How to not lose when given a crappy setup?

[With Clusters]

I recently watched a documentary on the famous charge, where historians and scientists did a more thurough examination of events, including visiting and studying the battlefield (discovering exactly who could see what from where - apparently the officer immediately in charge could not see the intended gun battery to target from his position, and thus attacked the wrong one), along with going over written eye witness acounts (including those of survivors of the charge). Apparently, only light casualties were suffered during the charge itself - the charge was to swift for the Russians to get off more than a few volleys at the English. The majority occured after the English had reached the guns, often in bloody dismounted hand to hand combat, and then in the retreat after they were driven off. One thing they also noted was that the casualities were greatly over reported (I forget the exact number, but perhaps less than a third, and certainly less than half). It seemed that the English had a wierd propensity to romantisize 'glorious disasters', and thus talked up the battle into an even more bloody and doomed (and thus more heroic, I suppose) affair than it actually was.

Way off topic, sorry!

[Joachim]

Originally posted by willbell:

You guys are all overthinking this. There are examples of attacking against odds in history, doesn't have to be many or common. Also, we're talking about a range severity in a bad QB, they're not all hopelss. We are playing a game, with lots of abstractions, with digital guys, not real guys. You don't get any points for living to fight another day, but you will lose points for failing to take the flag.

You can be a pussy and just bounce from QB to QB looking for a downhill game, or you can have a little sand and go for what ever gets thrown your way.

There are occasions when you have to make a stand even if you'll get hurt. No game in CM is one of those occasions. Want to prove something with a QB???

What really counts is whether you would make your stand in a situation like that in RL. And that Finnish commander - a true hero. Risking death to save his men. Absolutely adorable.

Gruß

Joachim

[Joachim]

Originally posted by tar:

Hmmm. This seems to be a very attritionist view of battle. I think that a lot of the maneuver theorists, and proponents of the "indirect approach' would argue that you win wars by breaking the will and ability of the enemy to resist. This is not necessarily the same thing as causing casualties, although that is one unimaginative way to stop enemy resistance.

If you think of what happened to France in 1940, it is clear that the Germans had not inflicted unsustainable casualties on the French. It was rather that they had been outmaneuvered and with the breakthrough and threat to Paris were defeated psychologically rather than physically. In general, trying for a dislocating move that demoralizes the enemy is a cheaper and faster way to victory than trying to kill all the enemy.

Nice post on the light brigade.

Could the French replace their losses? In numbers - yes. In combat power - no. They would not have had enough time to fully mobilize the reserves and bring the divisions up to strength or even form new ones. They feared they would be completely overrun much faster (not sure the Germans could have achieved that - but the French probably thought so.)

On my "attritionist" views:

IMHO the debate about attritionist and maneuverist is crap.

Read carefully: "Wars are not won by taking ground. They are won by inflicting more casualties to the enemy than he can replace while sustaining less casualties than you can replace"

You read the attritionist part of the sentence: Inflicting casualties.

Now read the maneuvrist part of the sentence:

"more... than he can replace ... less casualties than you can replace"

That "replace" part is very important. Cause this is where the maneuvrists want to beat the enemy: They want to reduce the replacement rate. Be it morally (shock), logistically (cutting of replacements) or both.

If the enemy has 5 active and 10 reserve divisions, you can either destroy 8 - or destroy 5 and hinder the enemy to raise 5 of his reserve divisions (while keeping your initial strength).

In both cases the enemy will see that resistance is futile.

Gruß

Joachim

[willbell]

With Clusters,

Thanks for the info, I can accept that they charged the wrong battery, it's a fact unearthed due to recent research, bravo!

Your synopsis seems to support my main point, you don't take guns with cavalry becuase, what do they do once they are there? Get shot at, or dismount, therefore no longer being cavalry, losing their mobility, which is the strength of cavalry. They would need infantry support to actually take the battery.

It's the combined arms concept.

[JasonC]

Tar - more maneuverist horsefeathers and straw man slander of attrition strategy.

Threats to Paris exist entirely in your imagination. The Germans did not go south to Paris, they went north to the channel. Because their target was not the French rear areas and C3I, it was their army - which was in Belgium. They used maneuver to create favorable opportunities for annihilation battle - as a multiplier in an attrition logic - not to shock the enemy into surrender or cause C3I paralysis by striking deep non-force objectives.

There are any number of maneuverists who think that is a mistake, but the actual successes they cite were not created by people following their "win without fighting" strategies. They were won by men committed to annihilation battle who saw envelopment and flanking as ways of getting multipliers for such battles.

Wiping out the enemy is no more or less imaginative the driving around him into his capital and hoping he gives up. They are simply alternate things one can aim at. If you aim at something the enemy needs to continue to fight and destroy it, your strategy will work. There is nothing less imaginative about picking that thing to be the fielded forces of the enemy. In fact, that has been the most successful target for most of the successful strategies actually employed in great power war throughout recorded history.

