Grey_Fox

Streaming Smokey's Challenge now:

Just a nitpick, but this is largely debunked. The main trench-clearing tools used by the British were bayonets and bombs (what we today would call hand grenades) due to the close-quarter nature of the fighting. The "cult of the offensive" is also a myth. If you look at the RUSI archives, between 1905 and 1914 there is only 1 article about infantry maneuver warfare, written by JFC Fuller, who went on to pollute discourse on WW1 in the English language for the next 50+years. Why was this? Because military institutions in the west very closely watched the events of the Russo-Japanese War, embedding observers on both sides, and saw what the next European war would look like. They spent the next decade trying to figure out how to fight trench warfare, to which there was no good answer until technology advanced enough and gave us aircraft, tanks, and wireless communications at low levels. So, military planners were faced with a terrible choice: attack as hard as possible before the enemy can dig in, or eat the casualties to kick them out of their defenses and prevent them from digging in again. There were no better options as the technology simply didn't exist.

I have no idea what you're referring to, so I really do think you need to say more.

155mm cluster is a battlefield munition and would be in the scope of CM.

I believe a number of those vehicles struck mines and ATGMs. Most of the vehicles looked relatively intact, and it looks like at least some have been recovered and are being repaired. What I'm getting at is that immobilizing armoured vehicles with artillery already happens in CMBS. There is some idea that shrapnel does less subsystem damage than perhaps it should, but I don't know about that.

I'd say some of the top things are that: 1. They're going to try to kill people 2. At some point they're going to have to look a subordinate in the eye and give them an order that they and the subordinate know will probably end in their death. 3. How to help their subordinates continue in their duty despite the stresses they'll face.

They may have come from the Israelis after the 1973 war.

The model used for aircraft doesn't seem to have changed from the WW2 games. They're still essentially P-47s doing gun runs, just with TOW missiles, Mavericks, Hellfires, and CBUs.

Yeah, the whole argument is bonkers.

I think this is the key, if what Steve said is accurate. It may correspond with driver/bow gunner, gunner, and commander. As it is vehicle-specific it would explain the differences in fields of view of the different vehicles. It would also indicate that the T-84 may in fact have a bug, as @Millien has suggested.

Thanks for editing in a real argument. My point is not that they can't perform the mission with **zero** losses. That would be as stupid as claiming that tanks are obsolete because they can be killed by ATGMs. My point is that they can't sustain the mission even when pitted against limited third world air defense systems consisting of MANPADs and AAA, and would perform far far worse against a peer who has a full blown IADS. That's why the USAF keeps trying to kill the airframe and focus resources on effective platforms like the F-35.

There's no point in replying with the same quote. That isn't a gotcha you want it to be.

They didn't fly the missions after a few experiments. That's the entire point. They tried, saw that the couldn't sustain those missions, and stopped doing them pretty quickly.

You can't look at raw numbers without looking at how they were used. The A-10 is built around a great big cannon, and when they flew the sort of missions where they could use the cannon they tended to take a lot of damage from air defenses before being restricted to high altitude missions. Ergo, the airframe can't be used for the mission it is designed to perform - low level CAS in contested airspace. Every time they try it, they take so much damage that they are told to perform safer missions that other airframes would probably be better at.

Have you seen the kind of missions they perform? They act as standoff missile trucks and are pretty much incapable of penetrating enemy air defenses. The fact is that CAS missions are not being performed in Ukraine to any great extent because the environment is far too lethal.

This is the kind of mission that was attempted in 2003 Iraq, and which led to some A-10s being severely damaged before they were forbidden from low-level missions. They became missile trucks restricted to high altitude, and that's a mission damn near any airframe can perform.

They were ordered to stay at high altitude. It was the same in 2003 after some got absolutely shredded by Iraqi air defenses early on in the invasion attempting the low-level missions they were designed to perform. It's widely acknowledged that the Kosovo aerial campaign abjectly failed to degrade Serb forces in Kosovo, with only a few dozen armoured vehicles damaged or destroyed.

The A-10 requires a permissive environment to operate in successfully. In a contested environment, it's a death trap.

From a fixed and arbitrary height, and not necessarily from where the optics are.

When have you seen a forest that didn't have a shedload of undergrowth and bushes? We *know* that there is undergrowth modeled and abstracted away.

Were they opened-up?

Good to hear that nothing has changed in 13 years, and that it's now 3 games that have the same issue not just 1.

Following a round of testing done primarily by @Millien on the unofficial CM discord server (link in signature I believe), it appears that the CITV on an abrams is not drawn from the CROWS viewer: Nor is the Primary Gunner's Sight used to draw line of sight from: Instead, it appears that the line of sight for both the PGS and the CITV is drawn from the main gun barrel. Additionally, the CITV does not provide a 270 degree field of view - instead it would appear to effectively act as a repeater for the gunner's thermal imager. Unless the turret is facing towards an enemy, the CITV does not appear to be used. Testing instructions are to use non-multispectral smoke between tank and hostiles, hostiles should be at a 90 degree angle, and wait. As such, this would appear to throw into doubt the perceived wisdom that Abrams should be used turned-in to take advantage of the tank's thermal imagers. Thanks to @Millien for performing the tests.

T34/85 had a bow gunner and believe it or not the bow gunner has a pair of eyes that they can see out of. So that's 4 people looking out of a tank, versus 3 in a T-72. Neither the t-34 nor the t-72 had thermal viewers or CITV, so yeah they're still limited to eyeballs and binoculars.

T34/85 has a crew of 5, T-72 has a crew of 3, and the technology difference in optics probably wouldn't have been that different. CMCW for many cases is modern weapons (ATGMs, etcs) with WW2-era optics (mk.1 eyeball and binoculars).