Probus

Well I grabbed 1st place in this one and just wanted to say thanks for the fun battles to all my opponents. Well fought to the bitter end, good times!
That last battle was excellent! I took the field with the Soviets but took heavy losses. I did manage to hold the line as the Axis but still took heavy losses. Fun stuff, love it! 👍

Translation for those who need it:
"Performation en mètres" = Penetration in meters (I understand this value as the distance up to which the area can be penetrated)
"Performation en yards" = Penetration in yards (you had guesses this one… 😉)
"Nota: ces chiffres décroissent avec l'inclinaison de paroi" = "these values decrease because of the armor angle"

Game over, tough battle, thank you @Andrew Kulin for this epic and thrilling battle (lawran in the tournament). We achieved approximately the same results on both sides. Towards the end, we took huge risks with big losses, of my 3 tanks launched to attack an objective during the last turn, only one survived, and if the game had lasted one more turn it would also have joined the tank cemetery.
However, I will send you an injunction from the international tribunal for war crimes: article 23 of the regulations concerning the laws and customs of war on land (The Hague/ La Haye, July 29, 1899 -1907): "it is prohibited to use unduly military insignia and uniform of the enemy. The Hague court will certainly follow my recommendations and sentence you to 20 years of ban from playing CMCW.

So basically no frontal shots against anything better than a PzIV.  Of course every enemy tank was a Tiger anyway 😉.

Yes probably (NON = NO).
Thanks it's interesting.
 

At "A Few Good Men" I am hosting my 5th and 6th Tournament and sign ups are now.
A person will need all modules of CMBN or CMSF2
 
You would be commiting to play in a Tournament that requires you to play one battle at a time, 
they are generally 30 turn battles and require you to have a turn rate of 5 turns per week.
These battles are scenarios and are locked, you will be playing them blind, your forces are selected for you.
You will be competing against those players playing the same side. The top 50% of the players receive 
points for each round as to how they did vs the other players playing the same side.
 
This is a 5 round Tournament, five scenarios, each lasting two months approx., So the Tournament last 10 months.
We only want Mature players, you are expected to finish all rounds, keep communications going when your away for more than a few days.
Handle being beat in a battle where you might have a terrible situation handed to you. Play with all sorts of different forces, play both defence and offence.
Be ready to handle the unexpected.
If you do not hold up to being a mature player, You are removed from the Tournament  and I blacklist you from my events for life, So dont bother to join if you cannot 
handle these things. I dont need you on my wall of shame list.

ISW Iran/Israeli/Houthi update.  Its a long one but packed with good info and maps:
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-january-2-2024

My one objection to that notion would be that... it's just, objectively, completely and utterly false.
There's no mental gymnastics in the world which can explain away these three fundamental truths:
1, All nations have been recognised as possessing the right to self determination for over a century, including the Jewish nation: ipso facto, Israel had the right to be founded. Additionally this means that the Jews had the right to determine how they would be ruled: they wished to reside in a democratic state with full rights afforded its citizens; since no Arab state meets those standards even today in respect even to Arab citizens, it's beyond disputing that a multi cultural one state solution would never allow the Jews neither democracy nor equal rights, since it would entail being a minority in a state dominated by the same Arabs who had for over a millenia violently subjugated them and at best tolerated them as second class non-citizens.
2, The Jews had a right to founding a state in the Palestine Mandate because A, they had an uninterrupted presecence and connection to the region and B, there existed no prior state there which that would conflict with.
3, a peaceful partitioning of the lands was proposed well in advance, accepted by one side, and thoroughly rejected by the other side which verbatim replied that their preferred course of action was "a war of extermination".
 
No "perfidious Albion" or "decadent West" argument in the books can twist that into creating a "all the peoples of Palestine lived in harmony until the West came along and ruined it" narrative, not one which concerns itself with truth at least.

You see it right here.  Even people on different sides are just people.
I am indigenous.  Cree and visible enough to get pinged on the street.  And I think this trend of white guilt is incredibly harmful and in some case just plain wrong - it is a topic of hot debate around The_Capt family table I can tell, especially with my daughter.
It is relevant that you mention it because it is exactly what we are wrestling with at the staff college right now: Are we teaching future senior officer "how to think" or "what to think".  I am in that first camp, deeply.
The reality is that racism exists in just about every culture on earth since the dawn of time.  Native Americans had a slave trade long before white men even showed up.  It was broader then economics but it definitely was there.  To lay all the modern ills on the White Man's table is nothing more than a convenient excuse to avoid dealing with internal social dysfunction goin back generations.  White men have got sins, there is no doubt about this, but they do not give me license to abuse my wife and family or lean on substance abuse.
Now where we likely differ is on the "so what?"  Our aim moving forward is to stare all that bad directly in the face and say "Ya, ok. But not me and mine."  I could give two figs about white colonialism, my son is going to be a lawyer and master the system at its own game.  I can be proud of my heritage (good and bad) and still be better at this world.  And make damn sure my kids are even better than me.
I am not pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian.  I am pro "let's stop acting like a bunch of insular and scared primates and evolve to the bigger game and better natures our ancestors really had in mind."  It is hard.  It is not fair.  But we can be better than them...that is what they really wanted for us in the first place.     

