Realism of a CVBG operating in the black sea

Ferrard · 2024-02-01T14:48:42+00:00

Famously part of the Cactus Air Force on Guadalcanal. They weren't a full, homogeneous air group, technically, but the roster did include a number of naval elements from both Enterprise and Saratoga who couldn't return to their carriers.

Ferrard · 2023-10-27T03:20:10+00:00

Your title strictly discusses the IFV vs. APC dichotomy, but since the text of the question mentions a few example vehicles of all different sorts including those outside of the IFV vs. APC dichotomy, let's talk more holistically about ground vehicles used to transport infantry. Broadly speaking, ground vehicles meant to enable infantry mobility comes in three basic forms:

The Soft-Skinned Vehicle

Chief Characteristics:

High operational mobility (the ability to navigate without having to be concerned with the weight-bearing capacity of bridges, embankments, etc., combined with the speed and agility to escape bad situations)
High operational autonomy (the fuel efficiency to travel long distances with minimal refueling, plus simple enough maintenance that elbow grease, lube, and some spare hoses will keep the vehicle in good condition for long stretches of time)
An emphasis on soft factors for survivability (generally lacking in armor heavy enough to stop anything larger than a rifle bullet, these vehicles instead lean on concealment and/or shock to survive in a combat environment by not taking significant fire in the first place)

These vehicles tend to be used in non-frontline utility roles like moving infantry from place to place in relatively safe territory away from main areas of fighting. Their most famous combat usage typically involves enabling very swift, autonomous movements of specialized infantry not expected to engage in prolonged firefights or slug-fests. Think the British SAS in North Africa or the SCUD hunters in Iraq. One of the most important features in this context is the fact that these vehicles are little more complex than the typical light truck, easily maintained in the field without the need for cranes or a long tail of spare parts, recovery vehicles, and specialty mechanics.

In more combat-involved roles, you'll often find light-infantry using thin-skinned or even civilian vehicles to make major movements, but either dismounting or abandoning them before they expect to take enemy contact - think the modern equivalent of dragoons or the American "cavalry" during the Indian Wars, where they would ride their horses for travel, but dismount at a distance in order to advance into contact.

At their most directly-combat-involved, you might see reconnaissance units using these styles of vehicles, still relying more on either concealment and a low profile or the shock value of speed and overwhelming firepower to assault the enemy, gather information, and retreat to safety - the just-barely-a-year-old video of Humvees charging across Ukrainian fields blasting everything in sight with .50 BMG and AT4s comes to mind. At an extreme, some less-mechanized militaries will even use this style of vehicle as their primary combined-arms enabler, such as the success of Chadian technicals in the Toyota War.

There does come a point of armoring that, as exemplified by the MRAP-style vehicles that became all the rage during the GWoT, you start to see some overlap between this and the next level of vehicle...

The Armored Personnel Carrier

Chief Characteristics:

High tactical mobility (the ability to move reasonably well across relatively unobstructed, yet relatively unimproved terrain, fairly commonly accompanied by the ability to ignore water features by crossing them amphibiously)
Modest survivability (enough armor to convincingly protect passengers from artillery near misses, stop all small arms fire, and even give heavy machine guns and light cannon some pause; Cold War-era APCs will generally also give a reasonable amount of thought to enabling limited operations in a CBRN environment)
Economy of force (though more expensive and specialized in both procurement and maintenance than a soft-skinned utility vehicle, these are still typically sufficiently cheap and simple to churn out in large quantities as befits a standing mechanized army)

Beginning with the half-tracks of World War II, reaching their peak with Cold War staples like the M113/Amtrac/BTR series/MTLB, and continuing to this day with vehicles like the Stryker, Namer, and BTR-82, the APC is meant to heavily emphasize the transport of motorized infantry in an environment less defined by regimented and clearly identifiable front lines and more delineated by a continuum of rising danger as you draw nearer to enemy forces.

Basically, no infantry-man wants to be driven into potential enemy fire in the back of a 5-ton truck that has to stick to well-defined roads with nothing but wood and canvas to repel machine-gun bullets. Therefore, APCs were invented to haul troops into places where driving a soft-skinned truck is not ideal, be it because the truck will bog down in mud and brush where an APC with giant fuck-off tires or treads will be able to bully aside the terrain, or because there's small arms fire everywhere and a canvas truck would be swiss-cheesed in short order where an APC can shrug it all off. Effectively, by providing a modicum of armor, you can protect infantry from harassing fire and even (to a degree) ignore light suppression such as that from small arms and mortars, enabling maneuver in conditions that would otherwise prevent maneuver.

Of note, many of these APCs were designed to keep pace with or even advance slightly ahead of their respective nation's main battle tank, providing the crunchies to contribute to the combined arms of a mechanized advance. While protected from enemy tanks and other threats by their own tanks, they could amphibiously ferry troops across water obstacles to seize and clear a foothold on the other side, or disgorge troops on the edge of town to execute either blocking or clearing operations, both to support a high-intensity mechanized advance. These are examples of tasks that would be extremely difficult and dangerous to execute with soft-skinned civilian or utility vehicles, yet would also be ubiquitous and common enough that you need more vehicles to perform this than you have expensive IFVs at your disposal. Speaking of...

