marais

Sources in the book are cited as a mix of inline references to 15 frequently-cited works, and then as footnotes. Those 15 dominant sources are: the reader for a 2009 NATO staff ride Team Yankee (?!) John English's The Mechanized Battlefield, 1985 US Army field manuals (mostly FM 100-5, 1976) British training and doctrinal publications (notably, The Infantry Battalion, 1975, Land Operations, 1971, and the 1942 battle drill instructor's handbook) Isby, Weapons and Tactics, 1981 First Clash (again, eh?) McGarth, Scouts Out (which I have problems with, above) Middendorf's The Russian Campaign, 1957, and Handbook of Tactics, 1957. I think that these are the little-known source, maybe? They're noted as "author's translation." US Army Report of Army Field Forces Advisory Panel on Armor, 1949 British Army Staff Officers' Handbook, 1999 Here's what the author has to say about sourcing: "The sources used in this study include a few books (particularly Middeldorf's), British and US Army doctrine, some first-hand knowledge, a little OR and some gaming. All have shortcomings. Written doctrine is not the same as actual practice. Middeldorf does not etll us much about what the Bundeswehr was actually doing in the 1980s (although my Bundeswehr colleagues' first-hand knowledge has helped to correct that." (Storr 284) Not a memoir. The text is speckled with personal remarks, just a few sentences at a time, a mix of Storr's own experience and conversations with other NATO veterans, who remain mostly unnamed. They provide context but not substance. I wish they came more to the foreground. Yes, this book is driving at the idea that the West German forces were good because they followed on lessons from WWII. From the chapter summing up the various armies: "Bundeswehr officers trained in the 1970s and 1980s were explicitly aware that their tactics were based in the Wehrmacht's tactics of the Second World War. They were not generally aware of the Middeldorf books, but their language and context were familiar." (Storr 56)

Agreed—also found the book interesting and a quick, enjoyable read. It's given me perspective or confirmed ideas that I only had before from random websites. I think I figured out how I'd sum the book up: good at thinking about battalion- and company-level organizational, training, and equipment issues that affect operations at the scale of divisions and corps. Talking about battalions and below, though, the book becomes more normative rather than descriptive.

The book's full of little gems: Storr suggests that, because of range safety rules at BATUS that made it awkward to push past notional enemy units, British small unit leaders acquired the habit of attacking hostile positions rather than bypassing. A chapter about armor compares major MBTs by diagraming their protection, firepower, and mobility in a triangle. The Panther tank is represented as an equilateral triangle, as a baseline, and it appears on every tank's diagram as a reference. The Chieftain's heavy weight toward firepower is clear in an instant; the T-34's mobility but limited protection and firepower is equally stark. Storr examines readiness and deployment times in considerable detail, tallying up the number of formations that would have been available to mount an attack or to resist a Warsaw Pact advance. (Maybe Brigade! might have been a more appropriate title?)

Just received my copy and skimmed the whole thing. A few initial impressions, with the caveat that this isn't my field and I'm not really in the best position to evaluate the correctness of facts or strength of arguments: It's well written, approachable but serious. There is a clear influence of operations research. Storr points toward different countries' OR work, and the text itself leans on calculations of quantities like platoon/company frontages, weights of fire, and tons of ammunition. The book relies heavily on a relatively small number of sources, particularly US and UK field manuals, and reports from 1980s exercises and simulations. That said, the author's own experience in the field, along with those of correspondents, informs his interpretation of evidence on paper. I have a criticism of the chapter on reconnaissance. One of Storr's sources is McGrath's Scouts Out! Neither Storr nor McGrath addresses the doctrinal and cultural differences between reconnaissance and cavalry in the US Army. For a book titled Battlegroup!, there's little discussion of the organization of battlegroups. Total quantities of TOWs and Milan firing posts, sure, but nothing that would tell you how a battlegroup operates. This comes back to the operations research perspective: Storr talks glibly about how it might be more efficient to organize a company in 10 sections rather than 9, without discussing the administrative and leadership issues that such an organization would raise. Having skimmed the book, I know no more about the organization of any battalion-size unit than I did 24 hours ago. There is good attention to human issues, like the unique amount of operational experience that British Army personnel had because of service in Northern Ireland. Everything in the book reflects the perspective of an officer who served in the era he's writing about, with input from a rich array of correspondents. Storr is skeptical of Soviet capabilities, and especially of Soviet forces' ability to function in a real operational environment. Much of the analysis of the Soviet side follows from WWII sources. The book focuses on British, US, and West German forces, with shorter passages about the French, Canadian, and Belgian armies. It does not look at the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces at the same level of detail. Storr holds that the West German army was the most capable of the NATO allies, through training, tactics, and equipment choices, largely ones that built on and continued the lessons of WWII. Given that this is a semi-scholarly book, Storr spends a really bizarre amount of time talking about wargames that he and his brother played out. Those wargames drive more of his conclusions than I'm comfortable with, and the results get mixed with other sources of evidence. (Storr and his brother, both army officers, ran their own tabletop wargames for 32 years, apparently under rules systems of their own design.) If I were a journal reviewer in my own field, I would not endorse this book for publication without serious edits. I'm shocked that an editor let Storr get away with this. That said, I've quite enjoyed the book so far and have found it immensely illuminating. I'd recommend it for purchase.

