LongLeftFlank

Agreed -- it should be an option only. IMHO, level restrictions are best suited to infantry close assaults in close terrain: MOUT, forests, or night actions. I haven't had good results with AFV-focused scenarios.

I liked that book too, except that it seemed like nearly ALL the military participants he interviewed on both sides all seemed to be trying to stress what great fans of Western civilization they were and how much they risked to save the abbey. Parker did finger some of them as BSers, but I got the sense that the others were doing a little halo polishing too, with the benefit of 40 years of hindsight. Freyberg also got kind of a bum rap too, as a bullheaded brute deaf to reason who insisted on the bombing.

You'd know a lot more than I would on this, but if I'm not mistaken, European armies went to war in 1914 still expecting to win decisive battles with (a) bold maneuver, followed by ( massed musketry, followed by © cold steel; as opposed to the artillery murderfest that actually transpired. So one way to look at the ammo load is 2 bullets a day in the positional warfare that actually occurred; the other is the intended 29 days of grand maneuver followed by that epic Waterloo the generals dreamed of in which each Tommy could "give 'em ten rounds rapid, good and 'ot" up to five volleys worth, and then "in with the bayonet". And that would show the Hun proper. Tangentially, my memory is hazy on this, but didn't the British up their ammo loads for the Martini-Henry rifles after ammo ran short during well-publicized "decisive actions" in the Zulu War, Khartoum, Omdurman, etc? Forward, he cried, from the rear, as the front rank died...

.... A little hint here, when playing Iron Man rules, popping smoke becomes a VERY useful way of marking a location for all to see.

In lieu of trying to program the AI to deliver a level of functionality for our units that it can't do without annoying the hell out of us with utterly dumb/suicidal moves, perhaps an "Iron Man" FOW option would allow the following: (a) You can ONLY watch the turn replay action through the eyes of the CO unit (at view level 1). i.e. he's the only one who gets the "big picture", assuming that he's picked a good OP (see Radike quote above). If the CO unit is destroyed, panicked or routed, you can keep playing, but your battle direction is hosed. ( During the orders phase, you can tab through all your units, viewing through their eyes at level 1, use the LOS tools, and give them orders. You'll be able to see the target lines and get basic info about their status and who's shooting at them, but that's all you really have to go on. If you want to issue orders to move to an area not yet in LOS, you'll need to eyeball it as best you can. ( The command lines are disabled -- you see only a message onscreen saying you're in/out of command. © The real kicker is this: if friendly units are in LOS, you won't be able to skip to them (and ID them) by clicking on them with the mouse. All you'll see with the LOS tool is the appropriate unit symbol and "Friendly Infantry Squad" or whatever, with no further identifying data. Generic low visibility unit symbols or "sounds" commands won't differentiate between friend and foe, so you have the possibility of "blue on blue" area fire incidents. (d) Location labels are disabled. You need to rely on things like hill shapes to navigate and estimate your position relative to other units. Better yet, only HQ, crack/elite infantry and vehicles would be able to see the compass, so at night, your units would REALLY be in the dark. (e) To further sort out the "Iron Men" from the "Plodders", you could also place a time limit on the length of the orders phase to limit your ability to piece together your overall situation by tabbing through units repeatedly for hours each turn. The CO would still be able to view the movie as many times as (s)he wanted to provide the strategic perspective, but you'd have a max of, say, 30 seconds per green unit, 45 per regular, etc. (playtesting will determine the right durations). If you took longer with one unit, it'd be at the expense of the others. As suggested by ATW and LTCW above, these rules would change the tactics in the game to a far more realistic and dramatic, seat-of-the-pants, keep-it-simple-stupid basis, complete with patrols lost in the woods, blue on blue fire and other issues. All the above would be readily programmable within the CM1 engine (and presumably within CM2 as well). Sorry about the ASL rulebook length post here, but I've used the above rules for some time while playing the computer and it's been very satisfying and challenging for me.

