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Smoke, used in an attack


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Shooting wins fights...

It doesn't reach objectives though. If a smoke screen will allow you to bypass an enemy position in order to achieve an objective, why even bother shooting at that position? Especially if, after movement, you'll be able to get more weapons to bear on them and you'd be interdicting their covered retreat.

...moving in the open to close range gives the enemy great opportunities hurt you instead - and frequently does precious little for you.

That's certainly true: if you have to use smoke to get "enough" firepower into the open (across, say, a convex field) to have a chance of suppressing the enemy in cover, you're probably picking the wrong firefight.

...firepower takes ground, not movement.

Hence, if I don't want the ground where that particular enemy are, I don't need to apply firepower to it if I can stop them applying firepower to me. Or if they have a cover advantage from one axis that I cannot overcome by numbers, but movement into an enfilading (covered) position across open ground that would be exposed to their fires without smoke will allow me to trivially defeat them.

Sure, if you use smoke to cover the wrong kind of movement, you'll suffer. Some of the uses are "gamey" in that they only really work against the AI: for example in School of Hard Knocks, the smoke isn't really to protect against direct fires, but to prevent the AI from using its TRPs, since it won't fire missions at those unless one of its troops can see there's a unit on them. Wouldn't work near so well against a human opponent. Add the "no fire through smoke" and CM smoke use diverges further from real life doctrines.

But you don't need to fight fair...

Which is why smoke (and demo charges, which also change the geography of the battlefield) is so useful. For both movement and fire.

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Actually, firing through smoke is very effective. It can be difficult to set up grazing fire with the right angle, but the effect on those surrounded by smoke and being fired on by an unseen enemy is extremely demoralising.

It's something the AI will never do though, and isn't always possible.

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Of course masking for movement is not the only use for smoke... more importantly than that I disagree with Jason on the importance of movement, I think its vital.

Of course he is correct that the goal is to gain fire superiority, but fire alone cannot defeat most enemies.

To say that movement is not important and its all about firepower is missing the most important team on the tactical battlefield, Fire and Movement. They work together, and you should be moving with the intent of gaining fire superiority on a portion of the enemy. If that means you use smoke to mask your movement so you can gather enough firepower to overwhelm an enemy held position, then that's what you do, if that means you use smoke to block enemy units on the shoulders of your intended target from being able to fire on your troops that could cost you fire superiority, then that's what you do.

Regardless smoke is like placing a temporary (more effective in some cases than others) hill in front of the enemy you wish to mask, for whatever purpose you need it there for. It can help you move troops forward for a close assault, or it can block enemy units from being able to spot and thus place effective fire on your units, or it can simply provide additional security as you move units across a danger zone or to a different position, or even if you need it so you can extricate a defending unit from a fragile position in a defense or delay operation. It doesn't matter, the intent is the same, blind the enemy so you can perform some task.

Back to fire and movement... when you are trying to reduce an enemy position, you want that position isolated. Whether you do that by placing smoke strategically, or whether you do that by using a clever direction of attack, or whatever, you still need two things:

• Fire Support Element - this unit, of whatever size is necessary, has the assignment of suppressing the enemy unit. If it cannot do it alone, then more units are pulled into the support by fire position, or you use indirect fire to supplement the firepower from your support by fire element.

• Maneuver Element - the job of this unit is to maneuver into a position from which it can assault the enemy position. It's goal is to capture and clear the enemy held position, it can't do that without maneuver.

If the enemy unit is not suppressed then the assault will either fail or it will be costly. Therefore I agree with Jason on that point, placing fire on the enemy is extremely important... but I also believe that without movement you will never really be able to eliminate the enemy position, it is much harder, often impossible, to do it by firepower alone, which seems to be what Jason is suggesting in these comments:

They are trying to take ground instead of kill the enemy and trying to accomplish that by moving.

The real lesson is that firepower takes ground, not movement.

Firepower can suppress and kill, but only movement together with firepower can take ground.

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A few quotes from FM 3-101-1 Smoke Squad/Platoon - Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures

OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS

Smoke is used during the offense to--

• Defeat enemy surveillance efforts.

• Conceal moving forces.

