A Canadian Cat

Make sure that you become familuar with your (and the enemies) equipment...It's difficult to come up with a good plan if you don't know what your various tools strenths, weakneses and limitations are...
I find it useful to test these things by playing QBs in hotseat mode against myself...This will allow me to see what effect my fire is having on the target.
 

Platoons were typically the smallest unit sent off to achieve anything on its own (there's a reason that radios weren't issued until you hit platoon level) in combat. While squads (and fireteams, if we want to go lower) wouldn't always move and fight in a literal line or always physically in a set other physical formation, they wouldn't move far away from the rest of the platoon, and certainly not away on their own missions.
Squads might might have split up to fight in mutual support, but not (far) away from their platoons... especially not the Panzergrenadiers, who were meant to accompany tanks in breakthrough operations (e.g., a scenario in which tanks wouldn't have been sent off on their own either).
 
Panzergrenadiers weren't meant for just any offensive operations, but for breakthroughs with the Panzer divisions. Hence they were quickly worn down in sustained combat, for much the same reason you're hitting upon even on this lower level: they are inherently quite small formations in regards to manpower.

Not if you want to maintain any kind of C2 they aren't. Unless it's a recon team with a radio (i.e. a specialist) then the smallest unit that should be assigned a task, IMHO, is the platoon. Of course the Red Army did things a bit differently as you allude to but if you send a fireteam or squad off on their own then they can and will suffer from not being effectively led.
MMM

I've heard that's a great blog.   

Check out @Bil Hardenberger's blog: 
 
 
This older thread has some good discussion too: 
 
 
Here is a play list the includes the afore metioned Armchair General videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ6dDlqye9Q&list=PLmW_vcwM_qxukdDjpfUEerpICUzTrTKek&index=1
 

I think the major flaw here is that somehow we can “routinely counter” unmanned systems to the point that their utility comes into question and therefore the moral ethical “rightness” can hold sway.  Like other disruptive technologies unmanned will go far and wide (already has) and likely remain a competitive space for decades, if not centuries.  There is no “whelp that was unpleasant” followed by “now we can go back to the way things were”.  It does not apply to military application nor regulation.  
We cannot unsee or unknow what has already happened.  There is no magic wands to make it all go away.  Even unmanned counters will remain a highly competitive space where arms races to counter-counters will occur all the time.  Hoping that unmanned weapons will somehow disappear is like hoping bullets disappear because we invented body armor.
This paradigm shift has been decades in the making.  This war has only demonstrated that it has arrived.  We will likely try to regulate - hell we try to regulate every new weapons technology, but like air power, cyber and space the punchline is inevitable.  So what?  Dive into the game and be better and faster than opponents.  Blunt the effects and understand what unmanned superiority means.  Shape future battlefields now through rapid smart adoption.  Not military cultural conservatism or pinning hopes on the “better angels”.  We are in a new age of warfare, there is no getting past that.  All that remains is how well we can navigate this new reality.

Unless something has recently changed, everything CMBN installs goes into the main install directory. Nothing should be in the documents folder. CMBN is the only CM2 game that does this. All the others put the games files/user data into the documents folder. So your mods z folder should be on the C drive ...CMBN/data/z. Something about Microsoft changed something but CMBN had already shipped.
I'd backup your mods folder, grab the latest installer and do a clean install.

Which landmarks are those again?

To be fair, you are correct, for sure landmarks are a way to go etc. My point is its not a solved problem yet and how well it works will govern how people ultimately feel about it. Both those in the armed forces - who's opinion counts and those in the civilian population - who's opinion counts in a different way.

LOL. I don't think your link pointing to a digital scan of an actual news paper (remember those, me neither) article makes it feel more recent. 😉 

In about an hour I will be drawing electric from the grid at 0p.
This last weekend we had too much power and I was actually paid to store energy. EV and house batteries were topped up and I got paid!!!
The UK right at the moment is pumping water back uphill in Norway...
Europe is well on the way to having a pretty good integrated energy system and during high wind high sun we easily generate more than needed.

While the messenger is important I think it is as much how that message is transmitted to those who fall for this.
There are certain TV channels that are as important to this undermining of trust and spread out right lies. Without this support Trump wouldn't get any traction.

well Congress may have woken up.  Seems they recently heard about all the appliance theft by Russian troops so now they are focused on eliminating that threat.
 
