point" is temporarily "cut off" from its supporting elements, by the LOS block or sight change you deployed the OPs along. Don't hang around to try to kill the pinned "point", however - break contact immediately afterward. For the OPs themselves, you want locations that have good fields of view on the forward edge of LOS blocks. But you also do *not* want the OPs to be within LOS of your main position, if this can be avoided. The reason is that you do not want to give the attackers the cover of your OP foxholes, when he is in his firefight with your main positions. In addition to not being within LOS, you do not want them within 100 yards of your main positions, for three reasons. You do not want the enemy locating your OPs to have located your main body. You do not want enemy artillery missions fired at your OP to hit your main body as well. And you do not want the enemy to be covered by your OP foxholes when you call in your own "final protective" fire missions on him, whether he is in LOS or not. On the other hand, you do not want the OPs to be so far forward that the information they give you about the enemy advance is "stale" and has been changed by his manuevers, well before he reaches your main positions. Which in practices means, you generally do not want the OPs more than about 250 yards from your main positions. Do not always use the same distance, or the enemy will be able to deduce the location of your main body from the location of your OPs, but instead vary the distance between 100-250 yards. The side-to-side seperation of OPs from the same squad should be between 40 and 100 meters. If they are too seperated, you will not be able to reform them in the heat of combat. The route between them should be through covered terrain, or as a second best, both should have covered routes backwards to the same piece of covered terrain. Whenever one OP team withdraws because of enemy contact, the other OP team from the same squad should do so as well, and immediately, not after "just one more turn of firing". When moving OP platoon forces, a useful phrase to remember is "sneak forward, run back". This refers to the appropriate speeds with which to move. Use the "sneak" command to move into locations that have LOS to large areas, the "forward" positions explained above. Inside buildings and woods e.g. But do not bother with the sneak command when moving out of LOS, away from the enemy, to the "back" positions. Run instead. It is more important to break the LOS completely, quickly, than to try to be "quiet". Also, when using "run" commands rearward, keep the size of the moves moderate and use "rotate" to turn around, by the end of the minute-turn when you can manage it. Men on the "run" have limited sighting, only the direction they are going, and do not shoot, so it is better to run for the first 1/2-2/3rds of the minute, then turn around. Whether to use the "withdraw" run, or the ordinary "run", when pulling back, depends on the quality of the troops and the state of the engagement with the attackers. With regular and lower unit qualities, especially out of command distance, the withdraw order is better because you cannot afford the delay time. Similarly even with higher quality units if firing is already in progress - a half squad does not have the fighting power to stay and shoot it out with platoons of the enemy, so you want to get clear as soon as possible. If the unit quality is fine and shooting hasn't started, don't use "withdraw", so you can avoid the greater susceptibility to panic it involves. When placing the OPs at their "forward" positions, be careful not to be too far forward. You can see out of a building from the center of it, and out of a treeline from 10 meters or so back into it, easily. If you put the position right at the forward edge, you will be in enemy LOS longer when pulling out, since the enemy can see ~20 meters back into the trees or so. You want to be far enough back to break LOS quickly when retreating, far enough forward that your field of view is not too restricted toward the sides. Play with the locations and the LOS tool from each place a little, and you will see what I mean. The OPs can either have no orders as to shooting, or hide orders Hide orders restrict their sighting abilities somewhat, but when the field of view is wide and the ranges that can be seen to are long, it is essential. You do not want the OP giving itself away with some ineffective fire on the first enemy half-squad 250 yards away. But in areas of tighter terrain, e.g. looking across a forest clearing that is only 80 yards wide, skip the "hide" orders. You do not want to wait until an enemy squad walks right over you. A half-squad can pin a moving squad in the open, with enough time to fire at it. But if a full enemy squad gets to 20 meters away or less, especially under cover, you will get killed. Do not think you are holding fire to point-blank in some effective ambush. Most of the attacking squad will survive, and in close combat it will make short work of you, if you let it get to grenade range. Supporting weapons can help an OP platoon, or perhaps more precisely, may be able to accomplish their own objectives more readily when tied into an OP platoon's positions. Single MGs or MG bunkers, for example, can delay the enemy by harassing open avenues or long stretches of open ground from the flanks. Snipers can take their first shots from the same general position as the OP line, before skedaddling to their next shooting position. Single AT weapon ambush teams can try to bag one vehicle along a road or obvious "bypass" route, before falling back. A mortar FO may get in one fire mission, on a TRP perhaps, before falling back, likewise. The goal of an OP platoon is to 1 - provide you with information about the enemy's route of advance, which in addition may 2 - provide indirect fire opportunities, to 3 - confuse him about your own deployments, and to 4 - shield your own main positions and ambush zones from the eyes of prying half-squads. The goal is *not* to "hold" him, "delay" him (although the intel effects above may have that effect as a byproduct), or "attrite" him. It cannot do any of those things, if he comes straight on in full force, a whole company on-line. The supporting weapons (MG bunkers, snipers, etc) may indeed accomplish some of those goals, but do not try to "hold back" the main enemy force with a mere OP platoon, with the idea you are giving them time to do so. Trying to accomplish anything like that with just an OP line, will result in a dead OP platoon and a happy enemy commander. Find him, watch him until you see not half-squads but a main force, then break contact, using the platoon reserve element when necessary to help do so, then skedaddle back to the secondary fighting position. I hope this is interesting.

OK, that does help me to get a much clearer sense of your preliminary recon ideas. It would have been nice to have an example in the level of detail of "the scout platoon HQ went here, and its first squad split and went there, ...", but I understand your meaning. As for my approach being a "recon that turned into an attack because it was strong enough", that is sort of right, except that it was not a "turning into" really, because it was the point and plan all along. Call the initial 2-platoon+tank left hook a recon in force if you like. To me it was my main effort, but I was retaining the flexibility to shift my main effort elsewhere in the form of a reserve. The point about the possible losses to from e.g. a gun, to me support my approach a bit more than yours. Wouldn't the loss of a half-squad or two tend to create a hole in your recon screen? Perhaps you don't care, you've found the enemy in that case. But if the loss is at range (like the gun example, typically, in VoT) then you lose a bit of time getting a replacement 1/2 squad to a missing, assigned "scouting route". What actually happened with the gun on my first outing, was that it saw the trailing men of the engineer platoon, and blew up their MMG and zook for not running previously. Then the 105mm off-map artillery nailed it. The actual squads and the HQ in the engineer platoon were untouched. The platoon had lost some of its capabilities, but was still recognizably a platoon on the attack (as with demo charges, still had some remedial AT capability - the result could have been worse to a rifle platoon). But those are minor points. I want to discuss your "recon thin, big reserve" idea, still in the context of the attack. One obvious difference to me is that your approach ought to be more vunerable to enemy use of an OP line than my way. It also may be more susceptible to defender deception and manuever, in certain ways. I will explain. If the defender string out a line of OPs - half-squads and 2-3 man MG teams and snipers - then your recon guys, "as few as needed to cover the terrain", will run into and find these OPs. In the nature of the case, they generally will not find holes, since you don't have to leave holes in a screen that thin. They might find mispositioned defenders, or places covered only by mines, certainly. But an OP line across the frontage is not going to leave areas of pure "air", uncovered by their fire. Simple enough. And when your scouting half-squads find the enemy OP line, they are unlikely to shoot their way through it. Indecisive skirmishing is the likely immediate result. You might call down your arty on his "identified positions", but those wind up being tiny units either in their forward foxholes, or in cover farther forward even than those, to which they then presumably retire (if shelled I mean). But the enemy main positions, the places he has actual platoons in command-control and mutual-support distance from one another, and is thus thick enough on the ground he is either in this place or that place, in this "defender uses OPs" case, remains largely hidden to your half-squad scouts. Those positions are screened, and moreover they may change from the time your scouts ID any of them or allow you to deduce any of them, and the time your attack arrives. Compare scouting by full platoons with a full squad on point, the rest in overwatch a ways behind, OK? When I run into half-squad positions, those are going to skedaddle or they are going to die. I am not going to stop for OP screens. One MG on a flank is not going to stop the recon advance until arty plasters it. I expect to find the enemy's main positions, because only main positions are going to make me slow down. They will probably hurt my point squad and make it withdraw too, but it will be supported after it gets into its first really heavy firefight, right away. Now, it seems to me this can become something of a "head game". If you scout "thin" with half-squads, I want OPs across my front and flexible main positions well behind. It is true there is not always room for this in some set-up scenarios, but usually there is. The "affair of outposts" will then eat up some of your time on the clock, not really tell you where my main positions are, and perhaps you will kill a couple of half-squads with whole fire missions. I'll take that; good deal for the defender. Compare what happens with an OP line vs. the platoon-and-point approach. Not all of the OPs are going to be run into. The ones that are, are going to run, and some of them won't make it and will get killed. The enemy will know there is a platoon here, and a platoon there. He gets info on the attack, certainly. But that is because there is one, if you get my meaning. His OPs get driven in, and he still certainly does not know which probing platoon is going to have the final main effort behind it - because the attacker doesn't even know that yet, and has a reserve. I can see only one real weakness to the platoon-and-point approach compared to the lots-o-little long recon, based on the above analysis. The platoon-and-point approach gives the defender better potential targets for his artillery or mortars. His OPs give him information on possible lines of advance, which may have been obvious to him from terrain alone. But he also has the more solid info that "there is a platoon in those woods", which is a target. I don't think this is a great drawback, especially if the platoon-and-point group can keep moving. Now, lets compare what happens if the defender *doesn't* use an OP line, and instead stages elaborate ambushes with his main forces, does not strng forward much in the way of scouting positions, then clams up until anybody gets close. Then either method will find him. Yours may find gaps between his ambush positions or around his flanks more easily. If he isn't using "hide" orders and exercising fire discipline, then your way may even spring his ambushes prematurely, for trivial cost to you, and then let you dump arty all over him. And if he does, you may run right over him, and at least find a squad or two (one squad, if he knows what he is doing and sneaks a tasked-squad out to bushwack a prying team that is set to literally walk over them). He might also shift to secondary positions, but then you've certainly accomplished something for little more than time. In the ideal case for your method, a defender uses main position ambushes without OPs ahead and then has poor fire discipline and shoots the first thing that comes into sight, and moreover does not move around but sits in place to shoot it out. There is no question such a defense is extremely vunerable to light recon, then combined artillery pasting plus flanking efforts by a main force reserve. Let's look at how platoon-and-point works against such a defense. A platoon directions might find an actual hole, but the defender has chosen his ambush zones trying to predict attacker avenues of advance. That is the usual defenders vs. attackers "head game", but there is no doubt the defender has the edge at it. If 2-3 platoons are probing in different areas, the likely outcome is that one finds the backside of an ambush position (meaning, finds men without entering the ambush zone), while another walks into an ambush zone. Again, fire discipline will matter here. If he shoots early vs. PnP, he will at best nail and more likely break the point squad, and get little else. He then gets into a firefight with the rest of the platoon, with an initial edge certainly. Both sides dump arty on each other. Meanwhile, when a PnP finds the backside of an ambush, instead of one squad coming out and waylaying them, it gets into a firefight on even terms. Then the attacker sees which is which and backs the guys doing better, with his reserve. But if the defenders get lucky on PnPs entering the zones, or do a good job with fire discipline and catch an entire platoon, not just the point, in such a zone, then the defense can work much better against PnP. They can break a platoon, and since that is forward and the reserves would rather go to the place that is doing well, that may overrun the broken guys and wipe them out to a man. Sometimes a less experienced attacker will even be tempted to reinforce failure, and send a reserve to protect a broken platoon and get it out of danger, which can wind up defusing the overall attack via one successful ambush. So, what is the upshot of all of the above, on PnP vs. broad many-little recon approaches? That it comes down to a head game with the defender. Like paper-scissors, in a certain sense. If the attacker picks "broad, many-little" and the defender picks "use OPs", the attack gains little and loses time. If the attacker picks "broad, many-little" and the defender picks "main ambush zones", then the attacker can do very well. If the attacker chooses "PnP" and the defender chooses "use OPs", then the attacker will do very well, overrunning OPs as well as finding the enemy. If the attacker chooses "PnP" and the defender chooses "main ambush zones", then the attacker could do poorly. Each recon tactic has its counter. Each counter idea has difficulty handling the kind of recon that is best against it, but can try things to adapt. E.g. OPs can rapidly run from scouting "PnPs", or call down arty on them. While ambush defenders can e.g. go to secondary positions, bushwack intruding scouts before they reach the ambush zone, or exercise tight fire discipline, against a thin recon. I hope this is interesting.