So, support the allies in 1944 but also the axis? But I forgot, we can never use WW2 as an example anymore. A war where we supposedly did defeat the enemy and tried to eradicate the philosophy of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The wars since then have all been lost or partially won. Call me stupid all you want but I HAVE picked 1 side in this case. You equate it to supporting mass killings of civilians. I don't. Israel can answer in the ICJ. maybe you have already rendered a verdict. Also, should our own soldiers not support only one side, our own side? In a future conflict.    
@The_Capt I met a wonderful Canadian couple about 20 years ago. She was a teacher in Saskatoon. Unprompted she somehow brought up the (new?) direction of the curriculum of her elementary school. Government directed curriculum. "First Nations". Maybe I am all wrong but it seems to be about instilling in white people from as early an age as possible some type of guilt for the past. 
I know you were Canadian Forces active duty in Afghanistan.  I don't know for sure but maybe now you are a civilian employee academic type professor/instructor of the Canadian Forces in some type of war college or armed forces type university? Did that require you to go to a civilian school to get a degree? I had started an online degree, a masters in social work, I was disgusted by the intro course to diversity and all the same trappings of white guilt/blame it tries to instill/teach/indoctrinate.
A comment was made about "North American voters". Now I suspect you meant white voters. Or maybe it was a general comment about the current low level of intelligence/intellect/IQ in people. Low Information voters is the term maybe? If the mantra to whites is to feel guilty and ashamed of the past to understand how non-whites feel...then the same low information/intellect/IQ people of non-white voters just pick-up the corollary. "I am not responsible for my feelings. It is someone else's fault based on the past. I am owed something. I can't be held responsible for my actions. I am oppressed." I have seen a press conference by native American groups openly praising the 7 October attack by Hamas with aspirations of how this might help them get "their" land back. Another video I saw showed an African American watching a pro-Palestine protest and he was asked what he thought. He said he felt a kinship to them as he was also living in occupied land. 
I am here today as the first day of the future. white, yellow, black, brown, red, whatever. Move forward to achieve prosperity and security. Don't have an agenda of restorative justice or whatever for the past. The US Armed Forces has gone more woke than ever. Meritocracy is apparently out the window. Both the US Armed Forces and many airlines now have a goal to get more non-white pilots. Them being non-white is the number one aspect of the application process. Will it help us win a war? We used to be told to be color blind. Now they instruct us to see the color of the other guys skin and make certain changes in how we treat them. 
I thought this was a good thread and some folks here were very smart. I could learn. I still feel the same way but I also see now that the current pathology of wokeness and "identity politics" is very widespread.   
The image in my signature is just a modern take on an old flag used in the early 1800's. 

Yes. You are absolutely right!

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/after-u-s-navy-helicopters-sink-houthi-boats-are-strikes-next
The Houthis are finally taking some fire.  We are not just knocking down their missiles. This combat may be more appropriate in a game like Harpoon, but this is also happening:

It also looks like the UK is getting ready to attack the Houthis
 

Maybe moving forward we all just post battle reports, technical info, and strategy reports. 
 
 Stay away from posting personal court room testimony or whatever you'd call it.
Just an idea.
Or lock it 

On the one hand you say that acts committed by individual Palestinians do not represent official Palestinian policy... but when an individual Israeli says something batsh*t crazy, you describe it as an established fact. Those are two wildly disparate standards.
Yes, most of the West Bank is occupied. That's frankly just to be expected when the state you claim to run either can not or will not exercise sufficient control over the territory you make claim to from being used for frequent terrorist attacks across the border.
 
At no point can the Palestinians honestly be said to have ever attempted anything other than violence.
The Oslo accords constituted a very brief period of diplomacy and limited non-violence... on the behalf of the PLO alone. All other attempts as "diplomacy" have involved clearly unreasonable demands in respect to the unique Palestinian "right to return", which effectively translate into "disestablish the state of Israel".
 
