Nashorn and Marder- endangered species?

[Krautman]

I recently set up a scenario in October 1943, south, cool, clouded sky. A crack Nashorn and a regular/vet Füsilier 43 cpy were about to defend against reg/vet russian Guards infantry and lots of T-34/43 (late).

The Nashorn was supposed to lie in wait, snipe at the russian armor and then take up another position. (It was hidden in scattered trees, with gentle slopes to allow a hull-down position).

Now when the first lone T-34 appeared at 800m, the odds seemed quite good: The Nashorn's crew, gun, optics, and position should provide a nice advantage. The fact that the Nashorn was in scattered trees obviously hid it from the T-34's sight a few seconds. The Nashorn was able to fire three shots before the T-34 (regular) fired its first. The Nashorn's three shots missed, the T-34's first one hit home and knocked the Nashorn out.

Bad luck, I thought, and tried the scenario again, and again, and another time. Results were almost similar: Usually one T-34 knocked out, then the Nashorn was lost. All duels were one-to-one, the Nashorn always had a hull-down position, the T-34s did not. The Nashorn always fired first. It hit with the third shot, the first two never seemed to hit (at 700-800m). As soon as a T-34 could get a first shot, it hit more often than not: Usually the Nashorn was killed by the first shot that was fired on it. (Although once two upper hull penetrations without effect occured)

The editor gave a hit % of 30-35 for the Nashorn, in said position and distance. The T-34s had 14-16%. I'll test again, probably this was bad luck in a row, but it seems strange. I remember Marders to also be rather useless against T-34s, despite their being able to penetrate and kill their opponent nearly just as well as the T-34s. The T-34s, in my impression -and I play both sides- seem to hit quite well. Have you had good experience using Nashorn, Marder & co?

Greetings

Krautman

[JasonC]

At 800m, the Nashorn is a waste. Any gun will do at that range, and the reply fire is going to be deadly rapidly, if you don't kill him first. A Nashorn wants to fire from 1500 to 2500 meters. The chance of a hit from the reply is quite small. It may need 2-3 rounds to get the range, but after that its own hit chance will be teens to low twenties, enough to get a kill in a minute or so. (It will stop climbing in the low teens if the target is moving fast, though).

Marders from 800m are sensible, the idea being just to get first shot and be favored that way, and that you are using a less valuable item, so you don't much care if you trade off on average. A PAK 40 is used the same way, with better stealth, but not able to relocate to do it again if successful.

As for T-34s always hitting on the first shot, um no, that is just being fooled by randomness. They miss just like everything else, more so even at the longer ranges. Can be relatively slow to pick up targets, too (2 main turret), particularly if you button them first. The gun will penetrate these SPATs readily, and the behind armor effect with full penetrations is good - though as you saw, sometimes NSDs still happen (particularly vs. larger AFVs).

[Corvidae]

with a nashorn,

range is your freind ,

shoot and scoot will keep you alive ,

you are in an open topped box made of thin sheet metal, think of it a cardboard or plywood, not steel,

at 800 meters you realy need to force the soviets to button, distract them with ATR fire or a mortar or something ,

for the price of a nashorn you can buy a 75 mm PAK

and a half track to tow it ,. and still have change to buy stuff,

I'm not even gonna talk about the marder.

NO NO you cant make me !!!!

[76mm]

Generally I've had really poor luck with Marders as well, but in a recent scenario I had a green Marder on the attack bag 3 T-34s (against the AI) and survive the battle...unbelievable!

[Guest Mike]

I've found Nashorns rarely hit at their "preferred" range, whereas any return hit still Ko's them - and there's usually quite a lot of return fire very quickly.

Firing "shoot and scoot" invariably ends up with them out of ammo having achived sweet FA.

[ParaBellum]

I have used them on the defense quite effectively in the past. Give them vet crews, use keyholeing positions and place target reference points to help their accuracy. What worked best for me was using a team of them. Advance one to hull-down position, fire two-three rounds, reverse and advance the other into hull down position, fire two-three rounds, rinse and repeat.

