Centurian52

I started a CMA/CMCW playthrough at the beginning of June in anticipation of CMCW:BAOR. I figure I'm about 1/3rd of the way through CMA (I've fought 17 scenarios and estimate that I have around 50ish scenarios, including campaigns). At this rate I figure it will take me another 6.5-8 months to finish off both CMA and the existing content for CMCW. In a perfect world I will finish the last US mission for CMCW the day that we get some British and Canadian missions to play. But I figure I can supplement by going back and playing Commonwealth forces in CMBN if I finish the existing content for CMCW before BAOR is released (start getting into a more British/Canadian mindset, even if its the wrong period (should be able to buy a few more months for BAOR to be released that way)). I suppose all of this is a long winded way of asking @The_Capt, how are things looking?

I can't wait to see the Chieftain in action. I don't think we'll see much from it in terms of firepower, at least in terms of armor penetration, since it's a bit ammunition challenged in this period (though it sounds like it may prove to be more accurate than the M60A1). It is still using the same L15 APDS round it entered service with in 1965, and the more powerful L23 APFSDS round won't start production until 1983. It should have impressive anti-personnel/anti-fortification firepower compared to the M60, having a HESH round. But mostly I am very curious about how survivable it will be. My guess is that its survivability in the 1976-1982 period will prove to be underwhelming for its reputation. Its thick and steeply sloped armor should have made it a tough nut to crack for the APDS rounds of the 60s and early 70s. But I have doubts that any homogenous steel armor, no matter how thick or steeply sloped, can stand up to the HEAT and APFSDS ammunition of the mid/late 70s and 80s (Stillbrew composite won't be added until 1986). This simulation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t-Vi4unTLQ) would certainly seem to suggest that the T-62 should have no trouble penetrating the Chieftain. Still, I have seen the M60 bounce rounds off of its turret cheeks every once in a while, and the Chieftain's thicker armor should prove able to bounce rounds at least as often. Overall my guess is that, like the M60, HEAT and APFSDS rounds will usually penetrate the Chieftain. Like the M60, the Chieftain will manage to bounce those rounds a minority of the time. Since the Chieftain is more heavily armored than the M60, it is only logical that it should bounce those rounds a more significant minority of the time than the M60. The question is, will this translate into an overall increase in survivability over the M60? Will the Chieftain's poorer mobility increase its chances of getting hit, so that it suffers an overall decrease in survivability despite having a slightly higher chance of surviving a hit? Or will it be about as survivable as the M60, with any increase in the chance of surviving a hit being either too small to be significant or being balanced by its poorer mobility?

Well, the module timeframe is from 1976-1982, and the Canadians only started replacing their Centurions with Leopards in 1978 or 79. So I think it's a safe bet that Centurions are going to make it into the game for those early (1976-1977) Canadian forces. But yeah, expect Leopards for most Canadian scenarios

Goodness, this module is practically being made just for you!

Right, nvidia. Thanks for the correction

Yes. I remember that the tank became obsolete in 1918, because the conditions that made it useful in WW1 were unique and would never be repeated. And then in 1945 the tank was obsolete because infantry carried HEAT weapons meant that any old infantryman could defend themselves against a tank. And then in 1973 the tank was obsolete (for realsies this time) because Isreali losses against Egyptian AT-3 Saggars proved that tanks could not survive on a battlefield dominated by ATGMs (which side won that war again?). And then in 2022 the tank was obsolete because...the Russians lost a lot of tanks (has there ever been a war involving tanks in which a lot of tanks weren't lost?).

*sigh* I'm definitely making sure I get an intel graphics card next time. What's the latest AMD driver version that won't get an "out of memory" error on large maps? Is it still 21.8.2?

So it looks like there are a few recognized ways of reinforcing the firing line, with the preferred method (when possible) being to have the reinforcing units extend the line. But the feeling seems to be that it will usually be more practical to fill in the firing line directly, though it is recognized that this will inevitably break up the units. The advice about the reinforcing units forming skirmish line at the last available cover reminds me of the advice for modern mechanized infantry to dismount at the last available cover before their objectives. The general guidance for modern mechanized infantry to move mounted and fight dismounted becomes, for pre-WW1 infantry, move in close order and fight in extended order.

