photon

For great Justice take off every HiMARS indeed. It's interesting how effectively Ukrainian communication has minimized showing human casualties and focused on material and memes. There's a fine line there that they've done a very impressive job walking. Are there categorically similar memes being produced by the Russians for internal consumption?

Oh - and Toll is indeed fantastic. But I still tip the hat to Morison. In the same way that this forum has a better understanding of the generalities of the current war for understanding the particulars of things, Morison's detailed account of every action the navy undertook is fantastic for understanding the war as a whole. You just have to saddle in for 10 kilopages of text...

That's what I'm not sure about. There's a great anecdote about MacArthur at the end of Toll's Gotterdamerung, that when he landed with his command staff in Japan, he told them to leave their sidearms in the plane. Practically, what're you going to do with a 45 against millions of Japanese?, but Toll notes that the real motivation was a flex: we have beaten you so thoroughly and you know that we have beaten you so thoroughly that we don't need to carry firearms. The decision was decided in a way that the Japanese would not undecide. And it stuck. The Japanese, for all their ferocity of weeks before, stopped. So the real end of the war was a decision by the Japanese not to continue it (driven by the Emperor's decision to stop the fighting after Hiroshima). Even if the Ukrainians push the Russians back to the border, that doesn't end the war. They Russians have to decide that it is over, and that they'll cease lobbing cruise missiles at civilian areas and firing artillery across the border, and that they'll allow free passage of the Azov sea. How do you compel them to decide that given that marching to Moscow is off the table? That where I think the role of indirect communication and information supremacy will be really important. Can projected friction alone do that? I don't know. The point of a decisive battle is that everyone sees that it's decisive. How do you shape opinion without that?

I think it's time for all the folks who have been focused on land war to read some naval history! In particular, Ian Toll's The Conquering Tide offers an example of exactly the sort of friction projection leading to collapse that you're describing at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. It also details how we build a military that was built around anti-friction capabilities. At the tactical level: The friction of having to fly their Zeroes down the slot to engage Henderson field meant that a huge fraction of Japanese aviation losses were operational as opposed to combat for the duration of the Solomons campaign. Weather was the real killer. We projected more of that friction on them by degrading airfields further down the slot so that the Japanese would have to engage at long range. We built a system robust against that sort friction by incorporating self-sealing fuel tanks and by aggressively using PBY Catalinas and submarines to rescue downed airmen and return them to flying units. At the operational level: we ran two offensive operations - the push in the southwest pacific under MacArthur towards Hollandia and Rabaul and the central pacific under Nimitz towards Saipan. This tick-tock operational cadence forced null decisions on the Japanese: the couldn't decide which offensives to mass against and consequently kept their battle fleet in being. That null decision also meant that the Japanese moved their ships around frequently without committing them to battle. More operational losses (and submarines!) and wasted fuel, which they had little of. At the strategic level: our undersea blockade imposed enormous friction on the whole Japanese war industry - it's better to sink oilers than capital ships because without fuel, capital ships are lovely hotels. The Japanese navy bemoaned this, calling it the Hotel Yamato, because it would be too expensive to have it sortie regularly. Once the 3rd/5th fleet got up and running, that undersea blockade became something like modern deep strike. We could hit anywhere in the Japanese Empire with little warning, and we chose to disrupt their plane production and staging infrastructure regularly. That forced the Japanese to concede lots of territory without fighting for it, and to fight ineffectively and without reinforcement where they did decide to fight. The whole Pacific Campaign was cumulativist friction projection onto the Japanese until their war machine collapsed into an armed mob. Of course, we could do that because our industrial might allowed us to put together the 3rd/5th fleet, essentially producing two whole additional US Navies during the war. Here are some stay thoughts: 1. If your strategy is negative-decision focused, how do you maintain home-front morale without decisive battles? Abstract friction is great if you understand it. How do you sell that to people? 2. In WW1, the negative-decision strategy was one of exhaustion. Is there a negative-decision strategy that can win without that? We ultimately did engage in annihilational battles against the Japanese because we badly overmatched them by '44, and it still took a pair of nuclear weapons. Can you win without exhausting your enemy of without the shock and awe of some sort of annihilational capability? 3. What does a modern anti-friction capability look like in a military? What's the equivalent of self-sealing tanks and PBY Catalinas?