Overall I don't like them too much since they are extremely vulnerable to return fire and we can't really ambush with hidden (camouflaged) vehicles in CM, so AT guns usually work far better. I'd really like to see an option to camoe vehicles in CMx2. What we currently have (the "hide" command for vehicles)just doesn't work.

[tankibanki]

ot: What does the hide command do? I've been wondering about that all along.

[MikeyD]

I recently bought a new Concord reference book on the Eastern Front. In it was a shot of a Nashorn with a caption underneath saying something like 'The most effective anti-tank vehicle of the war'. My immediate response was 'Not by my CMBB experience it wasn't!"

At least with normal CM LOS ranges against multiple targets.

[Joachim]

Try to close the hatches of the T34s first so you get more shots without return fire. An MG might do the trick. But you have to be in turret down, blind the T34, then hunt forward to hull down from the side or rear vs the blinded T34 to get the full effect.

But a Nashorn really is a waste at these ranges - except maybe against IS tanks.

Gruß

Joachim

[Joachim]

There are some tips on tanks and SP ATGs in this thread:

http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=7;t=002065;p=2

Plus a link to the TPG for a small training scen with Marders. Your lone Nashorn ignored two principles for "eggshells with hammers": Blinding the enemy and many on few.

Gruß

Joachim

[John Kettler]

Krautman,

Borg spotting (one sees, all know) and the lack of modeling of German smokeless flashless propellant are part of the reason your game weapons don't perform like their real life counterparts. These two factors alone effectively gut most of the combat potential of your force.

In real combat, though, American tankers complained bitterly about how hard it was to spot a German tank, SP or antitank gun firing, even when they knew roughly where to look. Likewise, an account in the now defunct armor mag AFV-G2 by former WW2 German antitank specialist Kurt Fischer regarding a Marder platoon engagement on the Eastern Front indicates that even those weapons were quite capable of inflicting terrible losses on the T-34s while surviving themselves. Remember, too, that doctrinally Russian tanks attack buttoned, drastically reducing their abilty to see the battlefield and respond to threats.

In the referenced Marder engagement, T-34s started exploding in rapid succession, with tanks milling about in confusion for minutes on end trying to figure out where the fire was coming from. During this confusion, the Marders shifted location and repeated the process, coordinating their actions by radio. Contrast this with CM, where firing a main gun brings withering counterfire in a minute--from every gun that'll bear. Begin to see

why you're having such a rough time of it?

Regards,

John Kettler

[JasonC]

JK - propaganda loves outliers. There is no way the average Marder accounted for more than one kill over its operational life. The Nashorns probably did better, and might have reached 2. The same goes for PAK incidentally. Yes in successful ambushes they would sometimes run the local table and live. But the operative word is "sometimes", which can be amended to "rarely". There aren't enough dead Russian tanks to justify all the "every weapon killed scads and lived" fish stories...

[John Kettler]

JasonC,

I'm well aware that not every weapon killed scads and scads, just as I'm well aware that only a few men in a given unit generate a disproportionate number of kills--while the rest do little or nothing. Some even hinder their units before being captured or killed.

That said, the fact remains that well handled forces time and again inflicted disproportionate losses on the enemy, even when using inferior equipment against a much larger force. The Flying Tigers are one good example, the Polish Air Force vs. the Luftwaffe in 1939 another (severity of Luftwaffe losses only recently recognized), and the meager fighter resources on Malta (down to a single Gloster Gladiator at one point) a third. Even if you cut Rudel's tank kills by 2/3, kills mostly made while flying a plane so overloaded and draining to fly that post battle crashes from sheer fatigue wrestling the unassisted controls

exceeded combat losses, you're still left with someone whose combat productivity rivals that of entire formations, never mind the battleship he sank! Marshal Schoerner considered that Rudel's squadron of Ju87Gs was worth more than an entire regiment of ground troops.

