Cold War doctrine regarding loss of APCs/IFVs?

[Codreanu]

After playing most of the American campaign and a bit of the Soviet one something that I noticed is that the loss of an M113 or BMP can, for all intents and purposes, take an entire squad out of action simply because they'll have no quick way of reaching the battlefield. How would having too much infantry and too few transports been solved in the real world? Would troops have been crammed onto the roofs of any IFVs available, would they have just acted as shuttles and gone back to pick up more men if they had the time, or would those units without transport just have to sit where they were and wait for follow up forces?

[BeondTheGrave]

To be honest, from a lot of what I read doctrine wise it assumes full strength fresh forces. I dont think I have every encountered any discussion of how doctrine should be modified as attrition occurs. Some of it makes sense, doctrine's purpose is to prepare the Army in peace time for how it will fight a war. In peace time you dont have to worry about serious combat attrition because, well, your units are fully strengthed. You probably also want to make sure the whole battalion or whatever gets range time and training time, so telling a squad to take the day off may replicate a specific battlefield scenario, but it also leaves you with two squads whove trained harder than the third. Its my general impression, though I would appreciate a correction from anyone who might have first hand experience, that attrition is a problem intended to be solved by the commander in the field. You have x resources, you need to accomplish y mission. Its up to you to make it work. Maybe thats putting guys on the roof of an M113, or putting a squad into trucks, or having a squad walk like it was 1942. 

There are a few things though that can get the commander out of a tight spot if he has a bit of time to reorganize. First, replacements. You might think that in the Cold War time frame there simply isn't enough time to replace combat losses with fresh reserves from the US. That may be true, depending on how you view the nature of a hypothetical World War Three. But its also the case that any number of vehicles might come available during even an intense campaign. An M113 breaks down and goes back to the brigade motor pool, brigade then returns it to a battalion for use once its fixed. In the Yom Kippur War Israel was ultimately saved thanks to the skill of its mechanics, they put tanks and half tracks back into service two, three, or more times. Often tanks would be knocked out in the morning, and that evening would be back in line with the brigade. Probably though at the tip of the spear there was a great deal of churn as one tank would not come back to the same platoon, but would instead be sent where it was needed and where was the closest. Another solution, an M113 or M3 casualty would probably also come with casualty among the infantry. Squads can be consolidated to produce two full strength squads where you may only have had three partial squads before. In that way, the loss of one M113 reduces combat power, but it doesnt reduce maneuver capability. In extreme circumstances replacements could be mixed in en masse (such a thing happens in the classic novel Team Yankee, and any number of National Guard's units would be floating around Germany looking for jobs in the event the balloon went up.) Larger units could also be consolidated across company or battalion lines. This is a more extreme solution, as the US followed Israel's example in holding the combat team up as a key factor in war. Changes that would disrupt the combat team were to be avoided in all but extreme circumstances. That being said, the most important thing in war is naturally that the unit accomplishes the mission assigned. If that meant ripping up old well established relationships to build a more combat effective unit, such a thing was unfortunate but probably also ultimately unavoidable. The emphasis on Task Force construction though was a major asset in this kind of reorganization. At the company level and higher, worn out units could be tagged out while a stronger fresher unit was tagged in. Unlike in World War Two or earlier when organizations were more rigid, a US battalion or brigade was already a semi-ad hoc unit which mixed and matched companies to tailor fit the unit to the mission. Doing so in a combat situation would be a natural extension of this training and doctrine. The Soviets trained to do the same, though its my vague understanding that they preferred a kind of centralized control and more rigid hierarchy which would have made such a thing more uncomfortable in practice. 

All this is just a bandage though. Like I said the ultimate reality, and one that CMCW isn't as good at rendering, is that combat units would always go into battle understrength. Maybe a unit broke down, a guy broke his ankle, a cheeky AT-4 team picked off a tank on the march, who knows. But it would be up to the unit commander to cover the gaps in his formation, and up to the larger group commander to assign each of his maneuver elements a mission which they could reasonably achieve. Doctrine also reinforces the idea that at the brigade and higher, the commander's job was as much logistics as tactics. That is it was incumbent on a good brigade commander to push forward everything he could so that gaps could be filled to the best possible extent rather than let them undermine the unit's effectiveness.