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Zone Recon is effectively trying to get information about a wider place, while area is more targeted. As a result zone missions tend to be less worried about details, and more on broader strokes. Area recons will still gather some wider information , but are much more focused on specific "targets." So as an example, a zone recon might be asking for location of enemy forces, confirm/deny contamination by CBRN type agents, locate civilian settlements, find ways across rivers, etc. An area recon would be focused in on figuring out how many enemy troops are protecting a certain bridge, if the bridge is wired for demolitions, if the bridge is intact enough to support tanks crossing it, etc. A route recon will include the bridge, but it's much more focused on establishing what a certain route can support, so it's actually a lot of engineer/math work to establish if the curves can support large trucks, guesstimating how much weight a bridge can take, etc. A recon mission might include all three of these too. You might conduct a route recon to a release point, a zone recon from phase line to phase line, and then an area recon of a suspected enemy artillery position or something. Some other odds and ends: Area Recons are almost always tied to Named Areas of Interest, which are places intelligence folks have selected as containing something interesting, or requiring an additional look. NAIs may be used within a zone recon to prioritize certain parts of the wider zone too (so while you're checking out from phase line Red to phase line Blue, you also need to check out the villages at NAI 102, 103, and 107). The recon mission is generally driven by information requirements, which come in many flavors, but they're usually questions that need answering for the commander. So a Priority Information requirement might be "confirm/deny presence of enemy armor at NAI 101" because that question will drive if he commits his armor to the attack, or simply gives it over to a mech infantry pure formation. It's a way of refining what the scouts are looking for, but is not exclusive (or it's not like the scouts wouldn't report if they spotted enemy BMPs on the objective instead of tanks). Recon is also guided by tempo and engagement criteria. In a nutshell, tempo is either "rapid" (see all things quickly, but details are not the priority) or "deliberate" (take your time, I need to know how many grass blades are in the NAI). Engagement criteria is how aggressively the scouts deal with enemy forces. Discrete is basically only if needed, Forceful is pretty much at the discretion of the scout leader, which is to say he'll shoot anything smaller than he is.

It's actually a very Cav scout thing! It's really important to remember that while "scout" is in the title, so is "cavalry" and modern 19Ds inherit a lot of the economy of force, security, and vanguard sort of missions from their house mounted ancestors. Super quick as I'm bored, the six basic Cav missions are: Three flavors of recon (zone, area, and route) Three flavors of security missions (screen, cover, and guard). We'll ignore the recon missions for now. Basically think of security missions as a blocking arm in karate. Your mission isn't to hurt the enemy, it's to keep him away from the soft parts of you while you're hitting with your own hurt inducing appendages. You'll notice if you look at most of the ABCT scout formations, they've got a lot of firepower for how few guys they have. This is on purpose. It gives a lot of strength for the cavalry platoon to hold the enemy at bay, or hurt him bad enough to buy time for the "heavy" part of the formation to mass on the enemy and effect their destruction. The three security missions are basically this blocking ideal, just in increasing intensity. Screen is really just somewhere between reporting if the enemy is active, in an AO, and maybe killing his recon assets. Cover is fighting broadly until withdrawal conditions are met (generally time, or enemy status based, so like hold for the 60 minutes it takes the friendly armor to shift to a different battle position, or destroy the enemy advanced guard etc). Guard is more or less hold until friendly forces show up, so generally is a much "heavier" mission. Historically cover and guard are not accomplished without tank augmentation. But against lighter forces (like a BTR formation) it may be possible to get by with just Brads or something. When conducting a security mission, it really depends on the terrain, enemy, and what I'm trying to accomplish. If I've got a lot of depth, I might just two vehicle "sections" arrayed in depth to erode the enemy's lead element. If I've got less depth I might array the entire platoon firing into the same engagement area (again most CMBS maps are pretty shallow). Or I might align cav-armor teams (so like, two tanks with two Brads+dismount, although one tank per might be okay) against possible enemy axis of advance while retaining the mass of my forces in the rear, and then only commit the main body once the enemy's primary avenue of attack is identified (the Abrams is great for this simply because it's so good on the move.