The Army found the same thing in Dragon ATGM live fire testing, which is why it stopped training everyone on how to use the weapon and began testing to find the few who could use the weapon effectively (the handful generating 80% of the hits), making them specialists. Most American fighter pilots got zero kills, but Bong got 40. An extreme example of grokking the problem is reflected in the Russian practice of putting up one or more fighter squadrons specifically to support and protect one ace, say, Pokryshkin or Kozhedub. Marseille got seven aerial kills in a single battle.

It also obtains in armor. While in aggregate American tank crew casualties were so high that a severe shortage occurred by war's end, and well before that per Belton Cooper, it is nevertheless true that people like Creighton Abrams and Lafayette Poole inflicted heavy losses on the Germans relative to their own (Abrams lost three tanks personally that I know of). A Russian husband and wife team on an ISU-122 had 17 kills, and everybody knows about Wittmann.

Units in quiet sectors don't see much action, hence have little opportunity to kill anything, dropping the average kill rate per unit deployed.

Some AFVs are destroyed en route to the battlefield or breakdown and are either overrun by the foe or destroyed by their crews. Again, no kills. Many AFVs enter battle and are hit and disabled or destroyed before they can do a thing, with the same impact as before. The Russians, in the 80s at least, reckoned the combat life of a tank as being 24 hours for a reason. But what of the units in the thick of things, in target rich environments? The History Channel program Panzers had interviews with a Tiger commander from the first Tiger battalion deployed in combat. He described one fight in which his company killed 52 T-34s, 15 of which he got. He went on to say that the usual Tiger to Russian tank ratio was in the 1:12-1:15 range.

Like it or not, JasonC, battles are fought and won by the outliers. A British soldier in Italy got the VC for killing two Panthers in succession, personally and apparently eyeball to eyeball. Audie Murphy stood atop a burning M-10 and pinned down an entire German infantry regiment advancing across a snow covered field. A single German 2cm gun caught a platoon at the edge of the woods and chopped it up so badly that it became combat ineffective in only a few minutes. The Spartans did hold Thermopylae long enough for Greece to organize against the Persians, doing so with a few hundred men against many thousands and gutting the Immortals in the process. A few hundred effectives at most caused some 1500 Mexican casualties at the Alamo, Bastogne was held, and in one case I know of, in Korea a single American soldier, following a night of Chinese human wave attacks, at dawn found himself in sole possession of the hill. And don't forget Camerone and 73 Easting!

Regards,

John Kettler

[Mad Russian]

Originally posted by tankibanki:

ot: What does the hide command do? I've been wondering about that all along.

The hide command makes them quiet. Like telling a squad to hide. Like a squad you want to give them a covered arc if you tell them hide.

[Mad Russian]

Originally posted by JasonC:

JK - propaganda loves outliers. There is no way the average Marder accounted for more than one kill over its operational life. The Nashorns probably did better, and might have reached 2. The same goes for PAK incidentally. Yes in successful ambushes they would sometimes run the local table and live. But the operative word is "sometimes", which can be amended to "rarely". There aren't enough dead Russian tanks to justify all the "every weapon killed scads and lived" fish stories...

What people often forget, as they read the after action reports, where a soldier wins a high decoration like the Knight's Cross, is that such actions are not typical.

They are just the ones that are written about the most and impress the reader the most.

Killing 10 tanks in an engagement, and winning the Knight's Cross, or Hero of the Soviet Union, has won that commander the award BECAUSE such actions were very unusual and often death defying.

Meaning that, most of the time, if you even tried what they won the award for you got killed for your actions.

[Mad Russian]

You can win with Nashorns. The key is TRP's.

For those of you inclined to do so, try HSG KC Lt. Ernst. It can be found on The Scenario Depot II.

You have to attack with Nashorns(read that a platoon of Nashorns!!!) at close range!

