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Erik Springelkamp

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Posts posted by Erik Springelkamp

    Identification of Units

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    I personally cannot see how it could be difficult to implement FoW in the GUI - after all, there must be code to get the specific information to the unit information part of the GUI - surely therefore, all that needs to be done is replace all and any information with the word "Infantry" or "Tank". Perhaps it could be restricted to Elite and Iron levels of difficulty, but it should certainly be doable.

    There is one fundamental difficulty with FOW wrt. enemy units:

    The actual 3D shapes determine hit and damage, and there is no 'fake' shape to show to the enemy.

    So if you spot an enemy, you can go close, and examine the 3D shape, and then discover its function by looking at its stuff.

    Not much point in hiding these details in the UI, when someone can get this information if he makes the effort to study the shape. At least not in two-player games.

    In solo-play a mod for the enemy icons me be helpful, but still one would be tempted to look at the details in the bottom panel when in a difficult spot.

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    The Peng Challenge Thread: Loading 29%

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    Being unable to play CM says nothing about intelligence. I'm sure there's rocket scientists, nuclear physicist, and nobel prize winning biologists that couldn't do squat with CM no matter how hard they ry. There are plenty of extremely stupid people that play CM quite well. Of course I speak of the Peng Challenge thread as prime evidence.

    Steve

    Just to make sure that it isn't missed here.

    No thanks needed.

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    Could CM:SF happen for real?

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    That is a stretch. Yes, the Soviet backed regime granted rights to women, but that was more theoretical than real.

    Not all families in Afghanistan were retarded.

    Those that were not sent their daughters to good schools and even University during that era.

    Soviet citizens were also granted extensive rights by the Soviet Constituion. The tricky part was trying to exercise them...;)

    For at least 40% of Russians life was better under the Soviet era than today.

    The Soviet Union in Afghanistan pre 1980 had nothing material to gain.

    Their only interest was to prevent the area to come under Western rule.

    It meant that Soviet administrators/advisors were on average of the idealistic kind and not of the greedy corrupt kind like in the rich republics and provinces.

    They built and maintained the infrastructure of power plants, roads, schools and hospitals, as that was (and is) something beyond Afghan society itself.

    In a way it was the Communist form of what Christian churches did for the West in 3rd world countries - probably with similar moral motives and similar moral errors.

    Edit: Of course it became entirely different and very nasty after 1979.

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    Could CM:SF happen for real?

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    Assad and Iran were never a good fit. One's theocratic Shia while the other's not only staunchy secular but Baathist - Iran's old nemesis fom the Iran Iraq war. I imagine if Assad were to stoop to using radical theocratic elements to quell the current uprising these elements would get a big surprise when he surpresses them in turn. So we'd likely see a nasty armed conflict arise between erstwhile allies even bloodier than the original 'Arab Spring' supression.

    But Hezbollah is for both a power that works to their strategic advantage so they cooperate intensively on this front.

    One doesn't need the same ideology to form an alliance.

    But indeed, internally Islamistic forces are not tolerated in Syria.

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    Could CM:SF happen for real?

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    but also a lot of progress has been made in helping women getting the education they would otherwise be denied under the Taliban.

    You do know that the best period for women in Afghanistan was under remote Soviet Rule, don't you (no I guess you don't)

    so yes the British and Americans have made a difference.

    Yes, to start with the fact that the Islamic revolution in Afghanistan was started by the CIA in the first place.

    You bring the place down from one side, then you blow it up from the other side.

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    notes on the Syrian Army

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    REVIEWED BY JOSHUA LANDIS, Department of Near East Studies, Princeton University

    International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Aug., 1998), pp. 447-449

    Published by: Cambridge University Press

    Only a handful of important books have been written on modern Syria; and Nikolaos Van Dam's The Struggle for Power in Syria is one of them. When it first appeared in 1979 with the subtitle, Sectarianism, Regionalism and Tribalism in Politics, 1961-1978, it rapidly set the terms for future debate on Syrian politics. With the recent publication of a revised edition, Van Dam, who has served as the Dutch ambassador to Syria, Egypt, and Turkey, has conscientiously updated his book. He has re-worked the original six chapters and the footnotes, and added three new chapters covering the last twenty years of Assad's rule. The bibliography is the best of its kind and should be the starting point for any student wishing to research Syrian politics. Although the book is twice the length of the original, it contains only a merciful 140 pages of text, making it ideal for serious undergraduate classes and indispensable to any Middle East collection.

