MHW

See Charles Stross’ “A Colder War,” which describes the unfolding horrors of a 1980s Cold War gone hot, but in a world haunted by Lovecraftian abominations. The short story is online. Edited to add: When I say “Lovecraftian abominations,” I am referring to the extraordinary creatures that flowed from H.P. Lovecraft’s imagination, not to the quality of the man’s writing. Further edit: Fixed Stross’ first name. Oops. H.P. Lovecraft might have gone into flights of overwrought prose, but he did edit well (or have good editors).

Alex Wellerstein looks at how the US worked to protect nuclear weapons information, doing compelling research about a little-understood subject. He published Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States a couple of years ago. Not a book, but there is a steady drip-drip-drip of declassified and FOIA'd materials coming out of the intelligence community, DOD, and State, and GWU's National Security Archive collects those documents. They publish blog posts about the most interesting new items.

The New York Times ran a piece about what went wrong with the IDF response on October 7th. The article doesn't reveal any surprises, but it does confirm the early picture and and add detail. Here is a non-paywall gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/30/world/middleeast/israeli-military-hamas-failures.html?unlocked_article_code=1.J00.nIkS.Ht8N0K3C2OiF&smid=url-share This quote sums up the situation: That might be the most damming point, but it is not news. The particulars about what happened are more telling. Take the case of Maglan, a deep reconnaissance unit. Its soldiers got their information from a civilian monitoring the news, social media, and chats: Other key points: The Israeli government intended that civilian volunteer units would protect kibbutzim and small towns near the Gaza border, holding off attackers until IDF soldiers arrived. These units were underequipped and undertrained, and many were unable to retrieve weapons from armories after the coordinators who held the keys to armories were killed. The quick-response force is commandos, maybe a company or two, intended to act quickly against small bands of hostage-takers. The IDF main force along the Gaza border was 3 infantry battalions and a tank battalion. About half of the soldiers were away on leave because of the holidays. Forces were much reduced from their recent strength. One infantry battalion was withdrawn after the completion of the border wall; two commando companies were moved to the West Bank just days before the attack. Units in the area started pulling their leadership back from leave, early that morning, because of unsettling indications that Hamas was about to do something, but those units let their personnel stay in bed. A base at Re’im hosted the Gaza Division's headquarters, and the headquarters for the brigades covering the northern and southern areas. Hamas attacked the base, and the entire IDF command structure for the area went off the air, fighting to survive. An early assessment held that there 200 terrorists had stormed into Israel, when the real number was more like 2,000. Soldiers underestimated the need for firepower and headed south with light weapons and limited ammunition. The article notes, a few times, that Israelis were outgunned. There doesn't seem to have been any kind of sustainment effort, of course, and tank crews ran out of ammunition. The Israeli system relies on mobilizing reservists. That takes time. A reserve major is quoted as saying that his unit planned and rehearsed for deployments with 24 hours' notice. Much of the Israeli response was ad hoc, with soldiers coordinating on social media, through messaging apps and phone calls, and by watching the news. (This type of emergent, self-organized response would be celebrated in some circles but not, I suppose, for a major military force.) Hamas terrorists took up blocking positions on the highways east of the border towns, halting IDF reinforcements.

I have a scenario on the way, for CMCW, a US mech company team attacking at night in the desert. Haven't really published a scenario, and I'm not sure how to wrap this one up. One AI plan is complete, briefing's drafted, and I suppose I can swap in screenshots for the strategic and operational briefing images.

There's a story where a naval aviator described the total rebuild of a crashed aircraft, noting that the US Navy considers the data plate to be the plane. Does sound too good to be true.

Hamas leaders may have thought that there was no strategic alternative. Saudi Arabia was on the verge of normalizing relations with Israel. The other Arab leaders might make noise about the plight of the Palestinian people, but they have no interest in becoming involved. The Oct. 7 attack puts Palestine back in the foreground.

That sounds like a mad world. "If you count the tanks that were damaged, starting from Saturday at noon until significant reinforcements arrived on Sunday afternoon, Z*'s tank is the only one that was combat-ready in the entire sector (19 kilometers)." I'm noticing stories from October 7th that report on commanders who go off and fight their own individual fight. There was the Chief of Infantry and Paratroopers who grabbed two men and headed south, and in this account, a tank company commander takes his tank fire-brigading around the area. Look back to 1973 and you come back to Zvika Greengold fighting a one-tank battle along the Tapline Road. Is this just how the stories come across? Was the situation so desperate and the forces so thinly stretched? Or is there something about the IDF that helps turn individual commanders into heroes fighting solo battles?

