DPICM?

[Lampshade111]

Regardless of the dud problem I imagine that DPICM ammunition would still be used in the open stages at of a war against Syria. At least when dealing with the better quality units.

The main problem I can think of is not dub rates or anything like that but just it being too powerful.

[Guest Guest]

deleted per user request

[the Fighting Seabee]

Yes the MLRS is HE, but still can be used with great accuracy during close support fire missions.

Hoolaman,

You said what I was trying to say, except with more finesse.

And I do realize that battlefront has very few people actually working on the game. I also realize that they do listen to us, which is why they have a HUGE laundry list of fixes and additions that they want to add. And also why the patches are up to 1.08 and not just left at 1.01. Still, as I have mentioned to Steve in past posts, this game is a gem capable of many great things, and we want to be a part of polishing it. The game has so much potential, that it would be a crime not to keep making improvements. Even with everything that has been accomplished with it at this point, it is still, in my opinion, an unfinished product (and probably always will be with respect to constantly changing military technologies, as well as our own pc technologies). So when I bitch and moan about what I want in the game, count it as the ultimate compliment. And I know that all of the people on this forum feel the same way.

[John Kettler]

the Fighting Seabee,

I note with considerable interest that Steve said work would continue on CMSF even after the first CMx2 WW II game was released. That certainly bodes well for the future.

Regards,

John Kettler

[rune]

Jason,

Yeah, I was surprised a bit about it too. Along the road, I found a really cool old article on how to call in a strike using the ammo. Can post the link if I find it again and someone is interested.

Found one of them

Artillery article 1

and I really liked this one:

How to lay down a strike

Rune

[ May 18, 2008, 04:04 AM: Message edited by: rune ]

[hoolaman]

Just want to add, welcome to the forum to Treadhead Martin. The more contributors here the better!

[Guest Guest]

deleted per user request

[Battlefront.com]

The Fighting Seabee,

So when I bitch and moan about what I want in the game, count it as the ultimate compliment. And I know that all of the people on this forum feel the same way.

Thanks and not to worry... I usually can tell the difference between constructive criticism and bitching. The former is embraced, the latter is rejected. You're not bitching Some of the itches you've asked to be scratched will happen shortly, others will happen eventually.

Steve

[John Kettler]

rune,

Good stuff! Note not only that the dud rate is an issue in DPICM use, but that there is no discussion of any counterbattery threat. The old Cold War Soviet criterion said (based on U.S. MPQ-4) a battery would start taking counterfire in 4 minutes, and with Firefinder, we know that if it's looking your way and not jammed or physically destroyed, the first round is enough to start the counterfire sequence before said first round even lands. Yet our hero in this piece thinks absolutely nothing of blazing away, in battalion volleys, for a whopping 20 minutes.

Heaven help the U.S. if it ever encounters a foe with real CB capabilities. I see no discussion of having to displace batteries to new firing positions, merely one of changing aimpoints to service a moving target array. This seems to me a far cry from the NTC terror of having an entire grid square pulverized by Soviet/OPFOR MRLs, and that was in the BM-21 days. The BM-27 and BM-28 make those seem tame and can reach way more deeply.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Splinty]

John, have you ever seen U,S, counter-battery in operation? In Desert Storm just one round of Iraqi Arty landed in my company's area befroe our brigade counterfired and destroyed the Iraqi guns. The Russian stuff may be good, but ours is automated.

[John Kettler]

Splinty,

You missed my point, which was that the U.S. apparently doesn't even bother to train to operate its artillery in a counterbattery environment. The operating premise appears to be that we are so uber no one else will be able to shoot at all, and we take Desert Storm experience, against a command net compromised, isolated, pulverized, semistarved and thirsty foe, as being proof this is a safe way to operate. We're by no means the only country with digital fire control, north seeking gyros, GPS and similar. Nor do we have any monopoly on ESM gear or CM/CB radar. The same holds true for smart munitions, to include SFW type items. I first heard about those being in hostile hands in 1985. We don't seem to think in terms of ARMs being used against Firefinder, but the Russians do against their equivalent assets

Firefinderskiy

http://www.warfare.ru/?lang=&catid=251&linkid=2434

Jammer

http://www.warfare.ru/?lang=&catid=251&linkid=2445

and have jammers, decoys, and hard kill weapons deployed to protect them, to name but one such capable country.