    The passage of eighteen years has only confirmed the intelligence of Van Dam's original thesis. He has demonstrated elegantly and simply that the coups and factionalism in Syrian politics of the 1960s must be understood in terms of identity politics rather than of class. At that time, Bacthist regimes were trumpeting their elimination of sectarianism and tribalism as meaningful social referents in Syria.

    Arab nationalists, inclined to accept such claims, theorized about Arab unity and socialism as if an age of liberation were at hand. Ac-ademics, too, were swept up by the post-revolutionary optimism. Many deployed such Marxist categories as the "rural middle class," "Bonapartist state," and "bureaucratic authoritarianism" as if to suggest that the military dictatorships that had become so commonplace in the Middle Eastern landscape were not as bad as they seemed. Some even argued that they were a pre-requisite to economic development and offered a way out of the destructive embrace of inter-national capitalism. Van Dam took a more sober view.

    For Van Dam, dictatorship in Syria was not as much a product of economic necessity as of social fragmentation. Culturally, Syria was too divided to support a pluralistic state. "A clear relationship existed," Van Dam writes, "between political stability and the degree of sectarian, regional and tribal factionalism in the political elite" (p. 139). When the power centers of the state, such as the upper ranks of the security forces and the military, have been divided among diverse sectarian and regional factions, as they were in the 1960s, Syria has been unstable. When "one all-powerful political faction" dominates, as has been the case since Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970, Syria has experienced stability (p. 137). Almost all of Assad's closest lieutenants are not only 'Alawis, they are also members of his family or tribe, or they come from his hometown of Qardahah. Relying on primordial ties for political loyalty has been a simple necessity of power politics in Syria-and the root of Assad's success. That is to say, it takes a village to rule Syria.

    The original chapters in The Struggle for Power in Syria remain the most compelling, for they explain how a complete re-shuffling of Syria's social and political hierarchy followed the cAlawi-led Bathist coup of March 1963. 'Alawi officers, with the assistance of other minority officers from the Syrian countryside, broke the political monopoly held by the Sunnis in a series of purges that led up to the second Bathist coup of 1966. The minority factions could not preserve their alliance following the downfall of the Sunnis. Neither their shared Bathist ideology nor their common background of rural poverty was enough to stem the tide of sectarian distrust sweeping through Syrian politics.

    In 1966, the `Alawis purged Druze officers following a dramatic standoff, which was re-solved only after Assad surrounded the Jabal Druze with artillery and threatened to level the region. Next, the Ismailis were swept from senior military positions. By 1970, most senior non-'Alawi officers had been dismissed or arrested for having supported abortive coup at-tempts. As Van Dam points out, "this did not mean that hardly any" non-`Alawi officers were left in the army; rather, "it meant the end of their role as significant power groups" that could threaten the 'Alawi domination of the state (p. 61). The last episode in this decade of upheaval was a battle between two cAlawi factions, one led by Assad and one by Salah Jadid. Assad's superior ability to cultivate regional and tribal loyalties within the military secured his victory. In these chapters, Van Dam demonstrates to the satisfaction of this reviewer that sectarian politics and primordial loyalties are the keys to understanding the major stages in the devel-opment of the contemporary Syrian state.

    That said, it should be noted that a number of fine academics remain unconvinced, most notably Raymond Hinnebusch. He insists that "class provides the crucial key that drives change" in Syria, and that sectarian politics are secondary, surfacing only "when class conflict recedes" (p. 141).

    The three new chapters continue the story of Syria's sectarian struggles up to the present. Two of the chapters deal with the rise of Syria's Sunni Islamic opposition, and its demise following the fateful Hama massacre of 1982. The final chapter, titled "The Power Elite under Hafiz al-Asad," touches on a number of topics, not the least of which is the question of what will happen when Assad dies.