I rarely use snipers. They're something that in the "real" Army I think we struggled with in CAB type units, the sort of operations tempo mechanized units have is pretty counter to the sort of infiltration snipers seem to enjoy. One of the great issues with scouts IRL and in game is the sensor systems and target acquisition abilities of a scout isn't much better than their not-scout equivlent (or a M3 isn't able to better find the enemy than a M1 or a M2, a dismounted scout team isn't much better at finding the enemy than an infantry team from my experience). I tend to: 1. Use Scouts as an economy of force measure. They're cheaper than infantry or armor by my recollection, but still have some pretty healthy firepower. If I'm attacking down one avenue, the scouts are covering the other approach to keep the enemy from being able to safely use it. If I've identified the most likely enemy approaches on the defense, the scouts are on the less likely but still possible routes. It doesn't take many Javelins or TOWs to ruin someone's day, and the sort of friction those scout elements induce will allow you to shift forces to address unexpected enemy efforts. 2. Task force "poke." Sometimes, you just have to check things out. Putting scouts forward is dangerous because they're fairly weak, but if they make contact first, it keeps your killing arm(s) free to engage on their terms. It also can lead the enemy to fixate on your small (and hopefully withdrawing under cover of smoke and artillery) scout element and not give your tanks/mech infantry enough attention. It's basically a lot of "hunt" or "slow" moves though, which often isn't very helpful in games. 3. Disruption. Similar to the first one, but more tied into the primary battle. In deeper maps, putting scouts slightly forward with good avenues of retreat allows to bloody the nose of the enemy, and will often steal their momentum (as missiles are missiles, and it might take a minute for them to figure out it's scouts vs regular infantry). Once the first few missiles are away (and maybe some sabots if you can spare some tanks), then TRP in as much smoke as you can get away with (if you site the scouts correctly, you'll basically know when they're going to see the enemy approaching, so placing a TRP forward of that to call in smoke, or even a HE/PD from one element and smoke from another), and pull back behind the main MLR. You'll likely have wasted a few turns of the enemy's attack as he tries to artillery your former positions, and will be busy trying to do something about what was actually a very small part of your advanced force. Timing is tricky. Basically you'll want to be calling the artillery as soon as you've got missiles on the way, as that'll get you basically your TOW salvo and a missile from each Javelin team. And you'll want to "recon" the escape routes to minimize LOS to the enemy.

Here's the thing though, why would the Ukraine allow its military to be smashed? They too sat through the Georgian war and likely took some notes. Forcing Russia to commit to a pursuit deep in the Ukraine plays to their strengths, and also places Russia in a position that if it fails to totally and utterly destroy the Ukrainian military, which is likely beyond Russia's capabilities even in favorable circumstances, that the issue will simply be revisited at some later date. More likely than not Russia would commit forces, they'd chase a Ukrainian force deeper across hostile territory. Casualties rack up, victory is illusive, Russian soldiers start dying in new and interesting ways not accounted for in previous planning, and a smart Russian leader declares "victory" and retreats back to the status pre-invasion, with the Ukrainians parked outside the silly little "republics" while a dumb one doubles down and rides Russia to ruin. There's no likely winning play, and there's certainly no quick victory.

I simply brought up the historical misdeeds in the context of fighting a counter-insurgency. In Iraq we had people who would cite stuff done by anyone not Arab going back hundreds of years as totally legitimate reasons why they should blow up a market place. There's a lot of bad blood that exists between Ukrainians and Russians, and even given the force numbers cited I do not believe they would be enough to successfully secure the Russian rear areas, and further Russian retaliation and COIN tactics are inadequate to deal with even a fairly modest insurgency, which would likely increase the level of resistance to the degree that Russian war aims are entirely unobtainable. So the shorter version of my previous posts being: 1. Russian invaders will almost certainly trigger an insurgent type uprising. 2. The Ukraine is a good place to be if you're an insurgent, it has the supplies, the anti-Russian sentiment, and a lot of places to operate from. 3. Russian forces are not technically good at COIN operations 4. Russian forces are not adequate in strength to both attack deep enough into the Ukraine to achieve mission success, AND secure rear areas. 5. Historical Russian treatment of restive populations virtually ensures war crimes, international outcry, and likely third and fourth order effects beyond the value of even a total Russian success on the battlefield. I'm just baffled at the "easy war" narrative. Going into the Ukraine in strength in a declared war and thinking it'll be anything clean cut or fast is like looking at someone with cancer, pulling out your trusty pen knife and announcing you're going to conduct surgery. The Russian military is adequate at applying force. It's wholly inadequate at much of anything else.

