slothropsez

I think it's fair to discuss the larger context of "Russian Doctrine." We are not (unless I am mistaken) actually sitting at somebody's prepared lecture and interrupting him with off-theme questions? Are we?

I think it also has difficulty with the post-modern (post-WW2) mindset that military spending is more focused "desire creation" than replacing fought-out armored battalions. Basically, Deep Battle requires keeping around an enormously expensive conventional military force in good enough repair to be deployed with strategic surprise. But you (the political regime) get no side-benefit from armored battalions during peace time beyond the millenia-old benefit of crushing internal rebellion with an iron fist. Compare this to the US model of the post-modern military: it's really R&D for consumer goods! Did any top NATO commander considered it realistic at the gut level to fight a conventional war with the Soviet Union? No, because the nuclear option was always on the table. Therefore, no US president was ever in a position to trade the voter's quality of life for more armored battalions. Compare US and Soviet policy on obsolete military equipment: the US couldn't scrap things fast enough because our economy for roughly 80 or 90 years has been based on absurd over-abundance and throwing out "perfectly good" strategic bombers or microwaves. The Soviet's kept 'em around because they just couldn't adopt the post-modern mindset that all politics is ultimately about creating new consumer demands (where even the military is a consumer). I suppose this could all seem like over-simplification but really, the US was the only country post-WW2 to recognize that war is politics by other means, but politics itself is only a super-structure of production/consumption (to over-simplify Marx), so full-on war is only a reflection of the underlying economic conflict. Which capitalism (in its post-modern form) did indeed win, deep battle notwithstanding. Something tells me that the Soviets never did understand the long-term game that the US was playing during the Cold War, namely, that it had no interest in really fielding an effective conventional army in Central Europe or anywhere else. Ultimately the Fulda gap was maskirovka for the perfection of self-referential, full-on consumer capitalism.

Yes, I was talking about vs AI, obviously. Playing head to head CM is really neither here nor there. It's not possible to get the players to treat the little pictures of men like real men unless both players agree to role-play to some degree. We just can't produce better simulation than playing by our games "as if" we were actually impinged upon by long term goals. Unavoidably, we all know at a deep level when we are getting into a one night stand and when we are getting married. Staff level wargames had referees for a reason; if left to our own devices, we're all gamey bastards.

Something else which can work to limit the mashing effect is to place a strong defensive position towards the back quarter-band of the map and the objective roughly in the middle-front quarter-band. I have created a few maps at company scale where an advancing company has a 75% or 100% advantage in man power which must be leveraged, not to wipe the map clean, but only to secure an enemy OP. So, in this model, the enemy man power is maybe 60% in the back, 30% in the middle, and 10% extremely forward. The advancing player has to move through up to 500 meters of thinly defended terrain (snipers, machine gun teams of two men), taking some losses and losing cohesion, before he arrives at the objective which is held by about a platoon with some heavier weapons. At this point, the player has to overcome the platoon without becoming tied up the the real company position which he is not prepared to assault. An ordinary CM approach (i.e. everything on the map is in principle a possible target) would lead the player to drive into this second defensive belt and get shot up pretty badly. I don't think it's possible to discipline the player into exercising realistic conservatism unless he is fearful his force will be outmatched if moved into the depth of the enemy position. I also like this approach because it emphasizes the importance of recognizing the natural culmination point of an attack, i.e. going any further forward dissipates strength and cohesion to no effect. The player might also have to be comforted by the fact that most attacks fail to achieve their objectives and instead gain a little ground from which to launch a better-informed attack Such an approach requires maps rarely go below 1 kilometer in depth or 800 meters of frontage for even small-scale scenarios. Without these dimensions the player is too confident about what cannot hit him from the side/ what cannot lie beyond the next hedge/hill/block. Ideally, the player should halt his movement because of enemy positions, not because he has run out of map.

Generally, I would imagine smgs are the weapon of choice when equipping troops poorly or hastily trained for combined arms fighting. Sure, you can't count on them move well, establish large-scale defensive positions, or handle artillery. But you can always park them somewhere and hope the enemy touches the hot oven (once) before the smg squads get taken apart from longer range by artillery. It just so happens that CM timeframes tend only to encompass that first painful moment of encountering the one-use smg squad, not the rest of tactical solution. Also, try playing against smg squads if every squad on the battlefield is at low motivation/ green experience/ scarce ammo/ % 40 losses--under these conditions infantry are fragile and you will find artillery and long range machine gun fire have historical levels of usefulness. Regular squads, too me, are too good at taking losses and standing their ground.

Elsewhere

You might find this paper on the origin and maturation of German defensive tactics during WWI interesting: http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/download/csipubs/lupfer.pdf. In general, the Germans learned that any strong point identified prior to an attack is getting suppressed and heavily attrited by the artillery preparation. So a strong point needs to balance the properties of being invisible to long range reconnaissance and covering enough ground to be of use. Reverse slope defense is of course ideal for both of these purposes. But where there is no reverse slope, the defender might be obliged to distribute pockets of machine guns and snipers where ever they can be hidden. All of this is done in order to hinder the attacker's attempts to identify clear weaknesses and strengths.

The difference between average engagement and kill ranges probably reflects different kinds of intentions among the involved tankers. Low yield long range skirmishing where tanks can easily disengage won't generate many kills but will certainly make up the bulk of engagements, raising average engagement range. It only takes a few serious fights where the attacker commits himself to closing despite initial losses to get the average kill range down very low. This scenario also make it likely that the defenders get over run and badly shot up. In a similar fashion you could predict that the majority of knocked out tanks were hit in the flanks, simply because that kind of fire occurs during a fully committed attack and represents a defensive shooter getting an entire enemy formation in his sights at once, not individual tanks piecemeal at long range, fronts towards him.

At least part of "careful aiming" would require the infantry elements to fill out range cards, tanks to discover ranges by mg fire, et cetera. These processes are represented by a TRP only barely covered by a cover arc. Of course, if the map maker neglects to give your infantry any TRPs, he's assuming your soldiers have only barely beaten their opposites to the battlefield. They are essentially meeting instead of defending and have no time to do more than find good cover.

Most of those operations were idiotic show pieces that flew in the face of the obvious operational situations. Evaluating a doctrine employed by every division commander over the course of a six year war, both during the high times and the low, by citing only four examples can't really make sense, can it?

It's also useful to note that the timescales for the action in example 2 aren't given. In example 1, we can see the Soviet commander needs to think of the scale of half hour and hour to orchestrate something as straightforward as charging his unsupported tanks across perhaps a kilometer or two of open ground directly towards a clear landmark. In terms of the a CM battle, this might be effectively how may commands issued by the player? Perhaps a handful of fast way points for each platoon, ending on the hill? Example 1 would require perhaps twice as many, since there is a major hook to the right around the woods. But certainly neither example implies that the Soviet (or German) commander was taking account of the location of every tank or gun beyond beyond what he could personally see at the beginning through his binoculars. In both cases, what the Soviet commander saw did not dissuade him from issuing the orders for a blunt frontal attack without support. Not exactly counting the bullet holes on every enemy tank...