panzersaurkrautwerfer

I really like science fiction. Lots and lots. Here's my issue with CM: Mariner Valley though. Science fiction is less about "the future" and more commentary on our present placed in a fantasy realm. Hard science fiction draws more from "science" than "fiction" but it isn't to show us the future in a realistic sense. Combat Mission is all about realism. Which therein is the problem, how does a realistic wargame series tackle an inherently unrealistic setting? And further the amount of time to properly flesh out a believable science fiction setting is much more dramatic than simply shopping for conflicts that might be close enough to build on (which is no small feat in itself, but we have the US Army and the Russian Army, and their MTOE. We don't have to decide the US will become the Federated States of the Americas after merging with Canada minus Quebec, most of Mexico and Cuba, and that it's principle off-world force will be the Armored Cav Regiment, which is comprised of two armor battalions, and an air assault squadron of dragoons to clear complex objectives, while the Russian Federation will be the Slavic Empire in 2179 as a result of the catastrophic Baltic Wars, and the T-18 will use dual 200 KW DEW weapons, which will make it less mobile than other hover tanks). It'd be cool to see a science fiction wargame, but making Combat Mission the series for that is a bit like turning your local steakhouse into a Mexican resutrant. Both are things you might like, but you'd rather have both choices exist in parallel, and I'd rather have CM: Armageddon (the Ardennes to the Elbe), and then have Battlefront introduce "Under a Uncaring Star: Mechanized Warfare in 2179" as a separate product line, then miss out on more good modern/historical games.

They weren't trials, they were a sales demonstration. Just fyi.

Said it better than I was saying it. See my Reply 13# in this thread. BLUFF is it'd be harder than it looks, and you're still looking at them being infrequent visitors.

Russians are B team. The mental image I find more useful for this is trench warfare. With Russian, and then the US/Ukrainian assets, the airspace on either side of the frontline is going to be supremely dangerous. The US and Russians will at the start of the campaign be largely able to defend their airspace, but will have difficulty penetrating each other's air space. The ability for aviation to mass rapidly, both for defense, and offense, and the ability for sensors to detect offensives at range all make again, some sort of truly contested situation where both sides are getting in a fair number of strikes to be very unlikely. The reality is both Russian and USAF forces will be almost entirely committed to either making the skies safe enough for operation, or denying skies to same. Until the defenses on one side are sufficiently reduced it's going to be difficult to suicidal to operate especially with the Russian generation of strike fighters. So again, contested doesn't mean the sky is shared, it means its a battlezone where it's dangerous to everyone. And reasonably speaking given the lethality of fighting, the life expectancy of the Russian airforce as a solvent threat is pretty short. Achieving air superiority/dominance over the Russian side of the fence will take a while, but that's because SEAD is tricky, and Russia has a lot to SEAD/DEAD. Reasonably it'll be fairly safe for Blueforces to operate behind the various PATRIOT/CAP/other SAM networks, and it's doubtful that NATO would be on the offensive until the Russian forces were fairly well mauled.

It would certainly look bad, but if there's a burned out BMP in the courtyard, and wrecked Russian hardware in the pews, it rather makes it play better internationally. Russia Today is trash and I honestly don't think it has traction outside of Russians or people who think Putin is the Lord Emperor here to save them from American Jackals or something. Re: Orbital bombardment While not universal, I've found in some quarters that statement from the movie Aliens is often used to express the extreme end of dealing with a situation (or alternately as a "Things are messed up enough we'd be better off burning it all to the ground")