• Isolate enemy defensive positions.

• Conceal maneuvering forces from enemy observation.

• Provide tactical surprise and allow the commander to set the terms of combat.

• Allow the commander to mass forces unobserved.

• Support the deception plan.

• Conceal obstacle breaching.

• Defeat enemy weapons by defeating enemy target acquisition efforts, defeating enemy guidance systems, and negating standoff capability of enemy long-range direct fire weapons.

and:

DEFENSIVE OPERATIONS

DEFENSIVE OPERATIONS

Smoke is used during defensive operations to disrupt enemy attacks and allow the commander to seize the initiative. Smoke is integrated throughout the battlefield framework to disrupt the enemy’s synchronization. Smoke is used to--

• Conceal disengaging and moving forces.

• Slow and disrupt enemy movement.

• Isolate attacking enemy echelons.

• Conceal engineers emplacing obstacles and preparing positions.

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Now Bil is teaching the wrong lesson.

Yes fire and movement is proper doctrine, but as he said himself "you should be moving with the intent of gaining fire superiority on a portion of the enemy". Movement in fire and movement is all about achieving the many on few firefight, by avoiding the enemy where he is stronger and massing fire on him where you choose (sometimes where he is stronger actually, to multiply the effect of area weapons; sometimes where he is weaker to defeat that enemy element quickly).

But lots of commanders don't get this, and fire to suppress the enemy so they can move.

Bil revealed how strong this thinking can be when he described the maneuver element of the team thus "assault the enemy position. It's goal is to capture and clear the enemy held position, it can't do that without maneuver."

He said earlier the point of movement is to achieve fire superiority over an element of the enemy, and that was right. That you have to go stand on the enemy to take a position is exactly the wrong idea. I will go into the case where there is an element of truth in it below, but first the true principle needs to be stated.

Every place on the battlefield that you so dominate by fire that the enemy *cannot live there*, you *already own*. You don't need to be standing on it. It doesn't matter whether the enemy can reach that spot, it doesn't even matter whether he is actually on that spot right this instant, and it certainly doesn't matter whether you can go stand there yourself, including whether the movement to that spot is safe for friendly forces. None of those things is needed for it to be your ground.

If the enemy is on a spot you dominate by fire in that manner, you just kill him. Maneuver then has nothing to do with it. If the enemy moves there, you let him - and then you kill him.

The whole goal of the combat is not to hold locations or to take locations owned by the enemy, either in the above sense or by direct presence.

If you could kill the enemy force from the bottom of a bunker in Shangra-La without getting your hair mussed, you would.

The reason you are moving is that you typically can't do those things, because the enemy uses terrain to protect himself from your firepower. Not in the sense of standing in cover with clear LOS to your forces, but in the sense of full LOS blockages between you and him cutting all lines of sight and fire. We say, he skulks. He stays out of view.

If the enemy is too arrogant or dumb to skulk, forget that movement bit and just kill him from right here. This happens a *lot* more often that you might expect from reading tactical manuals.

When the enemy does skulk, yes you have to move *in order to put guns on target*. By the same token, the enemy just broke the lines of sight from his skulkers to your forces. Maybe he has LOS to a spot 40 meters farther on, but he doesn't have LOS to your current position or you'd have LOS to his - and you'd be firing, right?

The same issue repeats on the coordination scale. Meaning, the enemy skulks to see a few of your guys but avoid most of them. That is a proper use of small scale, adaptive, keyholing movement - he is trying to "achieve fire superiority on a portion of the enemy". You have to move to change that, or to do the same yourself. Check, that is the proper need for movement in fire and movement.

*Not* to run into his end zone and score a touchdown.

I said above I would discuss the kinda sorta exception where you do want to move onto the enemy and need an assault force to do it, of the sort Bil describes and considers normal. This happens when you don't have enough firepower to kill the enemy where he stands, but do have, and have already used with effect, enough firepower to force all his heads down and suppress the heck out of him.

When the enemy can't shoot back even straight to his front because he'd die if he stuck his head up 6 inches, you can cash in that blindness and temporary impotence to get more firepower on him, by moving an assault force closer. Notice, you only need to do this in the first place because he can't kill him from right where you are. He has enough cover to duck behind to live through your fire, but you have enough to keep him from standing up to fire back himself.