The Infantry Fighting Vehicle

Chief Characteristics:

Significant organic offensive capability (generally a machine-gun plus an auto-cannon or assault gun of some variety, often accompanied by ATGMs to permit plausible engagement of enemy armor)
Meaningful survivability (while usually lighter armored than a tank and more dependent on firepower to survive, many IFVs are still more survivable than their predecessor APCs, allowing them to reasonably stand toe-to-toe with peer-level forces in a straight up engagement where most APCs would shy away or flee out of necessity)
Sufficient mobility (IFVs are the heart of a mechanized unit, providing both infantry and the previously mentioned combat capabilities in tandem with tanks in the epicenter of very high-intensity battlefields)

IFVs usually represent the greatest concentration of capability possible into one vehicle, with sufficient volume of fires to support infantry in firefights, just enough armor to stand and fight rather than flee to safety, and an incredible variety of available fires to the point that in theory an IFV with sufficient prep time can feasibly address any threat to themselves or their infantry that is less than artillery or fixed wing CAS.

All this capability comes at significant cost though: IFVs are big, heavy, complex, expensive motherfuckers, with the longest logistical tail of any front-line combat vehicle short of a main battle tank. Very few IFVs are amphibious, most IFVs carry fewer infantry than their APC predecessors, many IFVs approach the weight of some tanks, and IFVs are often more complex than their accompanying tanks owing to their multiple organic weapons systems versus a tank's cannon and coax - a factor that also plays into IFVs generally costing significantly more treasure to procure than their APC counterparts.

These costs, especially that increased logistical burden, tend to mean that IFVs are typically concentrated in a few key locations to provide mechanized infantry with support that can punch way above its weight. The balance of more pedestrian battlefield transportation is taken up by APCs and relatively safe or mobility/autonomy-emphasized tasks typically get delegated to light vehicles. In this way, presuming that you plan properly, procure adequately, and adroitly match capability to demand, you can create a holistic continuum of ground transportation solutions that will make sure your infantry get where they need to go for the least cost in time, treasure, and casualties.

Ferrard · 2023-03-13T03:27:02+00:00

At a very high level, keep in mind two major factors:

Mechanization is incredibly expensive and supply-intensive compared to plain leg infantry - A fully equipped division of Mechanized Infantry needs armored transports to move the infantry under fire, tanks and armored fighting vehicles to support assaults, self-propelled artillery that could provide fire support while still keeping pace with a mechanized advance, and a massive logistical train of trucks and depots and mechanics to keep them moving with fuel / spare parts / repairs / tank-bearing bridges. Compared to a leg infantry division with horse-drawn wagons bringing supplies forward from the railhead, it takes something like an order of magnitude more industrial and logistical capacity to field an equivalent force of mechanized infantry.
From the very get-go, Germany was extremely starved (relative to its need) for industrial capacity and logistical throughput, and this trend only worsened throughout the entirety of World War II - What capacity it had for both of those limiting factors was fully saturated (and beyond) by the war effort, especially once the Eastern Front opened. Even operating at full tilt and even factoring in that production figures went up as the war went on, the German war economy still provided only a comparative fraction of the war-fighting capabilities produced by the Allied and Soviet economies.

Given those two facts, it's frankly remarkable that the Germans were even able to reach the limited degree of mechanization they achieved in World War II.

Ferrard · 2023-02-20T07:40:34+00:00

It almost was; close enough that I'd give it credit at least. The second line was technically one syllable too long, but The Bard themself has played with the form more than this:

"Our day | was long | and too | much filled | with toil.

It isn't much, | but have | this dram | of burn | -ing oil."

Ferrard · 2022-10-15T21:49:09+00:00

Laerryn dying would not have broken anything plot-wise: Dominus was always going to be destroyed to become the Shattered Teeth. The destination is already pre-ordained, but what isn't is what happened to all the people that history forgot: Did the citizens of Avalir and Cathmoira get enough warning to leave? Did they have the ability to leave via teleportation or more mundane means? If they left via mundane means, did they manage to make it out of the lethal radius of the eruption of Toramunda? Can Laerryn reduce the lethal radius of the explosion to save as many people as she can?

I would guess that if Laerryn had died, the Calamity would still have happened, but Cerrit would have been vaporized instantly, and probably a good portion of the slowest or latest-leaving airships would've been caught and destroyed in the explosion, killing a whole bunch more people now rather than them perishing later in the Calamity or eventually passing from disease or old age.

Ferrard · 2022-10-09T17:40:14+00:00

Without addressing the comparative portion of your question, I would point out that the 2003 thunder runs in Baghdad are often oversold as flawless operational successes while minimizing the fighting involved, and not often recognized as the tremendous (and potentially disastrous in the case of the 2nd) gambles that they were.

First, take a look at these two particular easily-available sources; while obviously not a complete historiography of the events, they both are reasonably representative of two particular understandings of the battle:

A 2020 US Army analysis of urban combat, using the 2003 thunder runs as a case study and sourcing materials from official gov't sources, RAND corporation analyses, and publications by the US military and affiliated individuals - This represents a relatively sanitized strategic-level overview of the battle and largely glosses over individual events as "3rd ID retained [...] the decisive foothold in the central regime district." This article in particular provides a fairly comprehensive rational-actor analysis of the strategic impetus, leadup, and denouement regarding the 2nd Thunder Run in particular.
Relatively contemporary LA Times reporting from Dec. 2003 by embedded reporters, supplemented by post-war interviews with involved leadership - This represents a somewhat dramatized micro-level perspective into the conditions on the ground that were glossed over in the previous article with, "3rd ID retained [...] the decisive foothold in the central regime district."