Suggest you compare the technical capabilities of this vs. the one round a minute given in the articles for the Paladin.

Msta-S

http://www.warfare.ru/?lang=&catid=240&linkid=1562

Copperheadskiy

http://www.warfare.ru/?lang=&linkid=1588&catid=254

Some of the 152mm rounds

http://www.warfare.ru/?lang=&linkid=2454&catid=254

For deeper work

Pion (SP 203)

Note DPICM's listed. Philosophy is to use fewer, larger bomblets. Earlier BM-21 was designed to kill M113 and similar. Guess what this one's designed to kill?

http://www.warfare.ru/?lang=&catid=240&linkid=1564

203mm ammo

http://www.warfare.ru/?lang=&linkid=2453&catid=254

BM-28 Smerch (explicitly listed as having SFWs (60 per SPLL) and only one minute to leave firing position after shooting)

http://www.warfare.ru/?lang=&catid=353&linkid=1578

BM-28 (explicitly listed as having scatterable mines; 1.5 minutes to leave firing position after shooting)

http://www.warfare.ru/?lang=&catid=353&linkid=2317

Tactical UAVs

http://www.warfare.ru/?lang=&catid=324&linkid=2345

http://www.warfare.ru/?lang=&catid=324&linkid=2276

http://www.warfare.ru/?lang=&catid=324&linkid=2388

Mini UAV

http://www.warfare.ru/?lang=&catid=324&linkid=2277

Frankly, I think we're living in a fool's paradise to expect such benign artillery operating environments as those outlined in FIELD ARTILLERY JOURNAL. Sooner or later, that'll come back to haunt us. The reconnaissance fire strike complex beloved of Soviet military theory theory is all too real. This is from someone who worked directly on a slew of U.S. systems intended to beat massive Soviet/Warsaw Pact forces with fully integrated recon strike systems, such as ASSAULT BREAKER and WASP.

Regards,

John Kettler

[ May 19, 2008, 06:04 PM: Message edited by: John Kettler ]

[John Kettler]

Splinty,

Here's a simplified list for China.

http://www.uwmc.uwc.edu/political_science/miiie/catalogcover.htm

Note particularly the nasty MRL and modern SP gun howitzer.

http://www.uwmc.uwc.edu/political_science/miiie/catalogPLA.htm

The Chinese have had AT mines for their MRLs since the 1980s at the latest.

See also this for where some of that high tech came from and how.

http://www.softwar.net/loral.html

Chinese SP 203mm (note ammo types)

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/203mm-prc-specs.htm

See also the antiAWACS missile and the laser blinding device.

http://www.uwmc.uwc.edu/political_science/miiie/catalogMissilesC.htm

Hope these provide some food for thought.

Regards,

John Kettler

[cool breeze]

Damn. Having my pixel warriors pounded with artillery playing CM: Shock Force is pretty extreme. I don't know if I'll enjoy playing against an enemy with similar artillery as powerful as ours. But I'll certainly buy it.

[John Kettler]

cool breeeze,

Precisely! Now you know why I was so glad no war broke out in Europe during the mid 1980s. Not only did the Soviets have most/all of this already, but we didn't have the countering systems in place, the M1 was vulnerable to a smallish HEAT round (definitely no DU armor or 120 mm gun), their HEAT projectiles could penetrate some 40% deeper than we thought (the downside of static firing), they had broadband obscurants on their AFVs, plus ERA, Drozhd, etc., on the leading wave. The Bradley was vulnerable to the BMP-2, both the SS-21 and SS-23 had submunition warheads quite capable of wiping out entire mobile HQ complexes, the BM-27 was already in service, we had no effective conventional capability vs. aircraft shelters or underground CPs. What runway busters we had were few and all bought elsewhere (French Durandal, British JP-233). By contrast, the Soviets had demonstrated a capability of smashing our aircraft shelters, had loads of runway busters, scads of artillery, much of it deep strike modern stuff, ARMs galore to clobber NATO radar. Worst of all, the Soviets were reading our mail in real time, having the key cards for our standard cryptographic machines. Spies gave them

not just that, but the location of all the NATO nuclear storage areas, NATO warplans, composition of Chobham armor, to name but a few. And did I mention that almost every antiarmour weapon we had, from LAW through TOW, was effectively nullified, together with our tank cannon, and that was against a monkey model T-72? GSFG had T-80s in the sheds with much better armor in both thickness and type.

