CM 2 And Snipers

[jasoncawley@ameritech.net]

"It is doubtless vain to parcel out the various contributions, but it would go something like this. The artillery park on the eastern bank undoubtedly did more damage than snipers did. The room-to-room fighting of a corps of infantry obviously did more than snipers did. The breakthroughs on the flanks obviously did more than snipers did. The stupidity of the German high command obviously made more of a difference than the snipers did, at least as to the decisive nature of the victory won. The contribution snipers made to the entire thing, therefore, cannot possibly be more than 1/5th, and 1/50th is probably more like it. Somewhere between those two numbers."

[Seahawk-vfa201]

Off topic Stalingrad, on topic snipers.

CM battels span oevr ~30 to ~60 minutes in total.

usually - when using snipers - I have accounts for a numebr of killings in between 5 to 10.

Woudl you think snipers - on a setting as CM scenarios - would be accountable for more than that on WWII battles?

I doubt it but I have no infor to support it. Is the way snipers are right now contributing ALREADY a sizeable factor - comparatively speaking - in CM?

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Seahawk-vfa201:

Off topic Stalingrad, on topic snipers.

CM battels span oevr ~30 to ~60 minutes in total.

usually - when using snipers - I have accounts for a numebr of killings in between 5 to 10.

Woudl you think snipers - on a setting as CM scenarios - would be accountable for more than that on WWII battles?

I doubt it but I have no infor to support it. Is the way snipers are right now contributing ALREADY a sizeable factor - comparatively speaking - in CM?

Are they sharpshooters or snipers?

They are having a sizable physical impact - do we know how the psychological impact is modelled?

Some psychological impacts are modelled very well - ie every tank is a Tiger or Panther until you ID it. Very true to life.

[Seahawk-vfa201]

Ok, so the focus is on adding *real* snipers to CM in addition to sharpshooters. Gotcha.

Psychological effect is there i guess: Kill a TC with a *sharpshooter* and the tank crew is shocked most of times.

How many true *snipers* would then be allowed on a CM battle. I do not see problems with having 3~5 more sharpshooters but true *snipers*? Only one? sometimes not even available?

Or is that suggested to be as the Air support: i.e., not under the player control.

It is not that a true *sniper* walks with the company and is directed to go here, there, or shoot at at he TC as the HQ desires...

[citizen]

CM2 won't really be able to simulate the effect of snipers or allow them to be employed as they usually were. Reason being, during a CM battle all troops on both sides are wide eyed and ready for battle. They know, with 100% accuracy, that there are enemies nearby.

A sniper is at his or her best when the enemy is resting on his laurels, taking a shower , or generally relaxing... not realizing that there are enemies nearby.

During a battle there are too many enemies around, too many pairs of eyes, for a sniper to work his magic.

Here's how CM2 could simulate a sniper at work:

After buying your units, the game engine chugs away for a few seconds, then your Company shows up on the field for Setup. Your Coy HQ is down to 3 men and your Heavy Weapon Platoon HQ is just missing altogether.

The entire Coy starts the engagement "Alerted"

That Heavy Weapons Platoon starts out "Shaken"

The sniper your opponent bought either slips back through the sewers to friendly lines (NOT to the battle), or shows up as a casualty in the AAR. But this won't happen as it ain't much fun.

Thanks, Matt

[Guest Germanboy]

Originally posted by jasoncawley@ameritech.net:

I enumerated five factors involved in the battle, comparing four of them to snipers as the fifth, and stating what to me was the obvious truth in each case "such and such had more of an impact than the snipers". The factors were - artillery on the east bank, intense room-to-room fighting by the regular infanry, counterattack on the flanks, and stupid decisions by the German high command. So far, no one has registered the slightest objection to these qualitative statements.

Let me be one then :

What about the possible multitude of other factors? Some that come to mind off the top off my head:

- lack of German air transport

- Soviet air support

- Soviet weaponry better suited to close-range fighting (SMG squads)

- Inability of German supply system to cope with demands of city fight before cut-off?

- demoralising effect of the German wounded not being able to evacuated?

- Unlimited supply of Vodka and cigarettes to Soviet defenders (not making this one up)

- Mixed gender Soviet forces, enabling stress relief at night, also strong bonding (okay I am making this one up)

But I hope you get my point - your selection of five factors is arbitrary. If you include snipers but none of the above, you will need good arguments as to why snipers are more important than any of these. Honestly I doubt they were in some of the cases above. Even if they were more important than any of these, how do you propose to deal with my suggestions in numerical terms?