Well, I am glad you appreciated my last round of comments, Pillar. But you aren't helping very much - LOL. I doubt it is what you intend, and Lordie knows I am guilty of the same, but your last two notes came across pretty darn pompous. There was also a noticable lack of content in them, nor any real acknowledgement of the fact I urged, that Scout certainly has a point. As for the suggestion that I ask others how you conduct recon, that strikes me as pretty absurd. Surely you can tell me what you did more easily than they can, from the other side of the fog. I gave you a number of examples of CM incidents, some in pretty clear detail. To my blinkered perspective, what I got back was "yes, I scout with half-squads and use an OP line, but mine goes to 11!", as a sort of dismissal of everything I said. But you declined the opportunity to provide any examples or clearly explained tactics that address the issues I raised. As for your last, allow me to note that #1 it is unlikely you have in fact found anything truly new, simply because most moderately sensible things have been tried. #2 if you have found anything new it is unlikely to be sound (and it working against people you regularly play means nothing in that regard, for obvious reasons - particular commanders have particular habits and thus particular weaknesses). #3 if you have found anything new and sound it is unlikely to be any distinct improvement, as opposed to a rival but equivalent method of achieving similar results. #4 if you have found new and improved methods, it is likely they exploit unrealistic aspects of the CM engine and would work in real life (e.g. instantly-transmitted sighting reports, god-like move coordination from the top down, etc). Notice, that "monstering" up a level, means straining realism simply by putting complete info and cross-coordination in the hands of people who would not actually have it. A platoon leader having tight control over his squads is realistic, and the tac-AI and morale rules will take some of it "back". Going up a command level to company will produce more tightly integrated platoon manuevers than could probably really happen, but it is pretty close. If you command every squad in a division every minute, not a scrap of realism would remain, because the truth is no one in a division ever has that kind of information or control ability every minute. I trust you see the point. And #5, in all of the above you are hardly the most objective witness because no man is a just judge in his own cause. All of that said, it remains possible you have good ways of conducting pre-battle tactical recon. Duh. And I am certainly interested in discussing them with you. But I would like a few things clear at the outset if we are going to. I am not going to be the least bit interested or impressed with any past game of CM. I don't care a jot about your W-L record. Keep your ego to yourself, and talk tactical turkey, methods, why they work, not "I did this and everything fell before me" crowing. OK? I just am too old for that sort of horsefeathers. I start out by noticing one unmentioned issue in this whole discussion - the difference between tactical recon (or less flamboyantly, finding out where the enemy is in CM games) - on the offense and on the defense. Some things may remain the same, but many things change, in my opinion. I am one who believes that the largest edge the defender has is the sighting differential that a properly planned defensive scheme can help bring about, and I also have forcefully expressed my belief that the defender must manuever, indeed can't afford to remain stationary. The defender has fewer forces to play with. Losses matter relatively more. An OP line set up along the lines of historical doctrine can use up a quarter of a defender's force in a small engagement. The danger of the attacker coming on warm-place for leather is greater, and if the defense is scattered (including front-to-back) and that occurs, the result can be defeat in detail even with fine information on enemy routes of advance, etc. These constraints do not operate on attackers, in the same way anyway. The attacker has, in principle, a greater appetite for information and can spare men to go get it. He cannot always spare time to get it and to react to it in other than minor ways. But e.g. a probing wave and a reserve, then backing success, is a standard tactic. The weight of the two things can be varied, and that may by one of the "control knob" variables involved in your scouting ideas. An example - everything is better with examples instead of abstractions. In Valley of Trouble, which I presume everyone has played because it is one of the demo fights, the U.S. has a sum total of five infantry platoons. 3 starting rifle, 1 starting engineer, and 1 reinforcement. The reinforcement must act as a reserve, that is obvious. The deployment boxes prevent grouping the entire force, and time it not unlimited. The realistic options for "up" vs. "back", therefore, are 2 up 3 back, 3 up 2 back, or 4 up 1 back. Otherwise put, the U.S. can hold one, or two, of his starting platoons in reserve, or he can send all four in the "first wave". The benefit of additional platoons held back is, of course, that the lay of the defense can be mapped out somewhat before the axis of advance of these platoons is decided upon. The natural balance to me seems to be 3 up and 2 back, and that is what I used the first time I played it. It worked OK, but I sent the engineer platoon as one of the "ups" (the center one), and it might have been better as the additional reserve platoon. The reason I sent it is that I wanted them not only to scout, but to eliminate obstacles if possible, along the line of advance I expected to use as my main avenue, if it was clear enough. I did have an overall initial plan. Rather than commit nowhere until after a recon, I decided on the basis of terrain analysis to make the initial main effort of wide left hook. This advance was made by two platoons, infantry on the outer part of the hook and the engineers on the inner part; one of the Sherman 105s supported the outer, infantry platoon. The other platoon designated "up" was conducting a sort of recon, pretty much exclusively. It was not expected to charge and seize some objective, but only to probe - but to do so as a platoon. Its job was to either serve as a diversion and cause confusion about my main effort, or if the enemy reacted to my main effort correctly, to find a weak spot for a secondary effort. Since I had 2 other infantry platoons and a flock of tanks present or on the way, that seemed like an eminently flexible plan. Yes I had chosen an axis of advance. If things proceeded well along it, I could commit to it all of my armor and 80% of my infantry by half-way through the battle. If enemy reactions made that a poor choice, I would have probed for weak spots elsewhere, and could throw at such a weak spot almost all of my armor and more than half of my infantry. Now, just exactly what am I going to get in the way of greater flexibility, by *not* choosing that first axis of advance? If I send only 2 up, then I am probing everywhere, broad-front recon. I commit to nothing, and presumably do not reveal anything about axes of advance. But in return, at the pointy end I've got 90 guys, and the Germans have an entire company defending the valley. I can ID positions and arty them, sure. But I am not going to secure anything more, really. Whereas, with the choice I made, I had a Sherman 105 and two infantry platoons more or less on line (the engineers not entirely free to manuever because of pillbox observation zones, it is true), when I ran into the German's right flank platoon in a patch of woods. I easily shot the heck out of them. Then the Sherman 105 easily blasted a log MG bunker. The German right flank was then gone, and I could turn the line of pill boxes, and as planned threaten to attack south rather than east - or both. The Germans committed their reserve of course, and the opening stages did not decide the whole battle. The point is simply that the natural seeming 3-2 preserved great flexibility while also allowing enough up front to overwhelm a single-platoon German position. Whereas, a 2-3 long recon beforehand, would not have appreciably increased total flexibility in my opinion, while it would have reduced my ability to blast my way through the German right flank position rapidly and cheaply. Do you agree? Is 3-2 the obvious way to go in "Valley of Trouble", from the standpoint of your recon ideas? It might help if you explain exactly how you play "Valley of Trouble" as the U.S., and especially how you to the recon. I hope this is interesting.