So the advantage I see with this style of attack is that it allows you to have a relatively smooth transition from a thin skirmish line, to minimize casualties, to a thick skirmish line, to maximize firepower (Balck has talking about the tradeoffs between thin and thick skirmish lines, and this seems like a decent attempt at a compromise). Each wave can be very thin, with wide intervals between troops, which will minimize casualties while the advancing line is still too far away to return effective fire. After the first wave is forced to ground by enemy fire, and the successive waves merge with the first wave, you get a much thicker skirmish line that is able to put out considerably more firepower. Of course it might not work out like this in practice if most armies have a default interval of only 2 paces (unless specifically ordered to use a larger interval), meaning that they will probably be starting with a thick skirmish line. The disadvantage I see with this style of attack is that there seems to be no way to prevent units from getting mixed up. If you advance a regiment with the battalions forming the waves then all of your battalions will be mixed up by the end of the attack. It might be better to keep your battalions on line with each other, and have them array their companies into waves. But then all of the companies become mixed up by the end of the attack. The best approach might be to have all the companies on line with each other as well, and have them array their platoons into waves. That still gets all the platoons mixed, but at least everyone is still with their companies and battalions by the end of the attack.

The obvious danger of discussing pre-WW1 infantry tactics of course is that my itch to see them in action has been reignited. It's a shame that CM is never going to go as far back as WW1, and there are no devs out there making tactical level wargames set from 1870-1914 to CM levels of realism. At this point I'm seriously starting to think that my only option is to start dedicating a portion of my study time to programming.

So I've gotten far enough into Balck's 1911 manual that he is starting to talk about extended order tactics. He describes two historical examples, one from the 2nd Boer War and one from the Russo-Japanese War. In the first of these it sounds like there are 1000ish riflemen formed in two waves, with a separation of 300 meters between the waves, on a 2000 meter front. With 500 men per wave, that's about 4 meters between each man in the line (3.5 meters if you account for the fact that each man is probably about 0.5 meters wide). Those intervals are still a little short for modern sensibilities, but they are better than the 1 or 2 meters I was crediting European armies with in earlier posts. In the second instance it sounds like an unspecified number of men trickled out of a trench in small groups to form a single skirmish line with intervals of roughly 3 paces between each man. I believe 3 paces comes out to a bit above 2 meters. A little further he provides this detail about how skirmish line is formed. So it sounds like, at least in the German army in 1911, 2 paces is the default interval. I think that comes about to about 1.5 meters. Far too dense of a formation for my taste. And some details for other armies. So the British have by far the largest intervals, which makes sense given their Boer War experience. The Swiss interval of 1-2 paces is interesting, since at 1 pace we are practically talking about a single rank close order formation (though the same goes for the densest permissible British skirmish line of 1 rifle per yard of front). The Italian interval of 1.5 meters appears to be the same as the German interval, but with the interesting caveat that there is an extra 4-5 pace interval between squads (the squad is already showing up as a meaningful organizational unit more often than I was expecting for 1911, though it isn't actually doing anything that modern squads do yet). Not sure why they think they need volley fire by squad on the books now that they have bolt action magazine rifles though. Firing volleys by subunits such as this (half-companies, platoons, ranks, files, etc...) was very useful back when infantry firearms were considerably slower, since it permitted the formation to put out continuous fire. Moving on from intervals to movement techniques, there seems to be a recognition that one does not simply walk into the enemy positions. Advancing by rushes seems to be the accepted way of advancing under enemy fire. It fits neatly into my narrative of pre-WW1 tactics being something in-between Napoleonic and modern tactics. Advancing by rushes is a vastly more tactically proficient way of closing with the enemy then simply marching forward, and it represents a clear attempt to minimize the infantry's exposure to enemy fire. But it is not going to be as effective as the modern technique of bounding overwatch. It does a decent job of minimizing friendly infantry's exposure to fire, but, unlike bounding overwatch, it does nothing to draw or suppress the enemy fire. It is an intermediate step between the old Napoleonic way of doing things, in which "movement under fire" is the same as movement in all other circumstances, and the modern way of doing things, in which every step imaginable is taken to protect the elements that are moving forward. The picture that is emerging for me is that you will march to the battlefield in a close order formation (I'm reading close order formations as having roughly the same role as the Soviet "prebattle" formations described in FM 100-2-1), deploy into skirmish line to conduct the attack, walk forward until you are forced to ground by effective enemy fire, and then advance by rushes to close with and destroy the enemy.