Exactly Which gets to a sort of preemptive bit of commentary: Someone doubtlessly is going to say something about "but Ukrainians aren't Chechens/Ukraine and Russia are brothers!" etc whatever. Here's factors that will drive a Ukrainian insurgency: 1. Some really deep and totally unmitigated historical grievances doing back to the Czars, getting really bad under the Soviets, and leading to today. The reality of some of these grievances varies, some are totally 100% unvarnished "Russians are terrible" truths, some are modified to exclude that Ukrainians are terrible sometimes too. It's not reality we are discussing, but a population that has a reason to hate Russians. 2. The country has a lot of loose guns and munitions right now. More than anything else, what made the Iraqi insurgency tricky was you couldn't go 100 feet without finding UXO, abandoned caches, or other "donor" material. It's hard to make a good IED from scratch, it's really pretty easy to strap three 152 MM shells together and wire them to a detonator of some kind. 3. The Russians have effectively made a magnet to draw ethnic Russians away from the rest of Ukraine. This means they're going into a culturally similar, but still distinctly different place as outsiders. Invading outsiders. Who's fathers occupied the country, grandfathers raped it, great grandfathers exploited it etc, etc infinity if you're looking at it from a nationalist perspective. The friction will be immense. Russia would doubtlessly employ "loyal" Ukrainians from their side of the fence who will be treated just as much as outsiders, and likely subject to some really terribly disgusting creative retribution (the only thing worse than the invader is a traitor in most cultures). 4. Russia does not have the resources to isolate the Ukraine, or even parts of the Ukraine that it will occupy. Weapons from interested parties, and the interested parties themselves will arrive. This might be anything from western SOF, to folks who just have an ax to grind with Russians as a concept. 5. It's really hard to get people to unify when there's a matter of policy or nuanced approaches. When the outcomes are "subjugation by Russia" or "making dead Russians" a lot of the political frictions will dissipate, and you'll have Ukrainian communist party folks providing weapons to Ukrainian ultra right party fighters because they both agree a Ukraine without Russians is best. Here's factors that will drive the Russians to warcrimes: 1. While Russian forces with doubtlessly start with some sort of "liberating our Ukrainian brothers!" information warfare, it's a message that for reasons discussed above will not resonate with the people they're "liberating." It won't take more than a few trucks full of dead Russians from IEDs, dead 19 year olds found with parts cut off after they snuck off to loot, or just a persistent and seemingly omnipresent hostility (much of it perceived vs real) to totally negate whatever good will the Russians have towards Ukrainians. 2. Looking at Russians tactics against everything, they favor overwhelming application of force. Time and time again, it's placing the maximum amount of violence on a narrow axis to force the enemy to break. The answer from the school house to experience in the field is always most force, smallest target. Hammers and nails. 3. The nail will be a 17 year old hopped up on what happened to his sister last week, and a childhood of Russian bad acts. He'll be hiding the bushes. He'll have been enabled by three or four middle aged men who dug a whole for reasons. If they're detained the hole will have a legitimate reason, but realistically you'll never even see these guys. The hole will have contents built by a guy from Kiev who you'll never even know beyond the fact the contents keep appearing in places. He was trained by someone who has an accent, might be American, might be British, might even be something exotic, but you'll only hear of that through hushed rumors. The contents be dropped off by two cut off Ukrainian soldiers in a older model Lada. The car will look like every other car in the Ukraine. The hole will then be filled quickly by random middle aged men unrelated to the first set. This will all be concealed by two elderly women who just happen to make innocent phone calls about their grandsons whenever Russians are on the road. The nail will explode the contents of the hole, and already be just one of dozens of 15-25 year old men fleeing the scene. The surviving Russians will pour out of their vehicles, one of them will start shooting because he thinks he sees something. Everyone else will shoot on the assumption the other guy shooting is shooting at a real target (this is generally called the "death blossom" with some derision in American circles). The Russians may or may not search for the trigger guy depending on how jacked up they are, they might just death blossom until someone with some authority gets them to cease fire. They will however have to deal with the crispy critters than they had breakfast with before someone used a 122MM round buried roadside to kill them. One of the Russians who survived will blow his brains out in 2024 because he never stopped hearing Sergei screaming for his mother as he was reduced to a carbonized collection of former human parts. The Russians are now the hammer. They're mad as hell. And looking at Russian discipline, and behavior around "insurgent" populations, if they kill the actual men and women involved in the attack, it's going to be simply because statistically if you kill/rape/whatever 10-15% of the people in this village, you might get one of the actual insurgents through chance. This scene will repeat in dozens of places, maybe only once or twice every 24 hours, but it's what an insurgency looks like. The Russian hammer will strike out, but the nail is illusive. But when the only tool you've given someone is the hammer (and indeed, Russia is pretty sold on hammers), they will hammer, regardless of the unsuitability of the hammer in this situation. Anyway. I am rambling at this point. I think it's profoundly foolish to pretend that a Russian invasion of the Ukraine would do anything but kill a lot of people, and make the world just that much worse off. The Russian soldier belongs in Russia. It's the only way this ends well.