Scout asked - "Does anyone else out there think I over reacted to this?" Yes. I read that comment as an honest question by someone who was trying to understand two points of view, both of which he respected as more informed than his own, which puzzled him by their contrast. Nothing more. The writer, I thought, was thinking that you probably had a point about no time for recon when conducting an attack, if the body involved was 40 guys, and that therefore Pillar's ideas would indeed be inapplicable at that scale, just as you were saying. But he also saw something to Pillar's ideas about finding out where the enemy was before launching at him, and to put the two together he formulated a hypothesis. To wit, that perhaps there is time and need for such pre-attack recon at the battalion scale, but no time for it at the platoon scale. He was trying to reconcile the two positions presented by making a distinction between levels. I saw nothing more than that in the comment, no attempt to cast aspersions, no slight. You know, when people go to your webpage to read your fine strategy articles, we all see you in BDUs addressing a platoon of guys. It is easy to think of that as the perspective you will bring to a discussion, without examining or thinking over the other positions you've occupied or what you have learned from them. And to the average civy or even former reservist (like myself), that pigeonholing is not meant as a slight at all. I have darn little sense of what can and cannot be accomplished with 40 guys up at the pointy end in battle time-scales and amid fog-of-war, because I was a gun-bunny miles away throwing 100+ lbs firecrackers in your general direction - LOL. I've got a sense of such things from wargames, sure, but cross-checking that against reality is exactly what these sorts of discussions are about. When the person who said that cast you in the role of the expert on realistic limits on battle-field recon at the platoon level, I do not think any slight was intended at all. Quite the contrary. As for the substance and atmospherics of your discussion with Pillar, I have several things to say. First, I entirely agree with Scout that CM is made for company-level fights. Even battalions are cumbersome in CM, in terms of the command-span involved. A scale like TacOps is better for battalion level fights (it can handle brigades as long as their are in echelon, but even that is pushing it). In passing, I make note of the "monster" tendency in wargaming. Many wargames are expanded in size and complexity simply by including one additional level down, below the level of the actual important decisions the overall battle-size turns on. This is often a measure taken to increase realism, or player immersion, and sometimes to smooth out the impacts of random events the game system requires. It is a general rule of wargaming that the system design does not have to be as good or as clever if this is done, to get a decent game out of it. But the cost of this is a much heavier burden on the player. In a way, it is a lazy designers choice, but sometimes the results justify the procedure. Other times, it makes the game harder to play for little gain, and is a design mistake. Too abstract, so I will give examples. The old U.S. civil war games like AH Gettysburg, with division-level units, were obviously poor simulations. The unit interactions were wrong. Single die rolls matched against a combat result table determined the outcome of a battle for one flank. The flow of the battle was far from historical. So SPI designed TSS, which used regimental counters with step-loss results about the size of companies. Brigades were represented by commanders and the command system effectively made these brigades the manuever units, but each was represented by 3-5 counters and 10-20 strength points. The CRT was changed to a range-fire basis, of absolute firepower effects rather than odds, and fire effects in turn had morale consequences including retreats and loss of ability to fire, temporarily. The new system captured the flow of the battle extremely well. Single die rolls no longer determined the outcome of whole attacks. The capabilities of formations reflected those of the historical counterparts. This was a successful "monster" design. The load put on the player, however, was high, especially in the board wargame days. (Essentially the same system is used today by the Battleground series). The most famous unsuccessful "monstering" of a game is probably Campaign for North Africa. It was essentially trying to do for the old AH game Afrika Corps what TSS had done for Gettysburg. But the designers so overdid it, that it would have taken a command general staff to run the simulation, and the conduct of the game would have been as slow as the actual war - LOL. I mean, they had "truck points" of light, medium, and heavy that each represented 5 trucks, to cover the entire North African campaign. Individual planes, and even individually rated pilots. It was absurd. I once managed to play a single game turn of the smallest scenario, over the course of several months and with several others - LOL. But the most common case of monstering is an operational-level wargame that gets the command span wrong by one level - that gives the German commander in some portion of the Russian campaign, regiments rather than divisions, for example. Often these are then immediately re-"stacked", to get enough combat power for a bit of frontage, so the result is almost entirely just to make the game far more unwieldy to play. Using any game system in "monster" fashion for the size of fight that is one command level too big for it, therefore, is a very common thing in wargaming, but it is almost always the result of a design mistake and nothing else. On rare occasions, it performs admirably (like TSS). But usually a system one level up with clever rules (like step losses, to take a trivial example) simulates the events just as well, while keeping the player out of the minutae and focused on the actually decisive elements for the overall battle scale. (E.g. if CM had individual men given orders or running around as directed by the AI, it would fail utterly, as a game even if not as a simulation (and it would fail as a simulation with anything like the present AI). The individual casualty and firepower but squad movement mix, does much better. All of that is by way of explaining that I agree very strongly that CM is best at the company scale. What do I think someone is missing who "uses it" for higher scales? He is wasting his time on minutae, for one, for the types of decisions that matter for e.g. brigade level combat. He is missing the sense of the importance of each decision, and each manuever element, that an actual battlefield commander must have, for another. That is a consequence of the small size of the command span. There is nothing "expendable" to a platoon leader with only 3 squads to conduct his whole mission with all day, as an example. He is intensely conscious of the limited number of formations his unit can adopt, which is itself a trivial consequence of the limited number of sub-units that make it up. But those are minor matters, and obviously Pillar or anyone else can do whatever he likes with his own CPU. Now, all of that said, I do agree with Pillar about one substantive thing, though with qualification. It is indeed very important to figure out exactly where the enemy is on the CM-scale battlefield. It is not enough to know the enemy is "holding that village", which is all a CM briefing, to represent prior recon, can typically tell you. But the qualification has to do with losses of small units in CM fights. CM infantry firefights are not very bloody, fast, unless the ranges are very close or the targeted men are in the open. because of this, each infantry formation has a certain staying power. But there is an exception to this. When detached squads or especially half-squads run into distinctly larger infantry formations, they usually die very rapidly while accomplishing practically nothing. I give an example. A scouting half-squad is sneaking to the edge of a body of woods to get a look on who is trying to cross the open ground to reach it. As it gets to the point where it can see the clearing, it sees an MG and a number of "?s" on the far side of the clearing, then a full squad walks right out into the open heading toward it. In the same minute of time, that squad walks right by the half-squad into the woods next to it, despite being fired upon and taking 1-2 casualties. Meanwhile, the MG and other guys across the way open up and partially suppress the half-squad. The following minute, even with "withdraw-run" orders, the half-squad is shot pieces by the squad in the woods <15 yards away before it can withdraw. Now, this is close to the best "ambush" situation you can realistically expect for a scouting half-squad. If the "charging" squad hadn't been supported at all, or hadn't come so close, or hadn't ended with concealment rather than in the open, then the ambusher might have done a little better. But really, the case shows that any half-squad, in pure CM terms and moving in cover as they usually do, is risking an "overrun" by any full squad it stumbles upon. Why this long digression about half-squads? Simply to illustrate a larger point. At the scale of CM, light recon forces will tend to give the enemy many-on-one engagements and get wiped out very easily. Unless you know you will succeed in spotting the enemy a long way off (to lower firepowers), such seperated forces are extremely vunerable. And in a company-scale fight, you really can't afford to make your enemy a gift of an entire platoon's worth of infantry, in a series of such clashes. It is real easy to get 1/4 of your men killed in less than five minutes, thinking you are "scouting" the enemy, or "delaying" him, when all you are really doing is giving him the dream many-on-one lopsided shoot-out he'd kill for, even if it required a long flanking movement. I've seen more than one company advance on-line, run into a "OP line" platoon and shoot the heck out of it in less than 2 minutes, with the end result like 5 guys down in the company, and the platoon half dead and the rest broken and running. These incidents lend credence to Scout's points about "knowing how to attack" and "just doing it", instead of feeding in teams piecemeal, and attriting yourself much more than any company can really afford. The trick is to manage to figure out where the other guy is without letting him overrun a line of OPs. And he *will* overrun it, for nothing more than mussed hair, if he runs in to it with a force a "level" higher (platoon v. squad, etc). This means if you do use OPs, they should not even stick around for a single minute of "ambush" firing, but should run like a warm place as soon as they see the enemy. It also means the best scouters are units with longer range with covered positions that see one area but are not seen by all others. E.g. a unit on the back side of a wood, that sees forward at a 45 degree angle only at what advances on the right flank, say. Then if it spots something, everything in front of it is not going to be able to fire, and if its range is good (an MG or sniper e.g.) it can shoot a little before withdrawing. Obviously this is harder on the attack. But teamed advances can have the effect, looking over their "inward" sides. I do agree, then, on the importance of finding the enemy exactly, not just at the level of the briefing. But one has to be quite careful with recon or screening elements in CM-scale fights. They are much weaker than they appear, and concentrated attackers can blow through them, even if e.g. said attackers are caught in open ground. In practice, you will not "pin and delay" a platoon or company advance with the "cross-fire" of two half-squads or LMGs. The best way to scout on the attack, in my experience, is simply to have the lead infantry platoons use fire and movement principles, with a wedge or a modification of it, without anything more elaborate. Meaning, the point squad, as a full squad, goes into the piece of cover, while the rest of the platoon overwatches, a squad sorta toward each side and (if caught up) the MG and support weapons centered. The distance ahead for the "point" should not be allowed to increase beyond 100 yards, and in tight terrain should be closer still. I suspect this is exactly the sort of thing Scout has in mind when he says "just do it", and he thinks of this as traveling or the attack, not as any preliminary recon time-period. Anyway, those are my thoughts on the substance of your fracas. I should also say that I am disappointed in that fracas itself. I understand why Scout got "set off", but I do think that began from an overreaction. I don't think Pillar has been very reasonable after that, though, and I do get the sense that he expects people to agree with him and is annoyed if they simply don't. I think you both have useful things to say about tactics and CM tactics in particular. And that you'd do all of us a service if you remembered, that we want to hear what each of you think and decide for ourselves. You aren't going to convince, for one me, of anything, by pretending the other guy doesn't have any point at all, when he obviously does.

"the quantity of effort spent on guarding the Atlantic Wall and messing around in North Africa then Italy was enoromous" Not true. In 1941-2, the entire committment in N.A. was 3 divisions. The occupation forces in France were used for refitting units worn out in the east that would have refitted in Germany otherwise. The forces of occupation in Scandanavia and the Balkans were tiny, and saw little action in the case of the latter until 1944. (There was fighting, but the proxy forces did it). The only significant exception was the decision to reinforce Tunisia after abandoning Libya, which I mentioned as a mistake already, and still amounted to handful of divisions. Kesselring held Italy successfully with minimal forces. Before D-Day, the occupation forces in France did increase to a more significant figure, but #1 that is after the critical period I mentioned and #2 they still were not engaged yet and the billet was still used for rotating units. The eastern front was manned by hundreds of divisions, not tens. The Russians fielded 300 before it was over. In the period from fall '42 to spring of '44, the war in Russia was the main event in every respect, and for Germany everything else was a sideshow. Moreover, that is where they actually lost the war, which brings me to my next point. You evidently haven't understood even the subject I am addressing. I am not talking about hypothetical what-ifs in which Germany supposedly might have won the war. In my opinion, there aren't any, and any leadership she might have had that would have started the war would have been incapable of winning it no matter what. But that has nothing to do with the question I am addressing. The question I am addressing is how Germany lost. How. I illustrate with an analogy. An average 14 year old chess player from some high school team might play an international grand master at a 50-game simultaneous expedition. There is not realistic chance he will win the game, even before a move is made, and everybody knows it. But it is nevertheless possible to watch their game, and to notice here at move 20 "that was a blunder", and to follow it up with "see, he does this and this, and you have no reply anymore", and to look ahead as it actually happened, and lo, five moves later the young man's position is hopeless. One can then say "that blunder on move 20 lost the game, that is how you lost". There is no implication whatever that the young man would have won had he not made that move. Why does one conduct such an analysis? It is how the young man learns from his defeat. Not, learns not to play against international grandmasters. Not, learns enough to defeat the next one he plays. Simply, he learns what mistake he made, why it cost him the game, why it was a mistake, and he generalizes that perhaps, thus learning about other possible positions as well. The German defeat in WW II is of no interest to me in military history terms, except for one reason. Their actual military defeat contains useful lessons. There are no useful lessons in their leader's raving and criminal idiocy in trying to take over the world. But there certainly are useful military lessons from the conduct of the war, both by and against Germany. And the issue of central interest on that subject, is how it happens that the Germans went from kicking Russian tail in 1941 and the summer of 1942, to having the Russians kick their tail in the subsequent 18 months. Frankly, everything else about how the war actually happened, is militarily a few foot-notes compared to that passage of arms (for ground warfare I mean - obviously the Navy learned things about carriers, yadda yadda). I do not study military history to speculate about what ifs, and I don't give a tuppeny darn for any of the characters in the affair one way or the other. I study the history, to learn facts, truths, about military realities. If the campaign between Germany and Russia from 1942 to 1944 had been fought by different countries in 1200 BC on Mars, I'd still study it (if I knew about it, LOL). The interest is entirely internal to the military art - what are the military lessons here? And those military lessons don't have anything to do with the overdetermined question of Germany's eventual defeat. I am not asking the 14 year old's chess rating, because I don't give a darn. I am asking what happened on move 20 and did he hang a rook. And the fact is, that the German army was not beaten militarily in the fall of 1942. And the German army was beaten militarily by the spring of 1944. And the Russians did the beating, and the question is how and why. As for the production theory, you are ignoring in your "all allies, all axis, all the war" figures, that the war was already decided by the time the U.S. and British ground forces engaged the German army for real. The stuff they had done through the critical period was a series of sideshows, that did not draw off any appreciable portion of the German army. The Russians did not outproduce the Germans by the ratios you discuss, and the Germans faced only the Russians, practically speaking, in the critical period. Lend lease added a trivial amount to the Russian war program in that period, although it helped with trucks and railroad equipment. The tanks and guns the Russians used to defeat the German army were Russian made ones, and the Germans deployed almost all of their ground weapons against the Russians over the period when they went from not beaten to back-broken. The odds explanation fails to explain the data for the period when Germany was actually beaten. The odds explanation is perfectly adequate to show that Germany was outmatched strategically, or that the Allies combined rating was higher than the high school kids. But that is irrelevant to the question of how he lost. The odds explanation is also sufficient to explain things like the crushing of the German position after the U.S., Britain, and Russia were all fully engaged over broad fronts, from the fall of 1944 until the end of the war. But Germany lost the war militarily, its army was beaten, before then, so the odds explanation alone cannot explain the result. Like a chess game in which the end position on the board is 3 pieces of heavy wood against nothing but a king and pawns, you can conclude that loss of material mattered, but that alone does not tell you how the material was lost. I can put it in the form of a prediction and a falsification. If odds were the only issue that caused the actual German military defeat in the field, then one woudl expect the Russians to get the initiative only after they had a large advantage in odds. You would expect the Germans to keep winning until they faced steep odds, and then to begin losing, and as they did so for the odds to steepen, and then eventually for the German position to collapse. But that is simply not what happened. The Russians take the initiative when the overall forces are about equal. They do not have to wait until their have 3-1 odds. The Germans ramp up their production and field their technical innovations at precisely the point where the Russians ahve started winning. The odds move in favor of the Russians because the German forces are being destroyed, not simply because the Russian forces are building up. On the odds thesis, you might expect something like the Russian summer offensive of 1943, sometime in mid 1944 after the U.S. had opened a second front. But one does not see this. I revert to my chess analogy for a second. The 14 year old winds up with a weak pawn structure coming out of the opening. Against a strong enough player, exploiting those weakened pawns will probably be enough to defeat him. On turn 15, someone looks at the board and sees the weak pawns, and after turn 30 and the resignation he hears the youngster lost. "Oh, he lost because of his weak pawns", he might think. "Well no, actually, he lost faster than that - he blundered on move 20 and lost a rook". What actually happened to the German army was that it was militarily defeated in the field by a force with only a slight edge in numbers (and none at the start of the period) with comparable equipment and worse experience and training. And the reason why it lost, it because it made clear mistakes in the deployment and use of its forces, and the Russian high command exploited those mistakes and broke the back of the German army. That actually happened, and all the long-odds stories (or excuses) only come later. And what were these mistakes? I have repeated them several times and in each reply you have avoided addressing them, as to their actual content, and instead have simply re-characterized them in broad terms (like "lack of mobility", which I presume is a euphemism for the idiotic "hold at all cost" orders). But the mistakes were much more particular than that. Yes, such rigidity was part of the problem. But the part you have avoided addressing is the part that is truly interesting from the standpoint of modern combined arms doctrine. The Germans decided to try to take the city of Stalingrad, and a year later the Germans decided to assault the built-up Russian positions in the Kursk salient. They committed enourmous resources to both endeavors, and both failed with heavy casualties. And both were immediately followed by mobile, massed-armor counterattacks on weak infantry formations to each flank of the massed "seige" attack. Why is this especially interesting? Because in the prior 3 years, the Germans had conquered Europe by doing precisely the opposite. Did they attack Poland from the western side only, in a massed attack at one prominent city or bulge? No. Did they attack France by seiging the Maginot line with a giant battering-ram of heavily armored assault guns? No. Did they attack Yugoslavia by street-fighting for every block of Belgrade? No. Did they achieve their successes in Russia in 1941 or the summer of 1942 by such methods, perhaps? No. How about Africa, did they assault Tobruk that way and take it and make their progress that way? No. The Germans invented modern mobile combined arms warfare, and for the first 3 years of the war they practiced their new doctrine with stunning success against enemy after enemy, cumultatively racking up one of the largest strings of lopsided military victories on human record. And then the reverse happened, and they lost operation after operation. And at the precise turning point of these two series of events, one finds them abandoning the methods by which they had succeeded before, and adopting others that never worked once. This is much more than some coincidence. Undoubtedly, the rationality of German decision making declined precipitously as soon as it became likely, and later obvious, that Germany was going to lose the war. The high command began gambling, there is no question that was involved. There is a portion of this which is simple delusion, hope defeating analysis. But the gambles were not even smart gambles, they were recognizably dumb ones. The geniuses who had planned the successes, whatever their own limitations, were off the case. They were no longer in charge. The truths they were peddling were not wanted (like, in the summer of 1943, a mobile defense was sound and a seige attack at Kursk was not). And this is not just a matter of "lack of mobility" aka stupid hold-at-all-cost orders. The errors made were precisely about the operational employment of armor. The German employment of armor recognizably changed between the fall of 1942 and the spring of 1944, and it changed dramatically for the worse. Once does not even have to judge by the results. One can go look at the actual decisions, and if one knows anything about the modern combined arms doctrines the Germans invented, it is obvious that decision after decision was a mistake. And exactly the mistakes to be expected from someone who had completely misunderstood the reasons for the military revolution, since WW I. They were the mistakes of a technicist - if I just put enough Panthers opposite their armor I will destroy it, e.g. Of someone thinking that the tanks themselves confered combat power of their own essence (therefore, put them right in the line and fight them as long as possible, as though "armor units" just have higher "combat factors"). Of someone who thought morale the essential factor in combat (no retreating, prestige objectives, elite formations given preferential equipment). Needless to say, also of someone who thought evil or ruthlessness was itself a secret source of power (the commissar order, 100 other things). These are common enough errors that they are immediately recognizably. They will crop up automatically in some portion of any batch of military men, unless they are explicitly countered and trained out of them by truer notions, in the modern combined arms mobile era that is. They are also recognizably lessons from a previous war. I really do not see the reason for your strong resistence to these notions. They are quite obvious to me, and I think they are convincing to anyone who hears them articulated plainly and knows the history in detail, especially the history of the east-front fighting in the critical period. Anyone who has faced the operational decisions about how to deploy German divisions or corps during the critical period, for example, knows exactly what I am talking about. "Gee, he's got a ton of armor up here around Orel, and another batch of it down here south of Kharkov. I know! I'll put all my mobile divisions smack in between them, right on the front line, and then deplete them with frontal attacks on that dug-in infantry army! That's just the ticket!" And for my next magical trick, I will stick by neck in a noose and hang by it until dead.