Another thing I've been thinking about is the idea of "decisiveness", both during a battle and surrounding a battle. In the ancient world, to use @The_Capt's language, there were two ways to force a positive decision to a war: deliver a siege to the enemy's capital or destroy their army in the field. The defender had a choice whether to fight in the field, and could (in limited ways) degrade opposing LOCs. But ancient wars were decided by a pitched battle or a successful siege. And often by a single one of those things. Ancient societies (with the exception of the Romans, to everyone's consternation) were not capable of regenerating meaningful combat power during a campaign season. So if you win one battle handily or successfully deliver your siege, that normative decides the war. The theory that you produce a decision all at once with a single blow has continued to be popular into the modern age even though I'd submit that it is no longer possible against anything like a motivated peer combatant. The Japanese were obsessed with it, hence Pearl Harbor, Midway, and the Philippine Sea, and Leyte, and the sortie of the Yamato. American commanders broke both ways: Spruance was an avowed cumulativist, and didn't seek to annihilate the Japanese fleet after the Philippine Sea, while Halsey chased the carriers at Leyte. Spruance is, I think well vindicated in no seeking a decision-in-one-action. Certainly WW1 vindicated the cumulativist approach at the strategic level, WW2 reinforced that, and we're seeing the same thing in Ukraine: Russia's hopes of a single strategically decisive battle failed quickly, because modern forces can force a negative decision more effectively that they could even in WW1. It seems like the question on the table now is whether forcing a positive decision is possible for either side at the operational or tactical levels. Even at the operational and tactical levels, the ability of the defender to produce negative decisions or undecide things is driven by the size of the bubble of lethality that they can project and how that compares to the bubble of lethality the attacker projects. Again, leaning on naval combat in the Pacific, the Japanese designed ships to decide a tactical battle in a single blow: night fighting with long range torpedoes. The planned operations to decide operational battles in a single blow: the destruction of the USN. They were spectacularly unsuccessful at this, because our carrier air power projected a bubble of lethality (except at night in close waters) that allowed us to refuse battle whenever we wanted. I think one dynamic we're seeing now is that the undecision modern warfare imposed at the strategic level is now filtering down to the tactical level. I'm not sure how you end a war once that happens?

CMCW drove this home for me for the first time. I generally think of CM tactics as either closed (reverse slopes, keyholes, peek and sneak, low tempo &c.) or open (unobstructed lines of sight, fire superiority, high tempo). The Soviet ability to effectively exploit mass with open tactics -- especially in the Soviet training campaign -- was really eye opening in a way than none of the previous games had been. Open tactics in CMBS have always been a disaster for me, whichever side I play as. I might not be doing them well, but I suffer unacceptable losses and can't achieve fire superiority.

So, I've been reading Ian Toll's Pacific Trilogy, and in "Twilight of the Gods", he writes this: By contrast, according to Wylie, a cumulative operational strategy does not involve territorial offensives and pitched battles, but a "less perceptible minute accumulation of little items piling one on top of the other, until at some unknown point, the mass of calculated actions may be large enough to be critical". It weaponizes the logic of "death by a thousand cuts." In the Pacific, cumulative strategies chipped away at the economic and political foundations of Japan's imperial empire. It struck me that the Russians appear to have adopted what Toll calls a "sequentialist" strategy: "we will march to Kiev 100 yards of dirt at a time", while the Ukranians appear to have adopted a cumulativist strategy: "we will degrade the Russian ability to make war until it collapses". I think that analysis broadly harmonizes with The_Capt's description of warfare as decision space shaping. A sequentialist attack changes the decision space (the US capture of Saipan, for example, or the Japanese capture of Borneo), but cumulativist strategies (building a metric crapton of escort carriers; destroying the Japanese merchant marine) lead to breakthroughs and shorten the overall war by undeciding things and forcing bad decisions on the part of the adversary. In many ways it feels like the Russians are duplicating Japan's WWII playbook while the Ukrainians are duplicating that of the Allies.

