Centurian52

That is my sense as well.  It is not carpet bombing but the effect is the same.  A strategy could be to do so much infra damage as to make the area effectively uninhabitable.  The cost of reconstruction for these urban areas is going to be enormous and Israel is definitely not going to do it. 
The psychology of suicide actions is fascinating, and I believe entirely human.  There are arguments that whales and some other species do it but  these look more accidental than deliberate (post here please if you know of an example in the animal world).  Suicide is of course an extreme irrationality when done outside of mental health or dilemma crisis (eg people who jump from burning buildings).  Suicide bombers have no possible way of benefiting from the action or even knowing if it really is going to be successful.  What they do have is fiction frameworks.  Humans can make stuff up and believe it so hard that we are able to effectively “remember the future”.  So a suicide bomber believes in an afterlife or believes that it will somehow achieve something from which they will benefit.  Failing that they believe that who they leave behind will benefit.
Now for an individual or small groups these actions are still manageable.  But for an entire state to effectively commit suicide is rare.  A lot of states will do “hopeless” or “slightly less than zero chances” because we can convince ourselves of things through a drug called “hope”.  But what is happening in reaction to Oct 7th was almost a certainty,  Hamas knew they and Gaza itself was dead once they attacked.  But they were willing to believe so hard, hate so hard that somehow this action would make things better…even if they would never see it.  You cannot really negotiate with that.  
Israel has taken the gloves off and this looks more like a ghetto cleaning everyday.  As I said wars come in arguably 5 basic strategies: intimidation, subversion, annihilation, exhaustion and extermination.  That last one is a blast from the past - Genghis type stuff.  Without being inside the IDF command loop and seeing what the plan actually is, it is very hard to make a full determination.  But the results do point to an ethnic cleaning or at least give rise to it being a possibility.  Next question will be whether it was deliberate or simply was self-defence that “got out of hand”?
Either way, Israel’s high ground is slipping away as we watch Palestinian children being killed daily.  I honestly don’t think they care about “narratives” at this point but they do need to start thinking about how they plan to live in this world afterwards.  Right now they are making Assad look rational, which is pretty nuts.

There was an analysis of open source satellite imagery recently that showed that IDF damaged or destroyed about 56,000 buildings in Gaza during the first part of the invasion (before the temporary ceasefire).
Even if each of those strikes had only eliminated one single Hamas militant, there would be no Hamas left by now. But there are definitely still many of them. So it doesn't seem IDF is too concerned about where they strike or how many civilian casualties they cause.
In fact, there was an Israeli journalist who recently did a story on how the Israeli intelligence service is not even able to "produce" enough targets based on credible info in order to order in those numbers of strikes a day. So the intel they base their strikes seems to be quite extremely patchy.
I'm still wondering if the real aim of this war is to expel the civilian population from Gaza.