Here's the problem with that logic: 1. Ukraine likely recognizes the only way it's forced to end the war is the destruction of its military forces. It will likely attempt to deny Russia the opportunity to do so. Russia may yet still badly damage/"militarily" destroy* the Ukrainian military in this scenario, but it would be after a rather lengthy conflict, going deep into a country that is not too pleased with Russian presence. a. In this context, given the possibility of a Ukrainian insurgency, and looking at historical Russian COIN tactics, will likely utterly and totally poison Russian relations with the rest of the planet. b. If the Russian government's narrative is a short victorious war, and this is not forthcoming, and worse it's not forthcoming with some major losses, the Russian government will suffer greatly domestically. Given the historical trend towards concealing losses and overstating victories, combined with social media access it won't take terribly long for the "official" line to be discarded and Russians to start following information that confirms their fears vs their hopes (so if Russia claims they've destroyed the Ukrainian military and victory will be at hand in three weeks, just like they've claimed for the last five months, the equally false Ukrainian claims of having killed off several thousand Russians and being on the verge of launching special forces raids into Russia proper begin to have equal legitimacy). 2. Looking at the historical Russian adherence to treaties it has signed in regards to the Ukraine, do you seriously think the Ukraine wouldn't think twice about totally shredding whatever peace treaty they signed and going in to liberate the eastern portion of their country the second Russia looks weak? There is zero good faith, and the Ukraine would only be restrained by the extensive presence of Russian military forces. Which is exactly what Russia has to do now only without having fought a conflict to secure the status quo. There's no real point then to an actual conflict. Short of invading, occupying and making the Ukraine into a puppet state, there's nothing Russia realistically can do to accomplish any of its goals in Eastern Europe through military force. Arguably the best "play" would be a negotiated abandonment of the disputed areas. They were only taken as part of a wider attempt to accomplish hegemony over the Ukraine. This failed, and the moment in history that made it possible has passed. Right now they offer nothing to the people holding them, the folks living there have suffered greatly and have simply exchanged one corrupt inept government for another one. Russia gets nothing from the region economically, and it has a very significant political burden. And holding the ground offers no strategic advantage. Turning around, likely under whoever comes after Putin engages with the Ukrainian government. Demands/requests certain minor concessions for ethnic Russians (bilingual signs in Russian ethnic areas, recognition of right to celebrate Russian holidays, blah blah whatever it is that ensures ethnic Russians get to continue identifying as ethnic Russians), agrees to withdraw Russian forces from the Eastern Ukraine. Russia offers pensions and/or right of resettlement for anyone choosing to move to Russia post withdrawal. This is realistically also the only likely way the Ukraine regains the territory barring a Russian collapse or "catastrophic distraction" (civil war, Chinese invasion, war against NATO elsewhere, whatever). The ultimate fate of anyone remaining in the disputed region is below Russia's concern, as again it was only there to accomplish a mission that failed in 2014, and occupying the ground does nothing to make that mission succeed. If the Ukraine honors the agreement, perhaps it gets used as a jumping off point for a new Russian-Ukrainian relationship. If the Ukraine shoots every former leader/soldier from the defunct republics, and deports anyone who speaks in Russian, now the Ukraine is the bad guy and getting slapped with sanctions, or at the least torpedoing whatever aspirations it has towards the EU/NATO. *As a belated note, in military terms "destroyed" basically means the unit is not capable of doing anything until it has been reconstituted. But if Russia is unable to prevent the Ukraine from simply reconstituting destroyed units, collecting up what survived, etc then the military will not remain destroyed which gets back to the whole "it's a pointless exercise" aspect.

It's interesting we keep seeing references to the weapon going places and yet it doesn't seem to have made any impression at all outside of scattered engagements. It's almost like it wasn't a major factor in US anti-armor operations.

Not just courage, but it's what American ideals sound like. What made us great in the first place, not some cheap tarted up buzz words and blatant racism. Trump is an abject coward and it disgusts me he can even claim our citizenship, let alone dare to claim its highest office.