One thing I wonder is whether the flow of troops and material into the Kherson area is positive or negative right now? If the Russians are moving more men and equipment across the river, why not wait until they stop the flow to cut off a richer pocket? I suppose you'd have to weigh other political and strategic concerns and time dropping the bridge with other action along the southern front?

One thing that's been eyebrow raising to me is the nadir angle of so many of the drone videos - it looks like at least some of the drones are flying right over the things they're recording at relatively low altitudes. There are certainly some low-angle obliques, which makes sense to me. It looks like the nadir shots are often recon/targeting, and the low-angle shots are BDA? And the people whom the drone sees often don't respond in the way I'd expect (getting out of the way of the likely soon incoming rounds). Which suggests that not only do they not have effective anti-drone weapons, but they don't have a system to detect when they're being observed by drones *flying right over them*. German submarines suffered because our centimetric radar was invisible to German radar-detectors, a problem they never really solved. I wonder what systems to detect drone-based observation would look like? Even if you can't shoot the drones down reliably, knowing when you're being observed would be valuable I'd think?

Alway an interesting read. Out of curiosity, have you read the short book "Introduction to Strategy" by Andre Beaufre? He's a French military theorist who wrote a manual for western strategy in the face of the cold war (the book is 1963, so right after the Cuban Missle Crisis). He conceives of strategy in the broad decision-based framework that you do, and articulates a theory of interior and exterior maneuver to maximize one's freedom of action while minimizing one's adversary's freedom of action, leading to a psychological decision. In his terms, Russia has failed at both interior (i.e. in theater) and exterior (i.e. on the global stage) maneuvers, deeply restricting their freedom of action. Ukraine has engaged in very effective interior maneuvers -- developing a high cohesion hybrid light infantry defense -- and very effective exterior maneuvers -- successfully courting and maintaining broad international support. Similarly, the NATO countries have not (publicly at any rate) engaged in any interior maneuvers, but have engaged in exterior maneuvers to both reduce the freedom of action of Russia and increase the freedom of action of Ukraine.

Grognard escalation: When revolutionary changes happen, we look for ways to obscure them. This is, I think, an example. The difference between ships at anchor and ships on the move *seemed significant* to contemporary military theorists in the same way that it's tempting now to say, "well, the Russians are bad at mechanized warfare". That's a factor that *obscures* a revolutionary change in tactics and operations. It turns out that whether capital ships are at anchor or not, they are terribly vulnerable to the combination of dive and torpedo bombers and to hammer and anvil tactics. Everything materially needed for attacks of the sort the Repulse and Prince of Wales suffered was in place in 1940 for every major power. The British had the Beaufort and Swordfish, the Americans the Catalina and Devastator, the Germans the Ju-88 and Ju-87, the Japanese the G3M and Kate and Val. And most of those were products of the mid 1930s, so we can see that navies are contemplating and wargaming the sort of operation that sunk the Repulse and PoW for at least half a decade before it happened. In contrast to what that book argues, *most* major powers (maybe not the Italians and Soviets) could execute an operation like the sinking of the Repulse. The Germans rendered HMS Illustrious combat ineffective with similar aerial tactics about a year *before* the sinking of the Repulse despite the Illustrious having CAP overhead. What the book you cite is pointing to is a difference in quantity, not quality. That is, between late 1940 and early 1942 we moved from *some* land based aerodromes projecting no-go zones for enemy shipping to essentially *all* land based aerodromes projecting that same no-go zone (and the no-go zones growing larger as the tactics and weapons employed by land based bombers caught up to their range). A British or American admiral proposing an operation involving major capital ships without air support in late 1943 would be laughed out of the room. When the Japanese actually undertook such operations, they were (without exception) suicidal. To bring home the comparison to what we're seeing now, we're in that transitional period where it probably is suicidal to engage in mechanized operations without a snow-globe like anti-ISR bubble surrounding your force. No one has *developed* that snow-globe-like anti-ISR bubble yet, so we're in an interim period like the period between, say Coral Sea and Philippine Sea. At least one side in the conflict can project power in this new way (maybe both? we haven't seen Ukraine present mass to be targeted yet). Neither side (I don't think) has developed a plausible defense against the new way of projecting combat power. The USN eventually came up with one; the combination of excellent radar, picket destroyers, CAP, and the CIC. I think some of the discussion here is about what that looks like on land.