I think it is kinda central to the war actually.  The term Violent Extremist has gotten traction but it is not well defined either.  Insurgents for example can be labeled as VEOs while not actually engaging what we consider terrorism.
Key components of terrorism from a legal perspective appear to be cause, effect and how.
Cause is political, religious or ethnic.  It is collective, not individual (eg he slept with my wife) cause.  This means there are larger objectives and certainties at play.  One could argue it is all political but perhaps that is too narrow.
Effect - terror, intimidation.  There is not discerning of the target audience in this.  So political elites of Persia or peasants it does not really matter.  If one is trying to terrorize for collective cause towards a larger objective, one is in the wheelhouse of terrorism.
How - illegal violence.  So lawful warfare is not terrorism even though it can definitely terrorize.  In fact intimidation of a population is core to warfare, even if it is indirect.  Unlawful violence, so assassinations to car bombings, is a framework that encompasses the legality of the violence (the act) and the intended target.  So Taliban IED attacks on coalition troops were not legally terrorism.  In fact anyone in uniform could be considered a lawful target.  Attacking civilians is of course a different story.
You can go and look at all sorts of legitimate national legal definitions and they pretty much all have components of this.  I say “legitimate” because oppressive states will make all sorts of things illegal and define them as “terrorism”.
So what?  Well Hamas clearly conduct terrorism before during and after Oct 7th.  They continue to break the LOAC to this day.  The use of civilians as cover for military operations is a big no-no.  As such Hamas can and should be eliminated as a political entity.  Some countries would see Hamas as a criminal organization and this whole thing as one big security operation.  But I think based on scope, scale and open political declarations this has moved into war.
Within the context of a war the IDF is skirting lines here and the international community is getting uncomfortable.  The major issue appears to be proportionality.  It is a violation of the LOAC to employ over-kill particularly if it causes undue or reckless civilian casualties.  I have seen more than enough videos of IDF dropping JDAMs into buildings to kill a “Hamas Leader” to raise an eyebrow over proportionality.  LOAC also does not give license to throwing out the rule book because the other guy has.  In fact Israel has opened itself up to state-based terror charges in all this.  If proven unlawful in violence then the next question will be if that unlawful use was designed to use terror to get the Palestinian people to do X.
That is a slippery slope.  It will ask questions like “what did the IDF do to remove emotionally compromised soldiers and commanders from the kill chains?”  “What were the ROE and collateral damage templates? “ Does this thing stop being viewed as a military operation against a terror organization and move to an ethnic cleansing?
Note that I am not proposing or promoting either position.  I only raise it because it is definitely becoming a strategic consideration.  In the end terrorism is all about induction - giving rise to.  It is designed to 1) be high profile and widely seen, dramatic, 2) induce fear - in the name and 3) induce broader reactions from that fear.  The reaction Hamas was looking for here was likely (and I say likely because I do not think we really know yet) to induce Israel into a heavy handed response that would ensure its continued regional isolation.  There may have been other undertones that may come out over time but the big one it so ensure Israel-Arab reconciliation does not happen on a meaningful level.  Hamas vehemently opposes this as it would in effect leave them entirely isolation (even more so than they already are) and in a greatly weakened position with respect to external support.  Insanely enough they appear to have adopted a “winning-by-losing” strategy.  And frankly given the shifting political narratives, they may be pulling it off.  
It has happened before but it is rare - Hamas/Gaza may have just done a suicide-state action.

It's actually surprising that this thread is still so active. We know at this point that none of these features are coming with Engine 5. For one thing it's probably well into development (possibly getting hung up on some particularly difficult bit of code), so it would be too late to add anything new to it by now anyway. And for another thing, they've already announced it's going to be about performance, not features.
But, if we are still adding things to the features wishlist for some eventual engine upgrade (not Engine 5, but some future feature-focused engine upgrade) then I really need to voice my support for a shoot and scoot command. I didn't need it back when I was playing RT. But now that I'm exclusively playing WEGO the inability to shoot and scoot is a serious handicap. One way I could think to implement it would be as a reverse command that becomes active when the vehicle shoots. Or perhaps it could be a sort of pause order that deactivates when the vehicle shoots. I could just really use some way of shooting and scooting in turn based play.

It's actually surprising that this thread is still so active. We know at this point that none of these features are coming with Engine 5. For one thing it's probably well into development (possibly getting hung up on some particularly difficult bit of code), so it would be too late to add anything new to it by now anyway. And for another thing, they've already announced it's going to be about performance, not features.
But, if we are still adding things to the features wishlist for some eventual engine upgrade (not Engine 5, but some future feature-focused engine upgrade) then I really need to voice my support for a shoot and scoot command. I didn't need it back when I was playing RT. But now that I'm exclusively playing WEGO the inability to shoot and scoot is a serious handicap. One way I could think to implement it would be as a reverse command that becomes active when the vehicle shoots. Or perhaps it could be a sort of pause order that deactivates when the vehicle shoots. I could just really use some way of shooting and scooting in turn based play.

Particularly as I don't believe the thread is actually monitored or acted upon in any way by BFC. 
I would be happy to find out I'm wrong about that, but until I do I think this thread is just a sounding off place where users air their thoughts to each other on improvements.  There are similar 'bug' threads in the various forums.

I think the advantage of computer wargaming is that it can have way more rules. It's just that the human player doesn't need to learn any of them, because the rules are being read and executed by a cpu instead. It takes a lot of very complex rules to properly model reality. I think one of the biggest limitations of any tabletop game is that you are very limited in how many rules you can have before you start to overwhelm the human players with the complexity.