Considering that the PA officially supports the October 7th pogrom... no, they do not reject armed "struggle": the Israeli occupation of the West Bank simply renders them unable to effectively embark on acts of violence.
I agree that Isreali right wing governments go to great lengths to undermine Palestinian policy in most respects. But again, the Palestinians aren't mindless pawns, they have agency and as such, they bear the responsibility for what they do. Israeli policy in Gaza after the October 7th pogrom is clearly heavily influenced by the brutality displayed by Hamas, but that doesn't absolve them of responsibility for their actions.
 
Disproportionate losses of civilian life doesn't delegitimize military operations. Plenty of Iraqi civilians were killed by Coalition bombing during the Gulf War compared to not a single American, British or French civilian dead. The Blitz didn't kill nearly as many Brits as the combined bomber offensive against Germany did. Japanese bombing killed very few American civilians, which can hardly be said for American bombings of the Home Islands, etc., etc.
The major difference in Gaza is that not even the Nazis refused to protect their civilian population in an effort to intentionally drive up their civilian deaths to discredit their enemies. Hamas does exactly that.
 
What other country has neighbouring lands which completely lack an internationally recognised state, which objectively fails to achieve the basic tenents of being an actual state such as exercising control of the territory you make claim to (read Gaza)?
Checkpoints which are objectively necessary to prevent non stop terrorist attacks against civilians aren't delegitimized by virtue of being deemed "demeaning".
 
... what? Few settlements in Israel were safe from fedayeen massacres, especially during the 1950s.
 
I'm not sure what international treaty or the like stipulates that states are obliged to maintain open borders with their neighbours. Physically restricting the means to cross the border into your country from "states" which routinely use that to murder your citizens is not unreasonable.
And Gaza is pretty obviously Hamas' attempt at statehood.
 
If you're not going to take the debate more seriously than simply "deleting" inconvenient historical facts, I think I'll bow out.
Pogroms were not the least unusual in the Muslim world at any point in history (until they finally just expelled all their Jews to Israel). Yes, the antisemitic violence in Eastern Europe was part of the reason why Zionism envisioned a Jewish homeland in Palestine (the several thousands of years of continuous Jewish history and presence there likely also played a significant role, to say the least).
Widespread Muslim violence and antisemitism, which ramped up enormously the moment they caught wind of the notion that Jews should not be second class citizens without political representation (I'm assuming that's what you refer to when you bring up the Palestinian/Muslim "religious tolerance"), is also the reason why most Zionists soon realised that nicely asking to be treated as fellow human beings wouldn't be enough to compel the Muslims to respect that wish.
 
That is a blatant post fact construction. There were at least half a dozen major branches of Zionism from the very outset, only a few of which envisioned a sovereign Jewish state. What the "Palestinians" (all residents of Palestine were referred to as Palestinians pre 1947) took issue with was the very notion that a sizeable Jewish presence in Palestine should ever be realised, as they feared losing their very concrete privileged states compared to the Jews, much like American Southernes opposed equal rights for African Americans.
 
That is a very, very dirty distortion of history. You are intentionally twisting the statistics to make it out to be a "both sides" or possibly even a "but the Jews were worse" kind of thing, and you completely omit the cause of the event.
The Arab dead were virtually entirely at the hands of the British Army and Mandate police force, who killed mainly Arab rioters and militants to protect Jewish civilians, but mostly because the Arabs had turned on the British and to restore order. Extremely few Arabs were killed by the Jews during the revolt, and those few were mainly in self defence when the Arabs sought to destroy Jewish communities (there are still towns even in Israel itself which are nearly completely devoid of Jews, though they had contained strong and thriving Jewish communities for centuries if not millenia before the 20th century).
Jewish violence towards the Arabs didn't start in earnest until the 1940s, when they had realised that the Arabs only intended to escalate their openly genocidal violence once the British left.
 
... you might want to type "Christians Gaza Hamas" into Google if you honestly believe that.
 
I clearly referred to Black September, when the Palestinians attempted to topple the entire Jordanian state in direct concert with a Syrian invasion. That wasn't exactly a minor, unknown incident.
 
So are the ones I've met. So are most ordinary Russians today, most people who lived in Nazi Germany, etc. Almost all ordinary people are quite nice and don't actively harbour any particular ill will toward their neighbour.
That doesn't mean that their states (or in the case of Palestine, the political organisations which can most realistically be described as ruling them) shouldn't be resisted or fought if they act outrageously and violently.
 
 
Edit: Oh well, I wish you and all others who partake in/subject yourself to this thread a very happy New Years Eve! May 2024 be less of a misery than this year turned out to be!

