New Video: Domfluff gives us a guided tour through the wonderful world of Cold War Soviet doctrine

[Free Whisky]

I asked Domfluff to help me out in creating a video about Soviet military doctrine in the Cold War era, and how those principles can be applied in a Combat Mission scenario/QB. He played a game against me as the Soviet Army, gave me an arse kicking, and then sat down with me and explained why he did what he did. The result is the video down below!

 

[ratdeath]

Thank you and domfluff for taking the time to create and share this Soviet Army guide

[ALBY]

Fantastic work gentleman !

[Erwin]

Very informative video.  In CMBS one can generally use the Russian gear like the US (ie smaller units and "sniping"), but it's been a struggle in CW to use the Soviets effectively.  In this video I could help think that the US seemed more static than expected.  One would think that as soon as a US unit fires is would need to immediately displace to a 2nd position.  Perhaps the small size of the map hampers the US played in this example?

The other useful lesson is the vital use of artillery smoke and knowing what units can see thru it and which cannot.  

Thank you for making this.

Edited January 6, 2023 by Erwin

[Jaime]

Informative but I found the whole thing a bit pretentious. I couldn't see where "chess tempo" was relevant to the actual battle. Maybe where he forced you to move the TOW vehicle? Perhaps the more useful phrase at the tactical level in CM would be "initiative". The idea of forcing your opponent off-balance and to constantly react to your moves is something most people will be familiar with and understand. If you are the attacker you should have this anyway. Also the T-64 vs M60 maths was all a bit misleading, their points values in CM are comparable and while the M60 may score the first hit, it's certainly not a guaranteed kill with the T-64 having the better armor, it seemed "spotting" was an arbitrary argument to justify the explanation of the doctrine.

[IICptMillerII]

Love seeing Cold War get more videos, especially ones of such high quality. Loved the combination of graphics (really well done by the way) gameplay and commentary! I'll echo others in saying that Free Whiskey continues to raise his own bar with each video he releases. Just really well done stuff. Plus, I appreciated the short clip from my tactical doctrine training scenarios of the T-64s all firing on line. Great shot! The commentary from Dom is great as well! Very informative, clear, and well spoken. A fantastic overview of the fundamentals of Soviet tactical doctrine. I can see this video along with the one Hapless did a year ago being go to shares for any newcomers asking about the basics of how the Soviets should fight. 

Honestly one of the most satisfying things I have seen from Cold War is how much intelligent discussion it has generated. Talking about concepts such as Soviet doctrine, US Active Defense and AirLand Battle, higher level stuff, tactical intricacies, etc. Its all been great to see. Dare I say that CMCW might be the high brow CM title.

[OldSarge]

Great job on the video! It is very well produced and the primer on Soviet doctrine by Domfluff is very informative. Nicely done guys!

 

Edited January 6, 2023 by OldSarge

[Jaime]

For the non-chess players out there, to help understand the concept of tempo in chess.  How it pertains to Soviet Cold War doctrine ask Domfluff I suppose..

 

[Grey_Fox]

2 hours ago, Jaime said:

For the non-chess players out there, to help understand the concept of tempo in chess.  How it pertains to Soviet Cold War doctrine ask Domfluff I suppose..

 

?????????????????

This is exactly what soviet doctrine is all about - using templated battle plans to enable soviet commanders to get and stay inside of opponents' OODA loops.

This is an example of John Curry using it in professional wargaming settings: 

https://20thcenturywargaming.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/why-cold-war-warsaw-pact-tactics-work-in-wargaming/

It absolutely can be replicated in CM, as Free Whiskey's video shows, and as shown in the CMCW campaigns and scenarios.

If you want to read about Soviet doctrine, take a look at FM 100-2-1. If you can find the 1990 edition, that's better.

Edited January 6, 2023 by Grey_Fox

[Erwin]

Interesting article re sov tactics.  Thanks.

[Phantom Captain]

Brilliant!  Thanks so much!  I have so much trouble making the Soviets work and I still get stuck trying to use them as I use the Americans.

This made so much clear to me.  

[The_Capt]

You guys keep crushing these.  Outstanding.

 

[Monty's Mighty Moustache]

Great video once again guys, the one time in my current tournament as the Soviets I actually managed to do something like this I actually had reasonable success and felt I could have done better, but still learning. 

Quick question for @domfluff, that looked like a MRB you had to play with is that correct? In CM in QBs I very rarely have enough points to buy a MRB or even a MRC with the appropriate allocation of arty (and optional TRPs) to make the doctrine and fire plans work. How would you approach it with a “more limited” force and what should we be prioritising when purchasing Soviet equipment? 