In that specific case, you can move a maneuver element closer to him - to a spot with cover still shy of where he is - to increase your firepower bearing on him to killing strength.

There is a last case where you move onto the enemy - when he breaks. This occurs a bit after the full suppression described above but before outright killing him, in effective firepower applied terms. By breaks I mean there is no fire coming back, everyone over there is suppressed or worse, and you also see them trying to bug out to get out of the firestorm. They are in fact defenseless at such a moment and you can charge right on top of them to finish them off or take them prisoner, or scatter the running survivors.

That happens *much* later in the fighting that most CM players think. They are forever charging too soon, because they are trying to solve the combat situation as a whole by movement, and they think moving toward or even onto the enemy is what attacking is.

Only at the finale, is my point, and only in very specific circumstance. 9 times out of 10 in the movements I see players make in CM games, they are early and should be shooting, or flanking (a special case of movement to get a many on few on one element of the enemy), or at most getting one element to other cover a bit closer as an example of the suppression exploitation case above.

If Bil had stuck with - and understruck and bold typed - the phrase "gaining fire superiority on a portion of the enemy", and then not added the other bits about needing to assault onto the enemy location to take it, the distance between us would been merely one of emphasis.

I've fought and taught commanders who thought fire and movement meant one half of their force should be firing and the other half moving to drop the range so their fire would become more lethal, mechanically applying this idea and completely ignoring whether the current firefight match up was favorable or unfavorable. Hearing the phrase "fire and movement" without understanding what it is actually about leads to such errors.

I've seen others, even worse, who think the purpose of their overwatch force is to suppress the enemy enough that their maneuver forces can safely cross this or that dangerous area to get closer to the enemy, or closer to an objective, or get to prominent cover locations with wide fields of fire that they imagined must be valuable. They were shooting only to move, in other words, while expecting way, way too much to result from movement, and movement not directed at the right goals. They just wanted to eat the battlefield by passing their force over it, and thought how well they were doing could be measured in square yards.

In contrast, consider the tiny movement that shifts a friendly tank around a keyhole to avoid LOS to the enemy gun while having LOS to the enemy platoon in those buildings. Is this half the force trying to cross dangerous open anything? No. Is it an assault trying to take enemy ground by going and standing on it? No. It is skulking to his gun, it is gaining fire superiority (by combined arms match up in this case) over a portion of the enemy, and a little smidgen of movement was necessary to accomplish it. But the whole point of that little smidgen is to pull a trigger with effect.

If you get that out of your movements, the rest is *irrelevant*. Kill the enemy, and you will take all the objectives. Kill the enemy without dying, and he can't touch you no matter where he goes. He can sprawl over all the map he wants to, he can score all the touchdowns he likes, the only end he will find in the zones he reaches will involve six feet of earth. All you need to worry about, the rest is mere means.

Shift the fundamental focus of your tactical thinking, away from goals and ground and movement, and toward death and attrition and firepower.

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Honestly I think from the perspective of the ill educated (speaking for myself here), the two of you sound like you are saying very similar things. I think however Bil is speaking more to the mechanics of CM vs RL. For example in a current battle I have definite fire superiority over an opponent in the next hedgerow. However due to the rise in ground and the hedgerow itself I have difficulty targeting him. When his guys cower, my guys can't see him to shoot on their own, I can't directly area fire well due to terrain blind spots and those that can fire are just chewing up the ground in front of the hedgerow. I could probably spend the entire game shooting up that terrain and only manage to keep him cowering. Barring having mortars every time I have to take a hedgerow, I HAVE to either flank the hedgerow or advance right up to it to see his guys to eliminate them. That is just the nature of Action Spots, LOF and spotting and how they interact.