We've seen battle rifles in Combat Mission before (FG-42s in the hands of Fallschirmjaeger, and FALs and G3s in the hands of Mujahedeen). But we've never seen full squads completely equipped with battle rifles before, making it difficult to visualize how they will perform when used en-masse. The closest thing we have to squads fully equipped with battle rifles are squads fully equipped with semi-automatic rifles in the form of US WW2 infantry. The biggest difference between a battle rifle and a semi-automatic rifle is that battle rifles have twice the magazine capacity (and some battle rifles can fire in full auto, but that won't matter until we get West German forces), so looking at squads equipped with semi-automatic rifles should give us a pretty good impression of what sections equipped with battle rifles should be like. I figure a Normandy-era US infantry squad with two BARs should have approximately the same firepower as a Canadian Cold War-era infantry section (semi-auto rifles backed up by two automatic rifles). And I figure a Normandy-era US airborne infantry squad should have approximately the same firepower as a British Cold War-era infantry section (semi-auto rifles backed up by a belt-fed MG).
I have gone back to the WW2 titles while I wait for the BAOR module, since I want to be mentally comparing the Cold War equipment to WW2 equipment, not to modern equipment, when I get back to CMCW. So I have been seeing a lot of how US WW2 infantry firepower compares with US Cold War infantry firepower (CMCW was the game I was playing the most before backtracking to WW2, so Cold War US infantry firepower is still fresh in my head). And it became apparent pretty quickly that US WW2 infantry have a lot less firepower than US Cold War infantry. On the one hand, I should hope so (otherwise the M16 wouldn't have been much of a step up from the Garand). On the other hand, that probably doesn't bode well for British and Canadian Cold War infantry. But I should add the caveat that I have been seeing Sicily-era US infantry in action, not Normandy-era US infantry. I am playing my CM2 games in chronological order, starting with Sicily, so I still have another year to go until I get to Normandy (I was playing CM1 as well, but I got antsy for the more visually spectacular CM2 games). So none of my regular US squads have picked up a second BAR, like some of them will have done by Normandy, and my US airborne infantry are still making do with the tripod-mounted M1919 (none of my airborne squads have a bipod-mounted M1919 yet). 
Before the last year or so it had been several years since I was able to play Combat Mission on a regular basis. And since I started playing regularly again I spent most of my time in CMBS, CMA, and CMCW. So as far as recent WW2 experience I only have the 30 or so scenarios that I've played in the last month or so. I want to get a few dozen more WW2 scenarios under my belt before I try to draw too many inferences about the tactical consequences of having semi-automatic rifles instead of assault rifles (despite the reduced firepower, infantry vs infantry combat in WW2 seems to be mostly the same as modern infantry combat, at least from the perspective of tactics, with most of the differences having to do with supporting or opposing armored vehicles). But there is one tactical consequence that I have already noticed with a pretty high degree of confidence. In the Cold War and modern titles the tac-AI's decision to stop and shoot if caught out by the enemy while in the middle of a movement order often seemed like the right move. Their assault rifles provided each man with enough firepower to have a realistic chance of killing or suppressing the enemy, allowing them to then finish their movement order in relative safety. In WW2, the tac-AI's same decision to stop and shoot when it sees the enemy in the middle of a movement order usually seems like the wrong move. While their Garands provide a lot of firepower by the standards of a WW2 rifle, it isn't quite enough firepower to have a realistic chance of killing or suppressing the enemy. It usually seems like it would be much safer for them to just complete the movement order as quickly as possible, rather than stopping in the middle of a kill zone to shoot. The other end of that coin is that the enemy infantry also have less firepower in WW2. So while I think it's a mistake for my infantry to stop in the open to shoot back, the enemy's ability to punish that mistake is limited. The British and Canadian infantry in the Cold War may end up with the worst of both of those worlds. Their SLRs won't provide them with enough firepower to make stopping in the open to shoot a good idea, while the Soviets will have enough firepower to heavily punish that mistake.

Fair enough. If they hadn't been attacking civilians as well then I wouldn't have had to qualify my statement with "when they were targeting US or coalition forces". But I still think my assertion that "terrorist attacks are conducted without any realistic hope of achieving any tangible political objective" holds up. I think our eventual decision to leave Afghanistan came despite, rather than because of, Taliban attacks against Afghan civilians. If they never attacked US or Coalition forces, there would have been no pressure for us to leave (and apparently we are still maintaining some personnel in Iraq, so militant attacks on civilians in Iraq have been especially ineffective at getting us to leave). As far as I know, no person or non-governmental organization has ever achieved a tangible political objective by killing civilians*.
*I had to specify non-governmental organizations because obviously governments have sometimes achieved political objectives by killing civilians. The objective of crushing unrest has been achieved on several occasions by massacring protestors. And the objective of justifying a war has been achieved on several occasions by conducting false flag attacks that resulted in civilian deaths. This caveat probably doesn't ruin my point though, since when governments kill civilians it normally isn't considered a terrorist attack.

Hi, 
I am looking for a free source of Soviet maps of Afghanistan. Scale of 1:100.000 or preferably 1:50.000 of course. 
Anyone know of a source? 