Don't worry Haiduk, we got your back!  😕

Haiduk if you don't like Western values then return all the Western help you've got. Maybe some country that doesn't have the LBGT and genders will help.
Let me think of some of those for you:
- Russia
- China
- Hungary (currently blocking EU aid)
- USA with Republicans in charge (currently blocking US aid)
- Hamas
- Iran
well seems you're out of luck. The people with your values do seem to be on the other side of the war. Maybe you should listen to you buddies Musk and Trump and Orban (who hate LBGT and genders as much as you) and just surrender.

Amen!

I suggest it's not a good idea.
A targeted response against those responsible rather than creating any more terrorists by killing innocent people. 
Bombing people to the stone age has already escalated this to a level that was uncalled for..

So this is why I think artillery is not really going anywhere.  Let’s say China (or the US) come up with a snazzy APS system that can stop all strike drones cold.  A system like this can still standoff 10kms+ and light up traditional conventional units.  No tech exists to create a massive bubble of protection for small UAS out that far and if it did ground warfare itself would be changed forever regardless.  So this system plus precision artillery, plus strike drones, plus next-gen ATGMs creates an enormous denial pressure on the future battlefield.  The cost to even try to maneuver goes up exponentially.  The losses will be very high compared to previous wars for doing the same tactical action.  As both artillery and drone ranges get longer we are going to see an entire over-the-horizon battle before real people even get near to each other.

IEA Warns Attacks on Russia Plants May Disrupt Diesel Market
The flurry of Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia’s oil refineries risks disrupting global markets for petroleum products, the International Energy Agency said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-12/iea-warns-attacks-on-russia-refineries-may-disrupt-diesel-market
Really? We are deeply concerned. 
Alas, today's night UKR drones couldn't reach Novoshakhtinsk refinery in Rostov oblast - local authorities claimed four drones were shot down/supressed. One fell down on territory of refinery, but didn't cause any significant damage

So just spitballing:
A platoon of M1A2 Sep V3 come in around $100M to just buy the platforms.  To this add logistical costs (fuels, parts and repair tail).  Force generation costs - training areas and exercises. Force projection costs (strat to op lift reqrs).  Pers costs - 16 crew, plus logistics, plus admin overhead.  And weird intangibles like route and bridge repair in training areas.
This all scales up very quickly.  A fully autonomous UAS swarm Bn may need a staff of 16 and a logistics tail but is not going to weigh roughly 300 tons that has to be transported and fueled.  Even at 1 million a pop, a hundred fully upgunned and militarized fully autonomous drones are starting to look pretty damned competitive against current “beyond-Night One” systems.

I don't know if anyone has posted this yet, but  RUSI just published a paper on the present and near future state of drone warfare.
Mass Precision Strike: Designing UAV Complexes for Land Forces
by Justin Bronk and Jack Watling
Excerpt:
Swarming capabilities are commonly touted as the most significant area of capability development in the small UAV defence sector. However, the requirement to swarm introduces significant hardware and software complexity, which in turn drives cost growth and reduces the number of individual assets that can be fielded for any given budget. Massed UAV groupings, as seen regularly in light shows at civilian displays, rely on a ground control station tracking the position of all UAVs in a formation at all times and a central mission computer sending commands to each one to coordinate their movements. This allows large numbers of very simple small UAVs to fly in a coordinated fashion, but it is not a practical approach for military UAVs and weapons in a contested battlespace, due to terrain masking, EW, signal range and emissions control challenges – the ground control station would be struck, decapitating the whole swarm. Instead, for a mass precision strike complex to be capable of swarming tactics, the individual assets involved must have onboard sensors and low-latency datalinks that are resistant to hostile EW disruption. In addition, each asset must carry a mission computer powerful enough, and software complex enough, to fuse the information about terrain, threats and targets received from its own  sensors and those of other UAVs in the formation through datalinks, and to react to that information dynamically in real time. These capabilities are not inherently new, nor are they reliant on advances in AI or complex machine learning models. However, what the requirements for sensors, datalinks and advanced software do is raise component costs, even if used with an inherently cheap airframe/engine combination.
Furthermore, if a mass precision strike system is premised on swarming tactics for its effectiveness against its core target sets, then the number of assets required to use it in a sustained fashion will be increased, due to the need to consistently project sufficient assets into the target area to swarm. In conjunction with the increased hardware and software complexity required, this requirement to sustainably field swarming UAVs in large quantities over time means that fielding this sort of system as more than a ‘Night One’ theatre entry tool is likely to be uneconomical.
In terms of where swarming capabilities are likely to add value commensurate with the additional cost implied by their inclusion as part of a precision strike complex, the primary application will be to improve the capability to overwhelm air defence systems... Other advantages of swarming capabilities are that they can help reduce wasted warheads by deconflicting target selection so that multiple assets do not hit the same target. However, doing so in a way that can differentiate between a target having been hit and successfully disabled versus a target having been hit ineffectively and thus requiring a repeat strike with another asset requires significantly more advanced sensor and processing capabilities than simple deconfliction. Ultimately, for target deconfliction and strike optimisation, the value added question will come down to whether the additional efficiency against defended and undefended target sets gained from functional swarming capabilities outweighs the strike weight foregone by the increase in individual asset cost and the resultant reduction in quantity.

