NS Military Realism Mk. 7: NO

[Gallia-]

Headquarters and Headquarters Battalion

[Korva]

Bookstrength 7 169 men.

put 106mm RRs on all your APCs

now your rifle companies are also RR companies

praise sparky, blessings be upon him

[Immoren]

What is a "HHB" in the context of artillery? The first suggestion that came to mind would have been "heavy howitzer battalion", but this of course removes the distinction between an identically-structured light and heavy artillery battalion, nor would it be logical to be attached direct to an FO unit.

"Headquarters&Headquarters Battery".
Or "Headquarters&service battery" had I translated it directly from Finnish.

[The Akasha Colony]

What is a "HHB" in the context of artillery? The first suggestion that came to mind would have been "heavy howitzer battalion", but this of course removes the distinction between an identically-structured light and heavy artillery battalion, nor would it be logical to be attached direct to an FO unit.

Headquarters and Headquarters Battery.

[Immoren]

Bookstrength 7 169 men.

put 106mm RRs on all your APCs

now your rifle companies are also RR companies

praise sparky, blessings be upon him

There are not 106 RRs in eighties Finland though. :/

[Korva]

put 106mm RRs on all your APCs

now your rifle companies are also RR companies

praise sparky, blessings be upon him

There are not 106 RRs in eighties Finland though. :/

;_;

use Pvpj 1110

[San-Silvacian]

Alright.

What's a good range of naval radar systems? Not OTH radar like the Longsword, but normal carrier radar, etc.

Vs. air or ground targets?

[Immoren]

There are not 106 RRs in eighties Finland though. :/

;_;

use Pvpj 1110

95 S 58-61.

[Alien Space Bats]

They say multidivisional warfare is dead well look at Operation Iraqi Freedom it was what, 3 US divisions and 1 British and yes they worked as divisions. The division can centralise control of the signals and other aspects of logistics and lighten the movement of the brigades.

And if Korea ever goes hot again, all those people who said that multidivisional warfare is dead will look like complete and total idiots.

That said. You can't not have a Division. Who is going to command all your Brigades? What, a Corps? Well how many Brigades are you going to have in a Corps? Three? Four? IF it smells like a division, feels like a division, looks like a division...

Here on NS, I'd have to say THAT'S the ultimate nail in the coffin. We throw huge-assed armies around here; most older nations will have armies with tens of thousands of brigades if they use their population as a guide, and even the young ones are going to have hundreds (if not thousands) of brigades just to scare off the Great Whites out there who COULD field übermassive armies if they wanted to.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter:

Or what, you're going to have 9 brigades all in one corps?

Well, no; what RL general staff officers will tell you is that the "corps" is ALSO obsolete, having been replaced by the "military district", the theater-level "command", or whatever. Or that, if you REALLY want to organize your army into individual "corps", then they'll each be made up of 3-5 brigades — exactly the same as the old "divisions" — because armies just aren't that big anymore.

But this is NS, and NS is NOT RL. Our übermassive armies are OMG-huge, to the point where — if anything — we need MORE possible levels of command and not less.

Let me take my own Allemande as an example. If I play Allemande at its current size (i.e., as a nation of 17.584 BILLION people), and I assume an active-duty uniformed military establishment equal to just 0.25% of my population (with an equal number of civilian employees working in non-combat support roles behind it), then that would give me a total active-duty uniformed military of 43.96 MILLION men and women. If I then assume that 50% of this military consists of the ground forces (which is probably a good minimum for an island nation possessing a NATO-style military, judging from NATO's principal maritime nations [the US is at 51.5%; the UK is at 51.9%; France is at 53.5%; and Italy is at 59.7%]), then that would leave me with 21.98 MILLION men and women in my combined ground forces (both amphibious and otherwise).

Most NS players want force projection capabilities similar to those available to the United States; to achieve such capabilities, a fairly deep logistical tail is required. That translates into more uniformed personnel (and/or civilian contractors) per maneuver unit; for that reason, I'll use the current ratio of warm bodies to brigades within the US military, which runs around 15,000:1.

In the case of Allemande, this would yield a total of 1,465 brigades or brigade-equivalent units. And therein lies the problem: If we combine these together into operational commands (regardless of whether we call them divisions, corps, military districts, SOMETHINGCOMs, or whatever) at a rate of 5 per said command, that would still leave us with 293 such commands — which is just plain crazy.

