Jim Storr

Sorry, should read 'corrected'. Jim Storr

Thank you. To clarify: hitting a target where the fall of shot can be seen and correct is easy. However: In many circumstances fire will be predicted, rather than observed. That is where I would expect Soviet artillery fire to be heavy and inaccurate. And if the target is also not observed, then fire planning is led by intelligence, which might be poor and out of date. This is not primarily an issue of 'competence'. It's more a reflection on the whole Soviet way of war. But, more broadly, I agree. In the absence of any better evidence, I'll keep myside of the Christmas Truce. Best wishes Jim Storr

Thank you. Best wishes Jim Storr

We could go on forever. Please justify the assertion that BMPs did not follow the tanks due to poor combined-arms coordination. What evidence is there? What evidence is there of incompetence of Syrian officers in that particular? Which visit to the Golan Heights gave you that impression? I formed an entirely different opinion during my visits. HS 30 was not 'a first generation IFV' in any realistic sense: it was 'a massive procurement failure'. The Federal German government cancelled the contract in the year it entered service (1959). It was an atrociously bad vehicle. So let's discount any suggestion of the Bundeswehr having 'seven years of IFV experience' by 1967. Marder entered service in 1971. Production continued until 1976. So in 1973 the Bundeswehr had very little experience with working, practical IFVs. The 'stop gaps' you allude to in the early stages of WW2 were accepted into service. Conversely HS 30 was cancelled as soon as the political will to do so emerged. The Bundeswehr then had a simple choice: keep the early production run in service, or scrap them. If they scrapped them, they would have nothing. Gross vehicle casualty statistics are simplistic without some understanding of damage mechanism. To say that, therefore, tanks 'aren't much more survivable than IFVs' is dangerously misleading. Objectively, it's ridiculous. Your picture was not a Namer. Namer, and the stopgaps introduced before it, was developed primarily because M113s were found to be too vulnerable during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Any use in irregular warfare is secondary. We could go on forever. If IFVs cannot be used to assault a defensive position then they are of very little use. Hence the value of that as a metric. (Like most metrics, it has its limitations, but at least we could actually measure something.) Yes, IFVs' mobility is highly useful and, as I said in the book, the real value of in-service IFVs may well be that they are highly mobile in comparison with the APCs which they replaced (eg, Bradley for M113; Warrior for FV432; Marder for M113). But If you try to use them as general-purpose AFVs, they achieve relatively little and the real cost is that their dismounts are either killed in the process or lose their mobility. That's what our gaming suggested. You say that my conclusion may well be right: thank you. But no, there is no burden of proof on me. This is neither a court of law nor a high school debating society. I have presented my evidence and my conclusions. I am well aware that many modern armies think differently, and discuss that in my book (for example, page 124). You may, for whatever reason, want to believe that IFVs are a good thing. You may want more evidence. Well, I don't have any; please look elsewhere. If you find some, please publish the results. I did. With best wishes Jim Storr

Thank you for your enquiry, but I'm a bit confused. The quote you refer to says that I was taught at 4 levels of professional military education. But your question seems to be about what I taught. I'm happy to answer, but which did you mean? Best wishes Jim Storr

That's kind, but the book is on an entirely different subject. Best wishes Jim Storr

Thank you. I'm not going to reply to every point. The Wehrmacht had extensive experience of APCs in WW2; they specified what became the Marder; but they did not foresee the rise in shoulder-fired weapons. People go on and on about the HS30 but overlook the fact that it was a Swiss stopgap design which was clearly substandard. Only 2,176 were built of the 10,680 planned. When they got to design the vehicle they wanted, they designed the Marder. Middeldorf's books point to the Marder, not the HS30. 'Interestingly as much as the Arab Israeli wars were studied by Soviets and Nato alike neither abandoned their IFVs.'. The Arab-Israeli wars took place in 1956, 1967 and in 1973. In 1973 both the AMX 10P and the Marder were just entering service; the Bradley and the Warrior didn't enter service until later. So, arguably no NATO country had IFVs to abandon. But the wider point about analysis of the Arab-Israeli wars is addressed as Page 67-69. In brief: 'Overall, western nations did examine Middle-Eastern wars and made some important adjustments. But that did not change the way they fought very much'. (P68) If western analysts had looked more closely they would have noticed, for example, that in 1973 not a single BMP penetrated beyond the Israeli strongpoints on the Golan; whereas Syrian tanks penetrated several kilometers. Enough said? I have not found a single example of IFVs fighting their way onto well-prepared, well defended positions in the Second or 3rd Gulf Wars. I am less familiar with the 2008 Georgian War and the 2014 war in the Ukraine but believe that the same applies. I am astonished by Holoween's analysis of the choices which the Israelis made. Heavy APCs like Namer face insurgents, so they are closer in purpose to MRAPs? Really? Purpose? The IDF designed Namer in order to 'face insurgents'? I don't think so. The real issue at stake here is the one that I identified on Pages 124, 125, 287 and 288: evidence. I analysed such evidence as I could find. The real-world, high quality evidence is patchy and inconclusive. If anything it suggests the use of heavy APCs. Gaming suggests that IFVs are a bad idea. So, quoting from page 287: 'We may have been wrong. ... So: should we continue to accept the apparent value of IFVs based on belief, faith and superstition? Should we choose something else, on the basis of actual operational experience, as the Israelis did? Or should we try to discover, as objectively as we can, whether there is a better way to employ the relevant manpower and investment?' Yes, I think we should. Best wishes Jim Storr

