Red Onslaught CPX

[John F Monahan]

Red Onslaught is a CPX of a Soviet deliberate attack against the US 7th Army forces in Europe circa. 1987. Contemporaneous doctrine will be provided to the players and enforced by the umpire. It will be a four stage CPX. Planning, reconnaissance/counter reconnaissance fight, more planning and the assault. The playable area will be the Soviet doctrinal regimental frontage, approximately three to four kilometers. Blue will deploy to defend its doctrinal frontage and will have very limited redeployment. The engaged forces will be a Red regiment and a Blue brigade. The Red goal will be per their doctrine for a first echelon regiment. Attachments and detachments will be appropriate for a Combined Army main axis of advance. Lots of artillery on both sides including Red prep fires, Blue entrenchments, limited redeployment after the reconnaissance/counter-reconnaissance battle, etc. I envision a week or two between the reconnaissance/counter-reconnaissance CPX (which could be one on one) and the main assault CPX. Anybody interested? I am thinking over the Holidays but am very flexible. I don’t want to interfere with the Cuban capture of Pretoria.

[John Kettler]

John F Monahan,

I've never played the game before, but I spent over eleven years at Hughes and Rockwell as a Soviet Threat Analyst and am, frankly, baffled by your proposed scenario. A Soviet regiment attacking against an entire U.S. brigade, and dug in, no less!

Unless I missed something fundamental, this sounds like a recipe for outright Soviet military failure. What's the sector width for a U.S. brigade, please, and are you talking in terms of

a brigade slice as mounting the actual defense in sector, rather than having all of its considerable resources available?

Does the game reflect the fact that the U.S. was in a very precarious military-technical position then, having discovered that most of its antitank weapons wouldn't penetrate likely targets and that the Soviet weapons would go right through ours?

This is precisely why we went from TOW to ITOW to TOW2 to TOW2A to TOW2B; why we went from Dragon to Improved Dragon to Javelin; why the Rheinmetall 120mm gun was put on the M1 tank; why the "Silver Bullet" was crash developed and deployed; why we bought and fielded the AT-4 and dropped the LAW; why the M60 sprouted ERA, and why all the M1A1s were crash replaced with state of the art M1A1HAs before the "Hail Mary" was launched in the first Gulf War. All of these grew from live fire tests, ammunition and missile exploitation, realization that static tests of Soviet HEAT rounds weren't showing their true capabilities, etc.

To see how bad it was, please see then General Don Starry's charts from his briefing "The U.S.-Soviet Duel in Tank and Antitank Weapon Technology: 1958-1988" in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, 13 April 1987. The charts are reproduced in Cordesman and Wagner's THE LESSONS OF MODERN WAR, Volume 1, The Arab-Israeli Wars 1973-1989 on pages 218-219.

I was at Hughes Missile Systems Group then, and when the 1984 Defense Science Board Summer Study Report came in, the halls were filled with lots of quiet, anxious people. At a stroke, much of our product line was rendered all but useless. TOW, for example, was incrementally improved, before being practically built afresh when we realized that ERA completely nullified the gains from first a standoff probe and later a full caliber warhead

with probe. In fact, our nightmare scenario became a first echelon of ERA equipped improved T-55s, followed by the good tanks, attacking out of clouds of advanced obscurants, depriving us of those juicy long range TOW shots so critical to whittling down the overwhelming numbers we faced.

The DSB's assessment back then was bleak. Of the standard U.S. direct fire weapons for antitank work, the only one still considered viable was the Hellfire missile, with the 105mm considered iffy even with improved ammo.

I read the reports myself as part of my job, but the real eye opener was the CIA's Soviet Threat Technology Briefing the following year, after I'd moved to Rockwell. It was the year of the spy, and the Agency was running scared. With good reason! The top technical experts briefed us, and what they had to say was shocking. For example, a smallish Soviet HEAT round was found to be able to frontally penetrate the vanilla M1. How? Seems the Soviets responded to a later canceled development program for the

T95 medium tank, and said program used steel and ceramic composite armor. Guess what the vanilla M1 had? The T95 program died, but the Soviet HEAT development to counter it went on and was fielded in the 1960s, but we didn't know about it until

well after the Yom Kippur War when we got some from the Israelis. As if that wasn't bad enough, we learned that Soviet HEAT warheads were designed specifically to exploit their velocity components

to aid penetration. Longstanding U.S. practice was to static fire HEAT projectiles, leading us to underestimate performance by as much as 40%. The Soviets also were way ahead of us in explosives.

The conference was not just classified, but no note. I came back and wrote a 40 page report from memory which was deemed so sensitive by my department manager that people weren't allowed to read it in toto, only in carefully considered segments based on need to know.

Given the above and much else, I'm very glad no war broke out, especially considering the KGB's own assessment that thanks to the incredible intel haul from the Walker-Whitworth spy ring, the Soviets would've won! I had a decidely vested interest in this matter, what with a brother in the 2/11 ACR right up near the East German border

and studies in my safe indicating about 50% losses in units fighting the covering force battle.

Regards,

John Kettler

[ November 18, 2006, 09:33 PM: Message edited by: John Kettler ]

[Rattler]

Maybe thats a TYPO and should be reverse: Blue Reg vs. Red BDE?

Your analysis seems on the spot with one exception: As the USSR had only limited thermals they would have been slaughtered in open battle and would have had to resort to WMD really soon, at least thats what we always came up with

Just guessing in both respects, though...

Rattler

[John F Monahan]

Guys,

did you read the post?

The playable area will be the Soviet doctrinal regimental frontage, approximately three to four kilometers. Blue will deploy to defend its doctrinal frontage and will have very limited redeployment.

[Rattler]

thanks, that clarifies, thats then a BN vs. a Reg?

[ January 04, 2007, 01:53 PM: Message edited by: Rattler ]