The support for Trump is actually pretty marginal in uniform. A larger portion of the US military will support anything with a (r) behind their name. But there is a very, very, very low satisfaction with him as a candidate, and there's few enthusiastic Trump supporters. I'm really hoping Trump goes down in flames. He keeps saying really moronic stuff and it disturbs me greatly he's not sinking as fast as he should. If he does win though, he still has a wide variety of obstacles that keep him in check, and they will almost doubtlessly be manned by democrats (who hate him), establishment republicans (who also hate him), or just people who want to win their next election (who are giving him a pretty wide berth) Basically in a nutshell there's a very angry portion of the American populace that's driving Trump forward. He might win the election just because of disunity in the opposition, but it'd doubtful his agenda or platform would survive the resulting post election insurgency. As to Terminator: Or maybe you know, we actually benefit from global stability and a fairly peaceful Europe enough that at a strategic level it's worth accepting some fiscal losses. Because you know, a Russian dominated Eastern Europe would be a problem in the long run. Unless you're Trump, then you can be BFFs with your mancrush and you can ride horses shirtless at petty tyrant camp or something.

Eh. It's not like I have much experience with FA in a conventional fight outside of training. We also had a pretty pessimistic outlay for FA*Aviation/etc in Korea. It wasn't really a "spread thin" sort of thing, as much as the first few days or weeks was going to be a lot stuff going on at once, and the problems of one Company Team, or even BN TF wasn't going to rate very high vs theater level targets. Also 1-15 FA did drop rounds on a range my Company was on, so there was that as a bit of a distrust of those dudes.

Sigh. I've got places to be today so short reply: 1. It's worth keeping in mind a lot of the airbursting is dumping fragments at unfavorable angles for penetration (again outside of a direct explosion above a tank, nothing is striking a surface at a 90 degree angle). Also many of the "sensitive" bits are only really sensitive from narrow arcs (or as much everyone goes on about optics,, most fragmentation effects aren't going to do much against the ones on the Abrams at least except from near-frontal. 2. Most fragmentation effects are not "big ones" to the degree to produce reliable results. 3. An artillery hit within 20 meters is practically a "hit." If tanks sat stationary during barrages waiting to get the heck kicked out of them, then maybe this would be a likely outcome, but generally exploiting the fact that tanks are mobile, they'll just move out of the current impact area. On the offensive usually it's too kinetic to reliably mass fires during contact (the reconsolidation or refit phases however...), on the defensive, it's the reason why you have primary-alternate positions for both units and vehicles. 4. The key phrase mentioned earlier was "if the concentration of fire is dense enough" which is much like "if a tank is struck with enough 23 MM" or "millions of angry waterfowl attack" in that well, yeah if you do enough of anything it'll have effects. But the sort of massing required to use fragmentation to knock out tanks reliably. It's also worth looking at just how many rounds you get for your fires assets in CMBS, they're provided with the complete ammo loadout with the assumption your BN/BDE or the FA Battery/BN commander isn't going to cut you off after you fired 100+ rounds to try to HE/VT a tank into submission. When I did my fires planning for real life training, you might have fire support for a window (like during the 15 minutes of your assault they're firing as many rounds as the enemy on the objective would require), or a round allocation (like four rounds per gun battery mission), but at the end of the day, the sort of massive concentrated barrage we're all guilty of using is totally impractical in terms of logistics, and we're using it on targets that frankly wouldn't rank high enough on anyone's targeting matrix to draw the attention of a complete battery firing to the point of ammunition exhaustion. Which gets to the point of accomplishing the sort of density required to have HE/VT be adequate in an anti-tank role is grossly inefficient. A very lucky shot could accomplish something, like if you were going heavy HE/VT fires at a mostly infantry objective, and the tank section attached to them got caught in the heart of it, you'd likely see some damage, but there's a reason everyone on the planet fires PD or DPICM type rounds against armor targets instead of VT.

Re: AT Guns The 76 MM towed mount simply was Not Good At Anything. When employed doctrinally, it failed disastrously. When employed in a more conventional "heavy weapon" role it was not entirely useless, but was too unwieldy for regular employment. The 57 MM saw some success as it could penetrate a lot of German hardware, and the heavier stuff if the stars were right/in favorable angles/facings. it was also small enough to be placed in interesting places, and it was integral to infantry formations which meant it was part of a wider defensive plan which gave it much more utility than the towed tank destroyer units. Neither was entirely "Good" but the 57 MM wasn't a total wash. In regards to armor, Shermans fared pretty all right. Many Armored Divisions had started to acquire 76 MM Shermans in quantity, and the defensive nature of the fighting negated a lot of the advantages of German armor. The M36 did quite well, as did other tank destroyers, but given the kind of fighting and weapons involved, it could be argued that it was not so important that it was an M10 or Sherman, but that it was a full track tank-like AFV on station.