Amen to that. I'd love to see it as a FOW option. Re the "commander's eyes only" view, it would probably be asking a little too much of the AI to make all decisions for the troops unless you also had a game feature where you could give units a general set of orders for the battle and then let the AI follow the plan until first contact with the enemy dictates otherwise. There's a very vivid account in "Across the Dark Islands" (Floyd Radike) of the 25th Division commander personally overseeing a hill assault on Guadalcanal from his OP: 'You can move over, Lieutenant, because I am going to share your position with you. I see you picked out the best observation on this line....' It looked like I had half the division headquarters on the reverse slope of the ridge.... A sniper round snapped pretty close to our position. The general handed the phone to the operations officer and turned to me. 'Get a machine gun,' he said.... The general pointed to the southwest and said, 'Set up the gun to cover that wooded knoll over there.'... The general gently pushed me aside and lumbered down behind the gun. I was going to ask him if he knew how to fire such a weapon -- and remembered in the nick of time that he had written the gun's manual. He looked over the sights and let a few bursts fly into the knoll. I followed the tracers that found their target. 'Did you see that, Lieutenant?' 'Yes sir.' 'Well, every time you hear them snap off a round from that knoll, you spray them with bullets. Get enough ammo.' There was more talk on the phone, some of which got very salty.... "Look Mike, the charts we've got don't match the terrain, so sending coordinates is no good.... OK, now tie a handkerchief around your left arm and move into that clearing so I can see you."

Yes, I know a Navy SEAL who felt that the whole "load bearing work" concept in SOF (i.e. teaching trainees to hump 120 pounds on 10 mile marches) was utterly pointless and stupid. His slogan was "pack light, eat lousy, remember your feet; cache the rest." Carry only what you need to survive. The type of combat his unit trained to do (keeping in mind that combat wasn't necessarily the point of most SEAL ops) was bump and run... (a) blow claymores ( fire 2 clips from 50 meters back in the woods then © fall back so return fire just hits your empty scrapes. Then set a new ambush down the trail or simply disengage. The premium was on mobility and stealth, not sustained firefights and massive ammo load.

Heard several mentions of John Keegan on this thread. Keegan is one of my favorite historians, although like SLAM he's never served under fire (although unlike SLAM he has been very up front -- pardon the pun -- about this fact). However, similarly to MAF, the Face of Battle formulates basic hypotheses -- models if you will (without much sound numerical data to go on, much less firsthand interviews)-- relating to what each battle "must have been like" for the P.B.I. involved in each classic battle, and what kinds of physical activity and behavior created victory and defeat. e.g. at Agincourt, the rugger scrum in the post-archery stage of the battle among pikemen and archers and surviving horsemen crammed together and virtually immobile in the mud, a far cry from the Olivier vision of knights charging home at full speed, lances leveled, or even the mass kung fu swordplay depicted in Braveheart (and every Hollywood film since, excepting the otherwise mediocre Alexander). Since the participants in this and most of the other battles in FOB are deceased, the accuracy of Keegan's hypotheses is unlikely ever to be reliably tested, or challenged. And all this is to say: hypotheses are acceptable historical method in the absence of data, but not when you have hundreds of after action interviews available. While not disagreeing with anything people have said above about Marshall, I continue to honor him as a groundbreaker who drew popular attention to what was happening at the "sharp end" of combat (as opposed to the command, maneuver and victory through airpower level). His work made it respectable for better-informed thinkers in the US military to devote careers to studying ways to improve infantry firepower, equipment, etc. at the sharp end. Think of him as the Bill Gates of military science -- a pitchman who hogged the credit and had some real dumb ideas (WYSIWYG), but saw the big picture potential of the concept and got the ball rolling. Otherwise, the Marines might well have splashed ashore at Da Nang still bearing Garands, BARs and M1919s.

SLAM was in essence an amateur management theorist of (roughly) the same generation as Peter Drucker and Abraham Maslow, applying pre-1940 Taylorist scientific management principles, plus some behavioral psychology to the battlefield. I give him due honor and credit for being a pioneer in this field, without however overstating the value of his actual work. Like most other productivity models I've seen, his model identified the correct drivers for his area of interest -- infantry firepower -- but did not accurately portray the relationship among them: a. overestimates impact of the drivers of interest on overall performance (victory) while ignoring or minimizing complex confounding variables (e.g. artillery) b. overestimates benefits of increasing productivity (enemy body count) c. does not develop actionable recommendations for doing so (elan, aggressiveness) Scientific management was great for getting beans and bullets to the GI's; it was -- and remains -- lousy at modeling, much less improving the performance of complex tasks (infantry tactics). Oh, and most business productivity models I've seen falsify their data too. They pretty much have to. If you read SLAM's later works, e.g. A Soldier's Load and his evaluation of weapons in Korea, his central message seems to be less "how to micromanage the GI" than "how can we on the home front give him the tools that are most useful to him and not load him down with useless junk?" And this is a worthy question, today as well as yesterday (think body armour).