MMM

Edited January 7, 2023 by Monty's Mighty Moustache

[Aragorn2002]

I must admit that I've hardly touched Cold War so far, but that will change after the NATO-module is released. Going to watch this in preparation though. Thank you.

[domfluff]

1 hour ago, Monty's Mighty Moustache said:

 

Quick question for @domfluff, that looked like a MRB you had to play with is that correct? In CM in QBs I very rarely have enough points to buy a MRB or even a MRC with the appropriate allocation of arty (and optional TRPs) to make the doctrine and fire plans work. How would you approach it with a “more limited” force and what should we be prioritising when purchasing Soviet equipment? 

MMM

I generally feel like your typical cold war QBs should be Attack/Defend.

Even what would be referred to as a Soviet "meeting engagement" isn't the same thing as a "meeting engagement" in CM/wargaming terms, which typically means "an even fight" or something similar. Instead the term refers to an attack from the march.

With the points from an Attack, a Large qb has enough points for a full BTR MRB, with sufficient artillery support, and a huge qb has enough points for a full BMP MRB with some change.

This force was a little cut down from what would be ideal - an entire BMP company was left behind, and I had lass artillery than I'd like. 

Priorities though:

I start with the combined arms, task group formation.

It's important to have a mixture of infantry, armour and air defence. The pair of Shilkas I had here were very important, because the US had some significant air assets which weren't discussed in the video. You always want two.

Dropping a company as "off-map reserve" is fine doctrinally, sinve that force can exploit your success, so that's a reasonable option.

Dropping armour is suspect, you don't get a ton in an MRB, and you need them to do work.

Artillery then is the interesting bit. I've said before that I don't know how to attack with a red battalion with less than three batteries (a battalion, if you like) of artillery (that is 18 tubes of something).

The reason for this is that the battalion should be accepting three tasks, and each task needs to be enabled by artillery support.

Each battery should have a single FO.

The 120mm mortars are organics to the battalion, so should be taken - since the call-in times for those are reasonable, in my fires plan I often leave those as a "reserve", ready to be reactive, rather than proactive.

Next up are your standard regimental artillery, the 122mm self propelled gun battalion, and divisional artillery, the 152mm self propelled gun battalion and the battalion of rocket artillery.

The lower level assets will have less boom, greater rate of fire, and faster call-ins.

122mm should be your default in CMCW (in cmbs this is now the 152mm). A medium mission on max duration lasts something like 12-15 minutes, which is a lot of rounds going downrange, and a lot of denial.

The 152s have significantly more boom, and a mission there can last 30 minutes total, so is ideal for denying key terrain, or digging out handprints.

Rocket artillery is a specialised tool, and it's hard to use well in a cm context. Ideally it's doing counter-battery fire, or it's targeting fixed positions and hoping to actually kill things, where the other two can aim to suppress or deny. The best generic use-case I've found for it is to target an urban area - Soviets tend to find urban combat especially difficult, so a couple of BM-21 barrage can help a lot.

All of the other artillery is more highly specialised (the big mortars are bunker-busters, for example), so should mostly be ignored.

Ideally, I'd take the battalion mortars, and three batteries of artillery, possibly in a mixed load, with their intended tasks defined well in advance.

Artillery have four jobs - suppression, denial, destruction and obscuration, and each of those assets is good at different things.

In the above QB I have battalion mortars and two batteries of 122mm - less than I'd like, but still hitting that minimum of three groups of artillery.

One nice thing about thinking in threes is that you can continuously adjust and move around these fires having two hitting things, whilst a third adjusts in on to the next step.

One thing that you do see in the video is this continual adjustment of fires - the tempo gains that I'd made allowed the fires to be adjusting whilst free whisky was reacting, so they were able to start landing when he was just getting into position.

Likewise, the same advantages in tempo meant that I was frequently ahead of where his artillery was falling - he was forced to react to things that were by now firmly in the past.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 7, 2023 by domfluff

[Monty's Mighty Moustache]

1 hour ago, domfluff said:

I generally feel like your typical cold war QBs should be Attack/Defend.

Even what would be referred to as a Soviet "meeting engagement" isn't the same thing as a "meeting engagement" in CM/wargaming terms, which typically means "an even fight" or something similar. Instead the term refers to an attack from the march.

With the points from an Attack, a Large qb has enough points for a full BTR MRB, with sufficient artillery support, and a huge qb has enough points for a full BMP MRB with some change.