Using the divisions as our basic operational unit doesn't lessen this problem all that much. If we follow traditional practice and agglomerate our divisions into corps (or 3-4 divisions each) and then our corps into field armies (again of 3-4 corps each), we're going to end up with 24 field armies; that means we'll need to agglomerate THOSE into fronts, army groups, or whatever. That step brings us down to 6-7 such units, which is probably manageable — although it does suggest that we may need to have BOTH army groups AND "theaters" or "fronts" to bring finally bring the entire system under control.

Now for some people, this is way too much: Hence, the increasingly popular trend of just pretending that your NS nation is a certain set size and ignoring the actual population stat. This is highly recommended from the point of view of realism, but it does deprive us of a possible bit of (typically) NS humor: Given the fact that NS is, at its most fundamental level, a satirical game, there IS good reason to embrace the crazy and revel in it, out of the same basic instinct that makes squishing our toes in mud-pies so totally satisfying.

What I mean by that is this: Traditionally, battalions (and lower) are the bailiwick of Colonels, or at least Lieutenant Colonels; following this system, it's acceptable to place a full Colonel at the head of a regiment, especially if you maintain the throwback tradition of using regiments strictly as depot units (i.e., battalion farms), so that the Regimental Colonel (sometimes called the "Old Man" of the regiment) is essentially its spiritual/social/political mentor, and the child battalions are the actual combat formations the get deployed into battle, under a Lieutenant Colonel's leadership.

But Brigades are the province of the Brigadier General (sometimes simply called a Brigadier, and nothing more), and from there (by convention), the rank of each higher class of general officer goes up by one with each command echelon. In traditional symbolic unit denotation, this corresponds to the number of "X's" found above the unit symbol on the ORBAT or map, and we can go right up the chain of command to see what that looks like in practice (with the full understanding that real world armies are seldom so neat in their assignments, especially at the higher levels):

X - Brigade (under a Brigadier [General])
XX - Division (under a Lieutenant General)
XXX - Corps (under a Major General)
XXXX - Army (under a [Full] General)
XXXXX - Army Group (under a [Field] Marshal/5-Star General [or properly, "General of the Army"])

Except that in NS world, we need more echelons of command — which means we need more ranks.

<pause>

I mean, what could be sweeter? What could be more quintessentially "NS"?!?!?

My inner child loves this. I WANT to see 6-Star and 7-Star Generals; I WANT to see "Grand Marshals" and "Supreme Grand Marshals". I want to see officers with sagging shoulder boards and so many ribbons, buttons, and baubles that then end up looking like a Christmas tree (think of Miles Vorkosigan in the scene where he dons all his medals and awards before visiting the Emperor for a request, going "Full Vor" [Bujold describes him as looking absurd]). I mean, how much more "NS" can you get than that?!?

Of course, there are other ways around the problem. Modern military organizations are generally triangular; but there's nothing carved in stone that says that they HAVE to be that way. You could build brigades made up of 5-7 battalions instead of 3-4; that would slice the number of brigades in your army down by 40-45%; you could then give your divisions 5-6 brigades instead of 3-4 (for a further 30-35% reduction in the number of divisions), give your corps 4-5 divisions instead of 3-4 (for a 20-25% reduction in the number of corps), and give your armies 5-6 corps (for a 30-35% reduction in the number of armies). In the case of Allemande, combining all these changes would reduce the number of field armies from 24 to 6-7, allowing us to get by with just 2-3 army groups, and thereby limiting the number of stars on our officers' shoulder boards to a tasteful five.

Boring, I know. But that's the way to go if you don't want to have a crazy profusion of higher ranks (with all of the delicious zaniness such madness would entail).

The thing is, nobody in NS should be thinking of going "divisionless"; it would simply be absurd, given the differences between our environment and Real Life™

See the two benefits listed above. It's a nightmare to control both technically and from a personnel perspective. Also yes technology has allowed the Brigade to expand its frontage but all you get is an expanded frontage DIvision. And the DIvision can also compact its frontage. and not everyone has fancy things like JSTARs and so on.

Division STRONK

The thing about compacting frontages is that it very much reminds me of the state of affairs on the eve of the Great War. Yeah, we can compact our frontages, but given the lethality of modern weapon systems, aren't we running the risk of just giving our enemies more targets to kill?

We haven't seen a fair fight between well-equipped modern armies in full wrath since 1973. My gut tells me that the carnage involved would make the Somme look like a summer's stroll in the park.

[Yukonastan]

Alright.

What's a good range of naval radar systems? Not OTH radar like the Longsword, but normal carrier radar, etc.