It's like the transition from battleship-centric fleets to carrier-centric fleets. Battleships stopped being viable frontline units when the combination of submarines and carrier-based strike aircraft extended the lethal range of fleets (and airbases!) from the 40ish km range of battleships to the 300ish km range of strike aircraft. The logistical weight of battleships didn't help their cause either. We managed to repurpose ours as floating artillery batteries. Tanks might see a similar second life as you suggest. edit: And floating AAA batteries; I wonder if tanks can be repurposed to specialize in anti-UAV missions? it is a collision of systems, one we recognize, the other is something else. I think we're seeing in the Battle of Kiev something like the Battle of Taranto. Everyone should have realized that naval combat was fundamentally different after the British rendered three Italian battleships combat ineffective with cloth covered biplanes. But the British themselves didn't see the dramatic systemic shift and lost the Repulse and Prince of Wales more than a year later.

Thanks - I'll pick those up! Got to hit the library next week to pick up Beaufre's Introduction to Strategy, so will snag those as well. I'm on a second re-read of the Expanse right now; quite good. I also think Neal Stephenson's Anathem (oddly) does a nice job of analyzing strategic and operational art. In particular, it conceives of states of the world as points in a large vector space, and operations as moving through a world-line that's connected to the outcome you desire. That sounds a bit like the decision theory you're exploring. Reading this thread, what's jumped out to me is the analogy to the Pacific Theatre in WWII with the Russians playing the part of the Japanese. Each chose to launch an attack driven by ideological and operational concerns rather than strategic concerns. In the same way that the Japanese plan hinged on the Americans tapping out, the Russian plan appears to have hinged on a collapse of Ukranian resistance. Like the Japanese, they had a closing window when it appeared that strategic success was within reach, driven for the Japanese by the oil embargo and for the Russians by Ukraine's gradual tilt westward. Operationally, the Japanese launched bold offensives that they could not support. They never had control of their lines of communication, especially after the USN figured out how to make torpedoes that actually exploded. The degradation of our submarines on the Japanese merchant navy are similar to the NLAW equipped light infantry wreaking havoc in the Russian LOCs. Like the Japanese, the Russians are penny-packeting troops into operations that have no momentum. Compare the repeated company sized attacks near Kiev with the flow of 500ish troops at a time into Guadalcanal on destroyers. Like the Americans, who carefully husbanded their (temporarily irreplaceable) naval assets until either strategic necessity (Coral Sea) or a huge tactical advantage (Midway) made their collective risk more palatable. Like the Americans, the Ukrainians have denied the Russians the decisive battle the appear to want, rather focusing on small attritional engagement and friction. Time will tell whether Russian operational plans adapt in a way that Japanese operational plans did not. Tactically, non-obvious factors in both Russian and Japanese formations turned out very important -- Japanese ships were light on AAA, had inferior (if any) CICs, and had poor damage control facilities and procedures, all of which turned out to be really important. Russian armored vehicles appear to have insufficient flotation and poor mobility maintenance, which appears to be really important. Beyond that, American information supremacy eventually tilted carrier combat decisively in favor of the Americans, who could deliver CAP formations to just the right place to disrupt Japanese attacks. Similarly, Ukranian information dominance (?) is allowing them to attrit Russian formations and LOCs in ways that appear to seriously disrupt Russian attacks. It's really bewildering to try and make sense of. But thinking in terms of the Pacific has helped me some.