Do so correctly and you win the Knight's Cross! Mess this up and you go home in a pine box...

Pine boxes are easier to come by than KC's...think about it...

[Krautman]

Thanks for the replies. I don't get the argument with the Nashorn's vulnerability, because the T-34 is just as or even more vulnerable to the NH's return fire. Thanks, Joachim, for the link. The "many on few" approach is surely sensible, but probably more accessible to the russian side...

To find out more about the Nashorn's performance vs. T-34s, I set up a test scenario. October 1943, cool, breeze, ten regular Nashorns (108 pts each) vs ten regular T-34/43(late) (113 pts), open, flat terrain. Each duel pair had its own lane; separated from the others by pine trees. I ran the scenario 5 times for each range. Results will not add up to 50 each time, due to both vehicles destroyed or fleeing.

range: 2000m; Nashorn: 13% to hit T-34, chance to destroy it: good; T-34: 7%/good.

Outcome: Nashorn:T-34 36:10

1500m; Nashorn: 22%/very good; T-34: 15%/good

Outcome: 36:15. Up til now basically confirming what Jason said.

1000m; 34%/very good; 29%/good

Outcome: 23:31. This really surprised me: The T-34s were winners at that range, at least in these 5x 10 vs 10 duels. This might lead to the audacious and probably even heretical theory that the 76.2 is OVERmodeled, at least concerning accuracy...

No, just kidding. The results in the individual rounds were always extreme, e.g. 2:8 and then 7:3. Might be due to happenstance. However, it becomes clear why the T-34 and the "Ratsch-Bumm" were that much feared.

John Kettler, interesting info about the propellant. Never heard of that before. Btw i've seen a pic of a W-SS Marder with some 15-20 victory rings painted on the barrel, the commander proudly displaying various crosses.

Panther Commander: can you benefit from TRPs when the vehicle has already moved? What about when it just rotated?

Greetings

Krautman

[ March 08, 2006, 07:56 AM: Message edited by: Krautman ]

[JasonC]

JK - romanticism dies hard, but it still dies.

The flying tigers had P-40s with 325 mph top speed and well over 450 mph dive speed and were armed with 6 50 cals, against Oscars and Sallys armed with WW I era single and duel 30 cals. They had to learn not to turn with the Oscars, then they were golden. One pass, untouchable.

Luftwaffe losses in Poland were not all due to the Polish air force. There was also simply the high sortie rate in a green force leading to accidents and mechanical losses, and plenty of ground fire. Also, it was the Polish air force that got wiped out.

The fighters on Malta were not mostly Gladiators but mostly Spitfires and some Hurricanes, and most of the aircraft they faced were Italian types flown by not the best pilots in the world. Also, own side kill claims are always greatly exaggerated. What is true is that total sorties from a modest number of planes can be pushed rather high if you are reckless or desparate enough.

For the nth time, air to ground kill claims by the pilots themselves are not high by a factor of 3, they are high by a factor of up to 50, using enemy side loss reports. And it is not clear a regiment of infantry is worth all that much against a serious Russian offensive. Anything that can help at multiple points of threat in succession and live to do it again it valuable, obviously.

Examples from smart weapons are an entirely different matter and mixing them up with ordinary weapon systems will always lead to errors about the latter. Smart weapons actually can reach 50% kill rates per shot, no conventional weapon ever has. It is one reason the active phase of modern wars last days or at most weeks, not years.

As for the distribution of kills by fighter pilots, again discounting inflated claims, if there were no skill involved at all there would still be a large range of achieved kills. Discrete distributions of hundreds of thousands of pilots and millions of sorties will always have a tail of zeros on one side, and a long thin slice of higher and higher outcomes on the other. Even if they are coin flips.