This force was a little cut down from what would be ideal - an entire BMP company was left behind, and I had lass artillery than I'd like. 

Priorities though:

I start with the combined arms, task group formation.

It's important to have a mixture of infantry, armour and air defence. The pair of Shilkas I had here were very important, because the US had some significant air assets which weren't discussed in the video. You always want two.

Dropping a company as "off-map reserve" is fine doctrinally, sinve that force can exploit your success, so that's a reasonable option.

Dropping armour is suspect, you don't get a ton in an MRB, and you need them to do work.

Artillery then is the interesting bit. I've said before that I don't know how to attack with a red battalion with less than three batteries (a battalion, if you like) of artillery (that is 18 tubes of something).

The reason for this is that the battalion should be accepting three tasks, and each task needs to be enabled by artillery support.

Each battery should have a single FO.

The 120mm mortars are organics to the battalion, so should be taken - since the call-in times for those are reasonable, in my fires plan I often leave those as a "reserve", ready to be reactive, rather than proactive.

Next up are your standard regimental artillery, the 122mm self propelled gun battalion, and divisional artillery, the 152mm self propelled gun battalion and the battalion of rocket artillery.

The lower level assets will have less boom, greater rate of fire, and faster call-ins.

122mm should be your default in CMCW (in cmbs this is now the 152mm). A medium mission on max duration lasts something like 12-15 minutes, which is a lot of rounds going downrange, and a lot of denial.

The 152s have significantly more boom, and a mission there can last 30 minutes total, so is ideal for denying key terrain, or digging out handprints.

Rocket artillery is a specialised tool, and it's hard to use well in a cm context. Ideally it's doing counter-battery fire, or it's targeting fixed positions and hoping to actually kill things, where the other two can aim to suppress or deny. The best generic use-case I've found for it is to target an urban area - Soviets tend to find urban combat especially difficult, so a couple of BM-21 barrage can help a lot.

All of the other artillery is more highly specialised (the big mortars are bunker-busters, for example), so should mostly be ignored.

Ideally, I'd take the battalion mortars, and three batteries of artillery, possibly in a mixed load, with their intended tasks defined well in advance.

Artillery have four jobs - suppression, denial, destruction and obscuration, and each of those assets is good at different things.

In the above QB I have battalion mortars and two batteries of 122mm - less than I'd like, but still hitting that minimum of three groups of artillery.

One nice thing about thinking in threes is that you can continuously adjust and move around these fires having two hitting things, whilst a third adjusts in on to the next step.

One thing that you do see in the video is this continual adjustment of fires - the tempo gains that I'd made allowed the fires to be adjusting whilst free whisky was reacting, so they were able to start landing when he was just getting into position.

Likewise, the same advantages in tempo meant that I was frequently ahead of where his artillery was falling - he was forced to react to things that were by now firmly in the past.

 

 

 

 

Some great food for thought, thanks.

MMM

[Combatintman]

Just got around to watching this - kicking goals again @Free Whisky and @domfluff

[HerrTom]

An excellent video! Quite informative and it's great to see the principles in action.

On 1/7/2023 at 2:34 AM, domfluff said:

Even what would be referred to as a Soviet "meeting engagement" isn't the same thing as a "meeting engagement" in CM/wargaming terms, which typically means "an even fight" or something similar. Instead the term refers to an attack from the march.

I would quibble with this definition a little bit. A meeting engagement in Soviet military science specifically refers to an engagement where both sides are on the move (though variously defined by different authors as either or both on move or on the offensive), and by the 1980s was expected to be the most common type of engagement in a real war.  An attack from the march is a different but related concept in that a meeting engagement would likely, but not necessarily, involve an attack from the march.

Edit: Some good sources on this that I think are very good if anyone is interested:
The Offensive by A. A. Sidorenko
Soviet Airland Battle Tactics by W. Baxter - don't let the title scare you, he did it on purpose!

Edited January 11, 2023 by HerrTom

[Simcoe]

19 minutes ago, HerrTom said:

An excellent video! Quite informative and it's great to see the principles in action.

I would quibble with this definition a little bit. A meeting engagement in Soviet military science specifically refers to an engagement where both sides are on the move (though variously defined by different authors as either or both on move or on the offensive), and by the 1980s was expected to be the most common type of engagement in a real war.  An attack from the march is a different but related concept in that a meeting engagement would likely, but not necessarily, involve an attack from the march.