I think maneuver is essentially correct, but incomplete. It is a phase of operations that it makes sense to strive for, if practicable, but it can't be the only option in your toolbox. I think for maneuver to work your opponent needs to have an exploitable weakness of some sort, such as an open flank or a gap or weak point in the line. Maneuver by itself will work just fine on a low density battlefield or against a weak enemy. But if the enemy doesn't have an exploitable weakness then you need to fall back on attrition until you've weakened them enough to enable maneuver. On a high density battlefield with a peer opponent you'll need to grind then down in attritional battles until some part of their line is weak enough to enable a successful breakthrough battle, and only then can you engage in classic maneuver. Attempting a breakthrough battle before the enemy has been weakened enough will just result in heavier casualties. So I don't think its a choice between either attrition or maneuver. I think attrition enables maneuver.

Well I (mostly) have my assigned reading for the foreseeable future. I'm still in the middle of FM 100-2-1 (reading it all the way through for the first time, rather than just skipping to chapter 5 (Offensive tactics: Division and lower) like I always used to), but this is definitely next. I still need something for French tactics before WW1. And then I'll need to find time to reread some of my WW2 FMs in anticipation of switching back to the WW2 CM games once I'm done with my current CMA/CMCW playthrough.

Does anyone know how I can gain access to an article of Military Affairs? Specifically one on French Tactical Doctrine 1870-1914 by Joseph C. Arnold (Vol. 42, No. 2). I keep finding references to it, but I can't find a version of it that I can either view for free or buy (I don't have a university). I was able to find a first page preview, which referenced the French Service Regulations of 1875, but that's about it. Alternatively, where I can find the French Service Regulations of 1875?

Fair point. I forgot about that one. We certainly agree on both of those points. I think at this point our only major point of disagreement is on what is reasonable to expect of human beings. I'm fascinated to see what other people have to say on what European armies could or should have learned in the lead up to WW1, but I doubt I have anything further to add (about what they should have learned, I'll still be adding points about what late 19th/early 20th century doctrines actually looked like if I can dig up more details).

I also realize that I've been spelling Boer as Boar. So just to keep it all straight in my head: Boer: A Dutch settler in South Africa Boar: A very angry pig BAOR: British Army On the Rhine