You have provided an excellent, concise and to the point write-up of the battle from which I learned a lot. I feel that your insistence on numerical analysis is actually diminishing this accomplishment.

Then again, I am a qualitative researcher by training and conviction, so I would say that.

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Andreas

Der Kessel

Home of „Die Sturmgruppe“; Scenario Design Group for Combat Mission.

[tss]

jasoncawley@ameritech.net wrote:

The contribution snipers made to the entire thing, therefore, cannot possibly be more than 1/5th, and 1/50th is probably more like it. Somewhere between those two numbers.

Your upper bound is reasonable (but you should justify it better by proving that that snipers were less important than the other things), but, in my opinion, not relevant since it is pretty much clear to anybody that the actual percentage of casualties from sniper fire is far below 20%.

On the other hand, the only justification that you have given (at least the only one that caught my eye, I haven't read every line of every post in this thread) for the lower bound is that it is 1/10 of the upper bound. This is not reasonable at all.

Then what is the true percentage? I don't have any clue at all it may be that 2%. Or it may be 5%. Or it may be even as low as 0.01%.

My point in this is that we don't have any statistics available (or at least none are presented in this thread) to make reliable estimates on the effect of snipers. I prefer using the expression "small effect" to guessing some percentage range since someone may easily make a mistake and interpret the numbers as the absolute truth.

On the whole, if some student gave me a proof like that as an answer to some question, I would merrily flunk him (or her). [All HUT cs/ee students take a note here].

- Tommi

Addendum: I'm fully aware that you can't prove things about history in the way you do in mathematics. But if you use mathematics as a tool, then you should follow its conventions and justify all constants that you use.

[This message has been edited by tss (edited 03-20-2001).]

[engy]

Originally posted by citizen:

Here's how CM2 could simulate a sniper at work:

After buying your units, the game engine chugs away for a few seconds, then your Company shows up on the field for Setup. Your Coy HQ is down to 3 men and your Heavy Weapon Platoon HQ is just missing altogether.

The entire Coy starts the engagement "Alerted"

That Heavy Weapons Platoon starts out "Shaken"

The sniper your opponent bought either slips back through the sewers to friendly lines (NOT to the battle), or shows up as a casualty in the AAR. But this won't happen as it ain't much fun.

Thanks, Matt

Wow, *very* interesting idea. That one is certainly food for thought.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Germanboy:

You have provided an excellent, concise and to the point write-up of the battle from which I learned a lot. I feel that your insistence on numerical analysis is actually diminishing this accomplishment.

Thanks for agreeing with me, Germanboy.

Well stated rebuttal - I do wonder about the professionalism of the mixed-gender Russian units (of which I don't think there were many in Stalingrad, but I digress). Canadian women were just allowed on submarines, breaking down the last gender barrier. The women I've seen in my own reserve unit act very professionally and there has been no problem with them doing what the men do. I wonder how the Russian experience truly was.

[Guest wwb_99]

I guess the factor which cannot be accounted for numerically is the fear which snipers create. While the actual casualties caused were minimal, the psychological effects of their presence was great.

Did a German soldier know if there was a Soviet sniper hiding in that pile of rubble down the block? No. But did he know there was not a Soviet sniper hiding in that pile of rubble? No. So, in all likelyhood, that German soldier is not going into the street. One is real carful when it is their butt on the line.

There was a similar effect on the western front; the Germans would often leave a few snipers behind when retreating. Because one sniping incident really, really slowed down pursuers.

WWB

[Croda]

It seems to me that the word sniper has grown to proportions far more grandeoise than the actual job.

Let me put it this way: Inn wwb_99's post above, he reasons that the Germans may not want to go out in the street for fear of a Soviet Sniper hidden in the rubble. Well, does it matter if the person who may or may not be hidden in the rubble is a sniper? Perhaps he's just a soldier with a carbine. And in the occasion mentioned above where a German unit faltered because it's commander was killed by a sniper: would the unit not have faltered had the commander been killed by a grenade thrown from a hidden location? or by a machinegun a few blocks down?

My point is that the sniper has been romanticized in film and in literature because it is inherently interesting to see the rogue soldier go off and win the war.

WWI soldiers sitting in a trench would call anyone that took a single shot at them from the opposing trench a "sniper." Does that mean that there was a lone gunman with high-powered scope crawling around picking off commanding officers while they were eating their oatmeal? Of course not.

The sniper has been over-glamorized to the point that high-school kids must be clammoring to get into sniper school so that they can rack up those silent kills.