I recently reported on games plugging in the Mesa driver that translates OpenGL to Vulkan, "for situations where the drivers don't have good OpenGL support". Sounds familiar to you AMD users?
 
There now is a second alternative, by Microsoft themselves - an OpenGL to Direct3D translation layer. So you only rely on AMD to get Direct3D (DirectX12) right and you don't use any of their broken OpenGL nonsense.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-OpenGL-4.6-D3D12
Getting this plugged in without Charles will be an effort, but far from impossible. Of course if BFC were to pick this up it would be a big win.

It looks like the Leopard 1s are finally going into action. I just refreshed my Oryx tab for Ukrainian equipment losses and I see that they've lost one Leopard 1A5.

Not in the history of warfare, no. At least not that I can think of on short notice. But if you look at more minor forms of human on human killing, there is an example that actually fits pretty well. Terrorist attacks.
And I hate that I'm going there. I'm usually the first to point out that our fear of terrorism has been blown way out of proportion to the threat it actually poses. But the motivational pattern fits perfectly. Terrorist attacks are conducted without any realistic hope of achieving any tangible political objective. They are conducted by angry people who don't see any way of having their grievances addressed, just lashing out and trying to kill as many people as possible. In that respect the October 7th attacks look a lot more like a really big terrorist attack than like a military operation with a definable political objective.

Just know that I haven't read all the posts that have been made over the last day or so, so I'm not entirely sure what we're arguing about right now. I'm only responding to this one post.
It isn't a dirty word. It's just what that lot happened to call themselves. It's the individuals who make up the "reformers" that I take issue with. Not the label "reformer".
My biggest issues are with Sprey. That idiot kept insisting to his dying day that the A-10 was a good plane (it isn't), that the F-35 was a terrible plane (it isn't), and that he designed the A-10 and the F-16 (he didn't). I have fewer issues with Boyd. The OODA loop isn't terrible by military acronym standards, but those are pretty low standards. It certainly isn't very helpful. "Think and act faster than the enemy" is already a pretty simple idea to explain to someone, and telling them to "get inside the enemy's OODA loop" really doesn't help to clarify anything. Boyd still isn't someone I could recommend citing as a source if you want to be taken seriously.
That's exactly how we approached WW2. That's not a reform. That's a continuation of how we'd been doing things since WW2 (unless there was a period in the Cold War where we stopped doing things that way?). The mantra at the time was "steel, not flesh", meaning that we wanted to do as much of the work as possible with machines and firepower, leaving the humans to do as little dying as possible. And it worked.
You can't substitute people entirely of course (at least not until automation gets a bit better than it is now). Sooner or later someone needs to go forward to actually take control of a piece of ground. Being an Allied infantryman in WW2 was still a brutal and attritional job, despite our best efforts to back him up with as much firepower as possible. But it was a heck of a lot better than being a German or Soviet infantryman.
Probably the biggest thing going on in the 90s was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the "peace dividend". We could get away with smaller armies not because new technology enabled smaller armies to be just as effective, but because there was no longer a threat that required a large army to guard against. Armies shrank because governments didn't see the point of paying for large armies anymore. Of course I could imagine that senior leadership at the time, looking at their shrinking armies and equipment stocks and with the responsibility of figuring out how to keep their armies effective anyway, would hope that technology could provide the answer. Which may be why you might have noticed an increased emphasis on technology to offset manpower in the 90s.

I think that's a reasonable summary 😂.

I had another quick look around, and only came up with:
On January 30th 2023, in the CM General Discussion forum Steve said the Steam release of CMFB was planned for December 23 / January 24.
He had previously said the CMFB module would be released at the same time as the Steam release, but did not repeat that in the January 30th post.
A while later he said there was still a lot to do on the module, but that an update would soon appear in the CMFB forum.  I haven't managed to find that update.
I may have missed things, and the saying 'best laid plans...' probably applies, but my hope is the module will be released in line with the above.  Preferably December, but no biggie if not.

I don't trust 'em. I recall playing Blunting the Spear a couple year ago. It was the final battle of the campaign, a big one too, about a battalion. Battalion commanders surely drink a lot of coffee.
To get an idea of the scale of this battle I offer this wide shot about half-way through it.
 

 
That's a big battle. If we could focus in on the upper center it would reveal a situation which played out like a white flag ruse. Trees are turned off. The two soldiers who surrendered were visible to me, but not the one laying down with the LMG. Thinking the position was secure I advanced to cross the open ground beyond (you can see the smoke deployed in anticipation), but as my troops neared the captured soldiers the hidden Ivan opened fire and you see the damage he's done. The bastage.