IMO, the U.S. has gotten fat, dumb and happy because it hasn't gone against an equivalently equipped, functional, info secure foe in a long time. It has therefore developed the tendency to assume that stompings are normal, creating permissive environments in which all sorts of potentially fatal practices may safely be pursued.

Contrast that with Russian planning to evacuate firing positions one minute after opening fire.

We haven't been under real air attack since WW II, either. It's all well and good to hoot and cheer when an A-10 rolls in on the other guy, but what if it's a FROGFOOT dumping death on us? What if it's our positions being blanketed by DPICM after being spotted by a small UAV, our

AFVs savaged by SFWs, our radars blasted, leaving us blind to the strike that follows? We've got Stinger and Avenger for close-in AD, but they've got Igla, Strelets, Tunguska and more, not to mention additional capabilities on every BMP-2, BMP-3 and possibly MBTs via TLGM and/or prox fuzed antihelicopter rounds. did you know that we also discovered A-10s are in view and trackable long enough to kill with plain KE from MBTs?

I think such a game would force people, in all sorts of places, to really think about such issues and consider just how bad things could get, in a hurry. The rest of the world not only isn't static, but is highly dynamic, coming up all the time with nastier combat means. We have no monopoly on advanced weaponry.

Regards,

John Kettler

[rune]

John,

I think you underrate the American counter-battery responses. He is a great article on some during the Iraq War Counter-battery fire

Rune

[John Kettler]

rune,

Terrific article! I have both a well-developed respect for U.S. CB capabilities and a pretty good understanding of the underlying technologies. Again, my fundamental point has been missed.

If the U.S. military indeed still trains the way it fights, then it is simply not training to operate in precisely the kind of environment we created so devastatingly for Iraqi artillery in OIF. If you genuinely credit the opposition with effective counterfire systems, then you don't plan on battalion shoots lasting 20 minutes, or even 6.

The Russians used to plan (during the late 1970s) on 4-minute shoots before taking CB fire, and that had much to do with their later fielding SPs en masse once the General Staff began to see what kind of havoc could be unleashed on its artillery troops. These days, Russian artillery trains to fire a volley and clear out immediately, easy to do with MRLs; harder with tube artillery--unless the investment has been made in modern high ROF weapons with all the geolocation bells and whistles, which is precisely what the Msta-S is. In the time the Paladin can fire one shot, the Msta-S can bang off, I believe, 8. This is the kind of performance we see in the latest German SP, the FH 90, which incorporates the ability to fire a TOT

(these days called MRSI, Multiple Rounds; Simultaneous Impact) all by itself. The Msta-S can clear the firing site in one minute, as can the BM-28 Smerch. This is how a force operates that expects to be under counterfire. The ammo's on the vehicle, not sitting on the ground behind it while the back hatches are open.

None of this is to disparage our own staggering capabilities, but we've never been under anything like what we so gleefully dish out and are used to

having a benign artillery environment by virtue of overwhelming firepower to silence any gun that dares speak. IMO, this is a stupid and potentially fatal way to train for combat. If we keep playing global policeman and similar, one of these days we're going to wind up facing a force with many of the same capabilities we take for granted, and that force will also be much bigger.

It won't have to be better than us across the board to hurt us badly, just deliver carefully targeted blows at our weak points, such as a handful of ARMs directed at the CM/CB radars.

The article you provided noted that one Marine RCT was nearly in dire trouble because normal equipment failure left it with a single CB radar as its "eyes."

What happens when people are actively poking out same? What happens when we're on the receiving end of several OPFOR SPLLs worth of DPICM or SFW, when we're surveilled the way we're used to surveilling, when people are running around our rear areas sending target grids to deep strike systems, sniping radars and illuminating key point targets for laser guided munition strikes?