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Honestly I think from the perspective of the ill educated (speaking for myself here), the two of you sound like you are saying very similar things. I think however Bil is speaking more to the mechanics of CM vs RL. For example in a current battle I have definite fire superiority over an opponent in the next hedgerow. However due to the rise in ground and the hedgerow itself I have difficulty targeting him. When his guys cower, my guys can't see him to shoot on their own, I can't directly area fire well due to terrain blind spots and those that can fire are just chewing up the ground in front of the hedgerow. I could probably spend the entire game shooting up that terrain and only manage to keep him cowering. Barring having mortars every time I have to take a hedgerow, I HAVE to either flank the hedgerow or advance right up to it to see his guys to eliminate them. That is just the nature of Action Spots, LOF and spotting and how they interact.

I am pretty sure that a lot of the fighting in the hedgerows in Normandy would have involved similar issues as you outline here. Given the nature of the hedgerows the grunts couldn't simply saturate it with fire and expect to kill the dug in enemy - they had to advance across the fields, supported by fire, and use grenades to tossed into enemy positions to do that

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In contrast, consider the tiny movement that shifts a friendly tank around a keyhole to avoid LOS to the enemy gun while having LOS to the enemy platoon in those buildings. Is this half the force trying to cross dangerous open anything? No. Is it an assault trying to take enemy ground by going and standing on it? No. It is skulking to his gun, it is gaining fire superiority (by combined arms match up in this case) over a portion of the enemy, and a little smidgen of movement was necessary to accomplish it. But the whole point of that little smidgen is to pull a trigger with effect.

And you're trying to tell us that if you can drop some smoke to close that keyhole in order to maneuver to fire at the buildings you shouldn't because smoke isn't to cover movement? Are you really saying that, or does it just look like you are?

Kill the enemy, and you will take all the objectives.

'Tain't necessarily so in a CM environment. Some scenarios I've seen, if you spend the time to mop up every enemy that might have a shot at you, you won't get any boots on the terrain VLs that you need to take before the timer runs out. You won't even kill enough of them to get the AI to surrender in time, necessarily, either. Some scenarios, you have to "do a Patton" and let the enemy worry about your flanks, but you'll do better if you smoke your flanks, so they're worrying that they can't shoot at you instead.

Note that CM VLs do require that you move onto them. Just being able to direct overwhelming firepower into them won't do. If there's enfilading fire across the approach route (that you can't suppress from the last cover before the "rush to VL"), but you've eliminated the objective's in situ defenders, you may not have time to develop a new axis of attack to remove the enfilading positions before you have to get forward onto the objective. Smoke can often be the answer to that question.

Shift the fundamental focus of your tactical thinking, away from goals and ground and movement, and toward death and attrition and firepower.

Killing the enemy means nothing if it doesn't support your goals. At any level. At the tactical level of CM, bypassing strong points to reach your goals can be assisted by smoke. Why fight and risk your own men when you simply don't have to?

Sure, in the broad "real world" picture, killing the enemy erodes their will and capacity to continue the fight, but CM's not about the broad picture.

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Of course masking for movement is not the only use for smoke... more importantly than that I disagree with Jason on the importance of movement, I think its vital.

Heh, heh. Jason has been, and apparently still is, a die-hard believer in Attrition as opposed to Fire and Maneuver. There have been endless debates on this board between him and various proponents of maneuver warfare. Just warning you.

I have to shake my head about this particular belief of his, but Jason is an excellent writer and brings a valuable perspective to discussions on this board.

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For example in a current battle I have definite fire superiority over an opponent in the next hedgerow. However due to the rise in ground and the hedgerow itself I have difficulty targeting him. When his guys cower, my guys can't see him to shoot on their own, I can't directly area fire well due to terrain blind spots and those that can fire are just chewing up the ground in front of the hedgerow. I could probably spend the entire game shooting up that terrain and only manage to keep him cowering. Barring having mortars every time I have to take a hedgerow, I HAVE to either flank the hedgerow or advance right up to it to see his guys to eliminate them.

That is a good example of the need for maneuver.

Many defenses one encounters in CM are "linear" as opposed to "defense in depth". Often the best way to attack a linear defense is from a flank or rear. To get to a flanking position requires maneuver and a good linear defense will be designed to prevent that maneuver. A well placed smoke screen can often defeat the defender's efforts to to protect his flanks.

