Where are my Russian masses?

[Alkiviadis]

Try "FMR Tank Warning" in "The Kursk Pack" from

B & T, if you want massed, High quality Soviet Hordes.

[ November 07, 2003, 11:21 PM: Message edited by: Alkiviadis ]

[Los]

"Glantz served in the US Army, as an officer, from 1965 to 1993 and he also feels the US Army - at least until the 1980s - was largely ignorant of the more vital aspects of Soviet military art."

Note that my statement and yours are not mutually exclusive. I'm just saying that we didn't underestimate them, that doesn't mean that we got them right. BTW I came in in the late seventies and served through this year. So the whole NTC concept was coming up and being implemented right around then. I'd say the best "Soviet" unit in the world in the late eighties and nineties was by far was the OPFOR at NTC, kind of funny. Just like the largest flying operational squadron of HIND-Ds today is operating right at Fort Polk at the JRTC. Amusing.

BTW sidebar I actually met Glantz about a year ago, he was in Kuwait at bequest of the Army to write a lessons learned/historical project on ops in Afganistan. (which are run out of Kuwait)Of all people I ran into him at the airport and brought him over to the base. I was right in the middle of reading his "Zhukov's Greatest Defeat". When he found out what I was doing we had a rousing conversation of things historical and present. Good guy.

Los

[ November 08, 2003, 08:57 AM: Message edited by: Los ]

[Grisha]

BTW sidebar I actually met Glantz about a year ago, he was in Kuwait at bequest of the Army to write a lessons learned/historical project on ops in Afganistan. (which are run out of Kuwait)Of all people I ran into him at the airport and brought him over to the base. I was right in the middle of reading his "Zhukov's Greatest Defeat". When he found out what I was doing we had a rousing conversation of things historical and present. Good guy.

Cool. I've never had the opportunity to meet Mr. Glantz, but from several brief correspondences I came away with a similar impression.

[Andreas]

Los

Don't think we are much in disagreement.

I just wanted to add that I think the German officers participating in those studies had the opportunity for some mass-collusion, since they were all working in the same location. Being around the same people all day, working on the same project, can influence your views. I have read German officer accounts or studies from outside this project that read quite differently to me, many of them published in the 'Die Wehrmacht im Kampf' series, or later in the 'Einzelschriften zur Militaergeschichte' of the military history institute of the Bundeswehr. On a personal point, my grandfather does only refer to 'ordeal', when he is speaking about his service in Army Group North, when he is referring to the Russians he fought. Not himself.

Regarding over/underestimation - I had a conversation with an extremely well-read former German officer who participated in wrapping up the NVA in the early 1990s. He is also of the opinion that NATO vastly over-estimated Soviet/Warsaw Pact capabilities, based on what he saw. His line was that they had good doctrine, but just were too hidebound in implementation and training.

Good discussion.

[Los]

I agree that German officers particpating in the study could have had some chance for collusion (I don't recall if they were physically collocated with each other during the writing?) And certainly they still could have attempted such without collocation. However I don't feel that their opinions were far oustide of the norm of most german accounts of fighting and the enemy, however, certainly with a multiyear war and thousand of kilometers and millions of troops there would have been all experiences confronted.

"but just were too hidebound in implementation and training".

In my opinion/observations the mark of a good army is not just it's doctrine or weapons, or training, or quality of it's troops and leaders. It's the ability to get the small things right, mitigate friction, and rapidly disseminate lessons learned so that you don't have the same guys making the same mistakes over and over on disparate fronts. Most halfway decent armies do start getting themselves together after a while, some right away, some years later. And this ability to mitigate friction is a VERY perishable skill. In essence the mitigation of friction is a sign of quality leadership and discipline. Of doing the little things the right way, even when nobody is looking.

Interestingly enough, Glantz' studies on Afghanistan turned up repeatedly failures of many if not most Russian units (SF excepted) at the Regiment level or lower to conduct effective AARs, conduct effective transitions and unit hand overs, and thus every time new units came into sector, they made the same mistakes were ambushed at the same exact places and suffered the same level of misery. Year after year! Inexcusable.

Another interesting example is WW1. The Germans had a fairly effective intelligence organization and actually studied their enemies, and worked out new tactics in small sectors, developed methodolgies to disseminated the lessons learned along the front.

It was not until 1917 that the British intelligence section (always viewed askance by line officers in most armies) even had a bureau that studied what the Germans were doing and how they fought, the French neither, though they caught on quicker and established an enemies analysis section before the brits but still not after years of repeated failures and millions of casualties. They read many of the cues of the Germans wrong, always assuming they were on their last legs, for instance reading the German reorganization of the division going from 4 regts to 3 regts as a sign that the Germans were running out of men while in fact the Germans had figured out that it was firepower, not manpower and bayonets that was the key and had trippled or quadrupled MG, mortar and artillery firepower at the division level.

Imagine the Allies shock in 1917 when having induced Rumania into the war to attack Germany who was, as usual, "on her last legs", the Germans rapidly transferred 500,000 men from the Western front and smashed the Rumanians. How could they do that? One French minister, having studied German casualty lists as published in hometown newspapers (dismissed by the French as Propaganda) rapidly did the math and found that the disparity between French casualty estimates and published German casualty reports was about a half million guys!