So take off the 7.5 tons add-on armor, start from the original, and replace it with modern stuff that is more capable if you want. Do you think that kind of modification is going to cost 70 billion dollars??? Why can't anyone acknowledge that it is stooopid to not use a fine light armor platform just to pay tons for a new one to do about the same job? Why does everyone *want* to blow $70 billion to get *less* firepower? Do people here have any idea what $70 billion buys in the way of readiness, spares, more high-tech vision and communications equipment, etc? If the whole idea is smarter and higher tech weapons, why is all the money going into the tin can part we already paid for, instead of the gadgets, and why is the whole affair built around C-130s fer crying out loud?

Great question, but I don't know the answer. On your figures, be careful of one-month figures, because the consumption rate will exceed the production rate in periods of heavy combat, but over the long run it simply cannot do so. (There aren't enough stocks to drawn down continually, especially for the mix of types that will be firing later in the war, etc). Mid 1941 means, of course, Operation Barbarossa, the huge initial battles with the Russians. Not surprising therefore that the rate of consumption was well above the rate of production. They were drawning down the stocks built up and dumped forward to prepare for that campaign, over several months when the consumption rate was near zero (just limited fighting in the Balkan campaign, not artillery-intensive by comparison).

You are simply wrong about the weight of the Bradley. It weighs 45,000 pounds which is 22.5 (short) tons, not 45 tons. 1/3rd the weight of the M-1, not 2/3rds. It is only 10% heavier than the design spec for the MGS, which in fact was set just below the Brad's weight, to allow anything but the Brad effectively. And the MGS weight spec was subsequently relaxed because the designs were not meeting it. C-17s, incidentally, were supposed to be able to carry two Brads at a time. My comment on the vehicle that has "tracks, a turret, a gun, and an ATGM launcher" was about the Brad of course. I know quite well the BTR has none of those - just like the LAV. While the BMP has all of them - just like the Brad. As for Javelin v. TOW, there is no reason whatever Javelins can't be mounted on the Brad in place of the TOWs, including top-attack versions. Or later ATGMs for that matter. And there is also no reason for the squads to have any fewer dismounted Javelins. As for the LAV design spec v. 50 cal, you evidently did not read what I said. Yes, the LAV is rated to stop standard AP from 50 cals at about 500 yards (+) and from the front. But slightly up-market AP rounds increase the armor penetration of .50 cal above what standard ball AP can do. This was a critical issue during the war in Afghanistan. The Afghans had a limited supply of Russian-designed 14.5mm AA MGs, which could hole the heavily armored Russian helo gunships (the Hind in particular). But they had many more .50 cals available (via Pakistan for one thing), which were not proving effective against the Hind. So they went to slightly upmarket AP ammo, that costs marginally more and delivers better penetration. Or rather, our intel guys told Paki intel guys to tell the Afghans this was all they needed to do, more like. It worked. And as a byproduct, the Afghans found that their HMGs could now chew the shinola out of the light Russian APCs, and the BTR in particular. Which is a lot easier than getting close enough to RPG one. It is not rocket science and the technique is definitely "out". Any government and most serious paramilitaries in the world can buy up-market improved AP ammo for 50 cals. It effectively gives the 50 cal armor penetration abilities comparable to the Russian 14.5mm AA MG, which can penetrate the LAV but not the Bradley. As for the LAV vs. artillery, let's just say I wouldn't want to be in one if the enemy arty guys have 155mm HE. The side and rear armor on a LAV is rated to stop an AK-47 round, and that is about it. As for the inter-service cop out, that is just that, a cop out. Spending $70 billion on new LAVs to work with C-130s is horsefeathers. You could easily spend a fraction of that and fix and expand the C-17 fleet enough to fly brigades in Brads, and still have lots left over for the new gadgets to make the force more effective. Since you then do not need to buy a whole new fleet of LAVs, the army's budget situation for everything else would be looser, not tighter. As for the idea that the smaller logistical requirements of the wheels vs. tracks is essential, I can put my assessment bluntly as a prediction. Everything you save on less POL weight flown to the theater with the LAV, you will lose on excess demand from *medical* flown to or from it, compared to the Brad, in any case hot enough that the deployment time actually matters. In cases that simply are not that hot, all you will lose is one news cycle and a pittance of expense.

err, "their own" - sorry...

Actually, Terence's answer is a fine one in a way he may not have intended. As one example, the Brits used to give men sent off on an attack a rum ration, that filled a canteen cup about half way. Others had there one versions, and the cellars of France were a famous and constant lure. Perhaps your crack gunner was plastered - LOL.

