Casualty Budgets

[Vadr]

An interesting read.

http://www.strategypage.com/articles/casualty/default.asp

I think CMBO models these concepts quite well.

[lcm1947]

Oh man I thought you were talking about an insurance thing. Never mind.

[Leeo]

Sounds like man-hooverist propaganda to me! I'll not stand for it. I'll die for it, but I won't stand for it.

Damn, now I'm being attritionist.

[JasonC]

I read it. It seems to me it is mostly wrong about the examples chosen, which rather gets in the way of the point it tries to make.

For instance, Lee's problem on the 1st day of Gettysburg is that he didn't know where the union army was, nothing else. Wargamers playing the battle know the union reinforcement schedule and army size, and so conclude that the only way to achieve a victory is to prevent them from reaching the field in the first place by winning early.

But this is almost wholly an artificial situation. The reality is if the Rebs had pushed hard and kept the field on the first day, the rest of the Union army would not have trapsed in to be defeated there, as happens with limited, fixed map wargames.

The Rebs might have won a limited engagement, yes, but not appreciably altered the outcome of the war, because they would only have defeated a union corps, not their army. If on the other hand 2 additional corps had been waiting behind cemetary ridge before Rhodes and Early had even arrived, then pressing would have been suicidal.

Lee didn't know which; players of games with perfect hindsight do. It wasn't overall casualty aversion. It was the same effect as double blind intel limitation, just applied on an operational scale. A grand tactical game about Gettysburg can't show such effects. An operational one of the whole campaign (along the lines of the old SPI game "Lee Moves North") easily could.

Then he says the British were cautious early in Normandy when "nothing opposed them". This is simply wrong. The 21st Panzer division counterattacked on the same day as the invasion. Again, overall casualty aversion had nothing to do with it. Yes, they also had limited intel, which historical set up campaigns of Normandy don't have enough of (hindsight again). Again, a larger scale game would remove the hindsight.

If e.g. the forces around Pas de Calais were right behind the Normandy beaches, and the 21st counterattack was only the opening of a panzer corps sized drive for the invasion beaches, then trapsing off inland (to get lost in the forests), instead of holding the line along the coast in strength, would have been a mistake.

As for the comment that the overall Normandy campaign proceeded at a "regular" pace, with several day lulls and such, that again has nothing to do with overall loss avoidance. It was mostly a function of supply, particularly ammunition supply for the artillery.

The Allies were attempting to build up forces in the beachead, and to build up stores for larger offensives, at the same time that the guns could easily consume every ton they could move across the beaches. The US stood on the defensive on their south front in the second half of June, for instance, not to avoid overall losses, but because all the ammo was going to the fight on the Cotentin penisula and supporting the drive to Cherbourg.

Military wargames often do poor job of modeling the absolute limits and flexible choices that realistic supply issues present to historical commanders. They often want a supply system to function very abstractly, as a kind of afterthought, with all the focus of modeling detail on the combat units. Or only make it serious for cut off units.

Or they model supply only in a manner similar to generalised "fatigue" (e.g. in TOAW), without presenting the commanders with realistic choices about supplying this effort adequately at the expense of that one.

The desire of game designers to automate what they think of as a matter of "routine" is at work here. They remove supply decisions from the players. The games that result do not face the same trade offs as the real campaign.

Occasionally a game errs in the other direction. For example, the V4V series of operational battalion-level games gave commanders significant control over the level of supply of formations down to division level. And they had numerous intermediate supply rankings ("attack", "general", "defensive", "limited" e.g) that strongly effective combat ability.

However, virtually all supply usage by tonnage, as they tracked things, went to artillery units. You could put all the front line combat units in "attack" supply simply by cross attaching virtually all your artillery to some corps without front line forces, and then starve the guns. The error was the unrealistic "exchange" allowed between maneuver unit supply and artillery supply.

That is just a digression, though. The point is that the aspect of the Normandy campaign that this fellow sees is present in the history and not in his wargaming of it, is not in fact due to loss avoidance issues at all. It is just undermodeled supply constraints.

In the case of Borodino, Napoleon was supposedly a foolish poltroon of a commander because he didn't know, as every wargamer today knows, that the Imperial Guard must be committed as rapidly as possible, in order to fight as many engagements in sequence as possible, the better to run the Russians off their feet in one giant smush. It is extremely doubtful Napoleon (you know, just the guy who commanded at 60 major battles almost all of which he won, including Borodino) was the one who got it wrong, as opposed to modern gaming amateurs.