Be wary of surrendering soldiers. Not all their mates might have signed on.

Chieftain, mainly

So, Carl Gustav was the main section AT, alongside a pair of LAW.

Milan was the main dismounted ATGM. Wombat was a 120mm recoilless rifle from the 1950s, but Milan is correct for the time period currently in the game (we might get both).

Swingfire was the more powerful, longer ranged ATGM, and that would be mounted on FV432 or CVR(T) ("Swingfire" or "Striker")

One thing you're going to find is that, similar to WW2, the BAOR should be made up of specialists. A single element isn't expected to be able to do everything, and you'll need to court synergies to be effective. As a simple example, the M60 MBT is more or less an all-rounder. It's not the fastest tank, doesn't have the biggest gun or the most armour, but it's at least acceptable at everything, and as such can play multiple roles and enable others. Chieftain is designed for a more defensive, static battle, so has a ton of armour and firepower (especially for the 1960s when it was introduced), but sacrifices mobility to do so.
That means that they should generally be a little harder to use than the US, but potentially more effective if you can use them well.

Well, British SLRs are only capable of single shots. So yes, it's completely representative of how British infantry fought. But it's not because they place a tactical emphasis on single shots. It's because their weapons are physically limited to single shots. The full auto capability of the original FAL has been completely removed on the British version of the FAL, the L1A1. So even if these soldiers wanted to fire in full auto, they couldn't. But, since it's firing a full power cartridge, not an intermediate cartridge, I'm not sure how controllable full auto from a FAL would be anyway. I imagine it would be bucking around pretty wildly, so much that you would be depending on more luck than skill to actually hit anything. Which is probably why a lot of armies that used a full powered cartridge in their rifles disabled any full-auto capability.
The question of how the SLR will perform compared to the M16 is one I've been very interested in. I've been going back and forth, but my thinking right now is that British and Canadian infantry should mostly be fine against the assault rifle armed Soviets (probably). They'll be at a theoretical disadvantage at short range, but I think the situation and positioning should be more important than the weapon most of the time. Obviously a British infantry squad with SLRs and a GPMG will have a massive amount of firepower by WW2 standards. But having a massive amount of firepower by WW2 standards doesn't necessarily mean that they'll be able to compete with the fully assault rifle armed US and Soviet infantry in the late Cold War. Whether or not British infantry will be able to hold their own in this era is part of what I'm really curious about, and a big part of why I can hardly wait for the BAOR module to be released. Again, my current thinking is that they should do fine, but I'll lay out in a moment why that's in question.
Unlike the British, both the US and Soviets are armed with assault rifles. The core principle of an assault rifle like the American M16 or Soviet AK74 is that it is a sort of universal small arm. With an assault rifle, there is no need to choose between a semi-automatic rifle or a submachinegun. An assault rifle fully combines the features of both a semi-automatic rifle and a submachinegun. You no longer have a tradeoff between long range firepower and short range firepower like you did in WW2, in which every submachinegun on the squad meant one less rifle and every rifle meant one less submachinegun. An assault rifle can smoothly transition from functioning like a WW2-era semi-automatic rifle at long range, to functioning like a WW2 submachinegun at short range. 
It does this by firing an intermediate cartridge. It is "intermediate" between a pistol cartridge, and what would have been considered a normal rifle cartridge in WW2. What was found in WW1, WW2, and Korea was that almost all fighting took place at ranges far shorter than what was envisioned when the rifles that were in service in WW2 were first designed. The intermediate cartridge of an assault rifle retains the ballistic properties of a full power cartridge out to the edge of normal combat ranges (about 500 meters), but not beyond. Instead of wasting power on achieving a maximum range that will never be utilized in real combat, you can have a smaller and lighter bullet (so you can carry more of them) with a much softer recoil. The soft recoil of the smaller cartridge makes an assault rifle about as controllable in full auto as a submachinegun (we are talking about aimed automatic fire, not random spraying). But because it is still as accurate as a full power cartridge out to the maximum range that you are likely to encounter in real combat you can, with the flick of a selector switch, have a weapon that is optimized for long range fighting or a weapon that is optimized for short range fighting all in a single package.
The theoretical advantage that a full power cartridge, such as the cartridge fired by the SLR, has in range and accuracy only starts to matter at ranges far exceeding normal combat ranges. You would need superhuman eyesight (or optics (which have become more or less universal in the modern day, which is part of why we are looking at going back to something like the SLR (look up the XM7 rifle for more details on that))) in order to take advantage of the theoretically superior ballistics of an SLR. 
At long range M16s and SLRs should perform pretty similarly. The M16 may have a slight edge, since the softer recoil makes follow up shots a bit faster (your sight picture isn't thrown off as much by the previous shot). But at those ranges they are both functioning as if they were WW2-era semi-automatic rifles (with higher magazine capacities). But as the fighting moves from those longer ranges into close quarters the M16 can, with the flick of a selector switch, give you firepower equal to a submachinegun, while the SLR is still only giving you the firepower of a semi-automatic rifle. Unlike assault rifles, SLRs aren't universal small arms. They are just really good semi-automatic rifles.
If you don't think that having a squad made up entirely of submachine gunners gives you a tremendous advantage in close quarters fighting, them I'm guessing that you haven't played CMRT (there's a reason that everyone has switched to assault rifles). Again though, I've been going back and forth myself on how much of a difference this will actually make. One day I'll find myself thinking that the British infantry are screwed, and the next day I find myself thinking that they should prove more or less equal to US and Soviet infantry. So I'm really curious to see how they actually perform when the BAOR module is released.

