Determinant

How true. I installed 'America's Army' with high hopes. My expectations were cruelly dashed when I learned that it was the tactical wargame equivalent of watching 6 year olds playing soccer... There should be servers reserved for grumpy middle-aged men who like to do things properly.

Not from what I have read. But it should be possible to have Mobile Infantry as per Starship Troopers (the book rather than the 'standing in line like infantry at Waterloo firing MGs at bugs' film ). M1A1 TC in his post below has put up some links to how MI (as per the book) are supposed to look: guys in deep sea diving rig with rocket packs and lasers. In effect MI are more like vehicles than infantry as we understand them in the 21stC. They are very small compared to a vehicle; but slightly less able to find ground cover than an true infantryman due to their larger profile. Their small size of course makes then much harder to acquire as a target than a vehicle. Their armour is relatively light. Although it can defeat less challenging attacks (equivalent 20thC .50 cal; fragmentation; small bug pincers etc) it is vulnerable to any 'modern' anti-armour attack. MI's true strength is their agility. Their ability to duck into dead ground (re-entrants etc) and rapidly jet to a new firing position make them a formidable opponent. Think of them as tiny attack helicopters. But as a result of trade-offs with power to weight they are, compared to a vehicle, underarmed (unless using tac nukes!) and underarmoured. Similarly their sensor suite does not have the range and platform stability that would be found in a heavier ground vehicle. This means that they can be outranged and outgunned by ground vehicles where ground cover is not available: they are not suitable for those resource rich but flat desert planets! Another MI strength is their shared situational awareness derived from networked sensors and communications: MI have borg spotting capability as standard! Bring 'em on!

Fleet do the flying; Mobile Infantry do the dying! Will there be bugs?

ERA works against CE attack. RPGs, ATGWs and the like. Meaningless against a KE long rod penetrator using hydrodynamic penetration. The only thing that is resistant against KE is thick hard heavy armour. There are no shortcuts.

Very true. I am sure that the QBers would prefer a 'kitty hunt kitty' game of chess if they could get it. Only one minor disagreement: 'You go to war with the Secretary of Defense you have'. A better man once put a sign on his desk saying 'the buck stops here'; but honesty is unfashionable in our days: more's the pity.

He looks more like a war tourist to me with his obviously 'just chuckling around' mate gurning over his shoulder. War tourism. It'll get you killed quick. Fight the temptation.

I clicked on 'start adventure' - they wanted my name. What's adventuresome about that? In some of the best adventures I've had I never knew anyone's name. I'm getting old. It's cold and I feel tired...

Lest we forget. 'Half an hour of paddling brought them back to the beach. All they had between them was one tin hat, one revolver and the clothes they stood up in. The Beachmaster watched their arrival and commented, 'This is sure to swing the balance in Monty's favour. There will be consternation in Berlin.

Will the long range not work against your favour as the zooks will miss while the Hetzer will not? But best of luck anyway.

Lest we forget 25lbrs firing over open sights at 300 yds off the assault beach. There must be a scenario in there somewhere...

Thanks for your interesting posts RDG. You're a lucky man to live in Normandy - a charming and peaceful part of the world. It seems strange now that it was a scene of such extreme, if necessary, horror just 60 years ago. I assume that you will be attending some of the commemorations. What's your itinerary?

Good so far and after but wrong here: you would not be introduced to Lt Jones. You would be introduced to Mr Jones. If Lt Jones presumed to call the Regimental Sergeant-Major 'RSM' to his face he would be growled at and told: 'No Sir. You will call me Mr Smith'. A subaltern doesn't really amount to that much in the context of a British regiment. Quaint ain't it?

In the UK infantry; nothing. It is a staff (administrative) role. In an armoured unit a sgt might command a tank (but corporals also command tanks), and in artillery units a sgt will command each gun. In both cases other sgts will have the equivalent admin role as in inf units. Regards JonS Edits: blimmin' UBB. And corrected numpty pointed out by Dorosh in the following post. </font>

Interesting. Do you know anything about map-making in Europe? Nor do I. I do know that in the UK that when Ordnance Survey resurveyed the work of their Victorian predecessors with GPS and other modern gadgets they found that the Olde Ones were overall within feet spot-on with their surveys. It is a modern error to assume that without technology nothing can be done. The steam age surveyors knew their business and could draw accurate maps. No doubt there is an equation that directly links area of land and number of surveyors to accuracy of maps. The difficulty for the continental US is that the area overwhelmed the number. The same is not true in most of Western Europe. Indeed in Georgia FUSSR in 1999 we used maps that had been surveyed by the Red Army in 1942. Frenzied work that must have been with AG South sniffing at your heels. And they weren't that bad. The lines of latitude went a bit wonky in Eastern Georgia but I suppose that that is understandable in the situation...