First off they just don't understand his battle plan at Borodino in the first place. Which was based on victory by the last intact reserve, aka outlasting your opponent, aka one sort of attrition strategy. It is not surprising that people who think "attrition" and "strategy" are directly contradictory, don't understand someone using one successfully.

The "thought" seems to be that if Napoleon wasn't being a maneuverist that day, it must have been due to a head cold or something. The idea that Napoleon evidently knew a way to win pitched battles in that era that the gamer doesn't know, never occurs to the gamer. Not using a movement point, let alone not using a formation, is a tactical crime to a schwerpunker, and since Napoleon did not fight the battle that way, some mysterious external force must have been at work.

So out comes the loss tolerance idea again. Funny how everything looks like a nail, isn't it? And why loss tolerance? I mean, Borodino was a straight ahead slog that KOed more than 35,000 Frenchman. Intolerance of losses was not its leading characteristic. Napoleon tolerated the hell out of losses; he went into Russia with more than 500,000 men and came out with less than 40,000.

The mystery disappears though, when one reflects that a leading boast of maneuverists is that attrition is always more expensive, while maneuver will be less so. Since maneuverism recognizes a criterion besides victory, there is an allowed category for constraints besides winning. Loss limitation is a legal category of maneuverist thought; that is what is decisive.

Did Napoleon not want to destroy the Imperial Guard 100 miles from Moscow with potentially a whole campaign and more in front of him? Undoubtedly. But that was not the reason he didn't launch the Guard the instant the sun came up at Borodino. His whole plan was the run the Russians out of reserves while he still had some.

The Guard was the last rook for his endgame, in a battle he intended to fight by exchanging off pieces. Its intact presence on the field, after the Russian had run out of ever good order reserve to interpose between it and the broken parts of their army, is what compelled the Russians to withdraw.

Did he know the Russian Guard cavalry thrown in to stop his own was the last reserve they possessed? No. But they hadn't replaced the crippled infantry his cavalry broke just before, so they obviously didn't have much left. He didn't throw the Guard in as well because he didn't need to, and in a "victory by last reserve", "endurance" competition, throwing in reserves too rapidly is *the* cardinal mistake.

What if the Russians had had another reserve, and he threw in the Guard before they used it? Then they would have had the last reserve and would have stopped him. "But they didn't". He didn't know that. The Russians did not withdraw from the field until that night. In the late afternoon, they were still drawn up at the next ridge on.

So, although "loss tolerance" of a kind may have been a minor factor here, the real misunderstanding is the role of reserves in attrition strategies, and the limited intel commanders possess. Hindsight again, not loss tolerance, is what is really involved in the difference between wargames and the real battle.

Probably the resilence of units is modeled far too high, too tough, in most wargames about that battle, too. Making the critical importance of fresh reserves less in some simulations of it than in the real deal. E.g. NIR in the BG series gives entirely unrealistic gonzo morale boosts to the whole Russian army for precious little reason. It then one-third makes up for it by modeling nearly every cavalrymen in the French army as elite.

Obviously, grossly inflating morale on both sides makes freshness less important - nobody runs away no matter how tired out. To keep the *real* armies from running away was a very difficult command problem that required cycling fresh troops in to relieve "blown" ones. In which process the importance of fresh reserves becomes extremely obvious. (Try NIR with most units morale 3-4).

Overall, a bunch of difference game design issues for existing wargames are conflated with a single "problem" that doesn't really account for the cases advanced in support of it. 20-20 hindsight and far less limited intel in the wargame versions being one common denominator, but also innaccuracies in logistical and morale modeling.

The writer of the piece can't see these things, because he assumes his modern schwerpunker way of running units around the field until they drop, the run the enemy off his feet as fast as possible, is obviously the only right and true way to wage war.

And if anybody didn't in the real deal, political loss limitation issues must have been the reason. Why that? As the only legal category of thought, besides victory, available to explain the discrepancy. Otherwise you'd just have to conclude all the historical leaders were nimnuts, and 14 year old wargamers their strategic superiors in every way.

The far more plausible explanation is that the wargamers have acquired habits from the unrealistic resilence of their units and the perfect information they have to act on (undermodeled supply, morale, fog of war, etc). Which have little to do with workable strategies in the real world.

It is not the historical commanders who were distracted from "playing" like wargamers by loss tolerance considerations, it is the wargamers who are allowed to get away with unrealistic nonsense due to undermodeled and entirely real military friction (of many varieties).