Vs. air or ground targets?

San, just to let you know, change your RIP Puz date to today ;-;
He's received a six hour ban for spamming moderation. #rippuzikas

Anyway, on radars, as mentioned by others, the biggest problem for surface tracking is your radar horizon, and unless you have a very low frequency array (such as the Duga-3 woodpecker), you won't see anything past that array.

Second thing is that range is inversely related to resolution, resulting in the Duga-3 having a resolution of tens of kilometres, iirc.

Higher frequency means less penetration through and/or bouncing off of objects, as well as higher resolution and shorter range.

[Laywenrania]

*snip

Doesn't pretty much the most of this only applies if you play RP without Popcap?
According to NS I have 3,18 Billion People. IC I have 9 million. Which translates to a wholly different need of army organisation.
(Or are people seriously playing with 10 billion + pops? )

[The Akasha Colony]

*snip

Doesn't pretty much the most of this only applies if you play RP without Popcap?
According to NS I have 3,18 Billion People. IC I have 9 million. Which translates to a wholly different need of army organisation.
(Or are people seriously playing with 10 billion + pops? )

I have 5.6 billion. I have been considering updating that to reflect my current account population though (~7.2 billion). I don't do it often since it requires lots of fiddling with follow-on numbers whenever it changes and unlike IRL I don't have a massive bureaucracy to keep track of the changes for me.

[Questers]

imagine doing something dumb like posting about merits of brigadisation vs divisionism

and then topic turns to viability of V2s

why bother?

It did motivate me to go back and take a look at my brigade structure again, and perhaps at some point get back to re-doing my TOE diagrams.

if my posts motivate akasha colony I consider a job well done.

[Questers]

They say multidivisional warfare is dead well look at Operation Iraqi Freedom it was what, 3 US divisions and 1 British and yes they worked as divisions. The division can centralise control of the signals and other aspects of logistics and lighten the movement of the brigades.

And if Korea ever goes hot again, all those people who said that multidivisional warfare is dead will look like complete and total idiots.

right?
will reply when not drunk

[Spirit of Hope]

*snip

Doesn't pretty much the most of this only applies if you play RP without Popcap?
According to NS I have 3,18 Billion People. IC I have 9 million. Which translates to a wholly different need of army organisation.
(Or are people seriously playing with 10 billion + pops? )

Well I pop cap at 500 million. I'm still going to end up with ridiculous numbers of troops and units if I don't insert divisions into the command somewhere.

[Laywenrania]

Doesn't pretty much the most of this only applies if you play RP without Popcap?
According to NS I have 3,18 Billion People. IC I have 9 million. Which translates to a wholly different need of army organisation.
(Or are people seriously playing with 10 billion + pops? )

Well I pop cap at 500 million. I'm still going to end up with ridiculous numbers of troops and units if I don't insert divisions into the command somewhere.

Well, I have even with 9 million people Divisions.

But even with 500 million people you shouldn't need 8-Star-Generals of the Honour Guard.^^

[Spirit of Hope]

Well I pop cap at 500 million. I'm still going to end up with ridiculous numbers of troops and units if I don't insert divisions into the command somewhere.

Well, I have even with 9 million people Divisions.

But even with 500 million people you shouldn't need 8-Star-Generals of the Honour Guard.^^

Yes, I don't need an 8 star general, but I do have a need for more people running around at high ranks. Its helped by the fact that I don't use stars for high ranking commands. If I need to I can just come up with another grandeous word to slap in front of Marshal and come up with a new symbol to go with it.

[Imperializt Russia]

Grand, High, Chief, Supreme, etc.

[The Akasha Colony]

Well I pop cap at 500 million. I'm still going to end up with ridiculous numbers of troops and units if I don't insert divisions into the command somewhere.

Well, I have even with 9 million people Divisions.

But even with 500 million people you shouldn't need 8-Star-Generals of the Honour Guard.^^

I have an army of over 10 million actives and no standing ranks above four-star general.

[Immoren]

Well, I have even with 9 million people Divisions.

But even with 500 million people you shouldn't need 8-Star-Generals of the Honour Guard.^^

I have an army of over 10 million actives and no standing ranks above four-star general.

Above four star they are allowed to sit?

[Yukonastan]

I have an eleventeen-star general. He goes by the callsign "God".

[Imperializt Russia]

I'm noting a disturbing lack of inept 25-star generals.

[DHaera]

So question; is the following feasible IRL? I might be enlisted but shit, hell if I know politics.

