How do the Soviets deal with long range defensive positions?

[Simcoe]

WARNING THIS THREAD IS NOT A SPOTTING COMPLAINT THREAD

How does everyone deal with the Soviet’s worst enemy? The dreaded M60 holding a longe range angle.

In the Soviet campaign, pin point artillery strikes seems to be the only solution. Hitting a wide area doesn’t give much chance of a hit and many times the M60 has thermals so smoke is out of the question. 
 

You can line up a tank company against it but the odds are you’ll lose the entire company before you get a spot. Same with any other vehicle. This makes sense, in real life the M60 would be hidden and foliage and pretty hard to spot.

The only other solution is infantry ATGM’s but you don’t always have access to the extra long range kind.

Any other ideas? 

[Grey_Fox]

If they don't have the TTS then smoke is a good option.

If the long range forces are M150s or M901s then smoke is also a good choice, but regular artillery and even mortars are also a good choice as they can destroy them outright.

Other than that, use terrain to mask your approach, and use your ATGM and infantry teams to identify enemy positions and pass along spotting information.

[Codreanu]

If you can get a spot off on it with an infantry unit or something, get that information to your tank platoon or tank company commander and wait for the contact to disseminate through the unit, then roll them all up at once, unbuttoned if you can and there's a very good chance you can kill it with zero or maybe one loss at worse. That or find dead ground to get an AT-7 team close enough to fire. The Soviet campaign is damned hard so I feel your pain, you have to use speed but going too fast will get your advance elements smashed before reinforcements can arrive, you have to use mass but even a single M60A3 can take out your tank platoon without you ever seeing them. Artillery does nothing to M60s without a direct hit in my experience but it will absolutely kill anything using an M113 chassis so at least you have that going for you.

[Simcoe]

1 hour ago, Codreanu said:

If you can get a spot off on it with an infantry unit or something, get that information to your tank platoon or tank company commander and wait for the contact to disseminate through the unit, then roll them all up at once, unbuttoned if you can and there's a very good chance you can kill it with zero or maybe one loss at worse. That or find dead ground to get an AT-7 team close enough to fire. The Soviet campaign is damned hard so I feel your pain, you have to use speed but going too fast will get your advance elements smashed before reinforcements can arrive, you have to use mass but even a single M60A3 can take out your tank platoon without you ever seeing them. Artillery does nothing to M60s without a direct hit in my experience but it will absolutely kill anything using an M113 chassis so at least you have that going for you.

Thought about spotting with infantry as well. that's probably a good idea. I'm working on the third mission right now. Those Bradleys ain't no joke.

Luckily, I find artillery on a point target works for anything. Really slows you down though.

[Simcoe]

2 hours ago, Grey_Fox said:

If they don't have the TTS then smoke is a good option.

If the long range forces are M150s or M901s then smoke is also a good choice, but regular artillery and even mortars are also a good choice as they can destroy them outright.

Other than that, use terrain to mask your approach, and use your ATGM and infantry teams to identify enemy positions and pass along spotting information.

Thank you. I'll work on using my infantry to spot more often. 

[domfluff]

A few general rules of thumb here.

The first is recon. The Soviet method is a command push - that is to say that you are using an element (typically an infantry platoon) to advance on the same axis that your main force will follow, perhaps 10-30 minutes ahead.

The purpose of this reconnaissance element is to find the enemy position, and to report back. They may well find it by dying, but that's not a requirement - the important bit is an aggressive probe that takes risk, but reveals the enemy efficiently.

When you know this, you have a couple of things - you have a target for your artillery, which should start being called in immediately, and you have spotting contacts which can be transmitted to the rest of the force. The recon platoon is usually one of the infantry platoons for this reason - they'll send contacts up the C2 chain to the follow-on forces.

The artillery is not necessarily being called in on the spotted targets (although it might be). The aim here is to shape the later tank engagement, either by suppressing or destroying the targets, or by denying the supporting positions that the targets will need.

The core of any US position in CMCW are the TOW vehicles, which are extremely squishy (even if artillery doesn't destroy them, any fragmentation on the M901's hammerhead will usually take that out). It's then important to target those, or where they could be (or more accurately, where it would be terrible for you if they were).


So the endstate here is that you're not running into the position blind, and expecting your moving, blind tanks to out-spot the stationary, prepared tanks with good optics, because you're never going to win that fight.


The second point is the use of terrain. The Soviets want to create situations where they have relatively short ranged engagements (sub-1.5km) and enough space to mass fires. You want to be engaging with a line of tanks all at once, so that they maximise their chance at spotting.

That means you need a covered approach, and enough space to operate in. Smoke can be useful here, and would form part of the fireplan which you have been calling in since the recon elements first made contact, such that they will start falling when the main force arrives. 