As sburke's example illustrates, an attacker may have an overwhelming advantage in firepower, but the defender's position blocks that firepower, negating the attacker's advantage. Using smoke to blind some of the defenders may increase the attacker's advantage even more, but it is a useless exercise if he cannot harm the defender. Maneuvering to a position where lethal damage can be inflicted on the defender becomes the attacker's best course of action.

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I am going to do multiple readings of both JasonC and Bill H's replies. Seeing Bill H slice up some opponents in the AARs has been dazzling at times.

Yes, JasonC the reason I have not used smoke much is, I think, what you surmised. Usually in fighting the AI, I want to focus on a particular defense position, isolate it, and own it by project power from afar (the idea is similar in chess)--usually by trying to induce poor fire discipline on the defense by running a scout. I don't want my fire element to be too close to the enemy, because I want to completely break or kill him with essentially no casualties, except maybe a scout. Move forward the fire element when the defensive position is broken, then repeat. In CMBN, with all the hedgerow, it can almost be a bit monotonous, clearing all the hedgerow cells.

Spoiler alert about the 3rd mission in Road to Montebourg:

I said I was going to use smoke, but after looking at the map, I did not--I used the 105 turn 1 HE barrage to blast the right side of the village. The hedgerow already did the job of chopping up the enemy defense. I blew a hole in the bocage on the right, ran a scout in, and then blasted everything the triggered/saw. [moved forward, assaulted the right side of the town, etc]

Bill H, you are using some, to me, highly sophisticated arguments which I will need to reflect on, and take to heart.

In a super hard situation, the Hard Knocks come to mind, I can see needing to blind part of the defense. Practically, though, I tend to mortar/HE the worrisome tree line or defensive position, if I can, to weaken it. Admittedly, always against an AI, who is unlikely to cleverly be behind the position--a human is more able to understand and implement the idea that to hold a piece of key terrain, being around it rather than in it is often smarter when facing a major attack. (In H2H, given the pre-planned bombardments, it would seem crazy to me to put units in key terrain at start up, if one can help it.)

Using smoke as a "mountain" in order to maneuver is just something I am going to have to learn. For one thing, I try to maneuver as little as possible. For example, with the usual map sizes, running people around in trucks or jeeps--as a mobile reserve, and I have seen you do it successfully, Bill H--usually makes me too nervous.

Can anyone point me to an AAR where smoke was used effectively on the offense? What I thought I knew about WW2 tactics from CM1 and previous simulations...well CM2 showed my how huge my gaps of knowledge were, and I feel I have learned a lot over the past year by reading these posts and looking at the AARs.

[broken--but, as a practical matter, getting the smoke in the right place, in SBurke's situation is difficult. Presumably one does not have tanks--one could then just blast. If you have the mortars with HE, point targeting the unit would take the same amount of time and would, I think, be more effective. Running a few men to the rise, then prone, would be an option--those cowering enemy will break when enough bullets zip around them--or the rifle HE grenades, if the attacker is American. I am not saying one should not use smoke, but it is hard for me to think of many configurations where in Sburke's described situation it would be practical/optimal]

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Now Bil is teaching the wrong lesson.

...

Shift the fundamental focus of your tactical thinking, away from goals and ground and movement, and toward death and attrition and firepower.

You know, if you weren't so condescending Jason this might be fun to debate.

Fire can dominate ground, it can never take ground. I don't care how many encyclopedic novellas you write to say otherwise it won't make it so.

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Yes, JasonC is convinced his line of thinking is the best.

But then draws lines in the sand that sometimes make no sence.

I agree with his outlook about the point of battle is to destroy the enemy by firepower, not movement.

But smoke must be used at times to allow movement to help you get into place so that you can adcheive the firepower advantage you are wanting.

At other times, it will do no good to pull triggers instead of smoking the area if I seem to be in a fire fight that the enemy has the firepower advantage and I do not see changing that in the near future with any means that I have available. , it is then wise to use smoke and get my units out of the fight by movement if I can. Dead troops are not going to help me by shooting til they die. lets move and save them for a fight I can win.

So there is two basic reasons for smoke that do with movement which in no way indicates that I do not want my main objective as to being winning the battle by winning my fights with firepower which I am trying to position for and have units in place so that the firepower will be in my favor.