Well, British SLRs are only capable of single shots. So yes, it's completely representative of how British infantry fought. But it's not because they place a tactical emphasis on single shots. It's because their weapons are physically limited to single shots. The full auto capability of the original FAL has been completely removed on the British version of the FAL, the L1A1. So even if these soldiers wanted to fire in full auto, they couldn't. But, since it's firing a full power cartridge, not an intermediate cartridge, I'm not sure how controllable full auto from a FAL would be anyway. I imagine it would be bucking around pretty wildly, so much that you would be depending on more luck than skill to actually hit anything. Which is probably why a lot of armies that used a full powered cartridge in their rifles disabled any full-auto capability.
The question of how the SLR will perform compared to the M16 is one I've been very interested in. I've been going back and forth, but my thinking right now is that British and Canadian infantry should mostly be fine against the assault rifle armed Soviets (probably). They'll be at a theoretical disadvantage at short range, but I think the situation and positioning should be more important than the weapon most of the time. Obviously a British infantry squad with SLRs and a GPMG will have a massive amount of firepower by WW2 standards. But having a massive amount of firepower by WW2 standards doesn't necessarily mean that they'll be able to compete with the fully assault rifle armed US and Soviet infantry in the late Cold War. Whether or not British infantry will be able to hold their own in this era is part of what I'm really curious about, and a big part of why I can hardly wait for the BAOR module to be released. Again, my current thinking is that they should do fine, but I'll lay out in a moment why that's in question.
Unlike the British, both the US and Soviets are armed with assault rifles. The core principle of an assault rifle like the American M16 or Soviet AK74 is that it is a sort of universal small arm. With an assault rifle, there is no need to choose between a semi-automatic rifle or a submachinegun. An assault rifle fully combines the features of both a semi-automatic rifle and a submachinegun. You no longer have a tradeoff between long range firepower and short range firepower like you did in WW2, in which every submachinegun on the squad meant one less rifle and every rifle meant one less submachinegun. An assault rifle can smoothly transition from functioning like a WW2-era semi-automatic rifle at long range, to functioning like a WW2 submachinegun at short range. 
It does this by firing an intermediate cartridge. It is "intermediate" between a pistol cartridge, and what would have been considered a normal rifle cartridge in WW2. What was found in WW1, WW2, and Korea was that almost all fighting took place at ranges far shorter than what was envisioned when the rifles that were in service in WW2 were first designed. The intermediate cartridge of an assault rifle retains the ballistic properties of a full power cartridge out to the edge of normal combat ranges (about 500 meters), but not beyond. Instead of wasting power on achieving a maximum range that will never be utilized in real combat, you can have a smaller and lighter bullet (so you can carry more of them) with a much softer recoil. The soft recoil of the smaller cartridge makes an assault rifle about as controllable in full auto as a submachinegun (we are talking about aimed automatic fire, not random spraying). But because it is still as accurate as a full power cartridge out to the maximum range that you are likely to encounter in real combat you can, with the flick of a selector switch, have a weapon that is optimized for long range fighting or a weapon that is optimized for short range fighting all in a single package.
The theoretical advantage that a full power cartridge, such as the cartridge fired by the SLR, has in range and accuracy only starts to matter at ranges far exceeding normal combat ranges. You would need superhuman eyesight (or optics (which have become more or less universal in the modern day, which is part of why we are looking at going back to something like the SLR (look up the XM7 rifle for more details on that))) in order to take advantage of the theoretically superior ballistics of an SLR. 
At long range M16s and SLRs should perform pretty similarly. The M16 may have a slight edge, since the softer recoil makes follow up shots a bit faster (your sight picture isn't thrown off as much by the previous shot). But at those ranges they are both functioning as if they were WW2-era semi-automatic rifles (with higher magazine capacities). But as the fighting moves from those longer ranges into close quarters the M16 can, with the flick of a selector switch, give you firepower equal to a submachinegun, while the SLR is still only giving you the firepower of a semi-automatic rifle. Unlike assault rifles, SLRs aren't universal small arms. They are just really good semi-automatic rifles.
If you don't think that having a squad made up entirely of submachine gunners gives you a tremendous advantage in close quarters fighting, them I'm guessing that you haven't played CMRT (there's a reason that everyone has switched to assault rifles). Again though, I've been going back and forth myself on how much of a difference this will actually make. One day I'll find myself thinking that the British infantry are screwed, and the next day I find myself thinking that they should prove more or less equal to US and Soviet infantry. So I'm really curious to see how they actually perform when the BAOR module is released.

