chuckdyke

If Putin thinks he gets away with it he will nuke Europe tomorrow. But the Red Square possibly becomes the Black Hole.

If Putin thinks he gets away with it he will nuke Europe tomorrow. But the Red Square possibly becomes the Black Hole.

Very graphic this 
 

Hmm to be perfectly frank, I don't care much if at all about the hypothetical setting any more. Battlefront had a prophetic moment when they managed to identify Ukraine as a potential hotspot and came up with a good scenario for it as a pretext to use the game as a laboratory for future equipments and tactics.
And that was just fine until reality caught up with it and a real war broke out. But now current events have diverged so significantly from the fiction that they have made it obsolete in my book.
Personally I'd much rather use the game as a sandbox to explore real tactics and actual battles than stick to an alternate reality. I can see the appeal but I mean it feels a bit absurd to keep exploring a hypothetical branch of history while a different reality is unfolding before our eyes.
The only reason I suggested this is because Battlefront tends to be quite mulish and always sticks to their guns no matter what and so I figured this modest list of tweaks and addition is the best we can realistically hope to get without having to wait 5 or 10 years.

Yeah it is. The video is all over the place and viewed countless times. It reminds me of the guys after work playing some game called Quake (90's) on the company network. Four of them giggling like school girls having just enough knowledge of military matters to make you laugh yourself. Some have told me they thought the vid was fake because "there's no blood". Like a 1960's war movie. If I were to view the video without any experience, I might come to the same conclusion. Many Americans are clueless on what is happening. Most frankly. They are too busy. Those that are into fake valor and the irresponsible use of firearms will rejoice in this video; those with real valor and use firearms responsibly will not.  

Very graphic this 
 

I shared and referenced this on Discord. A mandatory read in my opinion.