Edit: Some good sources on this that I think are very good if anyone is interested:
The Offensive by A. A. Sidorenko
Soviet Airland Battle Tactics by W. Baxter - don't let the title scare you, he did it on purpose!

To add a bit more to this an attack from the march is just an attack where you are not in contact with the enemy beforehand. An attack from contact means you are already in contact with the enemy. 

For example: 1st battalion is in a defensive position about 400 meters from the enemy. It will conduct an attack from contact. 2nd battalion is located 2km away and will conduct an attack from the March either flank the enemy or reinforce the breakthrough of 1st battalion.

[Simcoe]

On 1/6/2023 at 2:43 PM, Grey_Fox said:

?????????????????

This is exactly what soviet doctrine is all about - using templated battle plans to enable soviet commanders to get and stay inside of opponents' OODA loops.

This is an example of John Curry using it in professional wargaming settings: 

https://20thcenturywargaming.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/why-cold-war-warsaw-pact-tactics-work-in-wargaming/

It absolutely can be replicated in CM, as Free Whiskey's video shows, and as shown in the CMCW campaigns and scenarios.

If you want to read about Soviet doctrine, take a look at FM 100-2-1. If you can find the 1990 edition, that's better.

Just finished the article. Very interesting read.

I think he he nails a concept that I've brought up here a couple times. In Combat Mission the Soviets are playing NATO's game. The company combat team is always in the right place and ready for the advancing MRB. 

Video games have a hard time with tempo. In the article he mentions how his team were tossing a football while the NATO side was still planning. How do you account for that MRB showing up before the company combat team is set up or what if they get there and the MRB already passed them and captured the division commander in his underwear?

In Combat Mission or Flashpoint Campaigns you always get enough time to plan every minute detail so tempo is lost.

Not sure how you would fix it.

[Simcoe]

On 1/7/2023 at 2:34 AM, domfluff said:

I generally feel like your typical cold war QBs should be Attack/Defend.

Even what would be referred to as a Soviet "meeting engagement" isn't the same thing as a "meeting engagement" in CM/wargaming terms, which typically means "an even fight" or something similar. Instead the term refers to an attack from the march.

With the points from an Attack, a Large qb has enough points for a full BTR MRB, with sufficient artillery support, and a huge qb has enough points for a full BMP MRB with some change.

This force was a little cut down from what would be ideal - an entire BMP company was left behind, and I had lass artillery than I'd like. 

Priorities though:

I start with the combined arms, task group formation.

It's important to have a mixture of infantry, armour and air defence. The pair of Shilkas I had here were very important, because the US had some significant air assets which weren't discussed in the video. You always want two.

Dropping a company as "off-map reserve" is fine doctrinally, sinve that force can exploit your success, so that's a reasonable option.

Dropping armour is suspect, you don't get a ton in an MRB, and you need them to do work.

Artillery then is the interesting bit. I've said before that I don't know how to attack with a red battalion with less than three batteries (a battalion, if you like) of artillery (that is 18 tubes of something).

The reason for this is that the battalion should be accepting three tasks, and each task needs to be enabled by artillery support.

Each battery should have a single FO.

The 120mm mortars are organics to the battalion, so should be taken - since the call-in times for those are reasonable, in my fires plan I often leave those as a "reserve", ready to be reactive, rather than proactive.

Next up are your standard regimental artillery, the 122mm self propelled gun battalion, and divisional artillery, the 152mm self propelled gun battalion and the battalion of rocket artillery.

The lower level assets will have less boom, greater rate of fire, and faster call-ins.

122mm should be your default in CMCW (in cmbs this is now the 152mm). A medium mission on max duration lasts something like 12-15 minutes, which is a lot of rounds going downrange, and a lot of denial.

The 152s have significantly more boom, and a mission there can last 30 minutes total, so is ideal for denying key terrain, or digging out handprints.

Rocket artillery is a specialised tool, and it's hard to use well in a cm context. Ideally it's doing counter-battery fire, or it's targeting fixed positions and hoping to actually kill things, where the other two can aim to suppress or deny. The best generic use-case I've found for it is to target an urban area - Soviets tend to find urban combat especially difficult, so a couple of BM-21 barrage can help a lot.

All of the other artillery is more highly specialised (the big mortars are bunker-busters, for example), so should mostly be ignored.

Ideally, I'd take the battalion mortars, and three batteries of artillery, possibly in a mixed load, with their intended tasks defined well in advance.

Artillery have four jobs - suppression, denial, destruction and obscuration, and each of those assets is good at different things.