The Soviets had three defined uses of smoke (blinding, camouflage and decoy) - on your own position to conceal your movements (i.e., creating "terrain" to mask your movements) on the enemy to blind them (using smoke to shape the engagement, cutting out sections of their line such that you can put maximum force on a minimal portion of the enemy - don't fight through your own smoke), and deception (to confuse as to the actual direction and shape of the attack). Clearly that last point only works against a human opponent. Smokes can be Frontal, Oblique or Flank, depending on the situation.


So, the current position:


- You know where the enemy is, with a fair degree of certainty, and you've shared the spotting contacts with everyone.
- You've worked out what axis you're going to attack on, with as covered a route as possible
- You've been planning and preparing your artillery mission(s) to support the move.

A really important point at this stage is not just to plan the target of the move, but the direction of further advance - you need to know where you're going afterwards at all times.

When the shells start falling, you move up the armour. Tanks-first. You already know the locations of some of the armour, so they will start getting spots, but there's also nothing stopping you area-firing to supplement that. "Maximum fires" is the go-to, since you're trying to overwhelm the enemy with a sudden, devastating attack.

Further, once this starts, you *keep moving*, at least on the macro scale. You need to press forwards, and not get bogged down. It's very, very easy to focus on the one objective, and then to get stuck aimlessly, coming under artillery fire or counter-attack. This does mean that when you commit, it's important to commit fully, and to follow-through. It's very tempting to hold back and to lose confidence, but "audacity" is the term in US military parlance - you need to be bold and confident in what you're doing, and force a situation where you're the proactive party, and the enemy has to react to you.


 

Edited March 15, 2022 by domfluff

[Simcoe]

8 hours ago, domfluff said:

A few general rules of thumb here.

The first is recon. The Soviet method is a command push - that is to day that you are using an element (typically an infantry platoon) to advance on the same axis that your main force will follow, perhaps 10-30 minutes ahead.

The purpose of this reconnaissance element is to find the enemy position, and to report back. They may well find it by dying, but that's not a requirement - the important bit is an aggressive probe that takes risk, but reveals the enemy efficiently.

When you know this, you have a couple of things - you have a target for your artillery, which should start being called in immediately, and you have spotting contacts which can be transmitted to the rest of the force. The recon platoon is usually one of the infantry platoons for this reason - they'll send contacts up the C2 chain to the follow-on forces.

The artillery is not necessarily being called in on the spotted targets (although it might be). The aim here is to shape the later tank engagement, either by suppressing or destroying the targets, or by denying the supporting positions that the targets will need.

The core of any US position in CMCW are the TOW vehicles, which are extremely squishy (even if artillery doesn't destroy them, any fragmentation on the M901's hammerhead will usually take that out). It's then important to target those, or where they could be (or more accurately, where it would be terrible for you if they were).


So the endstate here is that you're not running into the position blind, and expecting your moving, blind tanks to out-spot the stationary, prepared tanks with good optics, because you're never going to win that fight.


The second point is the use of terrain. The Soviets want to create situations where they have relatively short ranged engagements (sub-1.5km) and enough space to mass fires. You want to be engaging with a line of tanks all at once, so that they maximise their chance at spotting.

That means you need a covered approach, and enough space to operate in. Smoke can be useful here, and would form part of the fireplan which you have been calling in since the recon elements first made contact, such that they will start falling when the main force arrives. 

The Soviets had three defined uses of smoke (blinding, camouflage and decoy) - on your own position to conceal your movements (i.e., creating "terrain" to mask your movements) on the enemy to blind them (using smoke to shape the engagement, cutting out sections of their line such that you can put maximum force on a minimal portion of the enemy - don't fight through your own smoke), and deception (to confuse as to the actual direction and shape of the attack). Clearly that last point only works against a human opponent. Smokes can be Frontal, Oblique or Flank, depending on the situation.


So, the current position:


- You know where the enemy is, with a fair degree of certainty, and you've shared the spotting contacts with everyone.
- You've worked out what axis you're going to attack on, with as covered a route as possible
- You've been planning and preparing your artillery mission(s) to support the move.

A really important point at this stage is not just to plan the target of the move, but the direction of further advance - you need to know where you're going afterwards at all times.

When the shells start falling, you move up the armour. Tanks-first. You already know the locations of some of the armour, so they will start getting spots, but there's also nothing stopping you area-firing to supplement that. "Maximum fires" is the go-to, since you're trying to overwhelm the enemy with a sudden, devastating attack.

Further, once this starts, you *keep moving*, at least on the macro scale. You need to press forwards, and not get bogged down. It's very, very easy to focus on the one objective, and then to get stuck aimlessly, coming under artillery fire or counter-attack. This does mean that when you commit, it's important to commit fully, and to follow-through. It's very tempting to hold back and to lose confidence, but "audacity" is the term in US military parlance - you need to be bold and confident in what you're doing, and force a situation where you're the proactive party, and the enemy has to react to you.


 

Wow! I always look forward to your posts. Working on the 3rd Soviet campaign mission, I definitely fell into the trap of trying to take an obstacle while the rest of my forces pile up behind (and get pounded by artillery).