I tend to take: 1 Platoon M109A6 If I've got more points: 1 Battery M109A6 Occasionally I'll toss in a mortar section or platoon (120 MM). Basically I usually fight with ABCT type forces, so I'll provide it with ABCT type fires. If I do aviation I'll usually prefer AH-64s of whatever I can afford, or the fixed wing loadouts with mostly bombs. As far as effects, I tend to use the 155 MM to suppress enemy positions or AoAs, or for precision fires on select AFVs or strongpoints. I'll occasionally mass fires on small units, especially mech infantry or other targets that react poorly to artillery strikes. For mortars mostly it's rapid smoke, or for beating down infantry positons. For aviation, I use it so infrequently, but I usually hold it back until I've identified the enemy main effort, then I'll do some SEAD type fires with my 155s before using CCA/CAS. For fixed wing I really prefer the bombs simply because they're great at making select locations go quite. Even if it's only fairly modest actual damage, the absolute destruction of a building, massive crater etc is great at giving me space to do other things.

The Germans started and lost both world wars. They're pretty bad at learning from mistakes. In all seriousness, likely because it's an evolution of existing equipment that worked well enough to not make a total changeover attractive. The MG42 wasn't a "bad" gun, it's just very high ROF left so much of an impact on the Americans, Russians, French, Belgians, and virtually every other major non-German gun maker that absolutely none of them opted for over 1000 RPM infantry machine guns. The MG3 is a special case because it's an evolution of the MG42, and it's not "bad" but every clean slate machine gun post world war two seems to follow a much slower ROF model, and that can't simply be because inferior not Germans cannot handle the powar or something.

Yes. Yes they were. It proved impractical in regards to ammunition capacity, had a very detrimental effect on the service life of the weapon, and did not deliver performance proportional to that cost. Looking at post war designs somewhere between 600-700 RPM looks to be about standard for infantry machine guns, with few if any attempting to replicate the 1200 RPM of the MG42. The MG42 was more relevant not for weapons performance (although the rapid fire did leave an impression on folks being shot at by it) nearly as much as showing the benefit of a small squad portable belt fed MG. As to directly copying the MG42, it was attempted, but from my reading adapting the mechanism to accept the longer American rounds was proving to be problematic and the project just did not offer enough of an advantage to encourage pursuing the weapon much further (or in effect, more M1919s>time and resources spent trying to make an American copy of the MG42 that might really not make much of a difference).

I was thinking of a wider bowling alley. Basically it's sort of a sliding scale, and you're trying to find that optimal point of being able to cover enough battlespace to be useful, while not being left out where the tanks can eat you. I've just seems some employment of ATGM vehicles that feels like someone set the vehicle down out in the open yelling 'I choose you saggerchu!" and expected it to start munching AFVs. The ATGM of all major weapons systems really needs to be "placed" and given a cohesive plan for how it's going to shoot things (or like a target arch, and spending 5 minutes getting the vehicle exactly right). Even then if APS is about you might as well just skip it half the time (which is why I do not play with APS, the US hasn't fielded it yet, and the Russians haven't managed to get it widely fielded either. and ATGMs still have a major part in the battlefield foodchain).

For dismounted infantry, a very high ROF weapon does not offer significant advantages. Even on tanks or vehicles with literally thousands of rounds of ready ammunition, something that kicks out 800 RPM is considered entirely adequate to the task. In regards to "sweeping" anything, not so much. If you're bumping out 500-600 rounds you're likely getting as adequate of a suppressive effect as 1200+ RPM, in terms of lethal fires, rapid just ensures instead of a 3-5 round burst, you're dealing with a 6-12 round burst and it won't kill the enemy any harder you know? In ground employment there's something to be said for more rapid fire at very long ranges, as the divergence of the rounds will create a sort of lethal area, but that's usually well beyond the ability of a dismounted machine gun to realistically accomplish anyway.

I've found the best ATGM vehicle field of fire looks a lot like a bowling alley. If it's too wide, the launcher will get spotted and murdered easily. If it's too rough, the missiles take out their age old hatred of the color green on trees.

I think you need to break it up into two lines of thinking: 1. Is it realistic/possible for an advanced weapons system to 0/4 what it was shooting at? And the answer is yes. Yes it is. This is not the standard, but history is rife with examples of people and things failing to hit what they're pointed at, and there's a not at all short list of things that will make missiles especially opt to jihad against the terrain vs their targets. So it is a realistic, although should not be frequent output. 2. Is it something that is unreasonable to expect to occur in the game? And the answer is no. Looking at how the CM series tries to emulate warfare, it takes "science" type stuff like projectile trajectory, armor thickness, etc and then runs it through "soft" numbers much like dice roles to ensure the output matches the inconsistent behavior of objects in the real world. Sometimes this series of numbers outputs things that are unlikely because the dice roles tank, or the "science" part is intentionally somewhat opaque at times and will work in ways we didn't expect. I once watched a stationary Abrams firing at a slowly moving T-72B3 at sub 800 meters range. It put two rounds over, one into a tree, and then the T-72B3 engaged and firepower killed the tank on the move. This is not a common outcome in game or in reality, and the words I used when it occurred greatly concerned the household dachshund. However outcomes like that will occur in life and game, and it sounds like in terms of missiles leaving platforms that the vehicle works as intended most of the time which leaves me to think you just had a bad set of dice rolls, or ran afoul of some firing through trees rules. That this game side stuff occurred replicated some real life variables or something.