In the above QB I have battalion mortars and two batteries of 122mm - less than I'd like, but still hitting that minimum of three groups of artillery.

One nice thing about thinking in threes is that you can continuously adjust and move around these fires having two hitting things, whilst a third adjusts in on to the next step.

One thing that you do see in the video is this continual adjustment of fires - the tempo gains that I'd made allowed the fires to be adjusting whilst free whisky was reacting, so they were able to start landing when he was just getting into position.

Likewise, the same advantages in tempo meant that I was frequently ahead of where his artillery was falling - he was forced to react to things that were by now firmly in the past.

 

 

 

 

Great video! In the scenario you had some very powerful tanks attached. How much would you strategy change if you received T-62's or T-55's instead?

[domfluff]

5 minutes ago, Simcoe said:

Great video! In the scenario you had some very powerful tanks attached. How much would you strategy change if you received T-62's or T-55's instead?

So, firstly it's worth mentioning that a competitive game wasn't necessarily the priority here - it was supposed to be illustrative first and foremost, rather than a "look at how great I am at CM" - I'm not really interested in showing off.

However, T-62s would be the standard here, and the strategy wouldn't really change - particularly at these ranges, the T-64's armour is mostly going to be irrelevant anyway, so there won't be a massive difference between the T-62 (1975) and the T-64 in practice. The T-64 is obviously a better tank in a vacuum, so this will affect the outcome, but not the intent.

Similarly, the exact same approach would apply if the infantry were in BTRs or MTLBs. The low-level specifics would be different (e.g., the BTR formation would use on dismounted ATGMs), but the broad concept would be identical. There might be more losses, and there would be differences in mobility, but the basic structure would be the same.

[domfluff]

1 hour ago, Simcoe said:

Just finished the article. Very interesting read.

I think he he nails a concept that I've brought up here a couple times. In Combat Mission the Soviets are playing NATO's game. The company combat team is always in the right place and ready for the advancing MRB. 

Video games have a hard time with tempo. In the article he mentions how his team were tossing a football while the NATO side was still planning. How do you account for that MRB showing up before the company combat team is set up or what if they get there and the MRB already passed them and captured the division commander in his underwear?

In Combat Mission or Flashpoint Campaigns you always get enough time to plan every minute detail so tempo is lost.

Not sure how you would fix it.

So I think the Free Whisky video shows the tactical-scale tempo quite well (John's article is good, but it flips between the tactical and operational, which especially for the soviets is quite different). Notably in Free Whisky's video, the US artillery was mostly hitting where I used to be, because even the really fast US call-in times are slower than a BMP.

Otherwise you're just talking about operational context. I definitely don't think that the NATO player is always in the right place (unless you're talking about Quick Battles, which are their own, warped environment, which will definitely have this problem among many others). There are plenty of possible scenarios where you're playing against a US hasty defence or cavalry screen, whilst the main body tries to sort itself out off-map.

 

[domfluff]

2 hours ago, HerrTom said:

An excellent video! Quite informative and it's great to see the principles in action.

I would quibble with this definition a little bit. A meeting engagement in Soviet military science specifically refers to an engagement where both sides are on the move (though variously defined by different authors as either or both on move or on the offensive), and by the 1980s was expected to be the most common type of engagement in a real war.  An attack from the march is a different but related concept in that a meeting engagement would likely, but not necessarily, involve an attack from the march.

Edit: Some good sources on this that I think are very good if anyone is interested:
The Offensive by A. A. Sidorenko
Soviet Airland Battle Tactics by W. Baxter - don't let the title scare you, he did it on purpose!

Yes, this is correct - or at least by the definitions in FM-100-2-1.

Obviously from the Soviet perspective it doesn't actually matter all that much - the column is coming into contact in echelons, and whether the enemy is in a hasty defence or on the move is mostly just texture.

The important point - or at least the point I was trying to make - is that "meeting engagements" in CM terms tend to match that of traditional tabletop wargaming (say, DBA or the WRG moderns rules), and the desire that players seem to have to have equal forces battling over even terrain, which isn't common historically at all. I get the incentive to do that, but I don't think it tends to show off CM (or any serious simulationist game) at its best.

Edited January 11, 2023 by domfluff

[ALBY]

This is not as easy as it looks. One of my PBEM opponents is shooting up my MRB as I write this.   My addition to the topic here is that the ‘psychological’ aspect of CM is HUGE!  
 

I am taking losses and it is causing me to slow or change plans which you cannot do with the Soviets. 

failing forward I guess. At least my opponent is having fun with the target practice.