When I was a junior Captain and fresh back from Iraq, I got wrangled into a command post exercise to prepare our Division HQ to deploy to Afghanistan to assume control over...I think it was RC East. Dunno. I never went to Afghanistan myself and as it turned out I had precious little to do with the actual exercise. 2e Brigade Blindée would be falling under that HQ when they deployed some months later, so they actually sent a good part of their command team to Fort Riley KS to participate. one of my counterparts and I were both loaned out to the French contingent to help with helping them understand the various US systems they had to be linked in on, and explain the various Americanisms ("What is this fuel amber?" and so forth). It was actually really good times. Towards the end we had a sort of social event, snacks were bought, booze consumed (in the middle of a duty shift no less), and I started chatting up the various officers with good English skills. Being a curious sort I couldn't help but ask various questions about their hardware. Some takeaways: AMX-10RC: The recon guys seemed to like it lots, but the fleet was getting long in the tooth and they had a lot of "This vehicle is old" sort of maintenance issues. Tiger/Puma: Good, so long as they're not required to fly at high elevations or hot temperatures (this was actually a problem during the exercise, that on days the computer decided were pretty hot, the French required US helicopter support because their birds couldn't fly with load). Leclerc: Here's pretty much how the conversation went down: CPT P. "I hear the Leclerc is quite mobile MAJ Frenchguy "When she runs" CPT P. "The autoloader on the Leclerc sounds most impressive" MAJ F. "When it loads" CPT P. "How's the optics on the Leclerc?" MAJ F. "Quite good when they turn on" There's more, but that's effectively the jist of everything he said about the Leclerc, was followed "When it works" or "if it <whatever it was suppposed to be good at>." Leclerc hasn't done much to give 3rd party observation, but none of the French guys I talked to seemed to regard it as reliable.

Rules of land warfare say that a protected site loses its protective status once it is used for military purposes. If there's Russians in thar monastery-orphanage-hospital complex, it's free to be bombed to pieces. If there was some value to the site, like beyond it just being a hospital, it was an internationally recognized center for research into curing death or something, there would be some plan to deal with it. Easiest option would be simply to bypass the site all together, and once it's surrounded start conducting tactical callouts, or blasting them with heavy metal music or something. The way you can lose victory points for destroying a "protected" location is proper, in that it'd be a real shame if someone dusted the church, and it'll look bad on CNN, but as long as the answer to the question "was it full of Russians" was "yes" life goes on. It's important to ask as the scenario designer if the town church of whatever small town is the halfway point on their map is something that will matter in a war that's likely killing a few hundred people daily. To that end having seen some of the point values attached to "preserve" objectives, I think folks have gotten a little overboard. ROE is really not something that is designed to keep commanders from committing violence against things, it exists to give a practical progression from "I am not shooting" to "it's time to dust off and nuke this place from orbit, it's the only way to be sure"

I have to differ on the tank being on the way out. There's not really a viable tank alternative, or a technology that tank alternatives can use, that tanks cannot. And there's no "musket" as much as ATGMs were supposed to herald the end of the tank (as were mobile AT guns in the 1930's) the two systems are very much locked in a evolutionary arm's race, but neither really claims a massive advantage. The fate of the FCS and the marginal performance of the MGS seems to indicate the highly mobile gun platform sans protection isn't practical (and may honestly never be, the active defenses those all rely on also will mount right on a tank). The only system that I can really imagine that could represent a "musket" would be a railgun, in that it's something that could effectively penetrate any armor yet known to man from any range or something. But it's still a system literally decades away from fitting on a platform that might be mobile enough to see battlefield use

Extra range without the reasonable ability to acquire and track targets is a bit of a waste though.

Again, I will emphasize, a lack of US air control is not defacto Russian air control. There are many forward bases available, many with their own NATO aligned air wings. The USAF for all its faults can surge into theater pretty quickly, and odds are Russian strike fighters will have a life expectancy that makes the old cold war A-10 life expectancy seem like practically dying of old age. The USAF simply is a better trained, equipped, and more ready force. If there's a US ABCT in the Ukraine, there's already going to be fixed wing augmentation in theater. The most pragmatic, and realistic situation is the Russian resistance is such to force the USAF to focus on eliminating the Russian air defense threat, but the question is how long it'll take before those defenses crack, not by any rational observer if the Russians will be able to fly meaningful strike missions.