Maybe JasonC can move units into firing positions all the time and somehow manage to get enough firepower to pin the enemy also. But I find dead and pinned men dont shoot much, hard to have the advantage in such a state, and to shoot the enemy I must see the enemy, and to see the enemy I must move into place if I am attacking to do that.

Of course maybe he only plays them realistic battles where he has 3-1 odds and then it does not matter if the enemy pins a third of your units. because you will still outnumber them 2-1 with the rest of the units that you are getting into line of sight. So sure, lay down, in whatever place you find yourself, open ground will be fine. because you will pin the enemy in short order. your pinned troops will rally, add their firepower to the rest of it and you are on your way to killing or dislodging the enemy. But how many battles do we play where we have this type of advantage in general.

Creating the firepower advantage with smoke is a good use of smoke. But it will not become the only use of smoke for me. But by your point, I guess I will be a adv. player because I dare to also use it for other purposes.

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Bill H--finally noticed where you live. I grew up in Midlothian, lived in the Fan, and went to Medical School at MCV. When I visit family, I still like to go to Byrd and Maymont Park.

On topic: Thinking about it, attacking against a human opponent must be much incredibly harder than fighting the AI. For example, against the AI, when a hedgerow is cleared, it, generally, stays cleared. Against a human opponent, I would think that one tactic for the defense would be to put some men behind/against the hedgerow, but others back out of harms way. When the unit at the hedgerow is incapacitated, and the attacker is moving forward, shove the new units up against the hedgerow, and catch the attacker in the open.

PT and the rest of the scenario makers try to make it fun for us to play the AI, by sculpting terrain and buildings to shield the AI defenders, but it must be nothing like H2H play--with the need for each side to tactically shift reserves, and actually "maneuver".

H2H then, I can see a lot more uses of smoke, including misdirection, "messing with the opponents head", and blinding of movements, which would be mostly irrelevant when playing the AI.

So my not using much smoke may be because I only play against the AI. This also means that I won't become exceptional at CM2 an WW2 tactics unless I play H2H--which, because of work, and family happiness issues, I am not ready to do yet.

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Bill H--finally noticed where you live. I grew up in Midlothian, lived in the Fan, and went to Medical School at MCV. When I visit family, I still like to go to Byrd and Maymont Park.

heh, small world eh? ;) I work in Midlothian, live in the Museum District, and often walk to the Byrd. Next time you are in town let me know and I'll let you buy me a beer.

Bil

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At other times, it will do no good to pull triggers instead of smoking the area if I seem to be in a fire fight that the enemy has the firepower advantage and I do not see changing that in the near future with any means that I have available. , it is then wise to use smoke and get my units out of the fight by movement if I can. Dead troops are not going to help me by shooting til they die. lets move and save them for a fight I can win.

Indeed. What I find is that often I'll get into a firefight and be faced with a stark choice - either I can reinforce the firefight to try and win it immediately, or withdraw. The third option of using smoke to compartment an ongoing firefight generally doesn't work, because the several minutes it takes to arrive (plus the time it takes to first get an FO into position) usually means that the firefight has either already been won, or the trigger pullers are already dead, by the time the smoke arrives.

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[broken--but, as a practical matter, getting the smoke in the right place, in SBurke's situation is difficult. ]

sburke's example showed that direct fire against a hedgerow defender at a higher elevation is pointless, no matter how much of a firepower advantage the attacker has. If he has no indirect HE, the attacker's best recourse is to maneuver to outflank the hedgerow. To maneuver without taking heavy casualties, the attacker must either suppress the hedgerow or advance on a route out of LOS of the defenders. The attacker might use smoke to block LOS, provided he has enough.

I could send you a screenshot of a smokescreen used in School of Hard Knocks, if I had any decent screen capture software. All I have is Snipping Tool, which is useless with CMBN.