If in fact a true "sniper" would take hours, if not days, to get a good kill (a good kill meaning he killed someone without being spotted himself), then how over the course of a 30 - 60 minute battle could 1 man, or 3 men who tally a grand (probably unrealistic) total of 6 kills altogether have an impact on the outcome of the fight?

Snipers were a rarity that put an advancing unit on a temporary defensive until the sniper could be dealt with, and modeling even that much in CM2 would be greatly overstating the impact snipers had on the war.

**I consulted no specific source in the creation of this post, so sue me.

[Michael Dorosh]

Absolutely right about the pyschological impact. Its a very intangible thing - like baseball, war is a game of inches.

Remember what Captain Queeg said to the young ensign? He alluded to the parable of how for the loss of one horseshoe nail, an entire battle was lost. There is simply no way of knowing what "real" impact snipers had on the entire Stalingrad campaign - as I think you point out, the moral effects probably differed from man to man. Short of psychologically modelling every soldier in a CM order of battle, from toilet training to his last letter from home, the game will make huge concessions to "reality" by abstracting these issues, or ignoring them.

[Londoner]

Jason, your 1/5=1/50 statement was crazy, you thought you had every variable nicely quantified and wrapped up in your box of "reasons" for Germanys defeat at Stalingrad. LOL!! Germanboy has saved me the trouble of explaining thank god.

I doubt you are a student, my old tutor would have laughed me out of the "account for the defeat of the German 6th army at Stalingrad" seminar class for that kind of assumption.

I thought the exact same thing as Mr Dorosh when i finished reading your post, that last argument just made the whole thing look much less credible.

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In military operations timing is everything.

Wellington

1800.

[This message has been edited by Londoner (edited 03-20-2001).]

[This message has been edited by Londoner (edited 03-20-2001).]

[Mannheim Tanker]

Originally posted by jasoncawley@ameritech.net:

Now I feel like I am pulling teeth.

I stated that each of several factors was more important than another factor. You agreed with each statement.

I take the "more thans" and I collect them. I note the result. You object because the result is a number, as though that involved the invoking of some divine metaphysical power or something, different in kind that statements of "more than".

This is simply poppycock. "More than" is a numerical comparison, it says A is numerically larger than B. it is not "different than" "using numbers". Using numbers is exactly what it is; the numbers are just left inside the head doing the comparing and making the statement.

I am not talking about wastage, or casualties caused, or morale lowered, or any other mysterious intermediary hidden variable I am not telling you about. I am talking directly about the contribution of various factors to the Russian victory in the Stalingrad campaign.

When you agree that of five named factors, four of them are each, individually, bigger than a fifth, then you agree that that single fifth factor is less than one fifth as large as all five named factors combined.

This is not tendentiousness. It is not pulled out of my hat or any aspect of my anatomy. It is not a "failure to do research". It is just math! And math simple enough to be done accurately by average 12 year olds the world over!

When you have true statements, and you perform truth-preserving mathematical operations on them (like dividing both sides of an equation by five, the rocket science in question here!), then the truth is preserved. The same statement is being made after, as before. But you manage to get into a snit over one, when you agree with the other.

This is stooopid. End of argument.

Actually, I think what Michael is disputing is the implied level of precision that your numbers provide. If this were submitted to a scientific (peer-reviewed) journal, I'd bet that every reviewer would dispute your arrival at those numbers. Your abstractions are valid (and quite interesting, I might add), but impying a level of precision beyond that which the data supports is misleading. When in doubt, it's probably best to just leave the abstractions as, well, abstractions.

[Mannheim Tanker]

Originally posted by Germanboy:

You have provided an excellent, concise and to the point write-up of the battle from which I learned a lot. I feel that your insistence on numerical analysis is actually diminishing this accomplishment.

Then again, I am a qualitative researcher by training and conviction, so I would say that.

Hehe...I'm a quantitative researcher, and I'd agree with you. Good points! Subjective data is tough to express quantitatively without misleading anyone.

As far as snipers/sharpshooters in CM, many people have brought up some good references and points that suggest they were much more important at smaller scales than the global scale. I wouldn't want to put a number on it, though

EDIT: Spelling

[This message has been edited by Mannheim Tanker (edited 03-20-2001).]

[Guest wwb_99]

Originally posted by Croda:

It seems to me that the word sniper has grown to proportions far more grandeoise than the actual job.