    Little of this material will be new to those who have read Patrick Seale's biography of Assad. Many episodes of Syrian history under Assad are not discussed in any detail, in particular those relating to public and foreign policy such as the 1973 war and Syria's involvement in Lebanon. The reason for these omissions, Van Dam explains, is that "Syrian policies as such had nothing to do with the sectarian composition of the power elite" (p. 137). What is included is prescribed by Van Dam's original thesis.

    In his analysis of the Hama massacre, for example, Van Dam explains that the troops who destroyed the Sunni city were largely cAlawi in composition and that their commanding of-ficers were CAlawi almost to the man. He notes that the choice of Hama for the regime's bloody showdown with its opponents was not coincidental, for Hamawis had been responsible for much of the past mistreatment of 'Alawis. Revenge provided the motive for some of the ex-cesses of Hama. If Hama is the yardstick by which scholars and statesmen continue to measure the brutality of Assad's regime, it seems that Van Dam is critical but understanding. He does not try to clear up the controversy over the number killed, but repeats that somewhere be-tween 5,000 and 25,000 perished. If the Muslim Brotherhood had toppled the regime, or if Syria had slipped into civil war as Lebanon did, Van Dam suggests, matters might have been much worse. He points out that the majority of Syrians may well have supported Assad, even if grudgingly, in light of these bleak alternatives. Assad succeeded in breaking the back of the opposition at Hama, we are told, even if he may have "sown the seeds of future strife and revenge." It is clear that like many Western and Israeli statesmen, Van Dam respects Assad for his ability to survive and for his mastery of Syrian politics.

    All the same, Van Dam is not optimistic about the prospects for meaningful economic re-form in Syria, or about the possibility of a Velvet Revolution in the future. He points out that Assad's anti-corruption campaigns have been ineffectual because the president refuses to dis-cipline his security chiefs, many of whom are the worst offenders. He doubts that the country can make a peaceful transition to a post-Assad government, because Assad has allowed his re-gime to become ossified. No purges have been carried out, and few top personnel have been changed in the last twenty-five years. Consequently, no new generation has been groomed for power or schooled in the art of government.

    Only the president's son, Bashar, seems to be in line to inherit authority from his father. Other members of Assad's inner circle have likewise been grooming their sons to succeed them. He notes that the Sunni majority has not given up its "negative attitude towards 'Alawi religion and 'Alawis in general," and adds that he finds it "very difficult to imagine a scenario in which the present narrowly based, totalitarian regime .. . can be peacefully transformed into a more widely based democracy." The key to Assad's success has been his ability to rule through his metaphorical village. Whether the dynastic principle that Assad and his men have been pushing will catch on in Syria is an open question. Van Dam gives us little reason to believe that Syria is developing the political institutions or broader national identity that may someday replace the parochial loyalties and narrow prejudices that now define politics in Syria.

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    notes on the Syrian Army

    in Combat Mission Shock Force 1

    Posted

    NATO is not going to attack Syria now or in the near future (barring totally new circumstances).

    There are about as many demographic threats in Syria as there were in Iraq, and the current president is the formal head of a power coalition, he is not an absolute dictator.

    There are major Christian, Shia (including Alawi, who hold the power), Sunni, Druse, Kurd and Palestinian populations in Syria, and an unbalancing revolution would spell disaster for the country.

    After the lessons of Iraq, no NATO country would like to take responsibility for that mess.

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    A cool little discovery (TIPS)

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    Ever since CMBO came out I've wanted a command like 'Covering fire for X amount of time then stop'. Well, I just figured out how to do that in CM2. When you plan your area fires add a pause to the firing unit, then plot a movement order on the spot they are already sitting on, and add a cover arc to the move point. Your squad will fire until the pause runs out, reorg, and then cease fire.

    I have found this helpful when assaulting the hedgerows if you time it right, your men will stop firing just as your maneuver teams reaches the next hedge. It's a good way to save ammo and minimize FF casualties.

    I wonder if it works in CMSF...

    That has been in the sticky posts of CMSF for years, with many variations, like scoot and shoot. You can compose very elegant choreographies that way.

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