The recon unit still cannot actually acquire the target for the firing platform. And the level of visability you get at 5 KM will be entirely inadequate to ensure a hit on anywhere but "somewhere" on the target, assuming other variables remain in favor of missile hit. The Abrams has proven very resistant to HEAT type rounds, and again when your target is "a blob" your odds in terms of frontage are most likely to be part of the tank that's fairly resistant to hits. And of course, 5 KM sightlines are not at all common. The one vs one stuff is pretty silly. But simply put the Abrams is better able to find targets, engage them accurately, and achieve first shot kills within most combat ranges. The T-90 isn't again, a bad tank, it's just very clearly the best of 1999, stacked up against the various 2007-2014 era upgraded NATO tanks, which means it'll struggle to achieve results in situations where an Abrams, Leo or Challenger would likely succeed. It will however beat the Leclerc, simply because Russian tanks are able to leave the garage for more than five minutes at a go.

If we're looking at a Army unit about to assault a town full of Russian regulars, no one is going to care about private property. Simple as that. I got my knuckles rapped for being too soft during one of our scenerios at Captain's Career Course. I went out of my way to Iraq the situation, planning to keep the enemy occupied police compound intact, etc etc. My instructor just leaned back and asked if I knew the building was full of bad folks (which for the purposes of the scenario, it was 100% full of bad dudes) why didn't I just JDAM the building? Recent COIN operations has given a really skewed impression of ROEs. In a real shooting war Soldier's lives will always take precedence over how many holes the village has at the end of the day. You'd really have to go above and beyond to get prosecuted for ROE violations (shooting up suspicious looking buildings? No one is going to say a word, better safe than sorry. Announcing "HEY WATCH THIS!" before shooting a canister round into a gas station? Better hope it was secretly full of "separatists")

Negatron, it has "Detection" out to 8 KM, which is to say the sensor can locate something vehicle sized around 8 KM, but it won't be sure if it's a Tank, IFV, T-90 or M1A2 until around 2 KM. It's the diffrence between seeing something moving down the street and being able to tell if it's a woman worth getting a phone number from.

And for that you will die. Kidding. Maybe. It's a question of what level of identification. In 1991 US tanks were shooting at targets they could reasonably assume were enemy and armor type targets well beyond "identification" range. This led to a few of the friendly fire incidents, but it also lead to more than a few Iraqis assuming they were under air attack because they couldn't even see or make out the signature from the firing tank. If I'm sitting in a T-90 in a defensive position, and I know without a doubt that the friendly scouts are not in front, and I've got a 5 KM sightline, I'm pretty safe to spike a ATGM into the first tankish looking target coming down the road. If I'm part of a dynamic fight in which friendly positions are not known, or it's complex terrain and there's more than a few hotspots/areas where visibility comes and goes, engagement ranges are goin to get a lot shorter.

It's really something I think the SOF community will get the most mileage out of. While drones are handy, they also have a pretty tell tale audio signature (think, do the Tribal regions in Pakistan get much air traffic?). It's the sort of thing that a ground observer could call within a certain window, and get the same results with no warning except for the missile's terminal phase. It's too expensive for massed battlefield use, and the reaction time is well suited to "Shiek Muhammed and Abu Abdul Mutleb are sitting down for tea and terrorism" sort of strikes, but less so "Three tanks in the open fire for effect!" If they ever do include MRLS type weapons into the game, ATACMS would be interesting purely because it has been employed in a more conventional artillery role (largely because of COIN mind you), but offers the same sort of profile that a tactical Tomahawk would.

