Battalion actions impacting on a campaign

[willbell]

jim,

I have been thinking about this in the context of CMXX being the corner stone in a larger campaign as well. Part of the problem is thinking in terms of each individual player being the top dog. We tend to always think in terms of four quarters and the final tally. In fact, the CM battles and campaigns are mostly designed from the same point of view. Even the scoring system in CM tends to bend the design process into this way of thinking. But what if you were to consider a whole different set of outcomes. For instance, what if in a probe it was not a question of whether or not you killed more enemy than the other guy. What if the probe involved having to make a decision as to whether you would be better off withdrawing at that particular time? So in a meta campaign any particular player might not need to win a particular battle in terms of casualties and flags taken, maybe they just need to make their presence known in order to get the right response from the enemy in the wider theatre picture. Does this make sense? No one battle needs to be the winning battle, they all might be just good enough, but the overall goals of the campaign are met.

There's quite a bit more to this than I can type up here. Email me if you would like.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by Tero:

Originally posted by jim crowley:

So using company/battalion level battles to determine the course of a campaign (Normandy, Italy, Sicily etc.) seems entirely wrong to me.

The thing is it seems every campaign has a "make or break" king pin moment where the deciding battalion/company/platoon/squad/individual action has the success/failure of the entire campaign/action is hanging in the balance. In some cases it seems there were several such moments.

I tend to doubt that. In a well-planned operation campaign, there should be plenty of robustness against uncertainty -- what Wellington was talking about when he spoke of making his campaigns out of rope, instead of fine harness.

I suspect (but cannot prove) that the relative value of unit actions in an operation or campaign tends to follow an exponential law, like the number of connections in a scale-free network; most actions won't matter much, a few will matter a lot, a tiny number will be absolutely decisive.

Such a view would seem to me to fit well with some observations made from professional tactical simulations. When I was working on a recce vehicle project at Fort Halstead, we observed what I called the "Lucky Alphonse" effect, whereby the best-scoring vehicles in a run got very many more target acquisitions than the lower scorers.

The "ace effect" has been observed in air combat, where a tiny minority of fighter pilots account for most of the kills. However, this is usually explained by great disparities in skill, whereas in our simulation the performance of all observers and their equipment was statistically identical -- the variation arose only from the stochastic nature of the model, the positioning of the observers and the crinkliness of the terrain.

Along similar lines, Dave Rowlands' historical work has shown that the number of casualties inflicted by an MG follows an exponential distribution -- most score none, many score few, few score many and a very few bag huge numbers.

A former colleague of mine from the Fort has described tactical battles as consisting of a large number of tiny exchanges -- normally only duels and truels, and what he characterises as "more or less inglorious massacres", as with modern weapons the tendency is to go first spot - first shot - first kill quite quickly. It is the aggregate of the outcomes of these interactions that adds up to the outcome of the whole engagement. If, for the sake of extreme simplicity, we were to assume that each interaction was a duel, with an evens chance of each side killing the other, then we should expect the number of kills per element that had fought to follow the geometric distribution -- the discrete equivalent of the exponential distribution observed by Rowlands. (As an aside, ISTR that an early version of H. G. Wells' rules for "Little Wars" included a coin-toss combat resolution system, which he rejected because one "impossible Paladin" slew seven men on the toss of a coin before being himself killed.)

I don't think it requires any great leap of imagination to see that engagements may contribute to operations, and operations to campaigns, in a similar manner to the way duels make up an engagement. If so, I would expect that a similar Pareto-like law of relative contribution would also apply at these scales.

All the best,

John.

[Ardem]

I actually think the course of battalions do alter the war. In CM we play the historical important Battalion battles, these battles more or less contribute to the success of the battles around them. What if the important battalion battles took the tank works at stalingrad which affected the other units around them to gain the upper hand.

What if the really important battalion battles in the 1942 stages of the war went to the germans side instead of the russians. I think its the combination of every battalion battle that makes up a front, but its the important battalion battles that we play that decide that certain front.

Imagine 6 people playing CM right now, one is playing Pegasus Bridge, another is playing OMAHA beach and another is playing I don't know the rangers taking on the sea guns. Imagine if all germans won that battle and all the allies lost, do you think it would alter the war. I would say perhaps.

[JonS]

Originally posted by Ardem:

I actually think the course of battalions do alter the war.

Well, in a literal sense that's obviously true, but it's also not really what was being discussed. The question was how many decisive (or critical) small units actions were there in WWII.

The point that John was, I think, making above is that most operations have many points of redundancy planned into them. For example - 3 battalions might be attacking side by side, but only one of them really needs to attain it's objectives for the operation as a whole to succeed. The other two battalion attacks could be complete failures without affecting the overall outcome. And the thing is that it could be any of them that succeed, so none of them could be considered decisive or critical.