It has a pretty low profile, which is good. In tank vs. tank fights, you are relying on the same things Allied tankers always do - teamwork and shooting first and ambush and flank locations, etc. It can shrug off bazooka rounds (skirts probably help) fairly often, but can be holed by them and by any main tank type gun. It's a tank, and equal to the Sherman in most respects. I can also related one CM experience involving the Pz IV. But a spoiler alert first, if you haven't played most of the scenarios yet. Don't read the following unless you've played the scenarios, or don't care. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * In the short, 10 turn Hurtgen scenario, a U.S. infantry company with arty support and air support (which the briefing says nothing about), but not tanks or heavy AT weapons, is tasked to assault an open ridge line, backed up by a wooded one. A band in front of the second ridge is scattered trees, behind in the heavier forest proper. All the objectives are in the woodline of this second ridge. The time available is 10 minutes and the map is very small - no room for any fancy flanking. And the cover in front of that ridge consists of the prior crest-line, a small patch of brush or two, and half-a-dozen single 20x20m areas of scattered trees. Although at set-up the U.S. player doesn't know it, the Germans are waiting just behind the first crest in foxholes, with their "outpost" line. And once on the crest, the Americans come into range of the supporting main position, which includes mortars, machineguns, infantry, and - one humble Pz IV. That tank is the scariest thing I've yet seen in CM, simply because of the context in which it appears, and the fact that it is a fully functioning, fully capable, full-blown tank. Not an armored car, or assault gun, mind. You are on a ridge-line and there is no cover. Your AT weapons consist of 3 bazookas, and a couple of squads with demo charges. From the 1st ridgeline (not to hard to take) and its scattered trees, it is nearly 200 yards to the forward portion of the next ridge. Where, concealed in scattered trees, is this humble beastie. The only real protection on that ridge is the foxholes left by the German outpost line. The tank quickly gets them zeroed and sends in shell after shell. Do you know what the hit probability of a bazooka firing through scattered trees at a short AFV 200 yards away is? About 4%, that's what - LOL. My bazooka teams had used a few rockets on foxholes in the early fight (the battle opens with a mad minute as your lead-off guys draw the fire of the entire German OP line and your whole company replies). Lost some when a carrier or two were hit, as well. All told I think I had 16 or 18 bazooka rounds that all got fired at that Pz IV. I hit it four times, one upper hull front and one turret front form long range (~150 yards) and 2 turret fronts from close (50 yards) late in the battle. "No serious damage" was the best I got. This was certainly unlucky, but it shows it does happen. And the air force went after that beastie, with several runs that made an impressive amount of dust and noise. In one of these there was a loud bang smack on the Pz IV and a big uncertain German cross afterward, in the dust. Did they get it? 30 seconds later, nope, it is still crawling around in those trees spitting at me - LOL. I managed to clear out the infantry and soon enough to actually rush the objective. The Germans had like a broken squad and 5 men left in another pinned one hiding in the trees, left at the end. I had around 40 guys around this Pz IV trying to finish the sucker with grenades, hiding in the German foxholes, playing tag team as it crawled away from one toward another. My last bazooka team (the others had a man left each, but no more rockets) got its shots right at the end, at after 10th minute they were sitting in a little bit of brush staring done the things' barrel at 50 yards, with the ammo reading at "out". My plan after that was, I was going to have the 105mm arty dump smoke all over it. I had one demo charge left in one squad coming up through the forest behind it. They'd try to tackle it in the smoke, and if that didn't work everybody would chase it out of the woods into the open by rushing it in the smoke. Then the men could hide in the woods proper while the FO tried to tag it I suppose. "Battalion HQ, yes, this is the company you just sent on that idiot frontal assault on that ridge you said we already owned, even though I told you different. Yes, we took the darn thing. I'm here right now. Now, there was a whole German company up here, but they scrammed or are dead by now. Yeah, sure. Now, listen major. The reason for this radio call is... There is this tank still out there, in the open, between us and Battalion HQ. Yeah, we used all the bazooka rockets. I saw four of them bounce off the sucker myself. Demo charges too. Air force hit it, its still running. Um, Major, we were just in quite a firefight and the ammos a little low up here. There are also a number of wounded, some of theirs too. Remember that lecture the colonel gave about how the Germans like to defend with lots of little counterattacks? I think that should be forming up about now... Um, could you please send something up here that can kill a freakin' tank?"

"implementation of TacOps style SOPs (standard operating procedures) would go a long ways to fixing this. They work great in that game" Yep, that is very true, something like that could cover this sort of problem admirably. In TacOps, which is 2-D, modern, and platoon scale (like Panzerblitz rather than Squad Leader, but with individual vehicle step losses and options to split units, etc), all the units can have SOPs set for them. Just like real-world standard operating procedures, these lay out a specific action that unit (or type, if you set them en-masse) will take if a certain event occurs. For example, you can set it pop smoke and reverse 50 meters if fired upon, or to halt and unload passengers after firing (to continue to engage a target). There are a limited number of allowed actions and triggering events. You set them by hitting a button on the units control or orders panel, which brings up a sort of checklist, and you check off the boxes for the actions you want that unit to take in such situations. So, if CM2 had SOPs, it might have a box for "engage infantry while hunting" that you could check yes or no. If there is just one way you always want it to be done, that would be a matter of selecting a unit of one type, and picking that SOP for all such units. Then it would stay there for all of them for the whole scenario, unless you told 'em different. Incidentally, TacOps is plenty of fun itself, though without the 3-D "flash and chrome" of CM. It uses many BF standard ideas that also appear in CM, like we-go movement and great stretch LOS tools.

Yes, the HQs move out sooner. But that is why my HQs always use a 1-pause delay when the platoon moves out, so they trail slightly instead of leading slightly. If the quality is lower, a second pause might be in order. The AI would act smarter if it did the same. Rather than thinking the fastest movement is best, the HQ should pause when necessary, to keep "on station" with the men being commanded.

"the war journels I have read from German units, most were facing incredible odds in tank to tank fighting" Yes, certainly. But it was not production that brought about those local odds ratios. As I said already, in the critical period during which Germany actually lost the war in Russia (and I am not in the least talking "what ifs", but what really happened), from the last quarter of 1942 until the first quarter of 1944, the Russians did not field massively more of anything that the Germans did, simply because of factory output. The Americans and British were only fighting in North Africa and Italy over that time period. The total forces involved in all of that fighting were tiny compared to the forces engaged on the Russian front. Incidentally, they would have stayed smaller still if the genius corporal hadn't insisted on reinforcing Tunisia when it was obviously already lost, but that is a quibble. The Russians alone simply did not outproduce the Germans by much. And a lot of the excess in the overall production of the two for the entire war period, comes at the end of the war, after it no longer mattered. The Russians did not outproduce the Germans by more than 2:1 in anything, counting the last years and counting their focus on a few items to the exclusion of all else (so much so that undernourishment was an extremely serious practical issue - leave alone its humanitarian side - in Russian rear areas down through 1944). At the start of the critical period, the German army in Russia was larger numerically than the Russian one, better equipped in most respects, and much more experienced and trained. During that period, the Germans ramped up their war output in every respect. The Russians did not outproduce the Germans during that period by more than 3:2 in most types of weapons. The Germans introduced their most successful innovation designs for ground warfare, especially the Panther, in that period and fielded it in increasingly large numbers. They faced no fighting on other fronts of anything like the same scale (the scale of ground forces on other fronts is lower by a factor of 10). Industrial expansion continued strongly despite Allied bombing. The Luftwaffe was intact throughout the period. But by the end of that period, the German army was effectively defeated and it never really recovered. In the following six months, the army collapsed on both eastern and (new) western fronts, with catastrophic losses of up to half the force. How and why did the Russians kick the Germans tail from October 1942 to March 1944? There is no mistake about it, the Germans got creamed, and from a starting position that was stronger in just about every respect. I am not considering "what ifs", about whether the whole war would have ended differently if yadda yadda, or how the Germans would still have lost because unga bunga. I know all that, but that is not what is in question. What is in question is a military fact whose cause is sought, about an actual event not a hypothetical one. Rival hypotheses can be formulated, but then they must be tested against the known facts. And not the known facts about issues that do not bear, about U-Boats or V-2 research or Pacific island hopping. Just how exactly did the Germans manage to get their heads handed to them by the Russian army in those 18 months when they went from "ahead" to "back broken". Nor will wails about how hard it is to fight after your back is broken, address the issue of how it happened. It is suggested that the Germans were extremely clever and inventive and had all the best technology and all the best equipment. OK, so we can rule *out* a technological explanation, one presumes. The data are pointed the wrong way. Numbers, numbers, that is the all purpose explanation. The Germans were brilliant and had all the best equipment, but they were defeated by 5 and 6 tanks to one because the Russians just made 5 or 6 tanks to every 1 German one. Nope, the production ratio is probably more like 3:2 in this period and not above the 2:1 total war average, and the starting fleets are about equal size. It is suggested that the Russians learned all the tricks of German armor doctrine so the advantage the Germans had before went away. But the Russians didn't learn German tank doctrine - they were using a tank doctrine that was more like British tank doctrine from 1940-1941, which is rightly and roundly condemned as hopelessly old-fashioned and missing the point. The Russian doctrine did improve over the period in question, but without achieving the level of sophistication of German armor doctrine in the period 1939-1942. It is suggested that there was some residual problem from the leftovers of the German general staff system, a truly bizarre comment considering the fact that most consider is a great asset to them, which Stavka tried but failed to match in professionalism and efficiency of planning, and which George Marshall certainly sought to emulate. Perhaps Guderian just meant that not everyone agreed with him about everything. The most capable German armor commanders were, however, those who saw no conflict between the staff system and its "school solutions" and the new armor doctrine, an opinion by the way shared by the U.S. armor commanders and staff. So far, we only have plausibly going one way that the Russians had a modest edge in new weapons production, to balance which the Germans have supposedly better technology, better tanks in particular, are more clever, better trained, far more experienced, with a capable staff and innovative armor commanders, and to top it off they start with a slightly larger force. Yet fast forward and there they are, kicked bodily out of the Ukraine with between 1/4 and 1/3 of the German army annihilated. What a mystery, huh? The Germans were not allowed to use their own armor doctrine in the second half of world war two. The first time I said that, it seems someone took me to be talking about some hypothetical new doctrine that was never practiced. No, not so. I mean the modern combined arms doctrines of mobile warfare invented by men like Guderian and Rommel, tweaked by others, and operationalized in a series of campaigns that conquered all of Europe in the preceeding 3 years. The German army was not allowed to fight in that manner in the second half of world war two. Why is this so hard to grasp? The Germans lost their battles and took catastrophic losses during the critical period, despite their other advantages working in their favor - on their own probably enough to outweigh the modest numbers odds they were facing - they had beaten far steeper odds in the previous 3 years regularly - and in the process they lost Army Group South, rebuilt it out of new production, then lost it again. Why did they lose it? Go to the histories instead of speculating. You can find the dates and places where the units died, and trace the military events back on the map to find out why things unfolded that way. They lost Army Group South twice, in each case to massive flanking breakthroughs by Soviet armor-heavy reserves that counterattacked. That counterattacked *after* the Germans had concentrated their available forces - and especially their armor - opposite a single fortress-like objective and failed to storm said position, despite stubborn and repeated essentially frontal attacks, which inflicted enourmous losses on the attackers, in return for results in no case better than even exchanges of men. While these storming operations were going on, the Russians refrained from committing large portions of their armor, and instead used it for the flanking counterattacks, which were delivered at weak infantry positions. Stalingrad and Kursk are the names given to the two battles. Sometimes they refer only to the storming operations and their failure. Sometimes the terms are meant to include the subsequent Russian counterattacks and the catastrophic consequences thereof to the Germans. Where in German armor doctrine as practiced from 1939 to 1942 does one find it the rule and desireable use of armor, to use it as a frontal battering ram against an entrenched enemy fortress position backed by strong reserves? Where in German mobile warfare practice among the masters of mobile warfare, on defense as well as attack (like Rommel and Manstein, just to name two), do you find a reason or an excuse for these plans and these employments of the available armor? Nowhere. The Germans were not practicing their own 1939-1942 armor doctrines in the critical period. About the only exception one can find is a month or two - February 1943 e.g. - when they acted differently and got better results, typically during disasters and only until the use of better doctrine restored the immediate situation. I am not talking about what ifs. Army Group South died twice, and it died because of military *mistakes*, which were recognizably *mistakes* from the standpoint of the German army's own successful doctrines. The Germans lost the battles in the critical period because they did things with their army and their armor in particular, that are recognizably *dumb*, not brilliant or clever or inventive. That have nothing to do with their own well-developed doctrine. In other words, they lost those battles because they did demonstrably stupid things, even though some of them knew better. The losing chess player says "he just had so much more material at the end, so I couldn't hold him", and it is true enough. But how did he lose his rook? He made a dumb move and he lost his rook, that is how. The rest was a consequence. It may be the fellow playing him would have beaten him some other way if he hadn't lost that way. But what actually happened is, the guy made a dumb move, and his opponent took his freaking rook. In the case of Army Group South, twice. Both during the critical period mentioned. And the "dumb moves" occurred because the Germans ignored their own discoveries about the principles of mobile warfare, and laid themselves open to mobile-warfare replies. Even if not expertly delivered with full-blown understanding of combined arms, yet delivered. Then the Germans met those replies with inadequate rigid defenses of exactly the same kind as their early-war enemies had used, with the same lack of success. And that all happened, I submit, because the men in charge of the German army did not understand why their own doctrines had been successful. The men who invented those doctrines certainly did. But the supreme commander did *not*, and he threw the critical elements of the successful doctrine out the window without knowing it, because he had misidentified the causes of the earlier successes, and because he would not listen to anybody trying to tell him different. And that misidentification is extremely common. Many people still make such errors *today*. It is not trivial to get this correct. Prominent historians with distinguished careers and numerous monographs under their belt, get it wrong regularly. It is not a piece of common folk wisdom, that everyone can be expect to know, nor that everyone who looks into the matter can be expected to get right. The answers are not lying around in the open, such that one has to be an idiot not to see them. The alternate, wrong explanations that typically deceive people about the subject are plausible on the surface and easier to grasp and remember. These and related errors mislead trained general officers whose careers were dedicated to getting it right, with hundreds of thousands of lives riding on the outcome, and many of them still got it wrong. Yet somehow, the immediate reaction to any attempt to inform anyone of anything at all on the subject, is taken as some sort of personal insult. "Of course I understand all the principles of modern mobile warfare, you jackanape. Don't you know I've read 30 books?" I wonder why most people don't have the same attitude about physics, as though they think they are Paul Dirac because they once listened to a tape by Feynman or took college physics. It is not any kind of insult to suggest that perhaps knowledge of the principles of modern mobile warfare is not exactly common property, even among bright people who make it their life's business to know that subject to the exclusion of everything else. But it is instructive to see the "don't call me ignorant" reaction, because that reaction was involved in the historical events as well. People did not like to be taught about this stuff. They thought they already knew it. They thought suggesting otherwise was commenting on their jockey shorts size or something. Geez, imagine trying to teach it to a dictator in front of a bunch of high-brow generals whom he regarded as hopeless stick-in-the-muds. Yes, professor, I will now go to school professor, that is very interesting professor, Oh I see professor, I had misunderstood professor. With captains at an army war college that might work, or even young men at university. With a tyrant? LOL. The Germans made bonehead moves and lost a rook. Some of the seconds and kibbitzers knew perfectly well it was a dumb move and said so, but the player himself was not as good, did not know it out of pride, and dismissed their advice. After all of that, German doctrine actually used in practice still did not improve, but instead continued to go downhill, with brief upticks after disasters as the "kibbitzers" got their way on choice of next move. Incidentally, I am going through all of this in the interest of explaining my ideas on it all, and in the interest of correcting what I consider common errors on the subject, made by many otherwise perfectly informed persons. I don't give a darn what anyone else thinks about me, and little about what others think about the war events, at least when it is another rehash of the standard versions I can heard a hundred times before rather than anything new. I append to this, so that people can get a clear sense of my "thesis", ratings from 1 to 5 I would give the various powers on their practice of combined arms doctrine during various parts of the war. Not what the best men on that side knew (whether De Gualle or Guderian) but what the existing command structure actually allowed or made the fighting men do. First I explain what the rank numbers are supposed to mean - 5 - fully understood and integrated modern mobile doctrine. Combined arms plus concentrated mobile power used operationally in the right manner, etc. 4 - minor deviations from the above or close approaches to it. Missing elements from coordination, partial errors in mass or operational uses, etc. 3 - operational use of massed armor, a half-measure. Combined arms missing or largely so, but armor is mostly concentrated and is employed for proper mobile operations at basically the right sort of targets, etc. 2 - dismal understanding or use of modern combined arms. Combinations are used, but the operational roles are misunderstood. Armor sometimes distributed, sometimes massed, but rarely used in its proper operational roles. 1 - mobile operations ignored or fundamentally misunderstood. Linear thinking, infantry thinking. Tanks as pillboxes and re-deployable machine-gun nests. Germany, 1939-1942 - 5 Germany, 1943 - 2/3 Germany, 1944-1945 - 2 Russia, 1941 - 1 Russia, 1942 - 2 Russia, 1943 - 3 Russia, 1944-1945 - 4 France, 1939-1940 - 1 France, 1944-1945 - 4 Britain, 1939-1940 - 2 Britain, 1942-1944 - 3 Britain, 1945 - 3/4 USA, 1942-1943 - 3 USA, 1944-1945 - 4/5 One man's opinion...

