marais
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Posts posted by marais
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1 hour ago, Simcoe said:
Glad I'm not the only one who thought the wargaming examples were weird. I admit that I skimmed the chapter explaining the wargaming because it felt so bizarre to include in the book. Combat Mission has a number of people involved in researching armor values etc and no one is citing it as gospel. This is just too guys and some dice.
Another issue I had was how he utilizes citations. I think they should be used to support specific details/numbers (armor values, troop numbers) but Storr would state a generic maxim like "British infantry were just better" and a citation at the end. I am not going to read an entirely different book to confirm vague generalization.
I wish he focused on a few subjects and went into further detail. I was really interested in his discussion of mechanized infantry and how each nation preferred fighting dismounted compared to mounted but he only spends a few pages on it before moving on to another topic.
I'm being pretty harsh but I found the book interesting and finished it pretty quickly. For a casual like me, it's a wide but shallow introduction to operations in Europe.
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.
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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?)
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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.
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The Bisons aren't really tanks, of course, and they are arguably not vehicles.
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Least attractive: the Bisons. Made out of concrete, some with lines from the wooden forms visible.
(Image from Wikimedia Commons.)
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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.
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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)
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On 4/26/2021 at 6:02 AM, Combatintman said:
@marais I recall hanging around at Forward Mounting Centre at South Cerney many years ago and read something about the Red Cap team doing filming/research there for the series. The comment was that Tamzin Outhwaite could never play an RMP character convincingly because "she was attractive, intelligent and welcome in the unit."
Hah! RMP not thought of favorably, I take it?
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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.
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I particularly enjoy the drone of multiengine bombers that the sound editor laid under the footage of helicopters, at 28:15.
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On 3/31/2021 at 12:52 PM, Zergman said:
Lots of cold war training videos from UK
! Playlist
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Interested in playtesting (or just playing) an under-development scenario, Busy Day for the CAAT Platoon?
I got curious about how Marine antitank/antiarmor systems might operate against an enemy with good communications and capable sensors, and I started designing this scenario as an experiment. You're tasked with defending an area of countryside, vaguely modeled after a rural area in New England, against a German armored force. You've got a Marine rifle company, most of a Marine Weapons Company, LAVs, and a Dutch mech inf platoon (included for contrast).
Still to do: fine-tune units and AI for playability and challenge, adjust scoring, and finish writing briefing. I'm interested in comments about these areas, or you're welcome just to give the scenario a spin.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/q9sj9ntzxckjq79/ADR Busy Day for the CAAT Platoon b11.btt.zip?dl=0
Requires both Marine and NATO modules.
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Thanks for the background and clarification! I appreciate the depth and precision of the organizations that made their way in to CMSF.
On 11/13/2020 at 5:31 AM, Combatintman said:I did the TO&Es for the British units which were derived from the official publications and manuals for the 2008 timeframe. The implementation of the TO&E to fit CMSF structures inevitably means that there are compromises with groupings here and there but, apart from the NBC element which Steve did not want included because it was too specialist, the recce regiment is as accurate a representation of this unit.
Ground surveillance radars, UAVs and EW teams were not widely deployed in the British Army at the time and, possibly with the exception of Ground Surveillance Radars (I'm working from memory here), not part of the establishment tables for this formation. The teams you see in the surveillance squadron were primarily trained and equipped to conduct dismounted reconnaissance, be that close target recce or sitting in OPs mostly employing the mark 1 eyeball, binos and a radio.
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Just purchased the British module and am fascinated. I'm wondering about a few features of British organization:
1. I've noticed that British units tend to have HQs made up of two or three separate teams, with the commander, 2ic, and (presumably) another senior NCO, often carrying a laser designator. This is even down to the platoon level, at times. I'm curious about the doctrine behind this? And what are you doing with them in-game?
2. The Recce Regiment contains a C (Surveillance) Squadron, with one Surveillance Troop, made up of the usual three-part HQ and three teams of three troopers mounted in Spartans. I'm guessing that in real life, these would be three ground surveillance radar teams, and that there are other elements like UAV or electronic warfare teams that aren't represented in CMSF2? Am I right to think that these little teams have no particular value in the game? (I wish that the masts on the Coyote, Fennek, and British OP vehicles could extend, and that GSR was modeled, though I do recognize the technical challenges.)
3. How do the Support Troops work? Split up between Scimitar patrols, as needed?
4. Any recommendations for good sources on modern-day British organization?
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Or perhaps allow leaders to go forward while the operations team and signallers run the HQ proper?
New Book: "Battlegroup!: The Lessons of the Unfought Battles of the Cold War" (Jim Storr)
in Combat Mission Cold War
Posted · Edited by marais
Fixed typo. It's" ideas from WWII," not WWI, which would be quite the claim.
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:
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)