Note: I started typing out this reply over 24 hours ago, so some of the replies that have rolled in in the meantime may have already covered some of this ground. Gettysburg and Waterloo were about the same size. Waterloo had about 120,000 soldiers on the Coalition side (about 70,000 in Wellington's army, and about 50,000 in Blucher's army), and about 70,000 on the French side. Gettysburg had around 90,000 to 100,000 on the US side and about 70,000 to 75,000 on the CS side. They were also both about as bloody, with about 55,000 casualties at Waterloo and about 45,000 to 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg. And there were battles in the Napoleonic Wars that were much larger than Waterloo (Waterloo gets its place in history because it was the last battle and because English speakers participated in it, not because it was the largest or bloodiest battle of the Napoleonic Wars). Borodino had about 100,000 to 130,000 French and 125,000 to 160,000 Russians. Leipzig had about 200,000 French and 365,000 Coalition soldiers (this may have been the bloodiest battle in human history prior to WW1, with somewhere from 130,000-160,000 casualties). The scope and scale of the Napoleonic Wars was much greater than the US Civil War. There were more battles, more of them were large battles, the largest battles were larger, and the average casualty rates were (slightly) higher*. I think people forget just how much of a bloodbath the Napoleonic Wars were. Don't be fooled by the flashy uniforms and the wartime propaganda. It was the largest and bloodiest war in human history prior to WW1 (assuming you count each of the Coalitions as part of the same war (presumably someone counted them as separate wars at some point, which is presumably why "Napoleonic Wars" is pluralized)). Somewhere between 3.2 and 6.5 million people died between 1803 and 1815 in the Napoleonic Wars. I know this is a controversial opinion, but I think Napoleonic tactics were correct for the US Civil War. Rifle-muskets were not the game changer that so many documentaries have claimed. They did increase engagement ranges (more than double the effective range, from 200 meters for smoothbores to 500 meters for rifles, if the target is an infantry battalion in close order (if the target is an individual soldier then the effective ranges are about 70 meters for smoothbores and 200 meters for rifles)). But they were still slow, and they still needed to be massed in order to provide enough firepower to stop a charge. Dispersed infantry with rifle-muskets could still be easily driven off of a position by massed infantry, and they would still be easily cut down by cavalry. It's only when you get breechloaders that dispersed infantry have enough firepower to fend off massed infantry and cavalry. They did represent a significant increase in capability**, but I don't think that rifle-muskets made a significant difference in what sort of tactics were appropriate (although it would be nice if there was a CM-style sim for the 19th century that I could test that out in (it's all speculation until I can actually test it!)). Yes, units in close order were massacred from time to time. But some units are massacred from time to time in any war (the French infantry columns at Waterloo were torn to shreds). The difference was that in the US Civil War close order tactics generally worked, while in the Boer War close order tactics resulted in massacres every single time. It's easy to find examples of close order attacks failing in the US Civil War, but it's also easy to find examples of close order attacks succeeding in the US Civil War. It is impossible to find examples of close order attacks succeeding in the Boer War (as far as I know). Every last one of them was a massacre, while in the US Civil War only some of them were massacres. Overall I think the importance of the US Civil War has been oversold somewhat. Still, it did herald a number of significant changes. Railroads and telegraphs were both game changers. And while I don't believe that rifles had significant implications for tactics, breechloaders definitely did have significant implications. While breechloaders remained relatively rare right up to the end of the war, there were enough engagements with units armed with breechloaders to provide enough data points to force me to agree that they should have seen some writing on the wall. But people did notice, and there were active discussions about what the implications were and what to do about them. Even if they didn't quite figure out how to reform doctrine, they did at least figure out that breechloaders were so overwhelmingly superior to muzzle-loaders that they needed to completely rearm the army with breechloaders***. Anyone who didn't get that message from the US Civil War certainly got it in the 1866 Austro-Prussian war, when the Prussians (armed with breechloaders) completely massacred the Austrians (armed with muzzle-loaders). I have no idea why no one got the message from the 2nd Schleswig War in 1864, in which the Prussians achieved the same lopsided victories against the Danes that they would achieve against the Austrians 2 years later for the same reasons. Perhaps they assumed that Denmark didn't count? That might be an example of your point about military culture inhibiting learning. For further reading I recommend Bull Run to Boer War: How the American Civil War Changed the British Army, by Michael Somerville (part of the Wolverhampton Military Studies series). As a follow up I'd also recommend From Boer War to World War: Tactical Reform of the British Army, 1902–1914, by Spencer Jones. I think Spencer Jones in particular is someone you need to read if you want to understand modern WW1 scholarship. He's probably not quite what David Glantz is to WW2, but I think he's still pretty important. He's also given some good talks which were recorded by The Western Front Association and put on youtube. Come to that, The Western Front Association youtube channel has a quite number of good talks on it from a number of other individuals (these are not made for youtube, but recordings of presentations given at various conferences over the years, so they can be a bit dry if you are used to pretty graphics). I haven't read Jomini. But I have read Clausewitz. I can't say I recommend it, unless you are really committed to being able to brag that you've read Clausewitz (it is not a page turner). His views are actually pretty nuanced, though he is working with a completely different set of concepts (no notion of offensive or defensive primacy). He defines the defense as the stronger form of war with a negative object (don't lose something), and the attack as the weaker form of war with a positive object (gain something). He predicts several trends, from the increasing dominance of firepower over shock (bayonet power), to the diminishing importance of cavalry. Perhaps the cultural impact of Clausewitz would have been better if more people had actually read him, rather than just repeating the cliff notes, but I can certainly understand why more people didn't take on the