Saw this quote from Tim Snyder and thought it fitting to this discussion. It seems to me, Mike Johnson is looking ahead.

After this war....definitely a race to the bottom.  Ukraine had a $6B defence budget in 2021 - Russia had a $60B+ budget.  Ukraine's ability to stop Russia, push them back and now hold again is in no small part to employment of unmanned systems.
No government on earth is going to "just say no" on that level of disruption based on humanitarian or ethical reasons unless they are so secure that they can somehow take the high ground...looking at places like Iceland.  
What a lot of people in the AP mine and Cluster munitions camps did not understand is just how secondary or even tertiary these systems are to modern militaries.  Or maybe they did and were good with pushing the needle where they could.  Regardless, precision unmanned systems are by definition not indiscriminate. Will they be abused, most definitely.  But the opportunity/risks to the very legal and moral frameworks that would try to outlaw these systems is simply too high.  Fully autonomous systems are not a force multiplier, they are a deterministic weapon.  And as such, we are definitely headed towards them.

You mean like a strike package? With some flying CAP, others on EW, some clearing the route in, a couple providing oversight and a comms rebro and BDA, some SEAD, and of course some bearing warheads and payloads?
Yeah, of course. That all sounds clever and sensible, especially since it's already proven doctrinal approach to getting aerial effects delivery systems into an AO.
It doesn't sound simple or cheap though.

Ok...weird roundabout way of proving a point...sure, whatever.
But doesn't this totally ignore the quality of precision? A micro drone with a single DPICM munition hitting at the right location can do as much or more than a bunch of heavy boob-boom.  Have we not seen enough evidence of this already.  I mean I watched an FPV pull U turn and hit a tank in the @ss at speed.  
Small things do pack small but a single DPICM round can penetrate up to 100mm of armor.  The NEQ is around 33 grams.  The trick is hitting the right spot.  Back deck, tracks, gun, sights...
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/dpicm.htm
"But they will miss!!"  Ok, send a few dozen.
The argument in favour of drones is cost, precision, dispersion and extremely low logistical weight. 
Checkmate?  Add up all the support and infra tonnage to get that single 155mm shell on target, from factory to X.  Now add up the same chain for a small FPV with a DPICM attached to the front.  I will bet a pension cheque on which system is going to win that one.
That is the compelling argument in favour of drones.  What we do not know is if a million autonomous drones can replace artillery on the battlefield...at a fraction of the cost.

I like it so much that I'm playing the same battle (Pershing versus Tiger) as a PBEM against a second opponent (it's okay he knows and he suggested it).  But of course that's a fictional battle, perhaps more balanced than some of the historical ones.  And that might be my only reservation about Final Blitzkrieg, a lot of what it does (and could) cover is not likely to be well-balanced as the Germans were in a bad way by then.
As for the list, it is perhaps the result of a search on Wiki?  I don't really have any issues with that, and there are some 'new' things there that could be done in CM.

Hello,
Maybe you already saw Armchair General videos, if not it can help.
Personnaly, I play in a realistic and immersive manner and try to learn from my errors. I feel like it helps me progress.