Here is another one I'd like in the same category - hidden exit locations. Right now, one gets those silly looking "enemy exits here" signs, which are #1 rather mood-breaking (extremely artificial) and #2 how the heck do I know which way he is trying to go? If I should, let the briefing tell me. But without specific intel, there should be e.g. meeting engagements where neither side even knows which direction the other side is coming from or headed toward. So exit locations should be hidden to enemy players, and incidentally even the friendly ones should be toggled off or on as the player directs.

I offer my opinion. The army is brain-dead to pick the LAV. They should have used the Bradley and modified it as needed, and the M8 or something like it for the gun system. The army knows the Bradley and how to fight in it. It is also tracked, and long experience has shown the value of tracks in everything but road marches. Even half-tracks do not have the off-road mobility in terrain of a tracked vehicle. And it is better armored, enough to deal with MGs anyway, while the LAV can be penetrated by most HMG at combat ranges and from any angle. Using LAVs is very much like using BTRs, and the Russians found in Afghanistan that MGs with SLAP ammo (slightly up-market kinetic energy MG rounds) could chew them apart regularly. It also has a turret, and a gun, and an ATGM launcher - just little things like that. And the weight requirement for the interim system was set just above the weight of current Bradleys. In other words, they rigged the rules so that the Bradley would not pass, but anything even marginally lighter would. Then they were still having problems getting the 105 version of anything to pass the weight tests, so they relaxed the weight tests for the gun-system version. When asked why they would not consider a different chassis for the gun system, standardization of type was given as the reason. And why was the weight requirement set where it was? Because the mission spec was to be air-lifted by a C-130 - a ~50 year old obsolescent airplane. And the gun version won't be anyway, or doesn't have to be. And they already spent gobs on the C-17 which was supposed to handle airlift and the Brad in particular, and does not have this weight cut-off that excludes the Brad. But they haven't fixed its wing-cracking problems when they try to land it on runways as short as its specs, so they made the test requirement the C-130. In other words, after blowing about $50 billion on military airlift upgrades without getting a plane that works to spec, they are going to make up for that not working by ignoring and making no use of a huge fleet of capable Brads, and will instead blow tens of billions more on a new fleet of tin cans that fit in a plane older than most colonels. And call it "mobility". Never forget that money spent on training, readiness, maintenance, upgrades, new vision equipment, and more cheap smart weapons, only wins wars and will only save your life. Money spent on major new weapon systems is much more important - that goes to the friends of congressmen. Besides a new vehicle order, why did the brass not want the Brad? Because it is tracked, and tracked means higher POL usage especially for ordinary road moves and in training, and that means a larger logistical support job. All of the history says the tracks are worth their weight (I am not talking 70 tons M-1s for the first deployment, I am talking about 20 ton Brads instead of 19 ton LAV MGS systems). The army is throwing away off-road movement, turreted gun firepower, ATGM launchers, existing training and doctrine, and spending extra money up front to do it in the tens of billions - to get better gas mileage! It is the stupidest thing I have seen the army do in my lifetime. They also reduced the vehicle TOE of the brigade to include 3-vehicle platoons and eliminated about 40% of the ATGM launchers, to save some packing space, that all told will add up to less than 1 day of faster deployment time for a single brigade. One friggin' news cycle for the pols calling the shots, and bam a quarter of the brigade's AT firepower is shot, and doctrinal vehicle pairs are out the window. Generals have to move whole formations around on the map; they have to supply them and fly them here or there. The guys at the pointy end are forever telling them to give us some armor, enough to stop artillery rounds nearby and machineguns at least - top give us tracks so we don't bog - to give us more advanced missles that can actually kill whatever we point at. Do the generals listen? Only after Task Force Smith. And what is the entire exercise for? Because the brass has CNN envy. They have to be 1-2 news cycles faster, or the pols won't give them face time and will call the air force instead. There is nothing wrong with a focus on greater deployability for a portion of the force. But the single best way to increase that is to fix the military airlift situation, and relying on the C-130 to soldier on instead is a ridiculous answer, when that is the supposed emphasis and point of the whole thing. There is nothing wrong with smart light armor - the Bradley forces proved that in the Gulf, where they did extremely well. But the Bradley was the vehicle to use, not the LAV, because the purpose of light armor is to stop MGs and heavy artillery nearby, not AK-47 rounds, and because light should refer to the armor not the firepower, and because moving off-road means tracks or bogging, period. It sounds to me like your junior officer friends have all of this pretty well figured out, when you say they are "concerned" about things like no tracks and no turret and no gun and no ATGM. They are right. They ought to be livid, not just concerned. It is not too late to change the ridiculous rigged specs for the tests, especially since the MGS isn't going to pass the original weight specs anyway. Nor is it too late to plan on flying them places in fixed C-17s, which darn it we paid a royal bundle for already, not C-130s. Arg. Can you tell these kinds of screw-ups make me mad? One man's opinion...

Huh - you learn something new every day. The unit histories I've seen have all of them called panzergrenadiers or have it translated armored infantry, earlier than that. But I believe you; I don't read German so I haven't seen originals, just translations. Thanks for the correction.

Exactly, we are agreeing entirely. The point is to not just sit there and take it, but throw him a curve, exploiting how much easier it is to see him coming into your "hood" than it is for him to see you slinking around it with full knowledge of where he can and can't see you. Anything he doesn't expect and can't see coming...

You mention it soon after, but strangely you leave it out of your actual list of the defenders advantages. To me it is bigger than all of the above combined. He doesn't know where you are. In moving to get to where you are, he should show himself first. Therefore, you should have a "sighting differential" in your favor - knowing more about where the attackers are, than he knows about where the defenders are. You seem to fold this into "you should get to shoot first". But it is so much more than that. To me, the protection of foxholes (which is nice) and the presence of TRPs (which are fine, and I like mines too) are insignificant, compared to the power of the force... no, sorry, compared to the sighting differential! "But how can I possible use a sighting differential? I mean, besides using to to shoot first." Breaths there a man with a soul so dead, he doesn't now a dozen ways to yarz somebody over with a sighting differential? OK, OK. 1. If he can't see you, he doesn't know where to put that fire mission. 2. If you can see him, you know where to put that fire mission. Let's play - artillery tag! You're...it! If you see him coming and there are covered routes, he might not see you going. Should his strongest force hit your reserve (hmm, that depends) or hit empty air (ahh, you mean there is a choice?)- decisions decisions. I will give an example that admittedly includes a slight portion of "stupid AI trick" about it. The little Aachen scenario pits a U.S. company with support from a tank and a priest against 2 platoons of German ersztz infantry lamely supported by a single immobile anti-tank gun in the wrong place. But it is in the city, and the Germans are defending. There set up, it is true, is fixed and not-so-good. But they have decent platoon leaders and a number of snipers, MGs, and schreck teams. Well, I decided quite early that the entire defense would be gambled on a single left hook. My forward teams, 1-2 men units, spotted his avenues of approach. In a city fight, MGs can fire down long avenues, so once a unit is committed to attacking along a certain block, it is not so easy for it to shift to a different one side-to-side. He committed strongly to coming along the eastern two blocks, supporting with his armor along that street. While one MG dueled suicidally with his entire force to keep it out of that street, one of my infantry platoons, amounting to nearly half my available defenders, went a block west (away from his avenue of advance), two blocks north towards him, and back a block east again. Anatomy-to-the-wall into nowhere if my forward units and defender's sighting differential had not already let me scope it out. I could pick the moment for it, and decided soon was good because he wasn't there yet. What possible benefit could I get from this lame little manuever? Just this. I was hiding in the backside of those buildings when his right flank cover on that side ran forward, and well forward of where I was expected, and where any of my fire was coming from. His right flank covering force died in the street outside, or in the buildings on either side immediately afterward. And then I had a platoon in buildings at right angles to my original defensive line and a block-and-a-half ahead. Their fire beat the cross street he would have to cross to get into buildings close to my main position. As a stupid AI trick, some of his men actually tried it (bad move), which a human probably would not have done. His armor was in the wrong place to reduce this forward platoon, and the only long avenue on the map my fixed AT gun covered could keep them from getting too close - with some help on the forward or cross-street angle from shreck teams. (Otherwise put, the only *long range shot* at these flankers also meant long-range shots for my ATG). Game over. Yes, his concentrated force managed to smash up about 20 men on my right while I was doing this, but his infantry were not going to get closer. My right-side defenders just fall back a bit when they need to, and his attack is gone. Elapsed time - 10 minutes. German losses - 30 guys out of 90. U.S. losses, around 100 out of 170, and no chance of getting to the hotel. Was it because I was in foxholes? No. Because I have TRPs? No, I didn't even have a single indirect fire weapon, or any HE-firing weapon that could move or pick targets. Because I shot first? That might have accounted for 5 men on the long avenue of his main advance, nothing more. Instead, it was differential sighting plus an intelligent use of a reserve, with the attackers blundering onto them because - he doesn't know where you are... he doesn't know where you are... he doesn't know where you are...