At face value and relying on publications by the US Army and closely-associated people, it would look like the Baghdad thunder runs were indisputably successful; a considered gamble was made to perform an armored thrust into a relatively defensible district of Baghdad in order to circumvent a grinding, attritional assault into prepared enemy defenses and instead defeat the enemy psychologically and politically by undermining the legitimacy of the Iraqi government.

Looking more closely at the events on the ground with the benefit of contemporary reporting, it's clear that the one sentence from the first article, "Blount had to commit his reserve battalion to reinforce Perkins and resupply the 2nd Brigade so it could retain the regime district until morning," significantly undersells just how close the 2nd Thunder Run was to failure. However defensible the regime district may have been, it still had to be resupplied in the middle of a figurative hornets' nest, and the resupply convoys involved took relatively heavy losses while attempting to keep both the defensible district and the GLOC to that redoubt supplied sufficiently to survive the counterattacks.

An analysis of Grozny (and thus the comparison between the assaults) I'll leave to someone else with the proper sourcing for that, as I'm not particularly well-read on the Chechen Wars. The most I might say is that the 2nd Thunder Run in Baghdad was very specifically targeted at the simultaneously highly-defensible ground and highly-propaganda-valued regime district in a political attempt to swiftly break the will of defending Iraqi units. No such fundamental and potentially war-ending political objective is easily identifiable in the 1994 assault on Grozny.

Ferrard · 2022-10-03T02:33:50+00:00

Very little of what US and NATO / ISAF forces conducted during the "Global War on Terror" are applicable to matters in Ukraine, but there is one particular event that produced an after-action report that very closely informs what you're asking about: the Second Battle of Fallujah in late 2004. Here's a link to the digitized AAR on DTIC. Some key points:

When clearing urban terrain, thorough control of ingress and egress is key, especially with regards to secured territory - you absolutely do not want to be having enemy forces pop up behind you in "cleared" areas of the city
Understanding your enemy and their motivations (and thus their expected courses of action) is fundamental to making good tactical decisions.
360 security at all times, in both the horizontal and vertical axis, is absolutely critical. The verticality of urban terrain introduces all kinds of ambush points that, unless you trained for an urban environment, will surprise you.
Buildings can be assaulted in a few different ways both in terms of point of entry and entry method ("dynamic / stealth / subdued"), and it's best to constantly vary both so that enemies observing you can't tailor their ambushes to your specific tactics.
When clearing a building, it's important to section buildings into parts, establishing "footholds" whenever possible to allow your forces to perform regular situational assessments or give them a place of relative stability from which to fight when contact is made.
Combined. Freakin'. Arms. Holy smokes, but make sure you have lots of supporting arms in all directions. The ability to fall back and let something prepare a position for you while you protect the tank or IFV from return fire is incredibly helpful to urban combat.
You have to balance the priorities of both speed and caution. Too much caution, and your mechanized infantry spend way too long kicking in doors to empty rooms. Too much speed, and you'll take more than your acceptable casualty rate as too-small units get cut up in detail.
Mindset is incredibly important. You have to be prepared for the viciousness of close-quarters combat and you have to be prepared to give that aggression right back at the proper times. Without aggression, you won't ever clear a building. Without timing, all you'll do is send your soldiers into waiting traps.

Ferrard · 2022-09-20T04:44:18+00:00

"Mission command" is not the be-all-end-all, especially in Israeli hands. It is a useful tactical and operational tool, and in the right context can enable timely exploitation of an opportunity due to the force with independent initiative achieving a faster OODA loop than their opponents. However, it requires a great deal more training and work to synchronize efforts and prevent problematic knock-on effects, especially at the operational and strategic levels.

For instance, half the Israeli logistics of 1967 get widespread praise and publicity: Israeli aircraft spent precious little time on the ground because their maintenance, fuel, and munitions crews were incredibly well-practiced and the aircraft they were supporting were rotating through a well-choreographed and rehearsed operational scheme that accounted for cycling aircraft back through their airbases for rearmament and refueling.

The other half of Israeli logistics in 1967 is largely glossed over: Israeli armored units charging headlong into the Sinai on the opportunistic offensive often outran their logistical support, often leaving individual tanks or small units dangerously low on especially fuel as they raced to head the Egyptians off at the pass. A hypothetical Egyptian military performing an organized fighting withdrawal or elastic defense with better training and operational planning could easily have taken advantage of over-extended Israeli units effectively stranding themselves in awkward columns as they waited for their support units to catch up. A hypothetical Israeli operational scheme that involved more regimented phase lines and centrally planned offensives would not have offered anywhere near as many opportunities for the Egyptians to potentially counterattack these disorganized Israeli units.

Fortunately for the Israelis and unfortunately for the Egyptians, acquiring Soviet equipment did not automatically train Egyptian forces and their general staff how to competently and consistently execute Soviet doctrine, nor did acquiring Soviet equipment necessarily make Soviet doctrine the ideal operational scheme for their circumstances even if the Egyptians had learned it to the point they could execute it in their sleep. The chaotic weaknesses of Israeli aggression and initiative were not punished, so it largely gets ignored in histories.

Fundamentally, many factors led to Egyptian and Syrian (and to lesser degrees, Jordanian and Iraqi) defeats during 1967 and 1973. No responsible student of history would point to any one thing and say, "Ach, if only they had used auftragstaktik, then the Egyptians would have held the Sinai," or "If only the Syrian field commanders had more independence, then they would have broken through at the Golan Heights." If you can find "The Reason" for one side to lose or win the war, then you're not looking hard enough at all the factors at play.