I didn't have a chance to respond to one of @The_Capt's post in the How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get thread this weekend (too busy sleeping, visiting family, and playing video games). Since it took me so long to get around to it I figured my response didn't belong in that thread anymore, hence the new thread. But military history and tactical development are hobby subjects for me, so I did want to get around to responding. Though my opening post is on tactical lessons and development leading up to and during WW1, I'm going to make the topic of this thread generic to tactical development in any era. I think a discussion of tactical lessons learned, missed, or miss-learned in the past could be helpful for grounding our understanding of tactical trends in the present. Understanding that the tacticians of the past may have had good reason, based on the evidence and analytical tools available to them, for reaching conclusions that we now know were wrong may help us have humility in our own conclusions about tactical trends in modern warfare. And understanding that they actually got more right than they get credit for may prevent us from too hastily rejecting the received view on a subject, merely because it is the received view.
I think it's arguable just how obvious a shift to defensive primacy should have been. The Franco-Prussian war certainly wouldn't have signaled a shift to defensive primacy for any casual observer of the time. The Prussians overran French defenses with hasty (bordering on reckless) attacks in battle after battle. If anything the war repeatedly demonstrated offensive primacy until the French field army was defeated at Sedan and the Prussians settled in for the Siege of Paris. While the Prussians weren't able to storm Paris's defenses, that alone didn't prove defensive primacy since it couldn't set it apart from any other siege that had been conducted over the last several thousand years of warfare. For all of recorded history up to that point there were field battles and there were sieges. Field battles lasted from a few hours to a few days, while sieges were attritional slogs that lasted for weeks or months. In fact even the Siege of Petersburg would have looked just like any other siege. It and other months-long sieges in the American Civil War would not have alerted anyone to any sort of shift towards defensive primacy. In fact, far from the participants of the Siege of Petersburg noting some new form of warfare, reports and letters from 1915 refer to WW1 as if the entire war had become one giant siege.
It's fair to criticize the French, who went into the Franco-Prussian war believing in defensive primacy, for overcorrecting and assuming absolute offensive primacy. But it's clear that the overcorrection didn't come out of nowhere. I'll note that the French seem to have a habit of overcorrecting too hard, assuming defensive primacy in the Franco-Prussian War, overcorrecting to total offensive primacy in WW1, and overcorrecting to total defensive primacy in WW2. Another tragic downside of Prussia's reckless attacks during the Franco-Prussian War being met with repeated success is that it led the Germans in WW1 to think that reckless attacks were a good idea. I think the Franco-Prussian war may have a number of cautionary tales for how we derive lessons from wars.
Defensive or offensive primacy are useful as broad concepts. But each is brought about by specific factors, and soldiers in the field still need to adapt to them with specific tactics. The difference between close order and extended order formations is not trivial. Close order means fighting in a multi-rank formation (normally two or three ranks deep) with each file brushing shoulders with the files next to it. Extended order means fighting in a single rank (technically Napoleonic skirmish lines were multi-rank formations, with filemates forming small teams, but I'm focusing on the late 19th/early 20th century here), with several meters between each soldier (as few as one or two meters in the early 20th century, but 5 to 10 meters is more common today). A close order formation is the classic Napoleonic block of infantry. The dispersed formations of modern infantry are examples of extended order formations (even if no one thinks to call them "extended order" anymore).
With the invention of smokeless powder bullets had enough penetration to tear through multiple people, so no only is a close order formation a much easier target to hit, but each hit is sure to inflict multiple casualties. Add in artillery firing high explosive shells and a single shell could inflict dozens of casualties on a close order formation, where it may have only inflicted a handful of casualties on an extended order formation. For a worst case scenario, at the Battle of Magersfontein the 3rd Highland Brigade was caught in quarter column, the densest formation possible for British troops, by Boar riflemen and was virtually annihilated. The British suffered nearly a thousand casualties at Magersfontein, 700 of them were suffered by the 3rd Highland Brigade in the first few minutes of the battle. Over the course of the 2nd Boar War British infantry in extended order were frequently able to overcome Boar defenses, albeit with heavy casualties. But every single British unit that attacked in close order was massacred. Even the Japanese, at the Battle of the Yalu (1904) took such heavy casualties while crossing the river in close order that they stopped in the middle of the battle to extend their order.
The importance of extended order was not the only lesson drawn from the wars leading up to WW1. Mostly what I have are lessons learned by the British army (it seems that most English speaking historians have a preference for writing about the British (which is very annoying for me, since I'm interested in everyone)). The importance of snap-shooting, and the ineffectiveness of volley fire, was taken to heart by the British after the 2nd Boar war. Post-Boar War British marksmanship training is some of the earliest that I'm aware of to feature pop-up targets. The need for the cavalry to be armed with the same rifle as the infantry was learned through the frustrating experience of cavalry armed with carbines being repeatedly outranged by Boars armed with rifles. This was a lesson that was apparently only learned by the British, with the other cavalry forces in 1914 going to war with carbines. The need to conceal the artillery, rather than firing from the open, was a lesson that was theoretically learned, but not taken to heart by every artillery officer. In 1914 it seems that even trying to keep the guns in concealed positions wasn't good enough, and they needed to be pushed back to the rear where they could only provide indirect fire support. And of course that introduced the problem of infantry-artillery coordination which would plague armies for much of WW1 (it's a lot easier for the artillery to know what to shoot at when they can see what they are shooting at).
And unfortunately, defensive primacy doesn't mean you can get away with just defending. You can't win a war by sitting in your trenches forever. Sooner or later you need to figure out how to push the enemy out of theirs. You have to find ways to attack successfully despite the primacy of the defense. This means finding specific countermeasures for specific causes of defensive primacy. The most frequently cited cause of defensive primacy in WW1 was the firepower imbalance between the attacker and the defender. The machinegun, being relatively immobile at first, provided more firepower to the defender than to the attacker. It was easier for the defender to use artillery effectively, since they only needed to put up a screening blanket of artillery in front of their positions, while the attacker had to figure out how to get the artillery firing on the right targets at the right time as the infantry advanced, all at a time before man-portable radios had been invented. The solution that was found for the firepower imbalance essentially came in three parts. The first was to get better at creating an artillery fire plan to support the infantry as well as possible (WW1 artillery tactics could, and probably do, fill entire books). The second was to invent tanks, which could provide more flexible direct fire support, engage targets which had been missed by the artillery, and continue providing heavy fire support to the infantry after the artillery fire plan inevitably broke down. The third was to increase the organic firepower of the infantry by introducing light machine guns and rifle grenades. All of those were important, but that third point in particular is not to be underestimated. Imagine playing as Commonwealth forces in CMBN, but your infantry have no Bren guns, only SMLEs. Attacking with rifle-only infantry, with no automatic weapons of any kind, is unthinkable on any post-1917 battlefield.
Another cause of defensive primacy was that armies had gotten so much larger. That, plus the increased dispersion of troops necessary to survive modern firepower, meant that armies could hold an unbroken frontline along an entire border. So you can't attack the flank of an army the way you might in the Napoleonic wars, because there are no flanks. It's frontal attacks or nothing. The obvious solution is to create some flanks by breaking through the frontlines. Unfortunately railroads make it easy for the defender to bring up reserves to plug a breakthrough, or to prevent a break-in from becoming a breakthrough. And the lack of mechanization, and the difficulty of trying to bring a field telephone up to recently captured positions, makes it difficult for the attacker to push reserves through a breakthrough to exploit, or into a break-in to turn it into a breakthrough in the first place. Another difficulty is that the dispersed battlefield makes command and control far more difficult. The obvious adaptation to the difficulty (near-impossibility, prior to man-portable radios) of issuing new orders to a unit in the middle of a battle is to script out every step of the attack in advance. This makes the battleplan rigid. When things went according to plan, the initial stage of a battle could go very well (the first day of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle). But even if things went to plan, the script would inevitably run out, with the result that any attempt to exploit initial success would fail miserably (second day of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle). And of course, things didn't always go to plan (first day of the Battle of the Somme).
The solution to these problems came in two parts. The first was to stop the battle before the script runs out. Give up on trying to achieve a breakthrough, or indeed on achieving any single decisive battle, and instead focus on wearing down the enemy with a series limited objective attacks at different points along the line. The hundred-days offensives which broke the German army in 1918 were a relentless series of limited objective attacks up and down the line, never letting up the pressure on the German line, while being careful to never press any one battle past its culmination point. The second was to accept that complete, centralized control of a battle was no longer possible. A single commander could not issue timely orders to react to developments in every corner of a dispersed battlefield. The solution was to invent the modern concept of mission command. Delegate greater authority down to lower and lower levels. The basic tactical units got smaller (from company at the beginning of the war, to squad at the end), with leaders at each level empowered to make decisions based on their local situation without being expected to wait for orders from above.
The trend in WW1 scholarship over the last couple of decades has been to reject the "Lions led by Donkeys" narrative (see Blackadder's portrayal of British high command (great comedy, terrible history)). The emerging view is that the leadership of the major combatants of WW1 (with the possible exceptions of the Russians and the Austrians) were generally competent and did about as well as could reasonably be expected (they certainly made no shortage of mistakes, but I've played too many wargames to judge them too harshly for that). In any case, they invented modern warfare in the space of just four years, with a pseudo-Napoleonic system as their starting point, so they must have been doing something right.
PS: I definitely have to grant that you have a point about the Austrian cavalry. But I think it's worth pointing out that the Austro-Hungarian army was a train wreck even by the standards of the time. Even the Russian army was less dysfunctional than the Austro-Hungarian army. And the only respects in which the early 20th century Russian army was better than the modern Russian army were that it could raise more troops and produce more stuff.