To take a specific example at the other end of the scale, the combined operations PLUNDER and VARSITY featured 2 UK, 1 Cdn, and 2 US divisions, and 1 UK Cdo Bde making more-or-less simultaneous crossings of the Lower Rhine, and 2 A/B divs dropping in on the far side of the river. Now, presumably only one single amphibious crossing needed to be a success for the op as a whole to provide a springboard across the Rhine. The airborne drops made little difference - if they had succeeded but all the crossings had failed, eventually they airborne troopies would have gone the way of 1st AB at Arnhem. On the other hand, if the airborne had failed, but at least one of the crossings had been firmly established then again we have success overall. So, none of the Div ops were individually critical, and the airborne were irrelevant, so how could one say that any of the bn or company ops within the greater picture were decisive?

As it turned out, all the individual elements went more-or-less to plan, leading to a fairly speedy and very comprehensive victory in North Germany. But, to re-iterate, there could have been many failures with success still achieved.

To Johns list from the previous page:

It seems to me that there are likely to be three sets of circumstances that tend to magnify the effect of an action by a single unit (and don't forget that in WW2 terms battalions are small change indeed; a division, or in a pinch a brigade, was supposed to be the smallest organisation capable of independent operations).

The first is the seizure of bridges or other key points.

The second is the raid, always a planned operation, which may be executed by a very small raiding force and have strategic effects out of all proportion to the forces involved by capturing or sabotaging some vital person or installation.

Finally, there is the stubborn defence where a small unit imposes disproportionate delay or losses on an attacker and so prevents the larger offensive operation developing successfully.

I would posit a fourth situation: wherein the total scale of forces involved is quite modest. North Africa we have a situation where individual battalions make up a significant proportion of either sides total forces, and it becomes more likely that one of them will do something special. On the Eastern Front, where there were roughly as many corps as battalions in NA, the role and effect of bns becomes incidental. When there is just so much redundancy, it's very hard to shine.

Regards

JonS

[ January 09, 2005, 10:00 PM: Message edited by: JonS ]

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by JonS:

[snips]

I would posit a fourth situation: wherein the total scale of forces involved is quite modest. North Africa we have a situation where individual battalions make up a significant proportion of either sides total forces, and it becomes more likely that one of them will do something special. On the Eastern Front, where there were roughly as many corps as battalions in NA, the role and effect of bns becomes incidental. When there is just so much redundancy, it's very hard to shine.

Yup; if there are a small number of grains in the sand-pile, the movement of a single grain is more likely to trigger a cascade that is large in proportion to the whole pile.

I would instinctively think that another circumstance favouring bigger influence for the small units would be where a national orbat incorporates a high/low quality mix rather than striving towards homogeneity. The Western Allies, and especially the US, tried to maintain even standards and organisations throughout a theatre (when you have to ship your entire force across the sea to fight, there is no point in shipping second-best). The Russians and especially the Germans tended rather to have a force mix including some specially-equipped highly elite units and some miserably-equipped scratch units (when you are engaged in a continent-wide struggle for survival, you scrape up everything you can, good and bad alike). The latter case would I think be analogous to a a sand pile where the size of the grains is stringly variable.

Then again, if I understand Russian operational art correctly, a very high degree of redundancy was built in by the use of multiple and switchable main blows. And it's true that there must have been an awful lot of battalions on the Eastern Front.

All the best,

John.

[CombinedArms]

I think campaign-altering battalion actions tend to occur in situations where, for whatever reason, there's not that margin of redundancy. They also tend to involve combat over a key terrain feature, the capture or loss of which would tend to have a magnifying effect on the campaign as a whole.

Thus with Plunder/Varsity, planned with Monty's typical care for the set piece battle, and reflecting his tendency to do much with much, there's plenty of redundancy built in, and not much chance for campaign-altering impact by a single battalion sized component.

On the other hand, the seizing of the Ludendorff bridge at Remagen was an unplanned, improvised action where a key terrain feature was unexpectedly captured--no built in redundancy their. Similarly with the capture of that bridge into Antwerp (forget the name) which allowed the capture of a major port undamaged. The airborne seizure of Eben-Emael or later of Pegasus Bridge were planned, but they also lacked that element of redundancy. Campaigns turned on the successful seizure of these critical points by small units. And there were numerous key defensive actions where there simply weren't the forces to allow for redundancy--e.g. the Ranger defense of whatever that key locale was at the Salerno beachhead.

There were many battalion sized defensive actions in the Bulge campaign that collectively altered the battle--there are almost too many separate battles to single out any one. The nature of the terrain and the catch-as-catch-can character of the defensive effort meant that battalions fighting to gain time to blow bridges or hold key villages was the nature of the beast.

So while redundancy of force is the norm in a well planned attack, there are always going to be occasional situations where a battalion sized or smaller unit, in the right place at the right time, is going to have the possibility of achieving a campaign-altering impact.