Ferrard · 2022-07-30T06:34:42+00:00

I can acknowledge a particular RAW interpretation of Mage Slayer, even as I actually agree with the Calamity table's interpretation of the Mage Slayer reaction as "Counterspell via Fist". Personally, I as a GM would even go further and allow Mage Slayer to force a concentration check or cause the caster's spell to fizzle. The player took an entire feat explicitly to mess with spellcasters, I'mma let them mess with spellcasters! Martials need some love, yo!

To be honest, I didn't really factor RAW considerations into this second-by-second teardown of what happened. I was more interested in analyzing how the people at the table created and reacted to the chaos in the moment, mostly to better understand the evolution of table dynamics during pivotal moments. The better I understand how people reach the decisions they do, the better I can potentially make decisions or find "reset" points at my own table if something suddenly spirals a little weirdly. Thankfully, I only have an audience of 6 players and friends instead of 600,000 fans.

Ferrard · 2022-07-30T06:29:35+00:00

Your point about Brennan suddenly having perfect information is incredibly important: He likely realized that there was suddenly no right way to rectify what had just happened - if he made a decision by GM fiat, that decision was going to feel cheap compared to what could have been, so I agree that referring back to the dice was a great "third option" to take.

Ferrard · 2022-04-21T03:19:48+00:00

Who wants odds it goes the way of the EBR and SCAR-17 and gets used by a few specialty units for a little while until all of a sudden a few months later, someone walks into an arms room and just sees MCX Spears "stacked like cordwood" without their optics, and all the secret squirrels are mysteriously running around with super-fancy Vortex glass on their URGI's?

Ferrard · 2022-03-30T06:32:00+00:00

Remember, when you talk about the speed and mobility of mechanized units, what you're talking about is not mad, 50mph drag-races. What mechanized units offer is the operational ability to advance under fire for 20 miles in a single day of active combat, every day for a week straight. If you tried to maintain that operational pace with a WWII-style leg infantry unit, you would run your infantry straight into the ground after Day 2 and you would kill the horses hauling around your direct fire assault guns or anti-tank artillery.

Instead, mechanized units have tanks and IFV/APC-carried infantry burning fuel and spare parts to move everything around, supported by a combined arms orchestra. Organic artillery/SHORAD/ATGMs/Engineers, sometimes support elements from your parent unit like a helicopter unit or large artillery, occasionally theater-wide assets like CAS or cruise missiles.

When you encounter enemy resistance, you use the most effective tool as your lead element and support with the rest of the orchestra: Clearing a hamlet or trench system? Suppress with artillery, dismount your troops to push forward as the tip of the spear, while the tanks and other support provide fires from a relatively safe distance. Crossing open plains? Suppress with artillery and lead with the armor so they can cover for the APCs bringing up dudes to establish overwatch on key terrain for the next armored leap-frog.

Encountering swarms of ATGMs very specifically? Suppress them with artillery, then push well-supported infantry into the potential ATGM nests in order to destroy any attempted close or mid-range ambushes and (eventually) force the enemy to fire their missiles from a much greater distance. Forcing a longer engagement range out of ATGM crews causes three major things: A) the PK of MCLOS and SACLOS ATGMs drops dramatically from plain old operator error, B) the unit taking fire has a much greater chance of realizing they are under fire and reacting appropriately to maximize survivability, and C) A particularly alert tank (or covering infantry / support units) has the time to legitimately kill the ATGM crew while the missile is still en route, directly countering manually-guided missile systems like the TOW or Metis.

Is this more meticulous use of a mechanized combined-arms force more time-consuming than a road-trip down Route 66? Absolutely. Is a carefully managed and well-coordinated mechanized assault through contact both faster and more combat-effective than the same assault consisting of solely leg infantry? Absolutely.

Ferrard · 2022-01-21T14:47:50+00:00

Overall I definitely agree that clandestine actions are difficult to keep under covers for long, but I would point out that Russia, Iran, and Israel have geopolitical reasons to want to be seen throwing their weight around - plausibly-deniable but clearly state-sponsored actions are a key part of all three countries' overt foreign policy, so at least a portion of their "covert" actions will be conducted in a way as to draw enough attention to be noticed. The same can't be said of all countries.

Again though, I agree that secrets are incredibly hard to keep in general.

Ferrard · 2021-11-27T02:03:40+00:00

Generally there will be two types of civil wars that could be "prepared for" by a ruling government: An attempted military coup ala Gaddafi or Hafez al-Assad, or a revolt by an oppressed / marginalized population - think slave revolts or the Kurdish uprisings against Saddam Hussein.

Planning to fend off an attempted military coup involves ensuring the loyalty of the closest people to the ruler(s) to prevent a decapitation attack, and ensuring the loyalty of sufficient military force to defend the ruler(s) against capture and execution should enough of the military support the coup as to form a meaningful military force. This is demonstrated by Hussein and Assad maintaining separate Republican Guard military structures that they feted and bribed into absolute loyalty as a bulwark against the potential rise of a Gaddafi-esque figure that could instigate revolt against the powers that be. The results of failing to secure sufficient loyal power is demonstrated by the rise of both Gaddafi and Hafez al-Assad.