As pointed out already: 1. The Stryker and LAV share a common ancestor in the form of the Mowag Piranha. Both vehicles are built off of versions of that vehicles as license built by General Dynamics Land Division (Canada). 2. They are different generations however. The USMC vehicles belong to the LAV-I generation of platforms, which is smaller and more lightly armored, while the Stryker is based on the LAV III which is better protected, but also much larger and loses the amphibious capabilities of earlier generations. 3. There are LAV III variants that mount the 25 MM, however when the Army was designing the Stryker units it was seeking firstly a vehicle that could mount an entire rifle squad in each vehicle without crossloading. This would not be possible in the 25 MM armed Stryker models. Further for fire support, the 105 MM equipped Mobile Gun System Stryker was to be allocated at a rate of three per rifle company. In summery, by the Army's first go, the LAV III with autocannon wasn't enough transport, or gun to fill either of the potential roles. 4. The postscript however is that the Mobile Gun System has proven deeply unpopular and has not lived up to advertising. It's either too much gun for COIN, or not enough firepower and armor for full spectrum operations. The number of MGSes has been reduced to just three per Battalion, and there's talk of procuring autocannon armed Strykers to replace the MGS at the Company level (either the cheap fix of 25 MM, or a larger turret mounting a 40 MM gun).

Nah. He's talking more in terms of "Cavalry" as men specially trained to fight chiefly from horseback. The US Cavalry tradition was always closest to Dragoons in the European sense, which was a soldier who used a horse for battlefield mobility, but chiefly fought from the dismount. This is not to say Dragoons did not operate from the mount from time to time, or Cavalry never dismounted, but we're talking in terms of primary use. The US Army stood up three regiments of Dragoons (technically, the 3rd Regiment was stood up as a "Regiment of Mounted Riflemen" but same difference), and then started standing up Cavalry Regiments in the 1840's. Ultimately the distinction was discarded as the distinction between Dragoon and Cavalryman blurred (effectively, the US Cavalryman was a Dragoon who was trained to be able to fight from his horse when tactically advantageous, but still generally actually fought from the dismount). The three Dragoon regiments became Cavalry Regiments, and the Cavalry Regiments were re-numbered accordingly (which is why the 4th Cavalry Regiment's lineage actually starts off as a the 1st Cavalry Regiment). TLDR: US Cavalry would be US Dragoons under European standards, thus a lack of Cavalry tradition.

The big problem with Javelins is they've got a max effective range of 2500 meters vs the TOW's 3750 meters, and the TOW has a better conventional warhead. Personally I think a Javelin with an optional booster would be best, basically at 2500 meter+ ranges an additional engine would punt the missile a little further before noseover, while shooter ranges the additional rocket would just be dropped out the back of the tube. Would also allow for turret down firings without leaving the launcher above horizon (and concealing most of the launch signature).

There's more than a few "wrong place, wrong time" penetration instances on otherwise very tough tanks. The .50 cal SLAP penetration should be viewed as a fugitive from the law of averages, and an example of the whole "Alle Kunst ist umsonst Wenn ein Engel in das Zündloch Prunst" thing (translation milage may vary) rather than an example of armor quality. Re: Challenger 2 Again, by all accounts I've seen it was an impact under the hull, which on the challenger II was not especially protected at all. The round partially clipped the lowest sets of ERA, triggering them, but not in a way that'd prevent a penetration. So basically the .50 cal SLAP round again, and improbable event occurring. You'd struggle to replicate it, and the RPG-29 for all it's lethality is still best reserved for flank shots. This is true. The irritation for me is that the T-90 is very much a late 90's piece of equipment, and it shows. Having to explain that it is not at all on the same level as a M1A2 SEP V2, or that the hardware mounted on it is last generation/sometimes not even as good as it's late 90's peers is something that's important to understanding the tank vs tank fights in CMBS. It's not a bad tank, it's just not the same as a M1A2, or even a "almost as good as" M1A2. It's catastrophic overmatch for the "might as well be 1989" Ukrainian designs, something fearsome against forces without much dedicated modern AT assets, but it is certainly something that is not a high performer in a armor fight vs US armor.

I think I joined the military at least at first to give purpose to knowing half the stuff I do. The POW-friendly attitude does see a bit of a decline after the Ardennes. One of the things the movie Fury really needs to be commended for is showing what the American Army looked like on D+210 in terms of mentality and veteran nature.