Let me put it this way: Inn wwb_99's post above, he reasons that the Germans may not want to go out in the street for fear of a Soviet Sniper hidden in the rubble. Well, does it matter if the person who may or may not be hidden in the rubble is a sniper? Perhaps he's just a soldier with a carbine. And in the occasion mentioned above where a German unit faltered because it's commander was killed by a sniper: would the unit not have faltered had the commander been killed by a grenade thrown from a hidden location? or by a machinegun a few blocks down?

My point is that the sniper has been romanticized in film and in literature because it is inherently interesting to see the rogue soldier go off and win the war.

WWI soldiers sitting in a trench would call anyone that took a single shot at them from the opposing trench a "sniper." Does that mean that there was a lone gunman with high-powered scope crawling around picking off commanding officers while they were eating their oatmeal? Of course not.

The sniper has been over-glamorized to the point that high-school kids must be clammoring to get into sniper school so that they can rack up those silent kills.

If in fact a true "sniper" would take hours, if not days, to get a good kill (a good kill meaning he killed someone without being spotted himself), then how over the course of a 30 - 60 minute battle could 1 man, or 3 men who tally a grand (probably unrealistic) total of 6 kills altogether have an impact on the outcome of the fight?

Snipers were a rarity that put an advancing unit on a temporary defensive until the sniper could be dealt with, and modeling even that much in CM2 would be greatly overstating the impact snipers had on the war.

**I consulted no specific source in the creation of this post, so sue me.

To this I retort that the sniper's effect is not in the handful he kills, but in the many who watch them go down. They all know they could be next. And the all know there is little they can do about it, save staying down.

I would also add that your diatrabe on the glorification of the sniper is quite true. For dramatized accounts of wars, it is necessary to have one protagonist, who might actually affect the outcome. This is required for the human psyche to deal with fiction about such horrible events and well as to make the fiction followable by mass audiences.

WWB

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Before battle, my digital soldiers turn to me and say,

Ave, Caesar! Morituri te salutamus.

[Croda]

Originally posted by wwb_99:

To this I retort that the sniper's effect is not in the handful he kills, but in the many who watch them go down. They all know they could be next. And the all know there is little they can do about it, save staying down.

Agreed, but the sniper need not be a "sniper" if you catch my meaning.

A vet I know told me a story of being in an Allied held German town, and walking along the street in front of some houses when a shot was fired at him from a hidden position. He hit the deck and luckily the second shot missed as well. Sounds like a sniper, doesn't it? Well, this sniper was a farmer in a tree. He was killed quite quickly. So you see, a sniper doesn't have to be a "sniper."

I would also add that your diatrabe on the glorification of the sniper is quite true. For dramatized accounts of wars, it is necessary to have one protagonist, who might actually affect the outcome. This is required for the human psyche to deal with fiction about such horrible events and well as to make the fiction followable by mass audiences.

WWB

Again I agree, but this doesn't really play well toward being an integral part of CM2.

[Volstag]

Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

I prefer your approach to his, but don't consider it any more beneficial in getting to the heart of the matter.

No offense, but I don't see you doing anything to get to the "heart of the matter". What's preventing you from doing the research to answer the question? Quite frankly, I think it would be impossible to accurately quantify the contribution of Russian snipers during Stalingrad.

To Jason : As always your posts are highly informative and entertaining. You're one of the few people on here who, apparently, knows what they're talking about w/o sounding like a know-it-all.

Later,

Volstag

[Guest wwb_99]

Croda:

You are quite correct, but sniper is an easier term to use than 'Semi-regular soldier hiding out and shooting enemies unawares.'

The no-CM related blurb about fiction I put in relates to the romanticization of the sniper in modern military-historical fiction. While most fought as a part of the mass, they were the only ones who fought on the ground as an individual, and hence can be much more easily related to by audiences than the mass of common infatrymen, and much more easily glorified.

WWB

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Before battle, my digital soldiers turn to me and say,

Ave, Caesar! Morituri te salutamus.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Volstag:

No offense, but I don't see you doing anything to get to the "heart of the matter". What's preventing you from doing the research to answer the question? Quite frankly, I think it would be impossible to accurately quantify the contribution of Russian snipers during Stalingrad.

Precisely my point, and it appears others agree. Try reading all the posts. You can't research what isn't knowable, so to answer your question, that is 'what's stopping me.' Glad you agree with me.

[Croda]

Originally posted by wwb_99:

You are quite correct, but sniper is an easier term to use than 'Semi-regular soldier hiding out and shooting enemies unawares.'

Beautiful, added to my sig file.

And I believe we are in agreement.

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Woot! - Maximus2k

Stick around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster.