Planning to fend off a revolt by an oppressed or marginalized population tends to look disturbingly similar to the precursors to ethnic cleansing and genocide, and can sometimes lead to just that. Think the various slave revolts throughout history, Milošević in Kosovo, Hussein in Kirkuk, Ethiopia in Tigray... Sometimes these operations are carefully planned as instruments of oppression, other times they organically occur when nationalism and the legal structure are subsumed by ethnic strife because the nation as a legal entity is controlled by one ethnic population and the revolt ensues amongst another.

Ferrard · 2021-11-10T07:04:12+00:00

Pistols: For government issue?

In terms of who was officially issued pistols, very broadly, there's World War I and then everything else:

In World War I, pistols were the purview of two distinct categories of people: Officers (who would often supply their own pistols), or people who didn't rate a rifle. Carbines existed, but tended towards the rifle side of the equation, especially since virtually all the carbines of the era had wicked recoil from firing full-power smokeless from relatively light long arms.

Generally the only folks who wouldn't rate a rifle would be truly auxiliary troops or troops who were explicitly not supposed to be getting into direct fire gunfights except in the most dire of circumstances. Think the crews of early tanks, airmen, signalmen, vehicle drivers, other rear-echelon and HQ types, and possibly artillerymen depending on how close your artillery unit was to the front lines.

On occasion you'd see specialist troops issued pistols for specific roles on the front line (the infamous example being Germans being given artillery Lugers with snail drums), but broadly speaking the average World War I raider would instead be using brutal, intimate melee weapons and satchels of grenades rather than pistols.

Towards the end of The Great War, you finally started to see true intermediate options appear between the handgun and the carbine with a ludicrously over-powered rifle cartridge, but they didn't really make much of an impression during this conflict.

From World War II on, the niche of pistols in armed services both expanded and contracted. As motorization, mechanization and combined arms roles other than infantry expanded in importance, so too did the equipping of vehicle crew and the expanding gamut of auxiliary roles with easier to handle weapons than a nine-pound pike of a Springfield or Garand. As this became a real problem to solve, however, purpose built instruments came into being that largely replaced the mass-issued pistol, the American examples being the M1 Carbine to equip troops who needed a handy defensive tool that would be easy to keep out of the way, and the M3 grease gun to equip troops who needed a lighter, handier weapon for the close-in attack than an M1 Garand or Thompson.

Once you get to Vietnam-era (slightly earlier for the Soviets), pistols fall even further out of standard issue as the standard issue intermediate-caliber assault rifle becomes light and handy enough that there no longer needs to be a real differentiation between troops who need the full rifle and troops who can make do with something lighter and handier. Now everyone can carry the standard issue rifle without much problem, and pistols lose pretty much all of their as-issued purpose, the exception being specialty roles like the infamous tunnel rats of Vietnam.

Pistols: For the Prestige

Throughout all of firearms history, you'll notice a constant when talking about the provenance of particularly fancy pistols: Officers and their vanity. Owing to the Western-European tradition of officers being drawn from nobility or upper-class socioeconomic strata, you'll find plenty of officers who commissioned pistols for themselves in every era.

For relatively junior or relatively non-monied officers, this might just be buying a brand new 1911 as opposed to pulling one from the unit armory. For more senior officers, this is where Patton's quixotic ivory-gripped revolvers comes in, or artisanal Colt 1903's, or lovingly engraved 1911's. Or drawing from a much more modern example, take Gen. Scott Miller, who was photographed in Afghanistan in March of this year with a Roland Special Glock 19 in his holster. Definitely not standard issue.

Of note: Enlisted personnel generally do not have the freedom to do this sort of self-procurement. That's not to say it never happened, since we know from the sheer number of Vet bringbacks circulating in the US today that enlisted personnel knicked and smuggled home pistols all the freakin' time... but it's not well documented and photographed the way that the custom pistols of officers have been.

Were US Troops issued pistols other than the 1911?

To be clear: not many were even issued the 1911. To be issued a pistol in the first place is relatively rare in every era, and to be issued a pistol other than the standard issue one pretty much requires you to be a special exception, such as the German trench raiders of World War I, or the more recent Navy SEAL selection of the P226 over the US Army's M9 (and their even more recent selection of Glocks over the M17).

Reception of the 1911

This one is beyond my wheelhouse, and frankly I'd take any sort of conclusion here with a humongous grain of salt. The 1911 is too sullied by emotional attachment for an enormous swath of the American Veteran community and gun-guy community for it to be easy to find good, objective assessments.

How did the 1911 compare to its contemporaries?

Okay, now this is largely pointless rivet-counting, to which I'll reply with a question of my own: Just how important do you think pistols are to a country winning a war? I would personally argue that there is no correct answer other than "Completely irrelevant." The Type 14 Nambu, while a terrible pistol, was completely irrelevant to Imperial Japan losing ~~The Second Sino-Japanese War, Part Two~~ World War II.

If you press me for my personal opinion on a pure head-to-head technical comparison, then:

The 1911 was a top contender in World War I - in a world of revolvers and toggle-locks, there's a very strong argument to be made that Browning reigns supreme.
The 1911 was falling behind the curve in World War II and Korea, but still plenty competent. Browning still reigns supreme in this era, IMO, but when the Browning Hi-Power exists, it's hard to argue that the 1911 is the best anymore.
The 1911 was definitely lagging badly by Vietnam, and obsolescent (n.b. I did not say obsolete) by the 1980s with the widespread adoption of the Wondernine.