I haven't comprehensively tested it. But my impression is that that kind of penetration is modeled in Combat Mission. At least it feels like heavier rounds are more likely to penetrate walls and foliage than lighter rounds. SMGs will quickly clear out infantry in nearby buildings because of the sheer volume of fire they are putting out, but it looks like a lower proportion of that fire is getting through the walls than rifle or machine gun fire. And 0.50 cals seem to deal with infantry in buildings much faster than anything short of an autocannon. So I'm guessing the SLR should see the benefits in barrier penetration that come with firing a more powerful round in game. That's something I'll need to start paying closer attention to.

@Centurian52 Thanks for the detailed response! To clarify, I knew that the SLR/L1A1 is single shot, more that the film showed a much more deliberate rate of fire than repeated trigger pulls - you make a good point about the recoil being a limiting factor for maintaining target/sight alignment. While the round is, as you said, essentially overpowered, it will be interesting to see if the greater penetration is modelled - turning cover into concealment. And yes, in a CQB, I'd prefer my section to be armed with Sterlings (L2) - I saw what the Russian squads did in CMBB... 

Well, British SLRs are only capable of single shots. So yes, it's completely representative of how British infantry fought. But it's not because they place a tactical emphasis on single shots. It's because their weapons are physically limited to single shots. The full auto capability of the original FAL has been completely removed on the British version of the FAL, the L1A1. So even if these soldiers wanted to fire in full auto, they couldn't. But, since it's firing a full power cartridge, not an intermediate cartridge, I'm not sure how controllable full auto from a FAL would be anyway. I imagine it would be bucking around pretty wildly, so much that you would be depending on more luck than skill to actually hit anything. Which is probably why a lot of armies that used a full powered cartridge in their rifles disabled any full-auto capability.
The question of how the SLR will perform compared to the M16 is one I've been very interested in. I've been going back and forth, but my thinking right now is that British and Canadian infantry should mostly be fine against the assault rifle armed Soviets (probably). They'll be at a theoretical disadvantage at short range, but I think the situation and positioning should be more important than the weapon most of the time. Obviously a British infantry squad with SLRs and a GPMG will have a massive amount of firepower by WW2 standards. But having a massive amount of firepower by WW2 standards doesn't necessarily mean that they'll be able to compete with the fully assault rifle armed US and Soviet infantry in the late Cold War. Whether or not British infantry will be able to hold their own in this era is part of what I'm really curious about, and a big part of why I can hardly wait for the BAOR module to be released. Again, my current thinking is that they should do fine, but I'll lay out in a moment why that's in question.
Unlike the British, both the US and Soviets are armed with assault rifles. The core principle of an assault rifle like the American M16 or Soviet AK74 is that it is a sort of universal small arm. With an assault rifle, there is no need to choose between a semi-automatic rifle or a submachinegun. An assault rifle fully combines the features of both a semi-automatic rifle and a submachinegun. You no longer have a tradeoff between long range firepower and short range firepower like you did in WW2, in which every submachinegun on the squad meant one less rifle and every rifle meant one less submachinegun. An assault rifle can smoothly transition from functioning like a WW2-era semi-automatic rifle at long range, to functioning like a WW2 submachinegun at short range. 
It does this by firing an intermediate cartridge. It is "intermediate" between a pistol cartridge, and what would have been considered a normal rifle cartridge in WW2. What was found in WW1, WW2, and Korea was that almost all fighting took place at ranges far shorter than what was envisioned when the rifles that were in service in WW2 were first designed. The intermediate cartridge of an assault rifle retains the ballistic properties of a full power cartridge out to the edge of normal combat ranges (about 500 meters), but not beyond. Instead of wasting power on achieving a maximum range that will never be utilized in real combat, you can have a smaller and lighter bullet (so you can carry more of them) with a much softer recoil. The soft recoil of the smaller cartridge makes an assault rifle about as controllable in full auto as a submachinegun (we are talking about aimed automatic fire, not random spraying). But because it is still as accurate as a full power cartridge out to the maximum range that you are likely to encounter in real combat you can, with the flick of a selector switch, have a weapon that is optimized for long range fighting or a weapon that is optimized for short range fighting all in a single package.