The actually distributions seens do reflect some skill differences. Pareto distributions are expected when skill in the main factor, binomial distributions (of various types, depending on the question you are asking) if there is no skill (varying probability tied to the particular agent) involved. It is basically enough to assume there is a normal distribution of skill tied roughly linearly to probability, and then a binomial of trial to trial outcomes. You can tune the "roughly linearly" bit to get an exact fit to known outliers.

In the specific case of fighter combat it is somewhat obscured by group tactics, because the results are not actually independent. A wingman gets few kills while keeping his leader's tail clear to allow him to get his own, for example. There is also the matter of fate on own shoot-downs, getting home damaged or living through crash landings, etc. And there are plane quality differences - it is not exactly surprising that Oscars lose to P-38s.

On armor and the US, the death trap nonsense is anger from an ignorant mechanic. In reality, losses in US armor battalions were a third or less those in the infantry, and you were vastly safer in a tank than not. The US outscored the Germans in full AFV kills, though the two figures are close. Having numbers and logistical superiority and the overall initiative is better than having a thicker front armor plate. They Germans did fine in Pz IIIs when they had those things, and the Americans did fine in Shermans when they had them. Since at worst they traded evenly, and the usual binomials apply even in the absence of any actual skill, it is completely unsurprising that many US tankers were "aces".

As for the idea that averages can be established just by quite fronts balancing romantic achievements everywhere there is actual fighting, it does not stand examination. Because the theorem applies not to individual days but to entire service lives. And units do not spend their entire service lives inactive.

Yes some AFVs are KOed before they KO anything, that is sort of the whole point. And sometimes, horror of horrors, they aren't T-34 clay pigeon targets but are actual Marders driven by people with blond hair! Yes, shocking I know, but sometimes the T-34 hits the Marder before the reverse, and the Marder kill count over its service life clocks in at "zero". That is sort of the whole point of the comment.

Getting your operations analysis from the History Channel has some drawbacks. Snicker.

Own side kill claims are always wrong, and even own side officers gave them 50% haircuts (for ground units - for air, as already mentioned, they have no relation to the facts on the ground and miss by 2 orders of magnitude regularly). Every Tiger fish story ever told says the same thing - my Tiger or the best one got 14 or 15 tanks in just one engagement, presented as completely normal. Now try to pretend it actually is normal, and the Russians run out of tanks around August 1943 and lose the war.

The reality is a typical Tiger accounted for more like 4 enemy tanks over the course of the entire battle of Kursk. And was sent to the workshops itself in reply. Over its service life, 5 to 10 is the likely number taken out. For every one that does better there are another 3 that do worse, etc. (AG Kempf one company manages to lose 9 out of 14 to their own minefields on the first day, and 4 more to enemy fire).

And no, battles are not won by outliers, they are won by slow industrial processes of average and progressive attrition. You can write insurance on such things. You can readily predict what happens when unit an echelon larger hits unit an echelon smaller and you will be right most of the time, because the outliers break both ways and there are gobs of them piled on top of each other independently, both sides have high tails of their skill distributions represented and present, and anything independent piled high enough becomes Gaussian. Command decisions, because they operate independent of scale in effect, can toss in real noise in addition, but individual bottom up skills basically never matter, net, at the operational level.

Stopping platoons really doesn't matter very much, let alone taking out individual tanks. As for larger unit stories, Murphy didn't use a 50 cal alone, he used a radio. It was the artillery, of course, and a lot of cannon cockers who sweated but did not really risk themselves and therefore got no glory out of it. Seeing how artillery inflicted 70% of the causalties, there is a lot of that going around. But then it is an industrial process of progressive attrition and not romanticism, so...

As for famous last stands, um, the Spartans and their allies got stomped, as did the Alamo'ers, and no it didn't do much of anything for the rest of the war in either case. Might have inspired the courage of a few on their own side with sympathetic romanticism, but the first war had to be won by the Athenian navy and the second by the regular US army.