My worry is that China will go through a "feeling their oats" phase of more aggressive nationalism roughly parallel to that of post-1870 Germany, although I'm not suggesting that 21st century Chinese and 19th century Germans are the same, or that this is inevitable. However, whenever I speak with educated Chinese mainlanders at length, even ones who like and admire the West, I always find a certain sense of grievance and entitlement buried under the politeness. It goes something like: a. China is now standing up, no thanks to you Westerners who kept us down for hundreds of years (long and awful story about opium follows). Well, OK, our current growth IS fueled by your willingness to buy stuff from us, but that's just because our domestic demand hasn't ramped yet and you're too lazy to do make goods as well as we do. b. We have 1/4 of the world's population, but Westerners also shut us out of the chance to control the 1/4 of the world's landmass/resources that are rightfully ours. We were shut out of the New World and Southeast Asia (except as coolies) and shut out of Siberia totally by the Russians. So what type of future behavior does that imply, as China becomes steadily more formidable both economically and militarily, but that (partly imagined, partly real) feeling of being "dissed" lingers? I didn't say that this would make any kind of economic sense, but aggrieved nationalism seldom does. And the stakes are a lot higher this time. The post-unification Germans had a similar compex -- fear of foreign meddling, feeling of being sneered at by snobbish French and English, feeling they'd largely been shut out of the rush for colonies, etc. And in answer to those who have faith in the old globalization canard that "No two nations with a McDonalds have ever fought a war" (also factually inaccurate, since Belgrade had 2 McDonalds in 1995), recall that the elites who shelled and machine gunned one another in the muck in the Great War all loved much the same music, art, literature, cuisine and fashions.

My vote for a sci-fi mythos most likely to be compatible with the CM engine, would be Starship Troopers (a la the Heinlein book, not the bowdlerized Verhoeven film, although I might make an exception for Denise Richards) The MI suits were, of course, the most interesting "characters" in the book (a point the film totally missed), giving each individual infantryman the mobility of an Apache, the armor/NBC protection of a MBT and the firepower of.... well, mininukes, missiles and handflamers. What was best about Heinlein was that he made a bigger attempt than most authors to remain true to his futuretech premises once he'd laid them out. So his armor wasn't some kind of magical Superman suit -- the materials, energy sources, fuels, control mechanisms, sensors, countermeasures, etc.-- all had limitations that cunning Space Lobsters could exploit.... hence, you'd have futuristic strategy and tactics instead of just another boring robotech shooter or generic "tanks and casters" MMO game. Question, btw: would the Borg be able to use "Borg spotting" in a Star Trek module? Huh dad? Huh?

I've always found the best cure to the "God" command issue in CM1 is to restrict all unit views to level 1 throughout the game (a la the airborne drop scenarios) + strict time limit to plan moves. In my experience, this really forces units to go for the objectives and enemies immediately in front of them, as they generally would in real life. It also really ratchets up the challenge of playing vs. the AI.

Since there's a fair number of active service folks on here, are there any published stats on infantry actions in different environments (e.g. MOUT, jungle) that discuss numbers of casualties incurred in the first 30 seconds of a firefight? While the % of total would depend of course on how the fight subsequently evolved, common sense would seem to dictate that the first shots are the most dangerous ones.

Would this be an outgrowth of the belated German mobilization for total war after Stalingrad (as recently discussed at some length), or more in the vein of coopting captured armaments a la the early war Czech "T" series panzers and captured Soviet ordnance. I suppose what I'm asking more broadly is, was the German propensity to incorporate conquered/ captured armaments a manifestation of some "top down" policy pursued by the Reich armaments ministries, or more "bottom up" initiatives that were (reluctantly?) approved to make ends meet? Or a bit of both?

A tiny tangent here, and forgive me if I'm treading well-trodden ground, but I've often found myself wondering whether there shouldn't be some kind of "first fire/ambush" factor that increases casualty probability the first time an unalerted, moving unit is direct fired upon within normal range by a previously unspotted enemy unit. When you're moving, whether in open ground or not, it's pretty hard to hide all your men from enemy in unknown locations. You might take it a step further, and compound the factor for green troops, who have a tendency to bunch, particularly in column, and thus incur multiple casualties from a single surprise burst. That's the main point of having MGs in defilade for example. Don't know if this would tax the AI too much, but it would certainly reflect the RW challenge of modern COIN sweeps and patrols, where a casualty-sensitive US player can't afford to winkle out snipers by letting them pick off the scouts (a la "Big Red One"), but instead has to go slow, and spot them first with overwatch. Whether these kinds of patient, slow, cat and mouse ops are the right subject matter for CMSF, I'll leave to the experts. I'd personally find the suspense quite absorbing, in a game anyway....