The Bisons aren't really tanks, of course, and they are arguably not vehicles.

Least attractive: the Bisons. Made out of concrete, some with lines from the wooden forms visible. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The last information to go away, as the game strips out detail, is the color of the ground. I've appreciated maps where the designer used ground color not just to represent terrain naturalistically, but as a signal to the player. I'll tend to line edges of wooded areas with light or heavy forest; to mark breaks in fences and walls with gravel or red earth; to use brown grass on high elevations and green grass on low.

To speculate, given operating areas and shared equipment, as well as thematic connections, I'd bet on modules in this order: West Germany, Netherlands (the northern flank of NORTHAG) / East Germany UK, possibly Belgium, possibly Canada / other Warsaw Pact US airborne/air assault, perhaps other airborne / USSR airborne/air assault Less likely: USMC, Royal Marines, NL marines, Norway / USSR marines and Arctic forces France (unlikely, but fascinating)

Hah! RMP not thought of favorably, I take it?

The 2001 series Red Cap follows RMP investigators stationed in Germany. The setting is right for CMCW, even if the time period is closer to CMSF. (There's also a 1960s series of the same name, starring John Thaw, well before his days as Morse, but I've never been able to find episodes.) Edited to add: I think the series is terrible, but even terrible television has its place.

I particularly enjoy the drone of multiengine bombers that the sound editor laid under the footage of helicopters, at 28:15.

Excellent playlist. Includes this gem, about terrain in the 1 BR Corps area of northern Germany. Not immediately relevant to CMSF, not yet, though I find the part about German woods helpful.

More hillshading example from Edouard Imhof, a Swiss cartographer known as a master of this technique back when you had to do it by hand, whose ideas remain influential even now you can generate this in a web browser. I'm wondering if it's less computationally expensive to do this once, at the start of the game, as a darker overlay on terrain textures, rather than by modeling light and shadow in real time.

Two features come to mind, one about C&C, one about graphics but really interface. First, a change to C&C of split squads. An oddity of the command and control system is that, if you split a squad, the resulting fireteams both report directly to the platoon leader. This is reasonable for small squads, especially ones with lots of radios. It falls apart in close terrain and with limited lines of sight. It's a particular challenge for the USMC, where squads split into three fireteams, only one with a radio. This results in odd situations where, say, a fireteam is out of sight of the platoon leader and thus out of command, even though it's sitting right next to the fireteam with the squad leader. Better for the B and C fireteams to report to the 1st, which contains the squad leader, and then to the platoon HQ. I can imagine the data structure complexity here, and why this might be necessary, but one can dream. Second, hillshading. I wonder if graphics cards are now up to the task of having terrain cast shadows? This isn't just eye candy—it would greatly improve the player's understanding of terrain, and in a more intuitive way than the contour line mods. One quick example: I could imagine this as a controllable feature, even, with exaggerated hillshading available for low-contrast and nighttime conditions. The interface isn't just a scene from a war movie, it's a tool that gives players information. I'll probably say more about hillshading later. I'm a cartographer, and I tend to understand CM maps as, well, maps or visualizations.

Returning to the forum after a family exigency (all reasonably well now). Thank you for these initial comments! @Erwin Will do. @chuckdyke Fascinating story. Looked it up. I can see the resemblance; could also see borrowing more of the Flemish battle's conditions.