I'm saying it's not at all an unreasonable worst case output, and I've seen the darned things work often enough to know they don't go 0/4 often. Missiles are rather by their nature somewhat of a gamble, they're a highly precise weapon made as cheap as possible, with a guidance package that can work perfectly fine but be defeated by a wide variety of terrain that may or may not cause loss of track, that's various issues all become more acute the farther they have to fly. There's a reason many countries train ATGM volley fire after all. Radar introduces its own bag of problems, and there's a reason why ground launched radar guided ATGMs are so uncommon. Javelin is it's own special case in that being that it's a self contained missile with a fairly novel seeker system. But ATGMs are in life, and in realism, complicated often risky tools to use, that often do not work like you want them to.

ATGMs are pretty miss or miss. Javelins are pretty awesome, but the rest are not entirely reliable. With that said, there's reasons why large caliber direct fire guns remain relevant despite the significant cost and difficulty in fielding them. The great advantage to ATGMs is the complexity of the weapons system is carried in a self contained, fairly modest weight projectile (with some burden on the launch unit), but it does exchange that for a certain loss of reliability, and much greater impact of "friction." Also I'd say as a general rule the closer to 0 feet above the ground, the increasingly less useful anything radar based gets.

Errata: I'm no longer active in the armor community beyond being a casual observer, I'm still in the National Guard but we're in the process of going Strykers. So keep in mind I'm very well informed on stuff Abrams circa 2007-2015 or so, but anything after or before that I'm about on par with the average well read dude. When I hopped off an M1A2 SEP v2 for the last time in late 2014, it had no laser warning system mounted, nor was the equipment available for local installation. As far as I can tell no laser warning system was fitted to our M2A3s, or M3A3s within the organization. I do not recognize any of the sensor arrays Kettler posted as pieces of equipment I have seen installed on a US Army piece of equipment within my time in ABCTs. What I do know is that the system exists as a concept, and the integration piece is pretty modest (or it could be done "ghetto" with externally mounted and lightly armored wiring conduits external with few hours and some enthusiasm, likely a week or so at depot for a legit completely within the main armor array mounting). It fits right in with the APS as something the Army could do on a fairly short notice, and is less out there than a lot of other inclusions. Re: Abrams labels. I've always used the lowercase v. I'm on my drill weekend for the guard, but if this turns into a controversy I'll go into my stash of tanking memorabilia and dig out my boresighting checklists or something and see if it uses capitalization for the v. If you want to sound cool, here's how the various models of Abrams are generally refered to: M1: Almost never even mentioned circa my time in service, someone who used one as a brand new LT in Germany would have been nearing 20 years service when I first went on active duty. M1IP: Same as above, generally though referred to as M1IP simply to keep it clear. M1A1: Virtually all of them, regardless of M1A1HA, HC, AIMS, D, SA whatever are called either "M1A1" or just "A1s." Generally the first question you got asked coming into an armor unit was if you were coming from A1s, or A2s, because the gunnery, and controls are different enough that A1 guys basically had to get a fast and furious train up on A2s. In practice the various A1 designations meant little outside of what it said on the Technical Manual when conducting maintenance, and in practice, units had homogeneous fleets (so it wasn't like your platoon had two M1A1HAs, and then an M1A1 baseline and a M1A1HC, they were all one model). M1A2: M1A2 or just A2. The absolute base models were fairly uncommon outside of a few units. M1A2 SEP: Almost always just the "SEP" as there's nothing else that carried the SEP designation in service. M1A2 SEP v2: SEP v2 (say it like "SEP vee2"), or less common, SEP vic 2. v2 (again, vee2) was used sometimes too. More commonly given again, that if you were standing in a battalion footprint, 99,9% of the time every tank would be the same model, they were just referred to as "tanks," "Abrams," or "M1s" Bradleys were even simpler, almost always being called "Bradleys" or "Brads." Sometimes when relevant they will be called as "ODS" (for the virtually 100% fleetwide upgrades received to the A2 for the Persian Gulf War) or A3s went relevant. No one says "TUSK" or "BUSK" unless it's in reference to the kits or parts of them (so no one will ever be like "LT, get up on your SEP TUSK and get going!" but "Yeah we need some new seats for the troop bay on B12, it's got BUSK so use LIN 123456" would happen). There was no special designation for ERA mounting outside of as part of the TUSK/BUSK kit, although the ARAT/BRAT is correct when referring to the armor elements themselves. I'm sure with the coming of the M1A2 SEP v3 or even an M1A3 on the horizon a lot of this is subject to change however.