The moral of the story forget about Stens, Brens and Lee Enfield even Grenades. The might Webley .38 rules.

For her a Lada is a good deal.
 

I tried two methods a move followed by hunt of one or two squares. Or drag on top of each other. Then split and non splitted squads. So the best method is for me Move towards concealment highlight the waypoint and give a timed pause then a hunt move which I drag on top of the previous waypoint. Then plot my next way point. Hunt has the function to cancel the other moves. It works best with small fire teams not with a merged squad. Happy gaming.

Edward Fox. Who happens to be my favorite actor since The Harmfullness of Tabacco.  But yes, brilliant casting. Also the German actor who played GFM Model.

The way they handle hand-grenades is really impressive.
https://twitter.com/JayinKyiv/status/1667802346066157570?s=20
 

The way they handle hand-grenades is really impressive.
https://twitter.com/JayinKyiv/status/1667802346066157570?s=20
 

The way they handle hand-grenades is really impressive.
https://twitter.com/JayinKyiv/status/1667802346066157570?s=20
 

You are right I see it too. Besides the grass in front looks like it has been painted in by a Photoshop brush. It is too blurry.

Now we know it is true. The evidence is overwhelming.
 

BMP-1 still has its uses. 
 
 

BMP-1 still has its uses. 
 
 

BMP-1 still has its uses. 
 
 

Pity he is not alive today. Could be a T72 Song.
 

An all different level.
 
 

Screenshot. 

Put it this way I got rid of BS. Reasons in the area of operations USA No 1 Russia No2 and Ukraine No 3 in ability. I won't hold my breath waiting for BPs which updates reality. I enjoyed 2 or 3 games of BS Ambush on top of the list. Back to WW2 for me I am afraid modern warfare is not enjoyable for me.