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I think the logic for the 11B was to diversify the infantry branch, to make mechanized guys who had more experience with dismounted operations because they'd been light before, or have paratroopers who knew how to fight alongside tanks. They do the same thing to officers of all stripes pretty hard, I had to fight tooth and nail to stay in the Armor Brigade community when I was still on active duty because branch decided I "needed" time in a light unit. It's not the worst idea on paper, but I think it doesn't work nearly as well as whoever thought it up intended. Looking at the tankers who were mounted 1996-2014 like some of my E-7/E-8s were, it was just disturbing how good they were at their jobs compared to guys who'd been "infantry" or came from outside of branch due to MOS requal with similar times in service. Think I'd rather have a tanker superstud than someone who was more rounded. The enlisted stuff is pretty mysterious from the officer end. Like I'm fairly certain at least some of the promotions and jobs are based entirely on lunar phase and if cthulu has stirred this month. The amount of backroom drug deal "I'll give you SFC Snuggles for two SSG prospects!" stuff is staggering. And thank you for your service too.

11B is the infantry MOS. It encompasses everyone who might be a rifleman of some sort. The problem arises in that there's no special MOS for mechanized vs Stryker vs light infantry, so you'll have guys who are paratroopers E-1 through E-4, make E-5, then they PCS somewhere that's a "heavy" now they're expected to be a gunner on a Bradley or even a Squad Leader if you're a more senior dude. It's not a show stopper, but I feel it especially hurts the mechanized infantry community given the technical nature of the job. I'm an officer type person so a lot of the enlisted stuff is all mysterious and horrible. But E-6/E-7s tended to have some sort of outside of branch job for a time, like recruiting, instructor/drill sergeant, some weirdo staff positions, etc, but when they left those jobs and advanced schooling at least on the combat arms side they tended to return to combat arms units. The Cav Troop I was part of had a tanker 1SG for instance, and on the E9 side our Ops SGM was an artillery dude, or just straight up my 1SG when I was a Tank Company Commander was shockingly a tanker. Seems like most combat arms E-8 billets are filled by combat arms Soldiers.

Army was pretty bad for it too. It was especially hard on Artillery/Armor units because you would have E-5/6s show up who should be able to not only do their jobs, but lead others in the doing of jobs, who hadn't touched a cannon or track in years. And then there's that whole 11B mess.

One of these days folks are going to realize there's an actual cost to using non-infantry units as infantry,

If prior military service in a foreign country is enough evidence to prove malice, I've got some Russian terrorists to round up. There's an old guy down the street who was once a vile communist murderist 1st class (or whatever a "clerk" is in the Soviet Army of Rapists Supreme), and I'd better get him out of the picture before he tries to make the miners of this state revolt and carve off the People's Republic of Cascadia. This is has sort of gone from "debate between two very different perspectives" to "Kafka" at this point. Needless to say given the Russian security apparatus's tendency to "shop" for people to accuse, I imagine any one of us stands a remote chance as showing up as a NATO death commando should we present the chance.

I'm going to go with no. I'm sure "evidence" will appear to totally validate whatever Russia does next, but: 1. The Ukraine has very successfully let Russia paint itself as the aggressor. A cross border anything would undo that rather handily which makes very little to no sense. 2. There's no good strategic mission for a direct action mission outside of the active fighting areas, or much deeper in Russia. In either event looking into the rumblings outside of Russia, literally no one believes the Russian line. The most common theory is that Putin has some security crackdown or increased aggression against the Ukraine, and he's looking for something to justify it further domestically.

The whole Ukrainian special forces thing has a sort of dark humor to it. It's the absolute thinnest, least believable fig leaf for whatever happens next. It's clearly not intended to be realistically believed by anyone outside of Russia simply because it is so patently absurd. Actually now that I think about it, the Ukraine could send literal battalions of special forces troops into Russia, and leave little cards announcing that they are real Ukrainian special forces, with photo copies of their military IDs, and leave behind a specially trained operator at each attack site who's job it was to remain behind and announce that it really was Ukrainians that did this attack, and even then Russia has so little credibility that no one would believe it was happening.