This is really interesting - are there any good books that are primers on this sort of operational thinking? (I've been a lurker for the past 20 years, but this made me post! Huzzah.) (Also, if you've had a hand in CMCW, many thanks. I've found it a really compelling simulation; forced me to learn to think really differently from either CMBS or the WWII games.)

I've kept a G4 450 with OS9 stashed in my closet to occasionally get a fix slogging through Normandy, Russia, and Italy. It's got the public beta, CMBO, CMBB, and CMAK and not a lot else. Really exciting to see CM return to the Mac after such a long exodus! Looking forward to recapturing the excitement of playing Last Defense over and over, or my first PBEM game before smoke rounds were toned down. - Bill

But when every single allied company sized unit comes with organic mortars, all guns are short for this world once they're spotted. The 150 is big enough that it's often spotted after one or two shots, and then if your opponent is patient, it's dead to rights. Are they effective? Of course. Would I rather have a company of riflemen on the defense? Yep. - b.

And which Shermans are you shooting up? If they have a (W) in their name, then they have wet ammo storage and are much less apt to ignite. The Americans realized that having exceedingly flammable tanks was by and large a bad idea and took steps to fix the problem and save the lives of crewmen with wet ammo storage bins and armor reinforcement over the ammo storage areas. If you want to torch things, shoot at either the 105 close support tanks or flamethrower tanks. - b.

I'd add that it's also worth it to check and see if the unit you want looking has binoculars. Most HQ units do, as well as machineguns. They're much better at long distance spotting than regular rifle squads. I usually have my heavy weapons in the rear unhidden with small cover arcs and my front line of troops hidden with small cover arcs. Sharpshooters are a wonderful thing as well. - b.

Are these in the game? I played a game last night with '44 pattern British Airborne and they had no such thing. Do they only appear in '45? Now I'm gonna have to go check... There's something deeply satisfying in the game about taking out enemy heavy armor with only hand held AT and close assaults... - b.

I believe what you're seeing is the effect of terrain elevation. You can't have two buildings in adjacent tiles of different elevations. Frustrating, but possible to work around. - b.

It the cover modifier related to the unit size? In open ground there may not be enough cover for a 12 man squad, but a sharpshooter or a ATR team may find a hunkey dory log to hide behind. I'd like to see something like: C0 = base cover value C(f) = actual cover value C(f) = C0 * sqrt(12 / unit_size) That would allow small units to find good cover in relatively open ground while still keeping good cover the best.

Last game I smoked a Jumbo76 that was trying to flank my JpzIV with a 50mm AT gun. My opponent was unamused. -Photon

It would probably be best if they fought against a human opponent too, someone who will test their defenses more than the AI attacking. - Photon

While certainly not antithetical, they can be mutually exclusive. Consider that there are a fixed number of hours that a company can allocate to a given project. Work within this project then becomes a zero sum game. If BTS spends 100 hours improving the graphics that is necessarily 100 hours they will not spend improving gameplay. Now, a balance must be struck between the two areas of concentration, but no one on this board is even remotely capable of dictating what this balance should be. Only BTS can do that. It's ok to question BTS about anything you want. But when they answer (several times, definitively) you should stop arguing. It wastes their (very precious) time and yours as well. We should remember that every hour we spend bugging BTS about something they've answered already is one hour later CM2 will arrive on our doorsteps. - Photon

I guess the whole he dosen't know where you are was the bold stuff I had going on. If you aren't where the attacker thinks you are he's in a boatload of trouble. You should know not only where the attacker is, but where the attacker thinks you are (and don't be there!) If he attacks in force into empty space and you appear on both of his flanks as arty starts to rain down, well, that's a beautiful thing to watch. I think we're saying the same thing. You used forward manouvre to flank the attacker, I (generally) use rearward. The important thing is that the defender can steal the initiative from the attacker by being somewhere he shouldn't and counterattacking (or putting up stubborn resistance) - Photon