John D Salt

I'd say the fact that he was killed doesn't mean he was a bad politician. </font>

Belisarius is a good choice. I'm just waiting for someone to say "Narses, now, there was a commander who had balls..." All the best, John.

Ask the Serbs. If you can find them. All the best, John.

All the "tungsten" projectiles I can think of at the moment are really made of tungsten carbide. Never heard of anyone mixing iron with it. All the best, John.

What's wrong with conscription? USA still had it in Vietnam. Finland still uses it. Conscription does NOT equal poor training. </font>

I think the performance of the Arab Legion in 1947-48, and the Jordanian Army at times since then, is a clear case of Arabs getting very much better results. All the best, John.

I'd be interested to hear what people think "information management" (as distinct from recce, C4ISTAR or SA) means in this context, and the nature of the mechanism by which it helps people win or lose battles. Feel free to cite historical examples of good or bad "information management". All the best, John.

"Miss Destruction" isn't listed at http://pageantcenter.com/pageant_state_listings.html Presumably when the dizzy blonde young things competing for the title explain their ambitions to the leering compere, they must remember, when they say that they are interested in "Travel and promoting world peace", to add "...through superior firepower" to be in with a chance of winning. Always assuming they did well enough in the swimsuit, ballgown, and 200 metres M-16 events. All the best, John.

Sir Hugh Caswell Tremenheere Dowding is certainly a name to conjour with, but I'd like to put in a nomination for Keith Park as the greatest air commander of all time. Not only did he lead 11 Group, which bore the brunt of the Battle of Britain, he then went on to lead the air defence of Malta, GC. All the best, John.

Exactly the time you need to be at your very politest, I should have thought. When I was taught how to set up a VCP, it was stressed that the man talking to the driver should always be immensely polite. I imagine this was intended to keep some semblance of normality in the proceedings, which would otherwise be rendered a trifle tense by the fact of your oppo keeping a bloody great SLR pointed at the driver's head at all times (a fact we were far too polite to mention). Why "Especially the Corps"? The US Army may have little experience of or interest in low-intensity operations, but the USMC have historically been rather good at them. Do you really think there is no connection between failing to win the "hearts & minds" battle in VN and the ultimate US humiliation there? All the best, John.

It's not the events themselves that trigger the intervention points, but the commander becoming aware of the fact that the situation requires his attention. Of course, the nervous commander could insist on SITREPs every five minutes, so as to be sure not to miss anything, but he could also be pretty sure (assuming a reasonable model of how his subordinate comanders direct their attention) of nothing ever getting done. All this involves focusing on rather a different set of things to model than those that traditionally fascinate direct-fire modellers, but I cannot see how that translates into "complexity" or any particular difficulty in coding. "It would make CM into a command game" is an argument I can accept for Battlefront not doing it, but "It's too hard to code" is not. All the best, John.

People have been writing discrete-event simulations (i.e., with variable-length intervals between events) on computers at least since 1959.</font>

Errh, why? People have been writing discrete-event simulations (i.e., with variable-length intervals between events) on computers at least since 1959. Are you one of these callow youths who programs video/phone/PDA/toaster devices, and thinks Java is an advanced O-O language? All the best, John.

What kind of phone would you need to play it on? </font>

Yes, but those were interior plaster walls, not external structural walls (thus qualifying as "mouseholing"). All the best, John.

Exception: If the building contains live and armed enemy troops, it is reasonable to suppose that they will be covering existing openings. </font>

I don't see how variable-length bounds depend on the course of a battle being predictable. Rather, they are an attempt to get away from the traditional but entirely silly wargamerism that commanders will have a chance to change all their orders at regular intervals. In particular, there is simply no way you can get inside your opponent's Boyd loop when each player goes around their command cycle in lock step at exactly the same small and regular interval. All the best, John.

I think I would call that "breaching", but that's purely a feeling based on no doctrinally-approved sources. Then again, I would enter a building from the street through an existing opening, because the point is to get indoors off the street as quickly as possible, preferring windows to doors and upper stories to lower (if accessible, which is the hard bit -- I've never really believed that mucking about with ladders in FIBUA is a good idea). Then again again, there might be reasons for holing a wall other than to clamber through it in person. I think it was Sydney Jary who summed up the essence of FIBUA as trying to knock a hole in a building so that flame could be introduced. All the best, John.

Damn. If Battlefront isn't going to cater to the pirate market segment, does that mean I can kiss goodbye to my dream of "CM: Pirates versus Ninjas"? All the best, John.

I would like to have each side have "turn lengths" idependent of the other side's, and for these to depend on when the commander was entitled to make a decision or change of orders (a decision point being reached in a plan, or a report arriving of something requiring a change of plan, or a phase being completed). Pretty close -- what you describe I would call loopholing, moseholing is when you make a hole in a wall to move from room to room without having to go out into the street. All the best, John.

I suspect that the method you suggest would, in fact, have worked quite well, on condition it were done with an army of millions rather than mere tens of thousands -- and under those circumstances quite probably with less total loss of life on both sides (apart from the inevitable firearms accidents associated with deploying millions of M3 grease-guns). It is a well-established principle of riot control that the level of effect you can achieve on a large mob of recalcitrant people depends on the number of people you deploy muliplied by the level of violence you are prepared to use. You might be able to control a riot with a dozen blokes with firearms, or achieve the same level of control with a thousand men carrying pick-helves. I expect that the same sort of calculation applies further up the spectrum of conflict, too. Unfortunately, the whole thrust of NEC, Digitization, Medium-weight brigades and all that hullabaloo is to achieve the same level of effect with smaller (and cheaper and more deployable) forces. I have yet to be convinced that it will offer the level of improvement people are expecting for top-end, high-intensity conflict. It seems reasonably certain that digitized forces will be far less capable than the same money's worth of well-trained old-fashioned inf and engineers when it comes to low-intensity conflict. It would be agreeable to think that CM:SF will be able to reflect the spectrum of conflict in this way, but I doubt that it will, as the average wargamer is interested in high-intensity conflict and has little interest in the low-intensity stuff (and the same goes for the US Army, outside the Special Forces). It's exactly the kind of thing multi-player boardgames have repeatedly shown themselves to be good at showing -- think Diplomacy, Machiavelli, Illuminati, Mordred. Getting the same sort of mechanisms to work in a computer game might be a bit tricky when you want to play against the AI, but shows another good reason for using an agent-based approach. So, who wants the next version of The Sims to be set in the CIMIC cell of a Division HQ? I suspect that you might even need several different flavours of VP, rather than have them all interchangeable, so that a player might achieve (say) a military victory, a moral defeat, and a public-relations draw. The advantage to being the "rotating-eyeball religious fanatic" player would then be that you could be humiliated militarily, disgraced morally, suffer a public-relations disaster and still point to your smashing religious victory of 100 VPs to nil, because nobody but you is allowed to score points on the religious victory track. All the best, John.

If only BFC had included the Russian 37mm spade-mortar! This could have been the only bikeable mortar in the game. All the best, John.

Yes, you are quite right. All the best, John.