challenge. I believe I addressed that already. Sieges were nothing new in warfare. Was the Siege of Toulon (1793) a WW1 teaser? The fact is that sieges going at least as far back as the 17th century (which is as far back as I have any confidence in my military history) look an awful lot like previews of WW1. I believe the correct interpretation is not that all sieges going back for hundreds of years were WW1 teasers, but that something about WW1 made the entire war look like one giant siege. I think you are right that there was something different going on in the Franco-Prussian War. But I think it was a political dynamic that had shifted. I don't think it had anything to do with the technology of the time. The French field army was defeated, and the outcome of the war was decided. At that point the French Second Empire should have surrendered, as any other government would have. Instead it was overthrown and replaced by the French Third Republic, which refused to surrender, forcing the Prussians to physically subdue each city instead. At the time any observer would have had every reason to assume that was an anomaly. But in retrospect it may have been an early sign of the total war ideologies that would cause so much trouble in the next century. The system they had was pseudo-Napoleonic, instead of fully Napoleonic, precisely because they had not ignored the lessons of the previous century of warfare. They had stretched and contorted the Napoleonic system in every way imaginable in order to try to adapt it to the trends that were visible to them in warfare (what they ended up with looks to me to be about halfway between a true Napoleonic system and the modern system (the degree of dispersion was about halfway between Napoleonic and modern, the size of the basic tactical units was about halfway between Napoleonic and modern))****. But inventing an entirely new system is far more difficult than merely modifying an existing system. Inventing the modern system required thinking of things that no one had ever thought of before. I think it is important to keep in mind that it is very easy to think of things that someone has already thought of before, but very difficult to think of things that no one has ever thought of before. The solution is always obvious after you've found it. We know what the correct answers are to the problems of 20th century warfare because other people already found those answers over a hundred years ago. But at the dawn of the 20th century the modern system still had to be invented from scratch. I think inventing a new system is a bit like the nine dot problem. You arrange nine dots in a three by three grid, so they look like a box, and then tell the subjects to draw four straight lines through all nine dots without ever lifting their pencil from the page. This is impossible if you keep the lines inside the box formed by the dots, and the correct solution requires drawing the lines outside of the box (this is apparently where the phrase "think outside the box" comes from). If you're familiar with the nine dot problem then you'll know that no one ever thinks to draw the line outside of the box until they have explored and rejected the full possibility space inside the box. In all the wars that came before observers could gather evidence about what the trends were and form theories about the best ways to adapt. But by the time any lessons could be derived and reforms implemented the wars were usually over. There wasn't an opportunity to really explore what worked and what didn't, to fully explore and reject the full tactical possibility space inside the Napoleonic box, until WW1. *A few years ago I averaged the casualty rates of a bunch of battles from the US Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars (I didn't have a procedure for randomly selecting the battles, so this was hardly a scientifically rigorous exercise, but the sample size included dozens of battles from each war), and the Napoleonic Wars came out slightly higher. Just a couple of percentage points. It's all on a text file buried somewhere in my computer, but it was something like a 12% or 13% average casualty rate for the US Civil War and 14% or 15% for the Napoleonic Wars. **Just how significant of an increase in capability is an active area of interest for me. When I get time, I think the Crimean War is the appropriate conflict to study to answer that question. The Crimean war is almost the ideal laboratory for testing the relative effectiveness of smoothbores vs rifles, since one side (the Russians) was largely armed with smoothbores (IIRC only around 10% of Russian soldiers were armed with rifles), while the other side (the French and British) was largely armed with rifles (IIRC only around 25% of British soldiers were still armed with smoothbores). On a cursory glance I would guess that rifles represented a significant advantage for the French and British, since they were able to consistently beat the Russians in battle after battle (though there are confounding factors). On the other hand it seems that smoothbores, while inferior, were still very dangerous, since it seems that the Russians were consistently able to put up a tough fight and inflict significant French and British casualties. ***They only figured that out after the war though. There was some foot-dragging about switching to breechloaders during the war (apparently on the grounds that they would expend ammunition too rapidly) which I personally think was inexcusable and which probably led to needless additional US casualties. ****I should talk a bit about what the tactics of 1914 actually were. I call them pseudo-Napoleonic because they are basically Napoleonic skirmisher tactics that have been pressed into service as primary battle tactics. The basic tactical unit was usually the company of around 250 men, give or take (227 in a British company, 270 in a German company). A typical attack by a European army would see companies deployed in skirmish line, with a spacing of one or two meters between each man (I believe two meters was more common). Companies might then advance by short rushes while under effective enemy fire, sprinting forward a few tens of meters and then dropping down to return fire. An attack consisting of a full battalion or multiple battalions would probably deploy into multiple waves (by default I imagine a battalion attacking in two waves, with two companies up and two companies back), with successive waves reinforcing and adding momentum to forward waves that have become pinned down. The separation between waves might be around 100 meters or more. Of course European armies of the time seemed to be allergic to universal training in uniform doctrines. So there was a considerable amount of variation and the example above was at the high end of tactical proficiency. On the extreme low end of tactical proficiency your unit might be led by one of the remaining close order advocates, in which case you will attack in the classic Napoleonic block and get slaughtered within minutes. As far as I know, in 1914, no unit attacked in close order twice.