Most have covered the compass, but I can add a few points on two different subjects. One, a little on the history of the term "grenadier" before and during WW II, and two, a little on the unit quality and TOEs of VG infantry divisions. First the former. Someone else already pointed out the origin, way back in the days of musket and pike warfare. Many different infantry designations originated in tasks long since done away with as seperate jobs (fusilier is another of those, for example). By the time of the Napoleonic wars, the designations was widely used for slightly different but similar organizational subdivisions, where it definitely had a "selected" connotation. Most infantry battalions had one company designated as the grenadier company, and this company was the last, rear rank when the company was formed. They played a role not unlike that "3rd-rankers" of the Roman legions. In those days first-rank was not a compliment; the Romans put the youngest men in the front line and the veterans in the 3rd. The idea was they were the least likely to run away and would literally force the others to face the battle. In the Napoleonic period, a standard infantry battalion in column would have its rear ranks formed by the grenadier company. Men were selected for it based on service in the battalion. In that era, battalions often detached companies for seperate duty. The most common of these tasks was skirmishing ahead of the battalion as so called "light infantry", meaning open order as opposed to dense ranks, harassing fire at range with aimed shots, get out of dodge if closer threatened. Most nationalities used special companies for this role, some used selected portions of each company. The grenadiers generally did *not* have this function as their primary job, but could be and were pressed into it when necessary as an additional detached company. In addition, the grenadier company furnished "cadres" to the other companies. Meaning, its privates replaced NCO casualties in the other companies. From its deployment within a typical infantry battalion, the designation "grenadier" spread to mean something more like the 3rd-rankers generally. Larger units were formed with this designation. These varied - some were ad hoc organizations made by detaching all the actual grenadier companies from a number of line infantry battalions. Others were formed by the same process of picking, or employed as a last reserve, or were used as cadres and sources of new NCOs, or any mix of the above. And where designated grenadiers because of it. Thus, the 3rd division of the Old Guard infantry of Napoleon (the original "grognards" or "grumblers", by the way) was the grenadier division. The guards designation, BTW, was a somewhat different animal. It refered to units specifically designated to protect a sovereign, often officers by the upper nobility. During the course of the Napoleonic wars, however, Napoleon in particular turned the designation of "guard" into a somewhat empty honorific, by expanding what was designated the young guard, at first recruits for the old guard and an elite body of picked veterans, into a giant formation of more than 100,000 men. In the 1814 campaigns, some of the "young guards" had been civilians a few weeks before. This cheapened use of previously meaningful honorific titles seems to be a favorite of dictators throughout history. In the course of WW II, the Russians used the designation "Guards" in much the same way. They handed out "Guards" designations to units that did well in combat, and at first the designation had meaning as a veteran unit likely to be well-officered. Stalin increased their pay and tried to get them better supplied, as motivation. By later in the war, some many units had been given the designation that 1/3rd or so of the Russian army was "guards". By then it meant little in practice, except perhaps "not green anymore". It was obvious to many in the German army that the infantry that worked with the tanks was the elite of the infantry arm, by the time of the fall of France certainly. These had been designated "panzergrenadier" from the get-go, and the designation made some historical sense because it refered to picked men for a special duty. Later, the Germans adopted from the Russians the practice of giving unit designation changes as a reward for battle service, although this was relatively rare compared to its use by the Russians. That is the source of some infantry divisions having the designation "grenadier" before the VG units proper came out. The VG units proper were not picked or crack formations in any way. The designation was handed out automatically to essentially all new infantry divisions. This in fact worked as a kind of reverse designator, because it meant the unit was new or newly rebuilt (although some old ones adopted the name after changing their TOE). An infantry division that did *not* have the VG designation, and especially one with a low "old army" division number (meaning one with only 2 digits) was more likely to be a veteran unit, than a unit called "VG". Which does not mean all such divisions were, because many were gutted in combat then rebuilt. To understand how much of a change the German army went through in the second half of 1944, you have to appreciate the scale of the losses. Army Group Center, which was nearly half the German army in Russia (which itself had well more than half the troops in the whole German army at the time), was essentially wiped out. Stragglers and rear area troops survived, that is about it. The army in France was also mostly lost either in the attrition of the fighting in Normandy, or captured or destroyed in the Falaise pocket and breakout battles right afterward. There were more surviving stragglers in the west, but they hardly amount to units. Nevertheless, the Germans recovered on both fronts and stabilized them near the German borders. To do so, they threw an enourmous number of men into the front-line units, at by far the most rapid rate they had ever done so. This was accomplished by #1 cannabilizing the Luftwaffe and its ground units, as well as the smaller navy (the U-boat pens had mostly been lost when France was), #2 combing out rear area units for all spare personnel that could be sent to the fighting units #3 drafting 16 and 17 year olds in addition to the class of men just turning 18, #4 drafting men in their 40s, and those with marginal exemptions from duty because of war industry occupations, plus #5 cutting training time to an absolute minimum. Naturally, these measures could not produce units of the same quality as the slower processes the Germans had used earlier in the war. There were a fair number of men in their prime brought in by this "drag net", out of the Luftwaffe for example and the rear areas. These were fine "material" in most cases, but certainly were not trained infantrymen. These were mixed with men younger and older than did best in combat, to increase the available numbers (16-18, 40s). The VG recruits were provided with cadres of veterans and with good officers, although they also had to train some of the new men as lower-ranking sergeants, etc. These cadres were generally of high quality, but contained a portion of men who had already gone well past their peak performance time in combat. The heavy issue of automatic weapons to the VGs was designed to make up both for a relative lack of heavier weapons and artillery, compared to a standard infantry division, and also to make up for a relative lack of training, especially in marksmenship. There was not time for that. What the Germans had in abundance was MP40s and panzerfausts, along with a grab-bag of heavier weapons that tended to get away when units were defeated in the field - the mortars, the AA guns, cheap rocket launchers. To stiffen the new formations, there was also a steady stream of assault guns coming out of the factories designated for their use (the tanks went to the panzer and SS formations). In practice, many of these VG units fought marvelously, and others fought poorly. In CM terms, whether they are regular or green depends on the month and the skill level of the cadre the unit was formed from. Many undoubtedly deserve "green" labels at the time of the westwall and bulge fighting. Some deserve "regular" by the bulge, and the best might rate veteran status in '45. Of course, there will also be variation at the small unit level - I am talking about the bulk or average properties. The drawbacks of the VG division in practice were its lack of transport - it was leg infantry and many of the guns still had to use horsedrawn wagons - and its relative lack of artillery. This reduced its "staying power" in combat, because the rate of infantry casualties was in practice strongly related to the amount of fire support the men had, compared to its enemies or its defended frontage. Incidentally, the same drawback was noticed with the Allied airborne divisions when left to fight in the line for long periods. They too had more automatic weapons and in addition were picked men, and they fought very well. But their lack of artillery support meant they took casualties faster than a standard infantry division would have, holding the same front. Bravery and a few submachineguns can sometimes be substituted for a fire mission, but the guys who do it often do not survive the substitution.