You are quite correct, but sniper is an easier term to use than 'Semi-regular soldier hiding out and shooting enemies unawares.' - wwb_99

The New CessPool

[jasoncawley@ameritech.net]

More factors makes it worse. They cannot make the snipers more important. And I threw in a factor of ten, to allow both for the enumerated factors being substantially larger, and for other factors, when I said "1/50 is probably more like it".

Why do you nimnuts insist on deliberately misinterpreting every number presented to you as though it meant the opposite of what it does? Less than 1/5th does not mean "certainly at least 1/5th". < and > are not the same keys on your keyboard. Go back to grade school and relearn what they mean.

Moreover, do you actually mean to claim before all the world that you know that cigarette availability had more of an impact on the battle than snipers did? No. You are merely being tendentious. But you do not dispute, because you cannot dispute, that the factors I named were more important. Because they were. Enough so, that it is beyond argument, and anyone maintaining the contrary is making a fool of himself, like certain movie producers.

35 "probably less thans" do not add up to any deduction, as e.g. .0004 + .0005 + .0002 etc need not exceed say .18. But 4 "more thans" do add up, to the deduction of "less than 1/5th".

If you can be certain that a factor you name is another "more than", then you can refine the estimate, from less than 1/5th to less than 1/6th or 1/8th, as you name more such factors that you know are more important.

But this you have not done. Why? Because you are not trying to constrain the effectiveness of snipers at Stalingrad, i.e. you are not trying to answer the bleeding question. This is known as arguing in bad faith.

[jasoncawley@ameritech.net]

Oh, and to all my critics - kiss my grits.

[Simon Fox]

Sheesh!

Will the quantifiers vs the qualitators become worse than than the attritionists vs the maneuverists?

Can the sermoniser acheive moral ascendency over the expatiator?

Or will he choke upon those 'grits' (whatever the hell they are)?

The disinterested masses are just that.

------------------

"Stand to your glasses steady,

This world is a world of lies,

Here's a toast to the dead already,

And here's to the next man to die."

-hymn of the "Double Reds"

[Michael Dorosh]

I'm sure my colleagues will have the good sense to ignore your tirade, but I have no will power. Not that this will do anyone any good, but to answer you...

Originally posted by jasoncawley@ameritech.net:

More factors makes it worse. They cannot make the snipers more important. And I threw in a factor of ten, to allow both for the enumerated factors being substantially larger, and for other factors, when I said "1/50 is probably more like it".

In other words you admit the numbers are meaningless.

Why do you nimnuts

Really not necessary, Jason. Just because we don't believe the sun shines out of your bunghole doesn't mean we are incapable of rational or intelligent thought.

...insist on deliberately misinterpreting every number presented to you as though it meant the opposite of what it does?

That is not what is going on. We are saying the numbers you present are meaningless and detract from your otherwise solid points. At least three different people have now told you (and I have heard similar comments about this thread via email) that your attempt to put a half-assed number on sniper effectiveness just serves to detract from your posting.

Less than 1/5th does not mean "certainly at least 1/5th". < and > are not the same keys on your keyboard. Go back to grade school and relearn what they mean.

Unnecessary again. You could be told to go back to school and learn some manners - like in situations where you don't get your way.

Moreover, do you actually mean to claim before all the world that you know that cigarette availability had more of an impact on the battle than snipers did?

You miss the point entirely. Would you care to discuss this calmly and rationally, or will you bother to listen? You continue to throw out numbers that don't mean anything, and those that don't know better lap it up and ascribe to you some otherworldly powers of observation and knowledge. Case in point your offhanded comment in another thread about the hundreds of tanks that Commonwealth infantry divisions had, which was patently false. Yet you persist in rattling things off the top of your head and expecting us to swallow them.

No. You are merely being tendentious. But you do not dispute, because you cannot dispute, that the factors I named were more important.

No one disputed the factors were important, merely that the factors you chose were themselves affected by hundreds of other factors. You can't reduce Stalingrad to a five wedge pie graph, nor do you have any clue what snipers did or did not do in the city, nor ever know the "true" effect they had on victory or defeat for either side, and certainly not to any kind of mathematical certainty.

Because they were. Enough so, that it is beyond argument, and anyone maintaining the contrary is making a fool of himself, like certain movie producers.

Your continually missing the point is, I'm afraid, making all of us look foolish. Perhaps you are best left to post your chapter length treatises on history ("Jason Says") for the newbies and the twitch crowd and desist with the tirades against those that know better.