Glimpses of the early hours of the Hamas attack and the IDF response, in the New York Times. The attackers had planned carefully, which should be apparent. More surprisingly, IDF bases seem to have put little effort into local security, and the counterattack contained many serving soldiers, veterans, and volunteers self-dispatching to the south. Hamas terrorists storm what the Times calls an “intelligence hub” (sounds like a communications site or fusion center) ten miles from the border: Ten miles later, they veered off the road into a stretch of woodland, dismounting outside an unmanned gate to a military base. They blew open the barrier with a small explosive charge, entered the base and paused to take a group selfie. Then they shot dead an unarmed Israeli soldier dressed in a T-shirt. […] Reoriented, they found an unlocked door to a fortified building. Once inside, they entered a room filled with computers — the military intelligence hub. Under a bed in the room, they found two soldiers taking shelter. The gunmen shot both dead. Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus hears about the attacks in the south, returns to his base, grabs a weapon and two soldiers, and self-dispatches himself into the fight. It may be that the Times reporter didn’t bother asking this question, but there is no indication that the general tried to mobilize his command. A USMC news release gives BG Goldfus’s position as Chief of Paratroopers and Infantry Corps, which sounds to my ear like a branch chief or doctrine/training position. General Goldfus, 46, a paratrooper commander, had been on leave at home, jogging in his neighborhood north of Tel Aviv. Then he saw a video from the south, showing terrorists cruising through a city, entirely unimpeded. Without waiting for orders, the general said he ran home, changed into his uniform and headed south. He picked up guns and two soldiers from his base in central Israel, and called friends and colleagues to find out what was happening. Only a few picked up. Of the rest, “There was nobody really understanding the full picture,” General Goldfus said in an interview. The speed, precision and scale of Hamas’s attack had thrown the Israeli military into disarray, and for many hours afterward civilians were left to fend for themselves. Using the few scraps of information he could glean, General Goldfus said he and the soldiers headed to a village north of Nahal Oz, and then gradually worked their way south. Goldfus met another senior officer at the front and divided responsibility for local counterattacks. Near Kibbutz Reim, General Goldfus said he ran into another senior commander by chance. Like him, the officer had rushed to the scene on instinct, without any instructions, and had assembled a small group of soldiers. There and then, the two men came up with their own ad hoc strategy. “There’s no orders here,” General Goldfus said. “I said: ‘You take from this place and further south — and I’ll take from this place and further north.’”

I'm not sure about LtCol McBreen, but the Substack's main author is Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson, affiliated at various points with the Marine Corps University and the Modern War Institute. As an occasional reader, I would be that either writer would welcome a conversation. https://tacticalnotebook.substack.com

The NTC maps are fantastic for teaching the value of even low relief.

Brendan McBreen, a retired USMC Lieutenant Colonel, ran 300 squad assaults in CMSF and drew insights from them. McBreen, who has 25 years of service as an infantry officer, found that the service's manuals and training materials give only vague and inadequate guidance about how to conduct a squad assault. He used CMSF to run a series of tests, matching a rifle squad against different defenders, and tallied up the results. Then he wrote up his findings. The whole series of seven articles appears over on the Tactical Notebook, a Substack run by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson, a historian in Quantico. Abstract Part I Part II Part III (test setup within CMSF) Part IV Part V (tactical insights) Part VI (recommendations) Among McBreen's recommendations: "train with simulations" and "use simulations to improve our manuals." Fight Club US and Fight Club UK merit acknowledgements.

Found the original film, a 15-minute promotional piece by Bell Helicopter, Six Klicks to Schotten. The unexcerpted version gives more background about the exercise. The heliborne troops are from the 101st Airborne.

Here's a film about U.S. Army helicopter operations during Reforger 76. I hadn't realized quite what nap-of-the-earth flight means, in an operational setting and in heavily-wooded Western Europe. At 2:00, a Cobras rises above a hedgerow and launches a TOW against a target, then moves to an alternate firing position with its skids just a few feet above the ground. The helicopter is operating more like a more nimble M113 than like a fast jet. Suddenly, the argument that the attack helicopter is the real descendant of the WWII tank destroyer really clicks. The film later shows an antitank ambush by helicopter-inserted TOW teams, their launchers mounted on Mules. (Makings of a scenario, there.) There's also footage of an air assault operation. This leaves me wondering—where did the infantry force for an air assault come from? Manuals don't say where the troops come from, and as far as I can tell, there were few, if any, light infantry units slated for deployment in Central Europe. Dismounted mechanized infantry, stripped from their vehicles? Was this at all a common tactic?

I applaud this experiment and @wyskass's resourcefulness. Using Google Sheets for OCR is clever. More generally, topography would be much easier to read if CM supported terrain shadows (hills throwing shadows—even rough, static shadows that were overlaid on the terrain at load time) or cartographic ways of providing information like hillshading (stylized shadows that mapmakers use to help indicate relief) and hypsometric tinting (changes in color from low elevations to high). I find it tremendously useful to have additional map design cues like changes in tile color or bands of rocks/vegetation that aren't entirely naturalistic, which exist mainly to make the map legible. Personally, I'll put brown grass at high elevations and green grass at lower, and add bands of sand or red to help define terrain features. The NTC Mojave maps are excellent at this, whether as a style choice or because that's how the landscape really looks.

Miro is an online whiteboard, which affords visual notetaking, sticky notes, and marking up screenshots. Free for basic use. I use it (and similar tools) in my classes, and it's been a great help.