Generally the "kills" are considered Mobility Kill: For whatever reason the tank isn't going anywhere. Tank can still shoot back Firepower Kill: The tank cannot use its main weapons. This can be less narrowly defined, it might mean that the weapon works but cannot be trained effectively enough to shoot, or that the weapon "works" but poorly enough to be of marginal use Catastrophic Kill: The tank is dead. It's burning or visibly exploded. It was never taught at armor school, but there was also the: Crew Kill: Maybe the tank still works, but enough of the crew is killed/wounded to make the tank no longer an effective machine. Mission Kill: The tank may still move and shoot, but enough is broken to make it a liability. This I would contend applies to most world war two definitions of knocked out, the gun may work, the vehicle may move, but collectively enough is broken that the tank is now too dangerous to occupy.

Thought exercise: A previously unknown Russian stealth plane knocks out a major bit of infrastructure in the US dropping parts of the west coast into darkness. How is this different on the political level from a cyber attack? An act of war is an act of war. Cyberwarfare would be different, but again, once there's an attack, the distinction of bomb, computer virus, zombie mutant apes becomes moot. Which is why cyberwarfare remains somewhat restrained, as no one really wants to be the first one to provoke a meatspace war over cyber shenanigans.

Rather that. I think the Pinto has a better reputation.

Just because I'm bored and think this isn't a totally off the wall opinion: The Iraq war had some propoganda involved just as much as any democratic country has. The question is how much of it was KNOWINGLY patently false. We have no problem with propaganda that played up Germans as baby eating monsters, because honestly they ate more than a few babies and needed to be beat back down. If Saddam was a threat, and he did continue to have chemical weapons, going to war to defeat him might have been something that merited a little cheerleading. As the case was, from what I feel any honest assessment of the lead up to the war involved was not a deliberate attempt to convince the world of a non-fact (Iraq has WMDs) but a flawed intelligence and political system that earnestly believed Iraq was a threat, and was in violation of international law to the degree military action was worthwhile. Because it started from that position, and then sought out/rejected intelligence based upon the "known" that of COURSE Iraq had weapons, we just needed to find them, it ensured that the very true information that Iraq was a non-threat would be discarded in favor of sources that affirmed what was "true." This is a great study in how systems fail, and should be studied and understood for the benefit of future generations. Simply dismissing it as a matter of propaganda by the Bush-Hitler complex misses that even now the same cycle of conclusion driving "fact" has, is, and likely will repeat until we really revise how we handle intelligence. Where this ties back into the Ukraine is 100% totally and entirely the Russian government knew there were no real rebels of consquence in the Ukraine, but instead manufactured an entire reality to suite their purposes, and continues to push it. It would only really be comparable to Iraq if you could prove Bush knew there were no CBRN type weapons in Iraq, AND then continued to lie about their presence years on.

Basically imagine when you're moving as a rifle squad/section/whatever. You and all your little crunchy buddies had directions you were supposed to watch, so that in effect your element had "eyes" facing every direction. Same deal with a tank unit. Just as much as your unit didn't move with every rifle facing forward, so too do tanks divide up the battlespace into areas of responsibility. Then within that dynamic there's a further division among the crew. The better and more "eyes" the tank has, the better it is able to cover its "primary" arcs, and also still keep eyes on other places. So in that regard with the next generation thermals, the M1A2 has three effective sets of eyes per tank (driver actually has a pretty good view when not hull down with the DVE especially, then obviously gunner and TC), while the T-72B3 really only has one effective set of eyes (as the T-72 has a not at all very good view for the driver, a bad optic for the commander, and an okay one for the gunner). This folds out into the "eyes front" effect, in that the three tank T-72 platoon has only three sets of eyes covering everything it has to see. On a similar US tank platoon there's twelve, which accounts for much better situational awareness, even before you get into the differences between the capabilities of the sensors themselves.

But again, following that logic, how do we know the US doesn't operate 40 foot nuclear battle robots completely in secret? It's really hard to totally 100% disprove something. However the chatter and indicators for a Russian fielding of a new tank type seem to indicate there's still some significant problems in the pipeline, and nothing indicates T-90AMs or something beyond the T-72B3 being in service in four to five months.

How do you know the US doesn't have giant 40 foot nuclear powered kill robots? Russian EW is a threat, but it's not a threat without limits, or answers. Which is why these conversations are so annoying, it's either an unstoppable threat that will turn American soldiers into pro-putin zombiebots, or it's a total non-threat, don't worry about it. Ultimately technology and military hardware is a complex interplay between threat, countermeasure, with ultimately rarely the tools or the weapons being truly decisive. It's not US armored superiority that would undo the Russians in an eastward push, it's that net total, NATO is militarily dangerous enough to prevent Russia from accomplishing its tasks, and the political ramifications make it bitter fruit even in the event of a victory. Russian EW capabilities are dangerous and would make things much harder. But they do not exist in a vacuum, and likely do not offer a decisive advantage as much as a reduction in NATO's advantages.