Think it's been a see-saw. I remember hearing that IFVs ATGMed everything in Beta. Could use a tweak, I have only seen a few TOWs in flight.

Still genuinely unfun for all parties. Russian helicopters have to expose themselves a fair bit more to actually engage ground targets, while Apache users and some of the other NATO CCA guys can engage very effectively from standoff, making a lot of the ADA disparity less important to who's helicopters fly where (or to further illustrate, there's less shooting back at the Russians at the short-range realm, but the Russian short range ADA assets have a lot less to shoot at). While hunting helicopters with fixed wing assets as proven tricky historically, at the same time, you're looking chiefly at the question of the helicopter being killed by fixed wing. On the other hand the fixed wing just has to be dangerous enough to make the rotary wing be evasive to achieve a sort of mission kill vs actually shooting the helicopter down. It's also worth noting that the Hind flight profile given the size, speed and altitudes employed will put that airframe at much greater risk to air intercept compared to MI-28/KA-52 platforms. Further unlike Russian fixed wing, barring extraordinary measures such as replacing ordinance with fuel Russian rotary wing will have to deploy forward from the kind of locations NATO would be able to attack without going onto Russian soil. This is equally true for NATO rotary wing, but NATO for reasons stated earlier is more likely to be able to get bombs on those targets. There's not many scenarios that put Russian aviation as something US ground forces would have to be deeply concerned with on a regular basis. On occasion yes, and scenarios with some redair are legitimate (representing a lucky Russian mission, the results of a Russian surge to achieve air parity, etc) but SU-24s stacked up to 30,000 feet and a half dozen HINDs swooping in are very dubious.

Yes. But it'd be because the Russian Air Force would need to be committed to holding off NATO almost to a plane. Further the same complications that make heavy NATO CAS doubtful are equally strong, if not stronger against the Russians (given a smaller air force and less capable system for the Russians, robust long range ADA from NATO and more common, and better air defense fighters). It's not going to be a period in which Russia bombs more or less at will with the US vainly flailing at waves of Russian CAS before a turning of the tide with NATO taking air dominance, it's going to be a bloody messy initial fight in which it's hard for anyone to accomplish air strikes, with Russia not having the strength or capabilities to continue this struggle, followed by a general decline in Russian resistance and increase in NATO capabilities. Russian air defense will make it hard for NATO to bomb Russian forces throughout, but in terms of pushing Russian air strikes onto NATO positions, the number of 2S6s is going to be less relevant than then number of AWACS or recent generation fighters NATO fields.

Your link doesn't exist. Re: Challenger 2 It was a magic bullet sort of strike (the round struck the ground and skipped into the almost bottom of the hull from my understanding, so no ERA, and not in an area well armored on any tank), and not typical of RPG capabilities. If it'd come head on vs effectively up from the ground, it would not have been effective, and even at that, the strike damaged the tank, but it was still more or less functional. Re: FCS T-64 was good for its time because everyone was using transistors. T-80 started to slip because it was still using technology based on the finest the 70's could offer vs then modern electronics. Russia has never managed to catch up in terms of computing and electronics, which is why they're content using the CATHERINE based systems vs having an original home grown design. You can look at the sales brochure posted earlier. CATHERINE only claims vehicle identification out to a little over 2 KM without upgrade, which is well short of recorded identification/kill distances accomplished by Abrams and Challenger type tanks.

This. Once in CMBN I'd basically killed the hell out of everything the Germans had, except for this one Panzer that always seemed to get a magic spot in and kill some infantry or kill/damage a tank. Without fail "HALLO I AM HANS!" bam, it killed something. Rest of his platoon? Slaughtered. Didn't leave an impact. German infantry? Dead in their holes. But this one stupid MK IV always managed to just escape after killing something. So right as I had him dead to rights, gun knocked out, three Shermans bearing down on him, that last firepower kill apparently was the breaking point and the Germans surrendered. I have to imagine it was fairly likely Hans and his crew were shot while attempted to escape, but it'd have been nice to watch the tank burn.