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[broken--but, as a practical matter, getting the smoke in the right place, in SBurke's situation is difficult. Presumably one does not have tanks--one could then just blast. If you have the mortars with HE, point targeting the unit would take the same amount of time and would, I think, be more effective. Running a few men to the rise, then prone, would be an option--those cowering enemy will break when enough bullets zip around them--or the rifle HE grenades, if the attacker is American. I am not saying one should not use smoke, but it is hard for me to think of many configurations where in Sburke's described situation it would be practical/optimal]

What I did was use smoke grenades to blind my flank so I could get into a position to flank his force while protecting my own. So in effect I used smoke to cover my movement to fire. I now have his force with area fire pointed at him from the front causing him to cower and my additional units on his flank protected from any units he might have on my flank. Next turn my units to his front will advance to that hedgerow and my units on the flank will pull back before my smoke is gone. All his guys should be down and I will have the terrain.

Sometimes you just have to adjust your tactics to the battlefield and the game. Basically, everybody is right to some degree :D

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(Why are your troops moving, again?)

To reach a position where my fire will be more effective than the enemy's. This may mean closing the range to where my weapons become effective, or moving into terrain where there will be cover that will reduce the effectiveness of returning firepower, or some combination of the two.

Shooting wins fights...

Never doubted it. But there is little point in shooting off all your ammo if it isn't putting enough hurt on the enemy to achieve your objectives.

Michael

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Given the nature of the hedgerows the grunts couldn't simply saturate it with fire and expect to kill the dug in enemy - they had to advance across the fields, supported by fire, and use grenades to tossed into enemy positions to do that

This, I think, is where Jason's argument falls down. Not all of it, not even most of it, but a critical part of it. In the kind of fighting that is common in CM, being able to kill the enemy often means closing into grenade range (unless you have tanks or lots of artillery...I always try to have lots of both :D ). Without maneuvering, you can't do that. Also, as far as CM is concerned, he is dead wrong about the importance of capturing real estate. Usually the bulk of victory points comes from doing just that. We could argue that that is a mistake of emphasis by the game's designers I suppose, but there it is and it won't be going away soon.

Michael

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Heh, heh. Jason has been, and apparently still is, a die-hard believer in Attrition as opposed to Fire and Maneuver. There have been endless debates on this board between him and various proponents of maneuver warfare. Just warning you.

Well, he does have a point here. Maneuverism became something of a fad in the US Army several decades back, and like most fads got extended to the point of silliness. Some believe that it is possible to move to locations that make enemy resistance untenable. If that is true, it is likely that the enemy would have noticed it and taken measures to make that movement as difficult as possible. Which means that you won't avoid a shoot out, may even run into a tougher one than if you had just gone straight at his main position. Depending. Always depending.

Michael

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Well, he does have a point here. Maneuverism became something of a fad in the US Army several decades back, and like most fads got extended to the point of silliness. Some believe that it is possible to move to locations that make enemy resistance untenable. If that is true, it is likely that the enemy would have noticed it and taken measures to make that movement as difficult as possible. Which means that you won't avoid a shoot out, may even run into a tougher one than if you had just gone straight at his main position. Depending. Always depending.

Michael

Yes, the Robert Leonhard maneuver fetishists all wanted to be Erwin Rommel 24/7/365. Jason, on the other hand, tends to be more Bernard Montgomery. There is a happy medium.

In the Combat Mission series, theory doesn't really matter if your tactics are winning your battles.

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Also, as far as CM is concerned, he is dead wrong about the importance of capturing real estate. Usually the bulk of victory points comes from doing just that. We could argue that that is a mistake of emphasis by the game's designers I suppose, but there it is and it won't be going away soon.

Michael

I believe it was meant in the Napoleonic sense. In that if I destroy the enemy, secondary matters will take care of themselves. If you succeed in killing the enemy then you will get all of his VL's as a result; he can no longer defend them.

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I believe it was meant in the Napoleonic sense. In that if I destroy the enemy, secondary matters will take care of themselves. If you succeed in killing the enemy then you will get all of his VL's as a result; he can no longer defend them.

And that's even true in many cases. Most scenarios I've fought against the AI have ended up in an AI surrender, which has meant I've often not needed to have any men on the last couple of VLs. There are scenarios, though, where if you spread out three times as wide to kill all the enemy, you'll take 3 times the casualties (because you're diluting your firepower), but you haven't got time to scrape the enemy out with the tip of a properly constituted spear, and have to just drive in deep to grab the high value terrain.

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