You are all missing the elephant in the room.  With groups like Hamas in power within the Palestinians, there will be no peace until Israel no longer exists. I'm not sure if Hezbollah also has this view, but if the Palestinians want real peace they have to get rid of terror organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah.  I think (at least before Oct 7th) that Israel would be happy integrating with peaceful Palestinians.

This is probably a stupid question but here goes:
Why aren't either side using vast amounts of smoke ammunition to fool these less expensive drones during operations?  I've not seen (hardly) any action where smoke rounds/dischargers were used.  They could even make a smoke round that hangs in the air just above the troops to bork drones.

Because a streak of mass surrenders is still the best and easiest way for Ukraine to win this war. Every Russian soldier every day needs to think that "I can die of frostbite slowly, unless a drone gets me first, or I can be warm , dry, fed, and comfortable in a Ukrainian POW camp". It really is that simple, and I am the guy that fully agrees that that the lights need to go out in Moscow, among other things. I am not making a moral argument, pure military utility.
They need to put out MORE videos of POWs eating well.
 

I suppose making "facts" up to fit a narrative greatly helps said narrative... but at the end of the day, most people would still call that "lies".
The "ethnostate" of Israel has a Jewish population which constitutes less than 75%, with most of the remainder of the population being Arab. Few Western countries can lay claim to such a diverse population, and certainly not one other country in the whole of the Middle East. There is no political office which an Arab citizen is ineligible for in Israel, and boiling the <75% Jewish population down to a single ethnicity based simply on their religion is at best ignorant (and at worst, borderline racist) considering the very diverse ethnic backgrounds that Jewish population has, hailing from millenia long histories in Europe, the Middle East, North and East Africa.

The name of the magazine “is derived from the telephone area code that is shared by Israel and Palestine.”
While the publication claims that it “does not represent any organization, political party or specific agenda,” the “About” section of website states: “we oppose the occupation.” In addition, the blog presents highly biased perspectives on the Arab-Israeli conflict and promotes the Durban strategy to demonize and delegitimize Israel.
https://www.ngo-monitor.org/ngos/_magazine/

I would argue the level of spin has gone to new heights in the last couple of decades.  Journalism in the past did attempt some level of objectivity but telling people what they want to hear appears to have gone into overdrive with the advent of modern information technology.  Journalism is not even really a profession anymore, with standards and norms.  It has become millions of megaphones all projecting the world as they see it.
We are living in an ocean of easily accessible information.  And of course everyone is picking whatever truths they wish.  Earth is flat.  Nukes are a myth.  Mass shootings are all crisis actors.  Democracy was stolen.  As we try and understand a war in motion trying to “see” it has become even harder.  

Welp, thank you...
Interestingly, 972 is being derided as a "zionist hate website" that still "supports the ongoing total genocide of the Palestinian people" when you look at some pro-Palestinian comments about the outlet (after diving through the usual content of pro-Palestinian humanists about their wishes to kill all jews with a rusty machete etc.).
On a completely different note, this fellow here makes maps about the ground situation which he claims are based on geo-confirmed appearances of the IDF. I think the maps are quite nice. 
 
 
 

Well dang @The_Capt! Neither of these organizations are trustworthy I guess. Who do you trust anymore. At least I checked the 972 website’s About page and what the NGO says is true. They are anti-occupation and pro Palestinian.  I guess they are upfront about it. 

All media has always been biased. There's nothing wrong with a particular point of view informing journalism as long as you're not pretending otherwise. Much better to be upfront about it and take biases into consideration instead of pretending to be "Fair and Balanced."

Think I have read about this in some post but can't find it. Playing a CMCW scenario where I need to use smoke at the end of an arty mission that will use all the battery's HE.  However, I then realized that if you shoot off all your HE rounds and fire mission completes the Support Roster for the tubes show "Empty" and you cannot choose it for a smoke mission, even though smoke was an option at the beginning and the rounds are surely still available to the battery. Is this a known bug with a fix being worked on or is it an unfortunate feature of CM2 code. Reason I ask is IRL it is not uncommon for units, via their FIST, to plan fires that involve smoke to be used at the end of an HE fire mission.

The name of the magazine “is derived from the telephone area code that is shared by Israel and Palestine.”
While the publication claims that it “does not represent any organization, political party or specific agenda,” the “About” section of website states: “we oppose the occupation.” In addition, the blog presents highly biased perspectives on the Arab-Israeli conflict and promotes the Durban strategy to demonize and delegitimize Israel.
https://www.ngo-monitor.org/ngos/_magazine/

Merry Christmas everyone!  Thanks for such a civil discussion.