As for Bastogne, there were more infantry battalions inside the perimeter than outside of it. That is why the Germans could not reduce it - they simple did not have odds. They had more armor - for a while - but sent most of it past the position on the exploitation attempt. It was a gallant feat of arms certainly, but not caused by individual prowess nor one man fighting like 10 or 20. It was caused by enemy difficulties, one man fighting like one man, and rapid relief by entire counterattacking corps.

As for Chinese infantry attacks, the famous wags line is how many hordes are there in a Chinese platoon? They sent companies at a time, that is what made it a matter of waves. They also used weapons with ranges of 100 yards or less, with little in the way of heavy support. The US countered with mines and wire and artillery and mortars and machineguns. And, yes, the bullets in the rifles, whose great virtue was being fired slowly enough to last a night.

How do lone surviviors happen, though? Not by one guy wiping out attacking battalions, but by artillery wiping out attacking battalions while and after they kill most of the defenders, and somebody lives through it and afterward stands up in the rubble caused by wrath of the higher echelon gods, not his own small arm.

War is a bloody industrial process of averages and attrition, not a Sergeant Rock comic book.

[MikeyD]

[ooops! Double post]

[ March 08, 2006, 08:13 AM: Message edited by: MikeyD ]

[MikeyD]

Ah, Sgt Rock comic books - I'm all nostalgic now. I remember one issue the good sergant had survived all the way to the mid-sixties Vietnam war era as a grizzled old master sergant! It seemed preposterous then, but 1945 is to 1965 as 1986 is to 2006. Doesn't sound so unlikely looke at that way!

"Dragon ATGM live fire testing, which is why it stopped training everyone on how to use the weapon and began testing to find the few who could use the weapon effectively (the handful generating 80% of the hits), making them specialists." Huh! I did not know that. Reminds me of the general abuse RPG accuracy gets in the press, where 80% of the time they don't hit anything either!

[Andreas]

There are at least two sig lines in Jason's excellent post.

All the best

Andreas

[Black Jack Pershing II]

No, just kidding. The results in the individual rounds were always extreme, e.g. 2:8 and then 7:3. Might be due to happenstance. However, it becomes clear why the T-34 and the "Ratsch-Bumm" were that much feared.

I think this is more a result of the borg spotting highlighted in one of Kettler's posts. Once an AFV has KO'd its opponent it is immediately able to turn its fire on other AFV's in LOS. As I suspect you saw, once multiple guns are targetting a single AFV, its chances of KO'ing its opponents before being KO'd itself drop significantly. This then has a snowball effect (assuming all the AFVs in your test are in each other's LOS), and results in lopsided final outcomes.

[Corvidae]

The lone hero, and the small nucleus of heroes, is indeed a thing of both myth and history, Propagandists have always romanticized the absurd miracles that pop up here and there ,

But yes , the reality is that its whole organizations and plans that win battles and wars ,

Not the posterboy with the perfect smile who ends up being paraded for public consumption,

Victors write the history books , and they want to look impressive , they also want the enemy to look scary, Propaganda must ballance these factors ,

so the official historys will say that the evil marder crews were almost unstopable untill OUR brave and moraly superior boys came along in our tiny (but not too tiny) shermans, and saved the world,

In the mean time the marder was a pathetic tin box with a good gun but usualy a piss poor crew, It had suply problems , it was tall and easy to spot ,, hard to hide, and only good from ambush,

Vulnerable and weak, , it had to kill on the first shot ,, or it was dead,

against Shermans , T34s, Cromwells,,

Hell against a vickers 6 ton crewed by drunken welsh grandmothers, the marder could be beaten,

Like all weak weapons ,, the marder hunted in packs , to offset the weakness of the individual unit,

A force of marders crewed by conscript schoolgirls, could with minimal training and a bit of quick thinking , kill a LONE Sherman or a LONE Pershing,

and as long as young Elle and Mari keep their marders rocking back and forth to draw american fire , Their freind Lilly can keep killing american uber tanks with side shots all day ,, untill a competent american shows up to tell his fellow countrymen to smarten up and flank the defenders,

As JasonC said ,, Its the outliers that we read about ,, the rare freak who gets lucky and beats the odds,

And who makes it to the propaganda desk,

But Waterloo was won on the soccer fields of Etton and Camridge,

and the Bulge was won at Stalingrad and west point together, with a lot of help from detroit,

[Joachim]

Originally posted by Krautman:

... Thanks, Joachim, for the link. The "many on few" approach is surely sensible, but probably more accessible to the russian side...