Leave my computer? Are you nuts? I think I'd die if I ever left my computer. </font>

Take your car. Drive off road. Live the life. I once abandoned a land rover that I'd bogged in a dry river bed. I now maintain that abandoning a vehicle that you have bogged through your own incompetence is one of the stations of the cross en route to having a wife, mortgage and sprogs. Bad break if you do it when someone's trying to kill you though. You kids need to leave your computers and drive cross-country from time to time...

And now the sun's starting to go down... (startles nervously at the wind howling through the branches)

Why do people whine about people whining about people who whine? Go figure.

Interesting stuff. I think Treeburst has a good point. Special anti-armour weapons should add value to the base-level infantry anti-armour value. Instead the molotov cocktail (a special anti-armour weapon) appears to reduce it. The answer must be that the base-level infantry anti-armour value is too high. Men against tanks is difficult to model. There are many variables. But in general the man, without some special weapon, is pretty much helpless against the tank. See for instance the Germans against the British tanks in WWI. It was the German field guns that stopped the tanks not the infantry with their liberal supply of grenades. See also the efforts of the terrorists in Iraq fighting coalition forces tonight. There are lots of terrorists close to armoured vehicles but only their RPGs seem to be doing any damage, but mostly not fatal damage. The terrorists do not seem afraid to press their attacks in the face of certain death and yet they are not killing AFVs in the numbers that one might anticipate from that suicidal determination and knowledge of the CM universe. This would seem to suggest that the advantage of men against tanks is overdone in CM.

Jason, thanks for your interesting and thoughtful post. So the German Army still believed in a Napoleonic concept of victory through defeating the enemy army in pitched battle? The 'decisive battles' theory. As you say a perfectly reasonable selection of COG. It had worked against the Tsarist army in WWI. But the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a wholly different type of opponent to the old imperial regime. It was, as you observe, utterly ruthless, ferociously disciplined and perfectly happy to keep feeding millions of men into the Nazi buzzsaw. I think that the Nazis did mis-identify the Soviet COG. It was not the Red Army but the Communist Party. It was the CP that made the SU's war effort run. I think that if the Nazis had purported (telling big giant fibs being one of their talents) upon their invasion that their only aim was to liberate Mother Russia, and the Soviet subject states from the 'yoke of communism' that the whole 'rotten structure' might well have collapsed. But they quickly squandered any goodwill that they might have had by their bestial treatment of their PWs and the occupied civilian population. I think that Typhoon was a belated realisation of the true state of things: Moscow was the nerve centre of the CP and the CP was the SU's COG. Too late and a crude and bloody way to attack it. No doubt Sun Tzu would say something along the lines of 'know your enemy'. Sorry - none of the above has anything to do with the ahistorical use of SPWs but I found it interesting.

Sorry, I'm afraid its not available online. It is consequently quite hard to get hold of. Although it is unrestricted it is an official publication and I suppose therefore that they aren't too interested in helping out the ordinary punter. Distribution is controlled by DSDC Llangennech, Llanelli, SA14 8YP. I have no idea what they might charge for back copies. I think that our best hope is that Sydney Jary (author of Platoon 18) publishes his collected articles in book form. He is a remarkable man to be still talking and writing about his experiences sixty years after.

Thanks for that which is most illuminating. I am of course guilty of taking the OED at face value which records the first use of 'Blitzkrieg' in English by a journalist in 1939. But of course the OED is an English dictionary. Doh. I completely agree that the Germans do seem to have developed a marvellous tactical technique but not necessarily developed their operational and strategic doctrine to the same level. What's the quote about tactical steps making up operational leaps while strategy points out the path? The meandering around in Barbarrosa is another example. The German Army, or more precisely Hitler, never seemed to decide what was the Soviet centre of gravity: Moscow?; Stalin?; Kiev?; Leningrad?; the Red Army? They would have saved themselves much trouble if they had decided what it was that they were actually trying to do.