Except, of course, for the marvelous Toyota Hilux pickup, bane of the Libyan T-55s in Chad (1984, when paired with TOWs), and of the Russians in Afghanistan (as an all-terrain, and I mean ALL terrain transport).

Hmmm.... Just had us a little earthquake here in Berkeley. While we're discussing US Armored Divisions, I had dinner last night with the transport officer of the 9th Armored Division ("Phantom")... a very spry gentleman of 94. Among other things, he was the guy responsible for hustling as much traffic as possible over the Ludendorff bridge, and later the pontoon bridge, in the days after Remagen. Any otherwise unanswerable questions you'd like me to ask him for posterity?

Very nice, crisp recap of the Iraq campaign, Jason, although I'd hate to explain it to someone who just lost their kid there. But isn't that the key question though, irrespective of whether our army can be defeated or even bloodied in the field? It would seem that the West puts a lot higher premium on the blood of our soldiers than we ever did before. And that -- as always -- is the theory that the West's enemies has counted on: (a) That their troops are more willing to die than ours. ( Kill a bunch of US troops at one time -- a short sharp shock -- and their squeamish politicians pull the plug. Witness Beirut 1983, Mogadishu 1991... Arguably, Tet 1968, Chosin 1950. In WWII of course, only assumption (a) turned out to be true in practice... In 1941, Germany and Japan were convinced that Sturm und Drang / the Bushido code, plus Morgenthau bankers (or was it "Jew-communist" labour unions) stabbing the so-called arsenal of democracy in the back at home, would force the inept, decadent Yanks to sue for peace after the first reversals. The popularity of the America First and other communist and noncommunist backed peace movements seemed to confirm this belief. Pearl... Bataan... U-boat "Second Happy Time".... Kasserine.... Schweinfurt. Hmm, inept, cowardly Yanks haven't caved yet. Bummer. Of course, American authorities were worried enough about public morale that it wasn't until Tarawa that pictures of American dead were allowed to be shown in the press. And there were also the "Why We Fight" and related agitprop, just to make sure we all knew why it was worth it. Contrast today, where every drop of blood spilled -- however tiny from a military history point of view -- is meticulously tallied, and where possible, photographed in real time for the consumption of our profoundly visually-motivated species. And a US administration which has been unable to articulate/sell a "why we fight" either domestically or internationally in spite of its: (Insert Your Bias Here) [ clearheaded and honorable / hopelessly naive / evil and corrupt / controlled by Nazi aliens and the Illuminati ] intentions. But that's politics... Let's stick to the Lessons of History.

Enough material in this thread to write a book on the subject that's much better than anything I've yet seen. I don't post all that much on this forum, but my observations are usually along the lines of "the line between good/evil, insane/sane, brilliant/ stupid, brave/foolish, is very narrow indeed, and we're all at some risk to stray across it." In spite of JasonC's prickly namecalling, which I suppose is the price we pay for reading his well-informed insights free here, I suspect that his bottom line assessment that "it's the megalomania, stupid" is the most accurate evaluation of Hitler's state of mind in 1940-41. BigDuke's post and some of the others describe some of the logical constructs that Hitler might have used to backstop his prejudices (others cited seem to me as less likely to have come to his notice, even if they occurred to others around him). On the other hand, this profoundly selfish and evil man was human, all too human and occasionally betrayed moments of rationality and even self-doubt.... Guderian: "Why does the Fuhrer want to attack in the East at all this year?" Hitler: "I know, the idea of attacking makes me go hot and cold too." And as described by Speer, Guderian and others, as defeat loomed Hitler was prone to fits of inertia, indifference, loss of interest in offensives that had stalled, and what's called "repair service behavior" -- an obsessive interest in micromanaging small details you can still control while ignoring the big picture that you've given up on -- to wit, the "sixteen or seventeen Tigers" anecdote from the bunker quoted by Toland. All are situation-induced forms of "insanity" to which even well-trained professionals are prone to slip into under certain conditions; I've witnessed many in business, albeit not with millions of lives at stake. My favorite business psychologist, Dietrich Doerner, describes many of these behaviors in his excellent book, "The Logic of Failure", which I strongly recommend.