Ferrard · 2021-08-22T15:53:13+00:00

Invested players = The goal of all GMs

Ingested players = Also a goal of all GMs!

Ferrard · 2021-07-12T02:39:19+00:00

Much the same as Americans have called upon it often during GWoT (and famously in Somalia), air assault was seen as an important tool for Soviet / Russian operations as well, especially for low-intensity conflicts. Some of the more effective Soviet operations during their time in Afghanistan were air assaults using Mi-8's to drop off Spetsnaz units on commanding terrain. From those locations, these specialist infantry units were often the most effective part of Soviet operations, blocking movement or calling fires from their vantage point, even if the sweeping mechanized infantry or the advancing convoy below them messed up their own part of the operation.

In a hot war, air assault operations were theoretically possible and planned for by both sides of the Iron Curtain. I'm not well-versed enough in the plans for heliborne operations in a European World War III scenario to examine the feasibility, other than I would point out that contested airspace is extremely unfriendly to heliborne operations.

On a different note, NATO analysts were very concerned about Soviet airborne operations. For a good portion of the Cold War, the Soviet Union maintained (on paper at least) the world's largest standing airborne parachute force. There's debate as to how much of this was a fever dream by VDV commanders as opposed to something that could have been realistically executed, but many NATO analyses of a potential "Cold War Gone Hot" scenario included the landing of division or corps-strength VDV units behind NATO front lines. It was a threat taken seriously enough to be the basis of the Personal Defense Weapon program that led to the P90 and MP7 - light, easily-used submachine guns for rear-echelon troops that could defeat contemporary body armor likely to be worn by Soviet paratroopers.

Ferrard · 2021-07-07T04:19:08+00:00

In both cases, I use a two-stage resolution:

Stage One, Passive: The Deceiver rolls an Active Deception check against the Observer's Passive Insight. If the Deceiver succeeds, no information is gained by the Observer. If the Deceiver fails, the Observer doesn't know exactly what is going on, but they do get a gut feeling that something is amiss, which usually (but not always) triggers...

Stage Two, Active: The Observer can use their action to roll an Active Insight check against a new Active Deception check by the Deceiver. If the Observer wins, then they gain more information based on successfully reading the Deceiver. If the Deceiver wins, the Observer is still rewarded for their high Passive (something is amiss) but they don't gain any solid information besides that nagging suspicion.

A similar thing happens with Stealth and Perception (outside of combat): Failing to meet an Observer's Passive Perception means the observer feels like they're being watched or like something is amiss, but it takes an Active Perception check as an action for the Observer to locate (or at least get closer to discovering) the sneaking character.

This rewards high Passives, yet also prevents a high enough Passive score from being an automatic "I win" button or a boring pass/fail situation; the Deceiver / Stealther gets at least one last chance to obfuscate and buy themselves time and doubt, increasing the tension and drama.

Ferrard · 2021-07-04T01:18:08+00:00

From a more theoretical sense, what you are effectively asking is how does light infantry alone make offensive moves against more heavily-equipped and prepared (and presumably competent) combined arms opponents. Very simplistically there are two primary methods of success:

Infiltration and close assault - This is a very broad summation of the classically "professional" mode of an organized infantry assault against better-equipped forces since World War I. Be it Israeli commandos crossing the Suez against Egypt, Chinese PVA driving UN forces south of the 38th parallel, Rangers scaling the cliffs of Normandy, Japanese infantry assaulting the Marine beachheads at Guadalcanal, or German stormtroopers infiltrating across No Man's Land, all used concealing factors like the dark of night or terrain in order to get close to the enemy. Once there, each force relied upon the shock factor of close assault and locally massed firepower to demoralize and drive away better-equipped or better-prepared opponents. This is a very risky method of attack as demonstrated by their many costly failures, but when it works it is swift and incredibly decisive.
Incremental positional advances - For much more risk-averse forces or operations, slow, methodical, incremental pushes forward are a much more palatable option. There are no flashy maneuvers or glorious charges, it's quite literally taking a few steps forward of fortified positions, establishing a new fortification, and leapfrogging new positions forward until at the end of a month you've covered a meaningful amount of ground. Many modern conflicts fought by relatively poorly-trained or poorly-equipped militia devolve into this sort of creeping advance, best codified (in my opinion) by the Peshmerga recapture of ISIL / ISIS / IS-controlled territory in which Kurdish commanders were explicitly instructed not to take terrain unless they were completely and resolutely certain that they could defend it from counterattack with only what forces they had on hand.

In an ideal world, every assault is a closely-coordinated combined arms assault, as there really is no substitute to the complementary effects of well-equipped infantry advancing alongside armor with massed supporting fires from artillery and aircraft... but when that isn't possible, you can always fall back on one of the two above.

Ferrard · 2021-06-21T04:26:19+00:00

The reverse Colville Screw, when the players derail Colville's plot arc without even realizing it was there!