"It is claimed" doesn't really stand up so well when it's an especially silly Russian video of shameless bus slaughter.

"They won't fail forever" Here's the thing. If virtually every time the same factors have torpedoed every attempt to accomplish a given task, and those factors remain entirely unchanged, simple repetition is not enough to cause a success. If the fact you were 300 lbs overweight and had never run more than 400 feet in a go in your life held you back from being a champion marathon runner, simply trying another marathon without addressing the weight or the running ability likely means you're pretty doomed. Same deal with Russian military procurement, there's a lot of low number or phantom systems, all of which were supposed to redefine warfare tactics extreme, that have done pretty much nothing of the sort. Also interestingly could you find an article discussing these plans sometime after January? You'd think if factories were tooling up to crank out T-90AMs in production quantities four months from now, there'd be more than the howling silence and the "Armata will succeed!" mumblings.

This pretty much aptly captures the problemset. One of the things I learned way back in the college was a concept called "the Adaptive Enemy," in that your opposition is a non-static entity that will actively seek out your weaknesses and exploit their own strengths. Russia has done so, while many NATO members effectively looked at their armies in 1994 or so, figured there'd never be a need for them again/that was money they really could use for welfare payments. This stems into two effective questions: 1. Just what are really Russian capabilities? We've got a lot of "They have the EMP, and will turn off all the electrons in HATO tanks!" type reporting, or equally unhelpful "it doesn't do anything" perspectives. The Russian official line is, as always an interesting collection of lies. Or look at it this way: Russian EW is a significant asset that will be a problem to deal with. This is pretty much certain. The actual effective vs modern communications, or what the costs of employing this EW are rarely discussed. So like, against a threat with frequency hopping type radios, and without the sort of mature reactive jamming that exists elsewhere, the jamming is less "NOW AMERICANS CANNOT TALK!" and more "AND NOW WE HAVE JAMMED THE ENTIRE RADIO SPECTRUM AND NO ONE TALKS INCLUDING US!" And the same deal with having high power jamming transmitters going at intensity or duration to achieve effects in a world of home on jam, or even some passive counter-emitter type detection systems. But we don't get that, we get a whole mess of "HATO DOOMED EW LASER KILL" or a shrug. 2. If there is a Russian advantage, is it enough to allow them to conduct offensive operations against a NATO country and win? And this is where it just gets stupid. The T-90 could be superior to the Abrams and it wouldn't matter. There's a host of strategic effects that make Russia going to war against anyone who isn't a non-NATO neighbor of their country profoundly stupid, and those remain in effect regardless of technical capabilities.

This of course will totally happen like the Armata, T-95, Black Eagle, and other 152 MM armed tanks did. And modernization will happen on time, and to standard. Because everything has changed in Russian procurement system and the same things that have derailed virtually other Russian modernization effort no longer apply because reasons.

Oh I could really tear into this one, but I'll just simply say the tankers who only focus on their front are bad, in a Russian tank, or some combination of the two.

I guess from my end it gets old because at the end of the day when discussing this with people in Russia: 1. All Russia's military problems are fixed. 2. Everything is going according to plan. 3. The last time the previous two statements were incorrect does not apply here for reasons. 4. Russia is a net positive actor in the international community despite being increasingly a pariah. Occasionally you'll make some progress, someone will own up to portions of what actually happened in the Ukraine, but it all snaps right back to the State is never wrong, Putin is swell, there's no problems etc, etc, etc. It's frankly boring and often dishonest. And it's why negative perceptions of Russia have such legs, there's rarely a positive but honest perspective, I mean maybe it is a net positive that parts of Ukraine is occupied and Syrian hospitals are cluster bombed. But there's never that discussion of a real and multi-faceted event that we can debate, it's simply this silly perfect mock up of a world that doesn't exist outside of the knock off Jeremy Clarkson breathlessly telling us how THIS Russian weapon is superior and will save all, or another supremely silly RT presenter describing Texas being on the verge of total and absolute revolt. Which again just keeps the conversation to generally negative, with a wide spectrum ranging from the somewhat realistic, to the wildest "Putin literally is Hitler!" insanity on the Russian-skeptic front, to a narrow state approved set of talking points that insists there are still no Russian Soldiers in the Ukraine, and we've always been at war with Eastasia in the Russian corner.