THEY MEAN TO WIN WIMBLEDON

On the Russian intervention question and rational decisionmaking in their command structure, there is one post CW precedent that may provide some food for thought: the 1998 Kosovo intervention. My memory is a little hazy but didn't the Russian VDV contingent make a thorough nuisance of itself? -- unilaterally seizing the Pristina airport and threatening to fire on NATO forces or some such thing? IIRC, the NATO folks had to do some quick sidestepping around them to avoid an ugly confrontation. Of course there was significant pro-Serb sentiment in Russia, and one suspects, among the VDV paras as well.

Rather than flog long dead horses relating to gameplay, I'll venture a wish as to visual "look and feel" for the new game. In addition to stunning 2000 pixel 3D renditions of infantry in their camouflage, complete with authentic helmet covers, unit badges, sweatstains and five days of beard growth, I'd hope to see them "reacting" like men in combat, not like mannequins in a Christmas window display. Infantry in combat don't stand like statues pumping rounds into the enemy. They keep their heads down, they run bent double, they flinch and duck when shot at, or after they shoot. Some simple "body language" would add a great deal to the visual appeal and "grit" of the game and place it well in front of even the slickest FPS. This doesn't have to be a RAM buster. Use the Hanna Barbera rule -- not every figure in the picture needs to be moving at once. About a dozen basic movements, mainly in the head and shoulders, combined randomly, would create a good effect. A figure leans forward and raises his head and rifle slightly, peering out, then returns to the previous pose. A kneeling figure rises to a half crouch, advances a step, then kneels again. etc. etc. Otherwise, for all the astounding detail in the wireframes, the overall effect will be "Attack of the Clones" (and you know how bad THAT movie was). A breeze ruffling the leaves in the light of the setting sun will not compensate for the wooden impassivity of the figures. My three cents worth. Pipe dream maybe. It's OK, I'll buy the games anyway.

I'm hardly the biggest expert on this board, but isn't interdiction fire the most common kind of fire mission? IIRC, a large proportion (most?) of the American shells fired in Vietnam were blind "recon by fire" into jungle around US positions that were too hazardous to inspect firsthand. Blind isn't necessarily ineffective. As has been discussed on this board before, artillery is the biggest killer on the WWII battlefield but its effect is largely cumulative and incidental, as opposed to massive and precise (there are of course many exceptions, but not to be counted on). IIRC, even the heaviest prep barrages tended to suppress more defenders than they killed, a lesson learned in WWI. More generally, I've always believed that CM and other WWII wargames greatly overmodel the ATTACKER's artillery support in terms of its cycle time, accuracy and role in the attack. For a defender, sitting in a prepared OP, often connected to the battery via landline, and who may already have spent days or weeks registering and even plastering the field of battle, I can more readily visualize prompt and devastating "surgical" fires delivered on the heads of the grey (brown) masses. But for an attacker, this is a lot harder to pull off. There are indeed plenty of WWII instances of intrepid FOs moving with the assault forces, calmly spotting enemy strongpoints or counterattackers and calling down a rain of hell on them, all within a few minutes. But pulling this off requires a lot of luck as well as smarts and guts. You have to do ALL the following: 1. locating and occupying a decent vantage point in one piece and THEN 2. spotting the enemy positions that are worth hitting and THEN 3. contacting the battery with balky WWII vintage radios and THEN 4. establishing and communicating the right reference to them and THEN 5. walking the spotting rounds in on the target to FFE Given the above, I suspect that the attacking FO's most common role in the battle was not to blow the enemy out of their positions, but to cement the gains made by other arms, to wit: a. As soon as possible, lay down a curtain of fire on grid squares in front of newly won objectives to: (1) deter and disrupt counterattacks and (2) persuade remaining enemy to leave the vicinity pronto; b. If possible under constraints 1-5 above, zero fire in on any remaining strongpoints against which the attack has stalled. That's my thesis. Counterfire away grogs, I've shot and scot....

That's odd, I posted the above inane comment in response to the "fire" thread and it showed up in this one. Inanely yours,

Having a flashback to good old ASL days, with those hundreds of different Fire/Flame/Blaze counters and pages and pages of fire rules. I am the god of hellfire, and I bring you....