Well, I can give several examples of the importance of combined arms in the desert from the 1942 battles, showing ways the German force mix worked much better. And the Germans were using combined arms in DAK, not just tank-fleets. British tank-fleets - several armor brigades operating independently of other arms - ran into the German armor in a way they had planned beforehand. This was supposed to be their decisive battle to defeat and destroy the German armor. The Brits were operating behind their line of infantry "boxes", mined in forts stretched in a line across the desert. The Germans had gone around the southern, desert flank of that line. The British armor was supposed to trap them against it on the far side. Well, the Germans did indeed settle in on the eastern or British side of the line of boxes, with the British armor fleets coming right at them, just as the Brits had planned. But then they broke through that box line, cutting it in half and isolating its southern portion, and re-establishing a supply line to their spearheads. The Brits went in anyway, expecting the Germans to at least be low on fuel and supplies, after their long flank march and several days fighting, with supply lines only just re-opened. They hit a German "PaK front" of anti-tank guns, a linear version of the same sort of boxes the British infantry had been deployed in, but set up more rapidly and without much in the way of mines. It was also heavier on the towed guns, compared to infantry. This resulted in what is called in the histories the battle of Knightbridge, after a British map reference nearby (hardly more than a well, actually). The German ATG front smashed entire formations of the unsupported British tanks. 88s in particular had a field day, exploiting their much greater range and the light HE rounds of the small British tank guns, which were mostly meant for anti-tank fighting. As they nevertheless closed in and began to suppress and destroy ATGs, the German armor came up behind their own ATGs. It stayed at long range, in the dust and desert haze, so that only a portion of the attacking British tanks were in effective engagement range at any one moment in time. Many of the British tanks were also buttoned by this point, because artillery HE was landing around them, fired from behind the PaK front. Trying to identify small tank targets in dust and haze at extreme range while buttoned, was very hard for the British tank crews. By comparison, the German crews had men in the PaK front radio-ing them distances and locations of identified British tank groups. The Germans crawled close enough to wipe out a group somewhere, then rolled up the line, in the sense of being at extreme range to first one group, then another, with the bulk of their whole tank force. The British attack was also hampered by fuel and coordination problems between their formations. Part of this was due to the logistical organization of their units. being independent brigades, they fueled at night in different locations, and had to coordinate during the day by ad hoc back and forths between their commanders, often acting with old or innaccurate information. As a result, at least 1/3rd of the available British tanks attacked well after the others, creating a piecemeal effect. Also, many of the British tanks were so tank-duel focused they carried no, or trivial amounts of small, HE rounds, relying on a few suppot CS tanks with larger howitzers for all HE fire. This obviously made them far more vunerable to the PaK front tactic. Naturally, the British were slaughtered. The Germans lost some ATGs and about a company of tanks, the British lost two entire armor brigades with another reduced - in a single afternoon. Tobruk fell soon thereafter. Now, it is instructive to look as well at the German attacks on the Allied infantry boxes. Because in many ways that was a reciprocal situation to the disaster at Knightsbridge, or would have been if the Germans had only British doctrine, or the British had German doctrine. These desert forts were created out of large bodies of infantry, motorized, dug in and surrounded by mines - although the mine belts were thickest as mere obstacle areas between the boxes. These brigade positions had towed ATGs and field artillery integrated into them, as well as mortars and machinegun positions of course. Some of the ATGs were mounted on trucks, "portees" as they were called, to function as ad hoc tank destroyers. And a few supporting tanks were included, usually slower types less suited to work independently, which meant heavier armored ones. The tanks were dug in, to hull down positions with rear-facing exits. Along with the portees they in principle provided some mobile or adaptable portion of the fortification, but in action the protection of a hull-down position was prized pretty highly by the crews and they did not move around much during firefights. The supporting field artillery was in the center or sometimes rear of the box (when it had a "rear", instead of being surrounded). It could thus fire direct at enemy vehicles, especially close in or as the enemy reached the edge of the box, as well as on-call indirect missions. Why weren't German attacks on such positions one-sided shooting gallery affairs like Knightsbridge in reverse? How did the German armor formations manage to overrun these boxes for relatively light losses to themselves, with catastrophic losses to the dug-in defenders? And however they managed to do that, why couldn't the Brits do the same trick at Knightsbridge? The Germans did have one technical edge, in that their 88s outranged the guns on the British tanks by a long way, whereas the British ATGs had ranges comparable to the German tank guns. This edge only applied to a small portion of the guns in the German PaK front, however, and when to ordinary desert heat-haze is added the dust kicked up by a hours-long battle by over 200 AFVs, the benefits of greater maximum range can easily be estimated too high. It is harder to exploit full ranges in the desert than many imagine, because sighting does degrade rapidly with range (especially without the modern IR sight toys our tankers have today, which the Iraqis for example did not have). But the real reason is combined arms, and the way it made the difference can be explained easily enough when the German process of reducing an infantry "box" is explained. There are a number of fine accounts of what this actually involved, notably in a book on the Sidi Rezaj battles (which I have undoubtedly misspelled). The idea of at first staying at extreme range to exploit heat-haze and dust is again fundamental to the whole German approach. The kampgruppe rolls to this extreme range point. Scouting vehicles - often light tanks - will come in a little closer, but back in and out of range of effective sighting over and over, at different points. As enemy AT assets open up, the scouting tanks call down artillery fire on them, and the kampgruppe as a whole crawls closer to take them under direct fire, en masse. The idea is to exploit the immobility of the defenders to have only some of them in range at once, while also suppressing them with artillery. That the ranges are so long the hit chances with each round are low, is practically irrelevant. Front armor and loss of kinetic energy with range are also working for the attacker. As enemy positions in the box are silenced, the attacker's artillery shifts further into the box. There it soon winds up suppressing the defender's own tube artillery. Since that is in the box itself, to give the latter range and to protect the guns, they are far enough forward and easily enough located, that they wind up under directed counterbattery fire. Notice, by contrast, that at Knightsdbridge the Germany tube artillery was well behind the linear PaK front and thus able to fire unmolested (though indirect) the whole time. The German armor keeps inching closer, staying in the dust and engaging suppressed AT positions in sequence. If the defenders try to mass fires to avoid this by manuevering, they find #1 that a truck-based portee (or open-topped vehicle period, for that matter) doesn't get around too well in an artillery barrage and #2, that their own heavily armored but not-very numerous supporting tanks, draw massed fire - some of it always from the thinner flanking angles -whenever they move. About the only defender's measure that actually works is fire discipline - holding fire until the Germans have crawled within range of a number of AT weapons at once, then opening up simultaneously. This, however, calls for a high degree of coordination and discipline, and is hard to achieve ad hoc, especially in a barrage and with forward units already under fire (the next are trying to help those, etc). Once the tanks have crawled to the edge of the box and its surrounding minefields, resistence inside has already nearly collapsed. The AT assets have been wiped out by artillery fire or tank HE. Only at that point does the supporting armored or motorized infantry come forward and dismount. With the tanks having reached the box, it is very dusty, and the description from defenders from this point on show extreme confusion and narrow focus on events immediately around the reporting officer. The infanrry is supported by heavy weapons (mortars, MGs, infantry howitzers) units that dismount farther out and fire at areas of the box the infantry will de-bus next to, from a different angle than the infantry's approach. The tanks, remember, are still at the edge of the box spraying everything that moves or fires. Artillery fire has either ceased or lifted to far corners of the box, always targeting AT weapons if any are still functioning. The infantry moves through the defending positions and mops up. Anything they identify as still resisting draws a hail of tank fire. Game, set, match for combined arms. The accompanying artillery is essential to dealing with the towed ATGs. It also hampers enemy sighting by forcing heads down and buttoned up enemies. That works with long ranges. The mobility of the tanks is exploited to the fullest by using it to choose the range and to get massed local engagements of many-on-few. The entire approach is fully aware of the importance of *sighting* on the battlefield, one's own and the enemy's, and coordination of actions without assuming each unit knows what is going on. Now, let us look at why the British could not manage something similar at Knightsbridge. First, they had no supporting artillery to speak of. The 25-lbers were in the boxes, some had been overrun, they were on-call for other units. The tankers themselves had essential zero ability to call down HE barrages on the German ATGs, to adjust the fire themselves, to work with dedicated artillery assets tasked to them for ages, etc. This reversed the sighting differential that armor and mobility ought to have created. The British just did not think of the armor and mobility of the tank as things that improved sighting under battlefield conditions, instead of stopping enemy rounds or fighting several enemies in sequence. Next, the linear deployment of the PaK front was superior to a box in preventing the enemy from getting many-on-one range matchups by staying at extreme range from one portion of the box. That linear deployment meant that flanks were open, however. It would therefore have been suicidal for units not cooperating immediately with their own armor, as they just would have been rolled up from one flank. Trying to do that at Knightsbridge (besides mines) would simply have pulled into range of the supporting German AFVs behind the PaK front. Instead, the way to get attempt many-on-one engagements with the German ATGs was only to bunch up at range, or to use small folds of ground while bunching up, so that many tanks were in a small area that could see a few ATGs but not more. But that meant a fine target for German arty and a buttoned group, which the German tanks could then roll up opposite and engage en-masse with better sighting. Finally, since they never did get close enough it is almost immaterial that the Brits had no supporting infantry. But if they had somehow knocked out many of the AT weapons along the PaK front, they could not have actually occupied the German position. The dug in infantry around the German gun positions would have still been there, calling in artillery fire and radioing British tank locations to their own tankers. The British options would then have been limited to break off, roll through the German infantry for modest losses on both sides but no appreciable benefit, or try to root men out of trenches with small caliber HE shells, a few supporting CS tanks, and light machineguns. The CS tanks would run out of ammo (if they hadn't already, fighting the ATGs) and that would be that. In all of the above, the Brits could get the impression that the Germans were still just using massed tanks against them. They noticed that the tank force hovering out there in the dust seemed to be the entire Afrika Corps in tank terms, and they did not see hordes of infantrymen running among them, nor trucks mingled in the tank fleet as it probed and withdrew,massed now here and now there. But in fact, the tanks were being employed as part of a combined arms team. Their supporting artillery had marched right behind them and set up out of sight of the box they would attack or just beyond sight of their PaK front. The infantry waited in trucks or (much more rarely available) half-tracks until their debussing role on the attack, or dug in around the ATGs on defense - sometimes part of it around the artillery positions for security when attacking too. But some of it was there all the time, over the horizon and ready to go. They had their heavy weapons to add fire once the enemy AT assets were eliminated. The towed AT and AA were with the column on attack too, ready to turn any area taken into a PaK front defense in a matter of hours. The whole she-bang had its own dedicated transport and logistics, enough to fuel and supply itself for several days and several fights before restocking. A darn sight more complicated than massing the tanks, and a darn sight more effective too. Even in the desert.

Hose the buildings. That is the way to get the mission effect you want. Use area fire on the buildings from the MG and covering squad. Incidentally, area fire can be better for suppressing an enemy unit anyway, because it is kept up even when the unit "ducks" ("takes cover" and goes out of LOS temporarily, I mean - or backs up into a tree line or farther into a building then returns). I know your particular question is whether you can assign the men not to shoot at anything but the buildings, but also not to use area fire, presumably because there are more possible enemy locations in the village than two units can spray, or something. But the answer to that question is "no". If they do not see a target and have an active enemy in sight who could shoot at them, and are not ordered to shoot somewhere else, they will fire on the visible enemy out of self-preservation.

To Scout - Yes is was doctrine. But no, just concentrating wasn't the trick. Yes, the French spread their armor to support infantry and lost because of it. But the Brits and the mid-war Russians concentrated their armor so as "not to tie it down to the speed of the infantry", with the result that they used mass armor formations without supporting arms. And the Germans beat that too, whenever they were allowed to use a mobile defense. They did so in North Africa against the British and around Kharkov in early 1943 against the Russians, among other occasions. Tanks support infantry - tanks operate on their own - both were and are mistakes. Tanks should not operate on their own, but in combined arms teams or kampgruppen, which the "mass the armor" believers did not understand. And that means the tanks should cooperate with infantry indeed. But not the line infantry that is itself deployed in an even spread across the front. The principle of concentration and the principle of combined arms are both true, and both requirements have to be met for it to work correctly. And this was not obvious. The complicating factor is that in practice, the *defensive* or front-holding infantry formations were and *had* to be, evenly spread along the front. So issues of spread vs. concentration, and issues of working with infantry or independently, were conflated with one another. It was thought that working with infantry meant being spread out. In addition, the benefits of the German concentrated armor spearheads were misunderstood. It was thought, partially correctly, that their strength came from their operational speed, and then the false inference was made that what hampered armor when it was supporting infantry was that the infantry slowed the tanks down to a walking pace. This led to tank-heavy formations expected to operate independently, like the British armor brigades in the desert and the Russian independent tank brigades of late 1942 through mid 1943. In addition to all of the above, people also made the error of thinking it was the power of the weapons themselves that was involved, and that therefore the way to maximize the power x time generated and thrown at the enemy, was to have armor in the front line as much as possible, or at any rate to assign armored formations their own sectors of the front on defense, between infantry formations, and for extended periods. Because they were more mobile and stronger, they were expected to hold a greater length of front. This error was extremely common in the late-war German army, among officers who did not understand the military revolution and even more so with the corporal running the show. In terms of deployment, the tanks were most effective when #1 concentrated into armored formations plus #2 supported by all arms teams and "tasked" as need warranted, not rigidly and #3 kept out of and behind the line on defense until employed, and #4 on the attack given very narrow frontages but expected to operate in great depth forward and back, more or less at right angles to the axis of the main lines (aka in "column", not "line" deployments, or "in echelon"). A whole host of other tactics and techniques supported the above doctrines, from extensive use of radios, strong dedicated division-level recon assets, motorised forces for all arms to keep up with the tanks, tight artillery cooperation with other arms, meaning SPA where possible and towed guns marching right in the mobile columns, senior armor commanders forward in the columns themselves and granted enourmous operational responsibility to act as they saw fit. As I have already stated, the only guys that really "got it" besides the Germans were the post-1943 Americans, after the revision of the armor division to 3 armor, 3 infantry, and 3 artillery battalions. The German system actually had more artillery and towed weapons per manuever battalion than that, which was a reduction for the U.S. and lower on the armor-heavy scale of things than any of the other allies. Otherwise put, they had fewer tanks per panzer division than all the standard enemy formations, not more. Yes, the 1940 French mistake was different, and De Gaulle recognized the need to concentrate armor, and after 1940 everybody did. But they then got it wrong in that direction, toward pure tank formations which were not nearly as effective, and were especially not as effective for the same number of deployed tanks. Even though they were "more concentrated". I hope this is interesting.