• All drafts are an obligation of two years, unless the draftee voluntarily requests more service time during the initial contracting (typically by requesting a more advanced MOS, requiring more training and thus, more obligation).
• Every citizen is drafted at the age of 18 unless still attending some sort of primary school.
• Citizens can voluntarily (or through the judicial system as punishment) to be drafted at the age of 16, whereupon they will continue their education but begin their training whilst attending the school system they were previously enrolled in.
• There are strict numbers and if all billets are filled or are in the process of being filled, not everyone is drafted. Luck of the draw.
• The draft is not exclusively military, per se, and draftees can volunteer (with acceptance nearly every time) to join civil services instead, and become police officers, firefighters, EMTs, etc. They will undergo basic training and then advanced training for the field of their choice, and then are typically assigned to their home region to work under civilian departments. Billeting and other benefits would not be provided by the military, but by the departments. Military volunteers would be required to attend drill once every two months for training.
• There are programs for special-needs citizens, allowing them to voluntarily enlist. Their jobs are tailored to their skills, training is extremely relaxed, and they receive better benefits than ordinary citizens in order to care for their needs.
• Upon completion of their two-years of active duty, all citizens enter a ten-year inactive-reserve status whereupon they may be reactivated to respond to natural disasters or in defense of their home regions. All citizens, regardless of their duty status, are authorized to assist during these times, but members still contracted are required by law if called upon by their regional commands.

If there are any more primary points I should add, by the way, please let me know.

[Padnak]

Oh man, all this talk of organizational structures and here's me with my strange home grown one

The Padnaki military uses a mix of conventional soviet styled divisions and light infantry divisions/regiments. The Padnaki army's armored and mechanized divisions are soviet styled armored and motor rifle divisions respectively, while its light and motorized infantry divisions and regiments are homebrewed.

Light infantry divisions contain 22,000 troops and are commanded by a senior colonel or equivalent (major general, etc). Light infantry divisions are made up of 38 light infantry battalions (the divisions main combat formation), 5 tank battalions (or more depending on the division) 6 artillery battalions and a recon battalion + supporting elements (supply battalions, staff units etc). A light infantry battalion (LIB) is made up 400 troops and is capable of limited independent operations. LIBs have a fairly sizable unit tail that allows them to conduct some independent operations and occasionally will have a tank platoon attached to them. Light infantry are expected to fight on foot and are transported to and from battle in trucks, which greatly reduces the unit fuel tail and augments the number of trucks able to carry supplies. Generally light infantry divisions are permanently based in an area and are responsible for keeping the area under junta control, so they are rarely involved in offensive action on a divisional scale and can rely on established depots and support units for supply and support.

Independent regiments, mostly enlarged soviet styled operations, are the military's main offensive combat formation. Independent regiments organized like this but with a few changes. An additional motor rifle battalion (in Padnak called Motorized/mechanized infantry depending on if they have APCs or IFVs and or wheeled or tracked vehicles) has been added and the supply tail has been almost doubled in size to compensate for the unit being independent. The regimental field artillery section has been enlarged and now includes 12 guns. The commandants service (in Padnak known as rear area forces) has been enlarged.

During operations independent regiments are supposed to use their more heavily equipped forces to conduct the bulk of the combat while drawing on the support of light infantry divisions. Most Padnaki military strategy is concentrated around small units trying to accomplish limited objectives without allot of high level direction. Small units are thought to be more effective in the jungle where they can more easily react to rapidly changing battles and can more easily maneuver without dragging huge amounts of support personnel along with them like they would be if operations were carried out with large scale units. Communication between units is vital as should be apparent. The focus on the battalion is a bit of a leftover from pre-military modernization Padnak when the battalion was about as large as a unit could get and still feasibly acquire most of its own non-military supplies (food, construction materials etc) locally.

I know my whole thing has some flaws, but I tried to make something a little interesting and I think it turned out ok, thoughts and constructive criticism needed

[DnalweN acilbupeR]

Let's talk about small, light vehicles. The kind you can internal carry and airdrop from pretty much anything. Which ones you use and why. Which you feel has a place in a military and which doesn't.

• jeeps, Defenders, G-Klasse's
• internally transportable vehicles, flyers, growlers, S-ATV, all that jazz
• ubertacticool specops glorified jeep-buggies, HDT Storms, etc.
• ATVs - MRZR, etc.
• Quads
• Motorbikes
• Bikes
• Misc

????