The trick in CM is to either be (almost) invulnerable - or to achieve local odds in firefights between even tanks who can kill each other.

If you have 4 Marders on a reverse slope and 10 T34s cross a ridge one per turn, the Marders will most likely run out of AP ammo after killing the first 6 T34s. If you put all on a flat map, the Marders are dead.

Repeat your test with 10 Nashorns vs 4 T34s on a flat map and the results should be 4 dead T34s vs less than 2 dead Nashorns.

Put another 4 T34s vs the remnants and there should be 4 more wrecked T34s. There should be still more than 6 Nashorns around except for outliers. Now put another 2 T34s on the map and you will have at least 5 Nashorns left.

The same should happen with Marders instead of Nashorns.

Some simple statistical calculations show that odds work.

It is your task to achieve local odds. It is often very hard, sometimes impossible due to terrain and opponent. That's why I made the Marder scen. The terrain is very difficult for the Marders. But if you master that scen, you know how to maneuver with groups of AFVs, use inf support in the armor battle and how to evaluate the terrain to select firing positions.

Read that report on the Marders? They used radio to coordinate their attack. Probably crew members scouted firing positions on foot while the tanks were turret down. In CM you can't do that. But borg spotting works for you, too. And you can check LOS from points where you are not. You can't do this with the LOS tool. But you have eyeball Mk I and the "1" view to give you hints. If you are well-trained the hunt command will do the rest more often than not. It is just micromanagement and training.

If both opponents don't know the power of local odds, luck decides the battle. If only one player knows the trick, the other will complain about his inferior tanks. If both know it, skill and some luck will decide the battle.

Gruß

Joachim

[Dook]

I don't mean to pile on here, but I also don't see how 73 Easting supports an argument that the outcomes of battles are determined by the performance of a few extraordinary individuals (outliers).

In that battle, one troop from the US 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment (9 M1 Abrams tanks and 12 M3 Bradley fighting vehicles) met and destroyed 37 Iraqi T72 tanks and 32 other vehicles in about 40 minutes). Later action involving additional US and Iraqi forces resulted in a total of 113 Iraqi AFVs destroyed and some 600 Iraqi casualties. One Bradley and one crew member were lost to Iraqi fire (another Bradley was lost to friendly fire).

Although 73 Easting was a resounding victory for a smaller force against a larger force, it was in no way unrepresentative of other engagements during the Gulf War. At Medina Ridge, the 2nd Brigade of 1st Armored annhilated the 2nd Brigade of the Iraqi Republican Guard Medina division in 40 minutes. At Objective Norfolk, two battalions from the 1st ID destroyed more than 100 armored vehicles from the Iraqi Tawakalna and 12th Armored divisions with a loss of only two Bradleys. Every engagment in which there was a head-on clash between US forces and Iraqi forces ended up the same way - a decisive victory for the US forces.

Nor does it seem that the performances of particular individuals accounted for the lopsided victories. At 73 Easting, 85 percent of the 215 shots fired by 2nd ACR crews hit their targets. Everybody shot and shot well.

73 Easting was not an example of a battle being fought and won by the outliers. It was an example of a numerically inferior force with superior doctrine, organization, training, logistics, and personnel decisively beating a larger but less skilled force.

Stats and the core of the argument above are found in Stephen Biddle's "Victory Misunderstood: What the Gulf War Tells Us About the Future of Conflict," International Security (Autumn 1996). See also his new book, Military Power (2005).