Before just kinda letting this lay: 1. There's no doubt the BAR was an imperfect weapon. However by many accounts and from its longevity it was an adequate solution most of the time. I think the M16 is a good comparison. It's not the finest weapon in the world, and there's some clear things about it that aren't great. However there's nothing remarkably better out there to justify the expense of replacing it. The BAR was as good, if not better than most magazine fed machine guns/automatic rifles of it's age. The MG 42 demonstrated an actual machine gun was the better solution, and the M1919A6 was a poor attempt to replicate that with what was on hand. Ultimately the "real" solution was the M60, which even with a significant weight penalty offered real machine gun performance in a mostly portable package. It was however imperfect which is why BARs, or "Automatic Rifleman" M14/M16 kits lasted so long until a real true LMG in the M249 came about. Heck even things like the PRK, IAR, and the fact it took decades for the Bren to really die out illustrate the difficulty in finding a machine gun that "fit" at the squad level. I would contend the BAR's increasing number in squad sized formations had more to do with the trend in all Armies of world war two that MORE automatic weapons were always the right answer. In a world in which the Lewis Gun was the squad weapon of the US Army, the only thing that might have kept it from following a BAR-like trajectory of 2-3 weapons in a squad would be the prohibitive weight of the weapon. 2. I don't think there's a good argument the Lewis Gun is realistically a better choice. In one metric, a larger magazine it is superior...but it's like that's not the only defining feature of the weapon. And the BAR was ultimately done in by things that looked like the MG 42 vs a large pan magazine fed weapon. The Lewis does not offer some decisive advantage, and it comes with some other problems too. Judging by the course of employment for the Lewis Gun with other countries, even if it had been employed in great number in World War One, and had been the machine gun of the US Army for the 1915-1935, it likely would have been replaced by something BAR or Bren-like going into World War Two. If we're talking about solving or augmenting the BAR, it really should have been a belt fed weapon that was lighter than the M1919. The Lewis Gun just is not that weapon.

Re: "Appeal to Authority" What I find interesting is military affairs is the one place random people seem to think their opinion carries equal weight to professionals. You wouldn't argue what sort of knife the your surgeon uses, you won't debate your truck really needs a V-16, but gosh darn it, people will line right up to argue the M113 is superior to the Abrams or something. You're stating over and over again that the Lewis has a larger magazine. The US Army/Marines were likely aware of this. And yet, given this apparently massive advantage they still opted to go with the BAR. This might be indicative that the specifications for a squad level automatic weapon did not value having a large pan style magazine over other factors. Then when it became apparent some sort of light machine gun was needed, the Lewis wasn't even looked at, and instead the conversion of a medium machine gun into some sort of frankenLMG. No weapon is perfect. All of them are a series of compromises to try to find a weapon that's strong where it matters, and weak where it matters less. This sometimes turns out wrong as it turns out there compromises did not mesh well with reality. Classifying weapons procurement missteps as "stupid" is simply not understanding the problem or solution set. As the case was, a large number of people who knew guns, infantry tactics, and the like rather well did not seem particularly attached to the Lewis, and went with the BAR. Were they right? Dunno. There's certainly a debate to if the BAR was the right weapon. But the Lewis certainly failed to make the sort of impression you'd think an obvious superior choice would, politics or no. Re: Reloading No. I mean the reloading drill for the magazine on the BAR is superior. There's a reason most weapons have their magazine located around that spot of the gun vs coming in through the top. Re: M240B It was too heavy for a squad weapon full stop. That's why the M240B is NOT a squad level weapon, it's used by machine gun teams. Squad machine guns are M249s which mysteriously weights much closer to the weight of the BAR than the Lewis. The most current model of the M240 went through significant weight reduction measures to make it more reasonable for squad level use. Again. Was the BAR the right too for the job? That's an interesting debate. I lean towards "mostly." Was the Lewis a better choice? Jury is pretty solidly on "nope."