Look, it was in a video, that pretty much means it was super-real, and the RPO should kill everything. It's a well known fact that users of similar weapons have totally abandoned conventional warheads and embraced their new themobrnuclear gods.

On topic: From my understanding CMFB is supposed to evolve into the "end of the war in the west" game, so a British module seems a shoe-in as does a post Bulge US one. On the Off Topic: There's some really annoying misconceptions about the nature of the various armies in World War Two. Here's a few of the ones that are more relevant to the offtopic that drive me nuts: 1. German Soldier Supreme: Literally anytime you leave someone unattended from actual historical materials, the perception of the German army is that it's all superior panzer aces and ubersoldats. Please ignore the poor showings, disintegrating units, failed counter-offensives, and lets just talk about Villers-Bocage and Monte Cassino over and over again because those are the only battles that happened. 2. American soldiers are all fresh draftees just arrived from the states. Outside of Fury, virtually every bit of public portrayal is of the US Army green as green gets from 1942-1945. It ignores that on more than a few occasions, it was actually battle hardened American forces cutting through poorly trained green German troops (see Arracourt for a good example of this dynamic). By 1945 many divisions were crusty as crusty gets, some having fought all the way from Africa. 3. German Panzer supreme! Again, looking at the performance of German armor on a whole, it's not especially awe inspiring, and the lopsided popular conception isn't supported by actual losses. 4. JABOS!!!!! Virtually no battle damage assessment supports aviation as a major killer of armor in any theater of World War Two. Did they disrupt stuff? Yeah. But I think they have become an easy way to blame someone else for the fact German tanks went into France in 1944, and did not emerge again. There's more, but there's a lot of historical fiction that gets simply taken as reality that really needs killing.

If this was the case I imagine we'd have stopped issuing smoke grenades some decades ago. It's not "magic" but it does transform aimed fire at point targets into area fire, which greatly reduces the ability of an enemy to engage targets.

I don't think he political opportunities outweigh the cost. 1. Anything short of an unambiguous victory is insufficient for Russian prestige. If the Ukraine is well mauled, but defiant and enough Russians come home in boxes, Putin and his people's image of strength is destroyed and his legitimacy is no longer enough to stand on. 2. It's a lot of things that will have "cost" (human lives, military equipment, political ill will for decades) for "potential." Spending a few bucks every year to maybe win the lottery is silly, but fairly modest cost that may have a remote chance of major success. Going to for reals war is a great cost even if it's a resounding victory for an outcome that is deeply uncertain. 3. Russia has no exit strategy, but there's nothing so terrible about the status quo to demand one time now. It's a problem, but right now most of the damage is done, or at least steady state. Until things get a lot worse for Russians I wouldn't expect much change.

Re: Air War The problemset the Russians are approaching is not dissimilar from NATO in 1999, as the equipment is broadly the same, although NATO of 1999 still had some pretty major edges over the Russians (stealth aircraft, sheer proliferation of smart munitions in quantity), and a much higher plane to target/threat ratio. This is worth reflecting on in terms of executing an effective DEAD campaign, or anything beyond local SEAD, simply because it's a very demanding mission, and the Russians have a very limited pool of assets to accomplish it with (a rather small collection of "modern" airframes, and a lot of Soviet platforms), and a much reduced ability to hit military targets from "safety." I suppose where I'm going with this is the Russians may not have the resources to accomplish a full air campaign. NATO was able to manage Kosovo through legions of airplanes, some deep penetration assets, and even then was largely only hitting things too big to hide or move. A Russian air campaign likely has the same problem, only without the sort of tools that NATO brought to the fight, will be obliged to enter the Ukrainian threat envelope a lot more often, for a lot longer. While it would be unreasonable to expect the Russian air force to be completely defeated, it may simply not have enough planes, pilots, and munitions for the sort of campaign required to be successfully carried to conclusion fast enough to be relevant (or if Russia salvos SSMs into Kiev, kills a lot of people, but the war is over in a week, then there's not nearly as much the west can do. If it's week four and images of dead Ukrainian civilians and bombed hospitals are all over the BBC, strange things might start happening to Russian aircrew and their birds. It's not like the Russians would really know if F-22s hopped the border, zotted an entire flight of Russian planes, and then returned to base after an "exercise."