Guderian choose the enemy army as his target. He was not a paltroon. Barbarossa targeted the Russian army in the field for destruction, before it could withdraw into the interior - thus e.g. the turn to Kiev that maneuverists love to second guess. Moltke the elder believed in annihilation battle, and won the wars of German unification on that basis. Lee is supposed to be the masterful maneuverist, but that idjit Grant won. Napoleon, whom the maneuverists want as master of the "indirect approach", used it simply to bring about decisive battle, which was the problem in his era. He said "I see only one thing - the main body of the enemy. This I crush, confident that lesser matters will take care of themselves".

Maneuverists simply do not engage attritionists in conversation. Instead they merely slander them as stupid and unimaginative. Which begs the question. Contrary to their cartoons, military thought is not equivalent to maneuverism. Contrary to their cartoons, even the usefulness of maneuver cannot be reduced to a 12 year old boy's conception "just go around". Slogans are not thoughts. Maneuverism has become an academic ideology, in which those who recite slander of others imagine that doing so makes them smarter than anyone they smear.

And I for one am sick of it. Give it a bleeding rest. If you want to talk about attrition strategy, start by acknowledging that it is a strategy and often a perfectly workable and decisive one. Then you can talk about what conditions it requires and what maneuver can sometimes add to it.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by willbell:

[snips]

Thanks for the info, I can accept that they charged the wrong battery, it's a fact unearthed due to recent research, bravo!

Hardly "recent". I cannot recall ever having read an account of the battle that did not point this error out, and the phrase "curious blunder" was included in Russell's original report on the Charge.

Originally posted by willbell:

Your synopsis seems to support my main point, you don't take guns with cavalry becuase, what do they do once they are there?

Sabre the gunners.

The idea that you don't attack batteries with cavalry is not, I think, one that has any basis in the tactics of the period.

All the best,

John.

[YankeeDog]

In fact, my (granted, limited) understanding of combined arms theory of the period was that cavalry was the *proper* counter a gun position insufficiently supported by infantry -- cavalry moved too quickly for relatively slow firing cannon to target effectively, and once they closed the distance, they could easily overrun a gun battery, killing or driving off the gunners. I seem to recall somwhere that cavalry sometimes carried spikes and hammers to spike the guns if they succeeded in overrunning a battery, but could not hold the ground long enough to actually take capture the guns.

[FM Paul Heinrik]

JasonC,

For the most part I agree, "annihilist" (is that a real word?) warfare is the surest way to win a war. But, it is not so clear cut as just engaging the enemy army and defeating him. There are great risks involved engaging the majority of your troops into the fray, the best results of course result in a decisive victory and the route of the enemy. If you commit and lose, that's it, game over and I think that is the single most important concern of a stragegist. Manuevering buys time and improves intelligence but there is a window of opportunity that opens and closes. Winning through annihilation means you just bust the "window" open and try and win by shock, speed, and the opponents lack of abilities to deal with it.

You referred to classic military actions in which the aggressor won and the "manueverist" lost. In Gen. Lee's case I agree he tried to manuever too much and did not simply commit to battle when he had the advantage, which in hind sight costed him the war. But, with regards to Germany's 1940s Western Campaign it was not that the Germans won decisively through aggressive annihilation of the French, British, and Belgium forces, but the Germans actually "lost" by not being able to out manuever the British forces to annihilate them. Granted the entire blitz tactic is to win by annihilation of the oppossing force but remember that the german command halted the advance to destroy the British because the British managed to retreat faster than the Germans wanted advance, meaning they started to get cold feet, not wanting to commit. It was Rommel (a great maneuverist) that wanted to continue and catch them.

On a side note; this is what I really luv about this forum. There is actually a lot of really good "war" discussion going on here more so than on other military sites. Usually, the other sites seem to bog down into the history or the politics of war instead of the actual war/battle itself.

[willbell]

John,

OK, I will admit out-right ignorance of the wrong battery angle.

But not having cavalry charge a battery, unsupported, was most positively a tactical doctrine of the era. You can't sabre the barrels out of opperation. Dismounting to spike them is dangerous because you might lose your horse and you are a long way from your own lines. You can sabre some gunners, but this would be with enemy infantry around you taking shots at you, and most of the gunners will have run behind some infantry to hide. It's easy to sabre soldiers running away from you, but facing a lines of infantry with guns blazing is another thing entirely, and at this point you don't have a formed charge.

Just check out With Clusters' synopsis, the cavarly dismounted, and were overcome. The cavarly's main strength lies in speed, movement, sudden oblique attacks on unprotected flanks while infantry is otherwise occupied to the front, reforming beyond lines and attacking again from the rear (sometimes), sabering fleeing foe, as long as the cavarly are otherwise unmolested. In short, the cavarly have a great use, but are fragile. They can not stand toe to toe with an infantry formation, period. And those were nearly always in the locality of a battery.

[willbell]

Oops, I should have said Napoleonic era, just to be exact. Kyber pass was later, but the cavarly doctrine still held.

[willbell]

Yankee Dog,

Your impression is correct, as long as you have infantry support. They must be available to move in right behind you to actually hold the ground.

Will

[willbell]

You know, it is not far off from current cavalry doctrine. You get your armor ahead of infantry, stop movement, and it is vulnerable.

[Kobal2]

That's why they use the term "cavalry" for tank units I guess

[willbell]

No, but someone else can take up the flag here.