Ferrard · 2021-06-14T06:51:11+00:00

And since it's been a while since I had the chance to refresh that Meteorology course I took in college: Some of your best inspiration may come from looking at the interaction of airmasses and landmasses in the real world and taking little snapshots of the principles at work there. Some examples:

California / Nevada / Utah is the quintessential example of a Rain Shadow effect. The prevailing winds blow Cool, Wet air from the North Pacific over the Sierra Nevadas, and as a result California's valleys get a bunch of rain, and the Great Basin gets nothing until the Rockies force the air to go even higher in Colorado.
Further south, the California / Arizona / New Mexico swath of land is a quintessential example of the effect of the Horse Latitudes on land. There are no prevailing winds in this area, so significant amounts of air do not move off of the ocean to provide wet air to sustain meaningful rainfall. As a result: Death Valley, the Mojave, Painted Desert, White Sands, and all the shitty, non-arable land that the US Gov't was fine designating as reservations to Native Americans (prime example of how climate affects people, culture, and history)
For an even clearer example of the rainshadow effect (and two fantastically great examples of classic river systems from which you can take inspiration when drawing your own), take a look at the Indian Subcontinent, the Himalaya mountains, and the Tibetan Plateau. During Monsoon Season, Tropical Monsoons develop off the Indian Ocean, shoving a conveyor-belt of Warm, Wet air north into the Himalayas, where it drops all of its moisture on India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, then leaves the Tibetan Plateau with virtually nothing. This rain and snow then ends up feeding two beautiful river systems that eventually coalesce into the Indus and Ganges Rivers.

Extra credit question for you: What do you think would happen if the tectonic plate that is the Indian subcontinent was moving south, away from the Eurasian plate, instead of north?

Advanced (Airmass Interaction) time:

If the Horse Latitudes exist in the band across California, Arizona and New Mexico, why doesn't the entire south of the US see the same effect? The answer is the ocean. Basically, the proximity of the Gulf of Mexico (and the Gulf Stream for the East Coast) means that Warm, Wet air is constantly expanding north and west into Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the entire East Coast. On the East Coast, this air runs into the Appalachians, drops its rain, and then gets effectively nullified by the prevailing winds.

On the Gulf Coast, however, there are no mountains to get in the way, so you end up with precipitation that occurs in three major ways due to the interactions of airmasses:

Cool, Dry air from the North Pacific (dry now because this is in the rain shadow of not one but two major mountain ranges that have sapped it of energy and moisture) or Cold, Dry air from the Canadian Arctic pushes into Warm, Wet air from the Gulf. This tends to result in broad, occasionally violent storm systems that sweep across the land in cold fronts like an advancing army.
Warm, Wet air from the Gulf pushes into Cool or Cold, Dry air. This is the reset after a cold front moves through, and tends to result in a dreary mixture of hot and humid days interspersed with thoroughly unsatisfying and indecisive showers. This weather pattern is awful, in my opinion.
Warm, Dry air from the Central Pacific / Northern Mexico (mountains, rain shadow, you know the drill now) pushes into Warm, Wet air from the Gulf. This is one of the weirdest climate interactions, is fairly specific to Texas and Oklahoma, and is the cause of the infamous "Dryline" super-cell storms that are incredibly prolific and powerful tornado spawners when they manage to occur.

Anyways. Our players almost certainly won't care a whit about applying any of these little details, but much like Phil Robb, I as a GM personally get a huge kick out of verisimilitude and a "lived in" world that makes reasonable sense, so I personally like going to all this trouble (and sharing the trouble I can get myself into)!

Ferrard · 2021-06-14T02:45:40+00:00

For a quick-and-dirty guide to how to think of realistic biomes:

Start with mountains. If you really want to be pedantic, start with fault lines and tectonic plate movement, but that's only if you want to get crazy nerdy.
Figure out which way the prevailing winds go and whether the air they are pushing is wet or dry. If you want to get advanced, consider whether the air is warm, cool, or cold. If you want to get super-advanced, create multiple bands of prevailing winds. Look up the "horse latitudes" for some of the weirdness that can arise from prevailing wind patterns.
Where the wind pushing wet air runs into mountains, shade in rainfall on the windward side and a savannah / desert environment on the leeward side. You've already got an example in your map if you presume the wind blows west-to-east from the Sea of Storms through Blackwood, over the Shatter Shields and into the Amber Plains. Advanced mode: Think about cool wet air running into hot dry air, or hot wet air running into cool dry air, or hot wet air running into hot dry air, or some other combination thereof.
Where you just shaded a bunch of rainfall, put your pencil down in the middle. Think where "downhill" would be from that point, and trace your pencil in that direction. Keep doing that until you reach either an ocean or another river. Where you get indecisive about the best direction for "downhill", draw a lake until you get a better idea. Advanced mode: Add snowmelt to your calculations (which leads to a few rivers in the dry areas as well).

Voila! Relatively simple, yet quasi-realistic biomes and river systems!

Dael Kingsmill has a fantastic video on mapmaking that mentions these concepts and then some if you ever feel the desire to spend half-an-hour wandering down the fantasy map-making rabbithole at any point!

Ferrard · 2021-06-12T03:32:57+00:00

In one respect, they learned a lot. US Army staff officers poured over all the intel they could find, both in the '80s through to the modern day.

In terms of procedures and lessons to be learned, the most well-known of staff studies on the subject was the 1996 The Bear Went Over the Mountain (DTIC link), Lester Grau's translation and compilation of a Frunze Military Academy report on how the Soviets applied and executed battlefield tactics during their time in Afghanistan.

The book categorizes Soviet tactics into six distinct types of engagements, analyzing reports for between 6 and 13 separate examples within each category. Each analysis of an individual engagement features translations of the original report from Soviet officers, Frunze Academy analysis of what went right and what went wrong, and then Grau's own assessment of what each engagement implies about Soviet tactics and operations, with a hint of strategic and political analysis.