In short, where's the article that says we're training against anything even remotely approximating our own capabilities, as opposed to

the modern equivalent of bashing Fuzzy Wuzzies?

Back in the 1980s, the IDF wiped out the dense Syrian SAM defenses in the Bekaa Valley, to include the never seen in battle SA-8 divisional SAM. What did the Israelis use? Jammers, drones to excite the defenses, UAVs to locate them after DF cueing, ARMS (some fired from old Sherman hulls converted to missile launchers) and artillery. After that,

the Israeli Air Force came in and smashed the individual launchers for the SA-6 batteries, now helpless without the STRAIGHT FLUSH radar vehicle.

So annihilating was the strike that Moscow sent its Chief of Air Defense to find out what happened. Compared to the radar resources in the Bekaa Valley, what it would take to blind our CM/CB capability for a few divisions is trivial by comparison and what would be lost not easily replaced. If we can't can't "see," we can't shoot, and primary targeting for U.S. CM/CB is from those radars, which in turn cue other assets, as so splendidly demonstrated in the article you provided. Otherwise, we get worked over by loads of hostile fire and aren't really set up to handle it, as I have repeatedly argued. My own brother was in an SBCT TOC in Iraq, and it was highly vulnerable to attack, being located in tents and full of fragile electronics and displays, not to mention people. Being in tents certainly makes killing the target easier, but I've shown that likely OPFOR submunitions will handily smash Bradley type vehicles, and SFW can kill or badly damage even tanks. This is the real threat we have to train to operate under and somehow survive. IMO, if we continue on the path we seem now to be on, it'll likely result in a bloodbath for the U.S.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Guest Guest]

deleted per user request

[cool breeze]

Yikes! did Assault Breaker or WASP figure out how to beat the Russian attack? Would BFC dare model an all out conflict that the USA might badly lose?

[Racan]

Here is an interesting video, don't know if this was posted before a regimental DPICM fire mission

[Bigduke6]

Rune,

You didn't think that write-up was a little bit rah rah Marines?

Almost all that brilliant airland battle stuff could just as easily be attributed to an inept, unmotivated Iraqi army (whose leadership frequently was bribed outtright); as it could to the skillful efforts of 11th Marine Regiment.

This is what I took from that article, regarding counter-battery capacity:

1. There was one or two counter-battery radar nets to support two entire US artillery battalions, and one wasn't organic. Total radars available was minimum 6, max 10 if I count right.

2. The Iraqis were unable to attack those emitters.

3. Anti-battery radars got assigned the same way as a standard support asset, which stands to reason but I didn't know that.

4. During the invasion the radars processed about 1,900 enemy shoots over 22 days of "combat", making for an average 86 enemy shoots per 24 hour period, or an average 4 or so shoots an hour.

It's not clear whether the shoots detected by the radars were single shells or extended bombardments; my guess is every time a bunch of Iraq shells was computed back to a single location, that counted as a shoot, and of course there were peak periods and lulls. But no matter how you crunch it is seems pretty obvious the Marine counter-battery effort cited here was operating under close to ideal conditions, with enemy threat somewhere between marginal and negligible.

5. The article notes that frequently if the radars concluded they had found a target, the information was passed to Marine Air rather than to the gun batteries, reason given because air responds fast.

Now I'm going to speculate here, but reading between the lines, and based on what I know about militaries, what was happening was that the radar guys would get a target, get told the howitzers were busy, and they would hand off the target to the air boys and hope something would happen, and usually it didn't, as air boys are generally busy and even when they aren't a radar fix somewhere behing enemy lines, with enemy anti-air threat unclear, isn't going to be a top priority.

In other words, and again this is me reading tea leaves, I read that as a clear sign the counter-battery system of 11th Marine Regiment, unstressed though it was considering the opponent, was already finding targets too fast for the support system to deal with them.

This begs the question, how would that counter-battery system deal with artillery actually capable of putting a similar number of shells in the air, as the two battalions supporting 11th Marines? I don't want to be negative, but counter-battery systems overload seems to be a real danger in any kind of fight against any kind of competent US opponent.

[John Kettler]

Bigduke6 and Rune,

Precisely my point, and even this was nearly undone by routine radar failure.

Regards,

John Kettler