I'm grateful for this submission but I feel it's mistaken. I have know William Owen for many years and our discussions pre-date 2012 probably by 7 years or more. My thinking probably hasn't changed very much since the 1980s; but (more widely) the contributor is making assumptions that don't seem valid ('if we assume that Storr ...') As for the contention 'Storr probably got the idea to go anti-IFV after one of his contributors, William Owen, wrote an article ...': sorry, that's just wrong. I'm sometimes amused by people's projections. I'm not 'anti-IFV' and I didn't 'get an idea to go anti-IFV ... '. I just did some gaming and found that IFVs didn't work. That is, I followed the evidence. I hope that helps. Best wishes Jim Storr

Thank you for your enquiry. The 'God's Eye View': it was largely a matter of trust coupled to the convention that a commander at any level couldn't change his plan unless he, or someone communicating to him, had detected something that would prompt him to do so. It seemed to work. Games or battles: if you're in England sometime you're welcome to drop buy and I'll show you the references. The reason for citing them is to provide evidence that something real prompted the observation, remark or whatever. Consider the alternative: without such reference, the general perception would be less convincing. No more than that. Artillery: There are several reasons, many of them taken from the literature. Regrettably, knowing somebody who was a maths student and served in the artillery school doesn't make the whole of the Soviet artillery accurate; and I didn't say that their officers were incompetent. Their guns were crude; their sensors and computation roughly a generation behind the west's, their standards of training generally poor. Soviet artillery fire in the Great Patriotic War was often heavy but inaccurate and its fire planning crude; Arab artillery fire in those wars where they had been taught by the Soviets equally so. In simple terms, any artillery fire can be accurate if you can observe the target directly and correct the fall of shot. Western armies could do that quite well in 1916. But in practically every other case we can reasonably expect Soviet artillery fire to have been as described. Best wishes Jim Storr

Just as an example: 'Fingerspitzengefuehl' seems to appears in the literature in two contexts: a. In Middeldorf, literally feeling with the fingers (meaning tapping up the front line with reconnaissance) in order to strike with the fist. b. Elsewhere, for example by Balck, the almost metaphysical, intuitive ability of very senior commanders to sense and understand the dynamics of battle. He considered that very, very few divisional commanders had that ability. 'LD' hides behind his nom de plume and gives some hints as to his claim to better knowledge. The ability to type a diaresis ('Umlaut', or 'two funny points') does not 'prove' anything. It does suggest that he is German. The wider point that LD alludes to is that there is really nothing between Middeldorf and any good book in English about Bundeswehr tactics. If there is, he doesn't indicate one, and I couldn't find one. So 'Battlegroup' is weak in trying to extrapolate between 1955 and, say, 1985. I did the best I could with the sources available to me. I hope we can soon expect a thorough, extensively-researched, typically German academic treatise on the organisation and tactics of the Bundeswehr. Perhaps when that is published in English, we will find out who 'LD' is. Until then, I would ask him to stop using unsubstantiated rebuttals and referring to 'you' when he means 'Jim'. It's not nearly as accurate nor rigorous as his post pretends to be. Yours sincerely Jim Storr

Thank you. You make two substantive points. The first is that you wished there was a comparative study of the various NATO concepts of the battlegroup. The second is a wish for a lot more 'rigor' around outlining my methodology in relation to wargaming. My book was about 98,000 words (plus about 11,000 words of footnotes and references) about 'the lessons of the unfought battles of the Cold War'. I could have added more on the first point, but I don't personally think it would have added very much. And I was at pains to suggest the limitations of 'hobby' wargaming, and that I was cautious about trying to make strong deductions from it. I also don't think that diagrams of what we might, or might not, have done in any one of 200 wargames would strengthen any discussion. The subject is not one amenable to hard proof. I think many readers would accept at face value the assertion that, in 200 iterations over 30 years, we tried many variations and couldn't get them to work; followed by a numerical assessment of how often they failed. It would of course be interesting to see more material on either topic; please feel free to write something and submit it for publication. Yours sincerely, Jim Storr

Thank you. That is incredibly useful. The original intention, going back to DePuy and perhaps Starry, was to actually fight from the vehicle. You might remember that the Wehrmacht's half-tracked APCs (Sd Kfz 250 and 251) were open-topped, and at least some had a rear pintle-mounted MG. In some circumstances the panzergrenadiers would actually fight from the vehicle as they assaulted a position. For example, dropping grenades down into trenches. That was what inspired DePuy (and perhaps Starry), in the early 1970s. However the Bradley didn't enter service until 1981. I can't say at what point the idea of fighting from the vehicle was abandoned. It might even have been abandoned before 1981: the trials and development people, with early-model Bradleys, might have realised that it wouldn't work. You write that your experience, in the early 1990s, was that it couldn't be done safely. I can quite understand that. This discussion indicates a slight difference in terminology. You describe a 'mounted assault' as having troops dismount on the objective, but dismount nonetheless. In British Army terminology, the infantry always dismounted. However, from the late 1970s (and possibly before), the options were to dismount 'well short of', 'just short of', or 'on' the objective. 'Just short of' typically meant close enough that the leading dismounts could grenade, or possibly even bayonet, the enemy in the front trenches. By 1982, when I commanded a platoon, that was the only option we really considered. So it looks like US and British Army practice was in practice pretty similar. Thanks again for the clarification. Jim Storr

Enjoy!

Thank you