I bring up these little tidbits as examples of how Armies at one time or another can easily fall off the band wagon, or fail to climb on.

Los

[ November 10, 2003, 10:04 PM: Message edited by: Los ]

[JasonC]

A word of caution about assuming things in WW I armies, especially imagined ignorance. The western armies knew plenty and knew it early, at the level of a few officers and analysts. But it is much harder than people generally imagine to teach anything to millions of men in the field, actually fighting.

And there was more incompetence getting things passed down, through layers of people who did not understand it or its importance themselves, than you can imagine. This was a particular acute problem for the British, who were fielding the first real mass army in their history.

The Brits had officers by mid 1915 that knew the importance of raiding tactics, grenades, mortars, LMGs pushed forward, heavy shell, careful prep and planning, limited objectives, surprise, etc.

And they also had men landing in France about to serve in artillery units in the line who'd never so much as touched the gun type they were going to use, who had practiced around pictures drawn on the ground in pantomine as their "gunnery training". And others about to go into the line as infantrymen who had drilled with broomsticks in place of rifles, or had shot less than a dozen rounds out of shared, old rifles of a make no longer in service, whose sergeants shot their quals for them to pass them on, etc.

Armies are not composed of general staff officers whose entire lives have been spent in military education. The competence of an army is not measured by the theoretical knowledge of its leading officers. It is a distributed thing, from a few who know so much and a green mass who don't know diddly. The problem is always to coordinate the placement of such scarce know-how as can actually be attained, so the ignorant get reasonable orders they have some hope of carrying out.

[Andreas]

Los, 'collusion' is almost certainly the wrong word. Can't think of one to describe what I want to say that is not loaded to some extent. My point was that these officers would reinforce each others' beliefs - not necessarily consciously, but just by working around each other all the time. AIUI many of them were co-located, because they were still deemed POW.

Regarding dissemination etc. Armies are complex organisations. They do not often give the right incentives at the right time. They quite often seem to reward 'being one of us', and punish thinking outside the box. At least that is what it seems like from the outside.

A different failure of intelligence (in this case failure to convey a message from the front to the rear) was the US intel analysis failure to detect the German build-up to 'Wacht am Rhein', where the local officers seemed to have a good idea that something was about to happen, but higher ups did not want to listen.

On a personal note - when I was promoted to Gefreiter after six months' service in April 1989, our Squadron commander (a captain) gave us a rabble-rousing speech about how the Soviets could not be trusted, that they were still building hundreds of fighter-jets and tanks every month, and that we had to be on our guard against their treachery. Two weeks later he left to become a major and responsible for political/social education of conscripts in the Luftwaffe. About six months later the Warsaw Pact collapsed. It was clear to me while listening to him that while he clearly lived on the same planet as me, he was in a different world.

[Joachim]

Human waves in CM do work - both in QBs and the Editor:

QB: Allied Parameters are Low experience, Infantry only, attack. Give the AI a bonus of at least 100%. Number of turns at least 50 for a medium sized summer map - to allow the Soviets to find your positions.

Then wait.

Do use mech or infantry force type for yourself. Combined arms if you are less daring.

Make sure the AI has enough points to buy full Co's or even btns. It needs the leaders.

Scenario Editor:

Buy the Soviets lots of conscripts%greens. Group them in 3 waves, each at least 10 turns later than the first.

Or play a campaign with BCR. I promise you will see lots of those fights...

AAR for a recent QB with those campaign rules:

Even on the offense, my armor-heavy force (about 3000 points, 8 tanks, 4 guns and a reinforced Co of motorized PzGrens in '42) was stopped in a ruined city by 1400 partisans. I ran out of ammo, my infantry was stripped from the tanks in dense terrain, I had but little smoke. Was only able to contest 1/3rd of the flags, kills made it a lucky draw.

A more realistic scenario:

What is probably more realistic is the GD Romanian Defence scenario. The intro says a first wave of 8 T34 is followed by 20+ T34s and 300 grunts. GD forces consist of 2 PaK 75/L48 and two infantry companies, one of them at 60% - plus lots of StuKas, including Rudel.

You've got a wave of T34s followed by a moderate amount of infantry. That moderate amount of infantry (acutally about the same amount than what the Axis player has) will look like a big human wave to the few survivors and annihilate the remnants of what the T34s left over pretty soon.

(Spoiler: Move the PaK to the trenches. You can rotate fixed trenches and get PaKs behind a crest in a trench. )

Gruß

Joachim

[ November 11, 2003, 11:03 AM: Message edited by: Scarhead ]

[Other Means]

i don't think it would be collusion as much as them all sharing the same paradigm. they were all in similar military positions. such positions get much the same information, most of it passed laterally. therefore they would all come to the same conclusions. the veracity of that conclusion is to be questioned.

even ascribing the German Officers the highest of motives, they may have explained their own failures the same way. this is just how people & organisations work.

[Andreas]

Thanks other means - 'paradigm' was indeed the word I was looking for.