The theoretical advantage that a full power cartridge, such as the cartridge fired by the SLR, has in range and accuracy only starts to matter at ranges far exceeding normal combat ranges. You would need superhuman eyesight (or optics (which have become more or less universal in the modern day, which is part of why we are looking at going back to something like the SLR (look up the XM7 rifle for more details on that))) in order to take advantage of the theoretically superior ballistics of an SLR. 
At long range M16s and SLRs should perform pretty similarly. The M16 may have a slight edge, since the softer recoil makes follow up shots a bit faster (your sight picture isn't thrown off as much by the previous shot). But at those ranges they are both functioning as if they were WW2-era semi-automatic rifles (with higher magazine capacities). But as the fighting moves from those longer ranges into close quarters the M16 can, with the flick of a selector switch, give you firepower equal to a submachinegun, while the SLR is still only giving you the firepower of a semi-automatic rifle. Unlike assault rifles, SLRs aren't universal small arms. They are just really good semi-automatic rifles.
If you don't think that having a squad made up entirely of submachine gunners gives you a tremendous advantage in close quarters fighting, them I'm guessing that you haven't played CMRT (there's a reason that everyone has switched to assault rifles). Again though, I've been going back and forth myself on how much of a difference this will actually make. One day I'll find myself thinking that the British infantry are screwed, and the next day I find myself thinking that they should prove more or less equal to US and Soviet infantry. So I'm really curious to see how they actually perform when the BAOR module is released.

I don't have any direct experience to contribute (I was about a week old when that war ended, and despite studying military history my entire life, I have never actually fought in a war (I did consider going to Ukraine, but I chickened out (I just didn't feel prepared to die))), so I can't replace a response from Splinty himself. But while airpower has been absolutely invaluable in every war from WW2 on, no war has ever been won by airpower alone. No matter how much the Iraqi military was degraded by air attacks, eventually a ground element was going to have to go in to finish them off. And that's what happened. The war ended after ground troops went in, not before. And as heavy as Iraqi losses were to air attacks, somewhere from half to most of their casualties (unfortunately there aren't exact records for Iraqi losses, so there is a lot of estimating going on) were taken in the four days of the ground offensive, with the other half to minority of their casualties being taken in the six weeks of the air campaign.
So, with the necessity of the ground offensive (hopefully) established, how essential were tanks to the ground offensive? I'm sure Coalition casualties would have been higher without tanks, but it might still be doable if you permit the Coalition to retain IFVs. It's hard to imagine how we could have fought battles like 73 Easting and Medina Ridge without either tanks or IFVs though. As things went, tanks and IFVs accounted for a huge proportion of Iraqi losses. Taking those assets away certainly would have meant harder, more prolonged fighting, with higher Coalition casualties.
Still, someone could easily point out that the Iraqis were hardly a top tier opponent, and the Gulf War was over 30 years ago in any case. So it doesn't prove the value of tanks in warfare in 2023 and beyond. We had TOWs and Dragons in 1991, but no Javelins and nothing like current numbers of drones. And that would be a fair point that I am not prepared to refute. While I am adamant that tanks are still important today, and I believe that it is pretty obvious that tanks were invaluable in the 1991 Gulf War, I will admit that the value of tanks in the Gulf War does not prove that they remain important today.

Speaking as a Bradley infantry guy. I'll have to disagree with the ground war could have been won with APCs part. I was with 1st Armored at Medina Ridge, and that was a hell of a fight. The Air War cleared the way for us, But it was the Ground War that finished the Iraqi military.