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.

If you're taking bets, my money's on the Novosilka to Mariupol direction being the main effort. Gets around the toughest defenses, traps more Russians, liberates a famous early-war battlefield, still cuts the land bridge and clears out all Russian air defenses between Ukraine's Storm Shadows and the Kerch bridge.

Agreed. We should make it absolutely clear, right now, that if Russia blows up a nuclear power plant we will directly intervene with conventional forces. I believe we have already drawn that red line for tactical nukes, and blowing up a nuclear power plant isn't much better.

That's interesting. I'm not sure why they told you a different number than they told me. Either the M16s got better (difference between the A1 and A2?) or they had more experience over the decades to make a more accurate estimate of its effective range. I doubt it has anything to do with optics. Optics could extend the effective range of a rifle beyond 500 meters. Its the limitations of the human eyeball that caps the effective range of any rifle with iron sights at 500 meters. Optics couldn't explain why they were giving you an effective range of less than 500 meters. I was firing the M16A2 with iron sights (no optics) from 2012-2018. Most of the Army had moved on to the M4 before I even joined, but I was in a signal unit so I guess there was no rush to get us M4s.

Gonna have to put on my historical nitpicker hat here. The European powers closely examined the US Civil War (I have a whole book somewhere on tactical development in the British army as a result of the US Civil War (there certainly was a lot of "America Sux" at the beginning of the war, which petered out as the war progressed)). They also had multiple, far more relevant, conflicts to examine between the US Civil War and WW1. There was the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian war, the two Boar wars, the Russo-Japanese war, and many others that I skipped for brevity. The devastation of WW1 had nothing to do with failing to pay attention to recent wars. In fact much of the devastation can be chalked up to overlearning the wrong lessons from some of those wars, rather than failing to learn any lessons. One of the French lessons from the Franco-Prussian war was to re-emphasize shock, as opposed to firepower (there was a feeling that the previous emphasis on firepower and entrenchment made units hesitant to attack), leading to masses of French infantry being cut down in 1914. Among the lessons that many armies took from the Russo-Japanese war was that a high degree of tenacity and casualty tolerance was necessary to overcome modern firepower. Which resulted in masses of unnecessary casualties in battles that were pressed long after they should have been abandoned in 1915 and 1916. And often the correct lessons were learned, but with spotty implementation. Most people had figured out that it was better to abandon the old close order formations in favor of fighting in a single rank in extended order (basically, make the skirmish line the default battle formation), although there were ongoing arguments about that right up until the early battles of 1914, with some units being brutally punished for going into battle in close order formations (I believe the French in particular had a fondness for close order formations, which they quickly abandoned after a few battles). The British had figured out that cavalry would mostly be acting as mounted infantry from here on out, and there were fierce debates about whether the cavalry should even retain their sabers at all (the Russians apparently had the opposite viewpoint, and tried to use their cavalry primarily for traditional charges, while most armies fell somewhere in between the British and the Russian viewpoint on cavalry (as it turned out, British cavalry were probably the most effective cavalry of any army in 1914)). I'd say that most of the obvious lessons had been learned reasonably well by 1914. What remained to be learned from 1914-1918 were the smaller and far less obvious details. Things such as how much artillery ammunition is needed in modern war, how to maintain command and control on a highly dispersed battlefield before the invention of man-portable radios, how to improve coordination between the infantry and the artillery, how best to employ artillery against dug in positions, etc... My takeaway from studying tactical development in the late 19th century and early 20th century was not that officers of the time weren't paying attention. It was that deriving correct lessons from ongoing developments, and then applying those lessons to sound changes in doctrine and force structure, is exceptionally difficult.

If and when Russia becomes a non-aggressive and democratic state I will start discouraging people from undermining Russia. I'm not gonna hold my breath though.

To add to this, 10% losses absolutely is very significant. We tend to grossly underestimate how badly units are devastated by relatively "small" percentage losses. In part because we do the arithmetic and think that a unit which suffers 10% losses is still 90% effective (in reality suffering 10% losses may render a unit <10% effective). And in part because the reference point for most members of this community in particular is CM, and casualty rates in CM are too high (no sim gets this right, CM is still the best sim out there). In general I think of casualty rates in the following terms: 1% losses: That felt like a real fight. You may even have known some of the people who became casualties. 10% losses: That was an exceptionally difficult fight. Multiple members of your own platoon became casualties, and possibly a couple members of your squad. 20% losses: That was a historically bloody fight. This casualty rate is within the ballpark of such historically bloody battles as Gettysburg or Waterloo. It's worth noting that this only applies to single actions. A unit which is temporarily incapacitated by 10% casualties will likely recover. It is not unusual for units to take casualties in excess of 100% over several months of fighting.

As much as I love the discussions, probably the most valuable part of this thread is all the interesting sources that get posted