SteppenWolf Posted January 31, 2003 Share Posted January 31, 2003 Maybe this came up before, but I'm wondering about one thing. In several QB I played I bought whole tank platoons. Now how come in a tank platoon with multiple regular and green units a green unit becomes the HQ? Wouldn't normaly be the most experienced people be used to coordinate the fight? SteppenWolf 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Dorosh Posted January 31, 2003 Share Posted January 31, 2003 Yes, and the smartest people in the Army are always made officers. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JasonC Posted January 31, 2003 Share Posted January 31, 2003 Like he said. The answer is "definitely not". Rank and ability are two entirely different things, and armies often make precious little effort trying to get them to coincide. Even when they do attempt it, they don't succeed all the time. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Warmaker Posted January 31, 2003 Share Posted January 31, 2003 You really need to be around some officers. Especially Lieutenants. While there are some great O's out there, there are some guys that leave you wondering what degree did they get and where. Then again, the same can be said of some enlisted guys to an extent 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteppenWolf Posted January 31, 2003 Author Share Posted January 31, 2003 maybe I got that a bit wrong. Ok I can understand if regular troops represent an HQ over veterans and up. Since like you all said in the real world it's not always competence that gets you forward... Maybe I just take the manual to serious: It sais about green units: "Second Line" troops. Received basic trainng but have little if no combat experience. Now I can understand if an ad-hoc assembled unit full of greens has a green HQ, but my point is you would go to somebody who finished basic training and say "Here is your tank platoon kid, now go and play in the big snowy area there to the east... bye, have fun!"... SteppenWolf 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SgtMuhammed Posted January 31, 2003 Share Posted January 31, 2003 Unfortunatly that is exactly how it happens. New officers are given their shake and bake training and whamo they are leading troops. Many armies even shake and bake their NCOs. Your experienced cadre tends to get overshadowed by this influx of newness as even the best leader needs time to get everyone on the same sheet of music. The easiest way is to spend an extended time training together. Unfortunatly this isn't always an option so you end up with the faster but more dangerous methode of simulation using 1 to 1 scale with targets that fire back, IOW combat. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sergei Posted January 31, 2003 Share Posted January 31, 2003 Originally posted by SteppenWolf: "Second Line" troops. Received basic trainng but have little if no combat experience. Now I can understand if an ad-hoc assembled unit full of greens has a green HQ, but my point is you would go to somebody who finished basic training and say "Here is your tank platoon kid, now go and play in the big snowy area there to the east... bye, have fun!"...Well, the experience level is supposed to have more to do with combat skills than with leadership, although they are both represented with one exp. I think a "green" HQ is the sort that has gone through a rather short period of training, and the officer in the team has done his cadet school or whatever but hasn't had much of experience outside the school. So the officer himself has more than basic training although his aides don't, but he still hasn't gained the kind of experience you would normally get by drilling real conscripts in the boot camp. And while this freshly new officer has had a normal amount of training for that post, he hasn't had as much combat exercise as his "regular" subordinates would. Also experience level is an average of the whole team, so a regular officer might be hampered by conscript aides, and thus the HQ is green. Actually I would like to have more detailed experience/skill attributes, so that for example a HQ tank would have different entries for platoon leadership, squad leadership, and the gunner's rating. Not all good squad leaders make good platoon leaders, and the leader's ratings have little to do with how well the gunner hits his targets. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JasonC Posted January 31, 2003 Share Posted January 31, 2003 It is very simple. In combat, people break as well as things, and they need to be replaced. New parts are newer than old parts. Vasili saw two years of hard fighting and knew his equipment, men, and tactics inside out. A hard bitten fellow of 45, he fought in the civil war as a young private and lived through everything that followed. When men dropped like flies in 1941, he was promoted on the battlefield. But at Kursk, a round hit his T-34 and Vasili gets to hop around on one foot for the rest of his life. His experienced sergeants miss the old dog, but that's war. Meanwhile Stepan is a bright young man, the son of an engineer and small party official, with an IQ of 120. He attended a polytechnic institute. At age 20, he graduated from his armor officer school, but the shots he has seen fired were all on training grounds. He had a secure and relatively pampered urban upbringing, and saw his first dead body, and his first live German, last week. He still has rosy red cheeks and barely needs to shave. Stepan issues orders to Vasili's old hand sergeants. In time, if he lives, he may even learn as much as Vasili knew; he is bright enough though it remains to be seen if he is tough enough. But right now? "But wouldn't they just promote one of the old hand sergeants instead?" No. Not unless they had no other choice, in a battlefield crisis. That is what we are explaining to you. Armies are social entities, with class structures, privileges and pecking orders, imported from the whole surrounding society. They do not do things like conduct gunnery competitions and hand out platoon command to the best shot. Ability and rank have precious little to do with each other, even when armies try to get them to coincide, because they can't succeed at that all of the time. And often, they don't even try very hard. Murphy's laws say among other things that the most dangerous thing on a battlefield is a green 2nd Lieutenant with a map and compass. As for what is means to be "green", it means they have been trained but have not seen action. A month or two of real combat can remove greenness. No amount of drill and training can - at least of the sorts and amounts powers managed to provide up to WW II (and well beyond, come to that, through the Nam era certainly). [ January 31, 2003, 10:31 AM: Message edited by: JasonC ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Das Reich Posted January 31, 2003 Share Posted January 31, 2003 Originally posted by SteppenWolf: Maybe this came up before, but I'm wondering about one thing. In several QB I played I bought whole tank platoons. Now how come in a tank platoon with multiple regular and green units a green unit becomes the HQ? Wouldn't normaly be the most experienced people be used to coordinate the fight? SteppenWolf I think it is realistic to have green HQ's leading veteran or regular platoons. Look at it this way, their previous platoon HQ was promoted to company commander, transfered, or ended up a casualty. They would have to replace the platoon HQ from somewhere. And there are only so many veterans and regulars in the army. A new guy has to start somewhere. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeyD Posted January 31, 2003 Share Posted January 31, 2003 You should rent that classic Eastern Front war/anti-war movie "Cross of Iron". In it the Prussian officer was played as a strutting incompetent oaf. If memory serves, during the final battle he coldn't even operate his rifle! So officers with less experience than troops is a time-honored tradition. And on the U.S. side, in Vietnam enlisted men would frag their more dangerous C.O.s (toss a fragmentation grenade into his tent) as a final act of sheer self-preservation. [ January 31, 2003, 11:18 AM: Message edited by: MikeyD ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Das Reich Posted January 31, 2003 Share Posted January 31, 2003 Originally posted by MikeyD: And on the U.S. side, in Vietnam enlisted men would frag their more dangerous C.O.s (toss a fragmentation grenade into his tent) as a final act of sheer self-preservation. Thats not very nice... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CombinedArms Posted January 31, 2003 Share Posted January 31, 2003 You can also read Charles MacDonald's classic "Company Commander"--a memoir of his career as a company commander in the US 2nd Division where MacDonald shows up as a green as grass Captain in Belgium fall 1944 and is placed in command of a veteran infantry company that had fought its way across France. You might ask why they didn't just promote one of the platoon commanders to company CO, but that isn't what happened. I'm guessing the army just said, we have this captain who needs an assignment and we have an opening for a company CO over in F coy., so he's it.--And actually he performed very well, but I'm guessing it didn't always work. Interestingly, you'll sometimes see a Green HQ with juicy combat bonuses in command of, say, some vet squads, while a regular HQ in the next platoon doesn't have the bonuses. Question: are you better off with the green HQ w/bonuses or the regular w/o? From a gaming perspective, how would their performance differ? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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