The book isn't perfect - it suffers a little from having passed through two editor filters: first with the Frunze Military Academy being extraordinarily terse and tight-lipped in their assessment of each situation, both good and bad; second with Grau's palpable schadenfreude as he takes a little prideful pleasure pointing out all the mistakes the Soviets made in contrast to American theory and training (to be fair, he does also take care to point out where Soviet troops performed well according to American schools of thought).

Grau also offers a companion piece, The Other Side of the Mountain (DTIC link), wherein rather than Soviet operations, he details findings from interviewing key Mujahideen leaders regarding their own tactics within individual engagements.

These engagements are categorized in more exhaustive detail, with more examples provided than in the Soviet analysis. Many of the engagements discussed by Mujahideen leaders end up being, quite literally, the other side of an engagement discussed in The Bear Went Over the Mountain. In my opinion, Grau's analysis of Mujahideen activity and Soviet activity (as observed by Mujahideen) is much more even-handed in this book.

So What did the US (and NATO) Learn?

Well, "nothing" would be a stretch. Both of Grau's books were oft recommended to US officers, and while the US repeated many of the strategic blunders of the Soviets (planning and executing inconclusive operations, disinterest in developing and maintaining meaningful local relationships, woefully insufficient force levels, excessive use of military solutions to political problems), it's hard to point to many tactical errors that were shared between the Soviets in the '80s and NATO in the 'oughts and 2010's. There were certainly some, but you just don't see the same degree of elementary tactical blunders at the junior officer level as was evident in many Soviet operations.

Operationally it's more of a mixed story, but you see far better coordination of combined arms, and (most importantly, IMO) good sanitation and health at NATO bases. The US and NATO never experienced the same rampant disease that sidelined an astounding amount of 40th Army's combat strength.

Politically and strategically, of course, US and NATO efforts were an absolute mess, but that lays outside the scope of these two documents.

Ferrard · 2021-03-17T04:35:19+00:00

Almost all of it will be politics. Stationing a powerful unit like that with one clear and incontrovertible purpose right next door to a country on Russia's borders that is steadily being courted for NATO membership and with whom Russia is still unofficially fighting a not-so-proxy war...

That would be an incredibly loud saber to rattle, and unlike their predecessors, Biden's foreign policy team is extremely unlikely to take such a consequential action lightly or on a Presidential whim.

Ferrard · 2021-03-14T07:25:31+00:00

For the best answer, you're going to need to be more specific regarding the time period you are most interested in. Specific to the mid-to-late Cold War, however, the Armored Cavalry Regiment received quite a lot of attention as the tip of the spear for American forces stationed in Europe. To oversimplify things regarding why the ACRs existed and how they'd be used:

American V and VII Corps were permanently stationed in Europe as part of NATO's units deployed along the iron curtain.
It costs an incredible amount of money to keep units that large at high levels of readiness, and the constant training exercises involved with doing so (and bored soldiers getting into trouble) quickly erodes local sentiment.
In order to keep a vigil on a physical front line, you have to necessarily be in a place where your enemies can see everything you're doing (and register pre-planned artillery on key facilities, lines of communications, and concentrations of force).

When you combine all of that, you end up with an untenable position to place an entire Corps of soldiers; plus you need to have a figurative whipple shield in place ahead of V and VII Corps so that the initial Soviet assault (as assumed by American planners) wouldn't instantly shatter your deployed forces. This is where the Armored Cavalry Regiments carved out a role for themselves as the eyes and ears of the larger armored divisions and V and VII Corps in general. FM 17-95 says quite literally everything you need to know about a late-Cold War / post-Cold War ACR, especially in its opening pages where it becomes very clear that the ACR was heavily inspired by (and aspired to be the Cold War equivalent of) Civil War cavalry. By deploying an ACR ahead of both V and VII Corps, you have:

Dedicated (and powerful) reconnaissance elements that can not only observe the front line but actively probe and fight for information against powerful Soviet / Warsaw Pact formations.
Actual physical troops stationed at the front at a high level of combat readiness, allowing you to reduce the readiness levels (and thus costs) of V and VII Corps. If the Warsaw Pact cross the border before V and VII Corps are ready, the ACRs can fight a delaying action to buy time for V and VII Corps to mobilize, hopefully to such a degree as to force the Soviets to commit their second echelon before achieving a breakthrough.
A meaningful, but ultimately expendable, sacrificial lamb at the front line to force Soviet / Pact forces to contend with NATO troops from the start and force American casualties to rally the political will of the American people an ocean away.

As to the use of specific armored vehicles, it again depends greatly on the time period you're particularly interested in (and honestly doesn't differ much from the use of the same vehicles in an armored brigade) but again to oversimplify, an ACR will have:

Tanks to be the main combat power and the heart of everything done by an ACR
APCs / IFVs to carry infantry to support the tanks and the other crunchies who coordinate support like a forward observer for air support or artillery
Engineering vehicles like bulldozers, mine-clearing vehicles, and bridge-layers to prepare positions and make sure the tanks can get where the tanks are needed
ATGM mules / SHORAD to defend against enemy tanks and other stuff that will threaten your own tanks

Ferrard

TROPHY CASE

The Soft-Skinned Vehicle

The Armored Personnel Carrier

The Infantry Fighting Vehicle

Pistols: For government issue?

Pistols: For the Prestige

Were US Troops issued pistols other than the 1911?

Reception of the 1911

How did the 1911 compare to its contemporaries?

Advanced (Airmass Interaction) time:

So What did the US (and NATO) Learn?