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Interesting info from war correspondent.


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Hmm...what's the CMSF equivalent to 18-inch thick, 20mm-resistant mud wall structures?

Oh, and pretty please: humvees with armored turrets. :)

They also generally fired their AKs on single shot. All enemy fire was well aimed and very effective.

Heh. Different world.

Iraq has allowed us to become tactically sloppy as the majority of fighters there are unorganized and poorly trained. This is not the case in Afghanistan. The enemy combatants here will exploit any mistake made by coalition forces with catastrophic results. Complacency and laziness will result in mass causalities.

Very different.

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Michael Yon is awesome. I've been going to his blog site since 2005 or 06. He gives a very clear view of things from a perspective no one else really has. He's spent more time with the troops than any other war correspondent. He's also an ex-Green Beret, so he really knows his stuff. He has his finger on the pulse of both wars and has correctly predicted what would happen year by year.

Now he's saying that 2009 will be the worst year of fighting in Afghanistan and 2010 will be worse than that. The taliban, al qaida, and any anti-American resistance are ramping up operations for this fighting season. It's gonna be a rough year, guys. By October 2010, we're going to know whether our new strategy has paid off. According to Yon, it doesn't look good. Although he's confident we can win in 25 or more years. :[

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"Anti-Armor Tactics: The enemy did not attempt to penetrate the crew compartment of the vehicles they engaged. They fired volleys of RPGs to the front end of the HMMWVs in order to disable them and start a vehicle fire. Once the crew evacuated, they would engage them with crew served weapons. This demonstrates a very detailed understanding of the limitations of their weapon systems and a thorough knowledge of our armor vulnerabilities."

I dont understand this, why would the Taliban not attempt to penetrate the crew compartment of a HMMWV? The RPG-7 has a penetration value of 330mm RHA (Basic 85mm wahead) so its not as if it's possible to put that much armour on a HMMWV. The crew compartment is a bigger target and once hit, the surviving crew would probably bail out anyway.

Is this just deliberate misinformation by the US government to protect their troops?

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"Anti-Armor Tactics: The enemy did not attempt to penetrate the crew compartment of the vehicles they engaged. They fired volleys of RPGs to the front end of the HMMWVs in order to disable them and start a vehicle fire. Once the crew evacuated, they would engage them with crew served weapons. This demonstrates a very detailed understanding of the limitations of their weapon systems and a thorough knowledge of our armor vulnerabilities."

I dont understand this, why would the Taliban not attempt to penetrate the crew compartment of a HMMWV? The RPG-7 has a penetration value of 330mm RHA (Basic 85mm wahead) so its not as if it's possible to put that much armour on a HMMWV. The crew compartment is a bigger target and once hit, the surviving crew would probably bail out anyway.

Is this just deliberate misinformation by the US government to protect their troops?

You know, this kind of had me wondering too, until someone on another forum reminded me of something. The basic RPG is a HEAT warhead, very focused. It can penetrate, but it still has to hit someone or something to actually knock the vehicle out. If it simply goes through the hardback or similarly non-crucial structures, no harm. Despite how cramped the passenger compartment is, it's still a lot of air and open space and not much "crew", especially if they've partially dismounted.

HEAT sucks for killing people, no news there.

Plyaing too many games (CM:SF and ArmA) allowed me to forget the basic rule of lethality: to do damage, you must hurt someone or break something. Penetration is only a starting point.

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I'm surprised how effective the afghans are against the (blue force) coalition forces!

You can't compare them to the syrians in the game. I wished there was another red force simulating afghan insurgens or something similar, so there would be much more challenge, because the syrian (in the game and probably in reality) are much worse then the US.

Hope some time there will be a module with a new red force ;) . But I'm also looking forward to the Brits and Germans!

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I'm surprised how effective the afghans are against the (blue force) coalition forces!

Did you read the description of the final battle? 250 Talibs against 30 Marines, the Taliban "felt surrounded" and the Marines won. Grogs here scream bloody murder about that kind of thing.

You can't compare them to the syrians in the game. I wished there was another red force simulating afghan insurgens or something similar, so there would be much more challenge, because the syrian (in the game and probably in reality) are much worse then the US.

Hope some time there will be a module with a new red force ;) . But I'm also looking forward to the Brits and Germans!

You can always jack up their experience and motivation.

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There are a couple of reasons to hit the engine instead of the crew compartment. As Apocal pointed out, if you get a mobility kill you're probably going to get a shot at the soldiers with small arms fire very quickly. Because we're talking about ambushes here, this means that you know where you'll engage the dismounts because the vehicle will be stuck in the kill sack. If you go for the crew compartment, the vehicle may be able to continue fighting, may not have casualties, and may get out of the kill sack before getting another shot at taking the vehicle out.

There's also another practical reason. If you have a gunner positioned ahead of the intended target, it's easier to hit the engine compartment than the crew compartment because at that angle the engine compartment offers a larger target to shoot for hitting.

In CM:SF there are a variety of RPG rounds available. The ones most similar to what the Taliban have are the least effective in killing. This is what Apocal was getting at in terms of what HEAT weaponry does. It's also the case that anti-personnel RPG rounds are more likely to do damage to the engine compartment than the crew compartment due to armoring differences and the fact that an engine compartment MUST have openings to the outside. Getting some fragments into the engine compartment has a much higher chance of disabling the vehicle than the same fragments chance of getting into a crew compartment AND (even if doing so) causing enough damage to be worth having the ambush set up in the first place.

However, there are many types of RPG rounds in CM:SF that are rather nasty when they get inside a vehicle. Thermobaric, for example, or a tandem warhead hitting armor without standoff protection (like slat armor or ERA). As far as I know these sorts of rounds are not common in Afghanistan because they are newer, more expensive, and more difficult to obtain. I could be wrong now, but that was at least the way it's been for many years in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Steve

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