NS Military Realism Consultation Thread Type 08

[Questers]

I have some almighty sperg ready to descend on this thread.

[Vancon]

I have some almighty sperg ready to descend on this thread.

Oh no.

[Questers]

HMS said a good chunk of how I wanted to respond to soode, though.

[Vancon]

HMS said a good chunk of how I wanted to respond to soode, though.

Yay?

[Yukonastan]

Question: Let's say you're in a post-nuclear-holocaust metro system with rudimentary resources. And you're reloading ammo. What sort of reliability of this homemade ammo can be expected?

[Imperializt Russia]

Sorry to interrupt the intellectual PGM debate, but I have come to the conclusion that two T-90SMs are better than a single M1A2, as that is how it works out based on price. Therefore should I be buying T-90s or M1A2s?

Two battalions of T-90s may be better than a battalion of M1s, if you can put yourself in a favourable position that allows you to continually make this kind of deployment on the battlefield.

Question: Let's say you're in a post-nuclear-holocaust metro system with rudimentary resources. And you're reloading ammo. What sort of reliability of this homemade ammo can be expected?

Got a reloading press, bullet casting equipment and powder on hand?
Nothing unusual.

[Gallia-]

if youre at the point where individual tank costs start to matter, you can't afford two battalions

[Imperializt Russia]

if youre at the point where individual tank costs start to matter, you can't afford two battalions

I was assuming he didn't realise that the units are more important than tanks "1v1 me irl"ing and trying to steer him towards that idea.

[Pharthan]

After being lol'd at quite logically by TBN, I've reimagined my illogical submarine carrier.

Still obviously a WIP, but better.
Now it's going to be bit more "boatlike" in the bow, like old submarines, for increased longitudinal stability. It's also going to be considerably smaller, carrying no more than 18 aircraft, whereas the other design I had going could have easily carried twice that much.

This one is going to be wide. At 790 feet in length, already massive, it's also 140 feet in width, to help increase stability. By comparison, a scaled up Typhoon-class would be 103 feet in width.

Depicted I also have the shrouded propulsor I intend to use, or at least, the approximate size of it.

I've also elected for a STOBAR design. The CATOBAR of the previous simply seemed to complicate things and, with a smaller huller, will only take up needed space.
There will be two STOBAR flight lines, in parallel with the hull of the ship, allowing for both landing and take-off - or, for the purpose of this carrier, two landings or two launches at the same time, since it's meant to be a strike carrier.
More of my thoughts and logic on the issue.

[Mostrov]

What would be the 'budget' for an independently operating unit (say a brigade) of various nations? Presumably this is less than that of a nation whose entire military size is equivalent to said size given administration and procurement costs, but I can see certain circumstances where these might not be too much of an issue.
How viable could a military force be that is made up of many of these fractured forces fighting together given their lack of standardization? This is based around concepts of decentralized state forces particularly and does come with the caveat that command is likely resolved through personal relationship rather than hierarchy with the resulting problems that this creates.
Of course this can also be scaled up to large coalitions of multinational forces, which we don't have many accounts of historically - given that most conflicts either featured a predominate force or standardization. Any examples would be appreciated, especially in regards to administration and the logistics of these forces.

Also, how effective is artillery against Armor? Is there any role for the anti-tank gun given modern ranges of engagement and detection? Could this serve for infantry in a situation where they find themselves without sufficient support?

[Questers]

Weapons systems don't develop independently. Here's the thing. PGMs were developed because capacities for targeting and acquisition increased dramatically. You can't win a war by sitting in your house with a drone and lobbing PGMs at people, that's true, and these weapon's don't work if you can't see the enemy. For sure. But the point of developing them was the increase in technical intelligence gathering that allowed us to use them in the first place. And that comes out of the Assault Breaker Project. A lot of this technology is determined by technological advances, and as you all know, we're getting exponentially more powerful technology every year. The ability of a military unit not to be seen is not really technology in the material sense. Concentrations of tanks can be spotted by air-ground surveillance; if you dig them in, they are vulnerable to other types of surveillance (and, er, they're stationary) and in many senses more vulnerable, not necessarily to PGMs but to ICM. So there is an idea that PGMs are not useful because the enemy can hide. PGMs exist because the enemy stopped being able to hide.

(Or so we thought.)

But here I want to address what HMS Vanguard said. It was a great post.

Military principles don't stay the same. They differ according to technology and context. And we have to consider what does manoeuvre mean. People like to think that manoeuvre means moving. It doesn't, really. If it did, The Somme would have been a battle of manoeuvre since manoeuvred straight towards them. Manoeuvre is usually considered to mean making smart tactical movements, or as Liddell Hart suggested, the indirect approach.This is because defensive weapons have been getting really powerful lately. And you can't counter them with APS or armour or whatever. So one way is to go around them, mass and schwerpunkt, but that was a feature of WWII, not of any other war. There was no "focus point" in the Gulf. VIII Corps attacked on a really wide front and drove straight into the Republican Guard head on. And killed them. The Soviets didn't have one because their doctrine was totally different. German manoeuvre warfare was distinct for its time because the armies they faced did not have serious defence in depth, and deployed large masses of slow-moving forces in a straight line in front of them. If Cold went Hot the Soviets would have chosen their objectives and driven towards them, drawn lines between our national-corps boundaries and turned our forces inwards on themselves. Or so they hoped. They weren't like yeah we'll outmanoeuvre the enemy, they planned on pushing us and breaking us, and figured once they were through in at least a few areas, we'd collapse.

World War Two is over. The lessons that we can learn from it, frankly, are mainly strategical-political. The Gulf War is over. We can learn lessons from that but it doesn't define what's next - HMSV is right, though, that warfare never goes backwards (unless global society collapses.) And although Gulf War 1 was the tutorial mission, it's still the same game. The enemy was just weaker. I'll come to that later.

Moving on to what Kyiv said, because it focuses on the main thing.

Dominating by fire places an extraordinary burden on the communications network which must be low latency (minimum time between send and receive) and high throughput (many messages must be handled simultaneously), a burden which is asymmetrical.

Yes.

Signals are really important. If you don't have battlefield command and control, you've just lost. part of the Firepower Theory belongs to this. I'll just give a general example to show what I'm saying. Trunks. Military signals are based on trunks, and repeaters. Unit A broadcasts a signal and it is picked up by the repeater and distributed. That's why there is listening/speaking separation. Of course that can get hectic when two people want to talk to one another without talking to everyone. So a trunk assigns callgroups and separates out the signals. That's why you can flip through channels and hear different people speaking rather than everyone talking and listening at the same fucking time. Otherwise you'd get the division commander talking to the artillery brigade on the same listening channel as two battalions talking to one another. So you'd have to queue it and nothing would ever happen. So you have trunks and repeaters and they connect your military unit to the same network so people can listen to individual callgroups and talk to one another. The Soviets never mastered this and loads of their tanks only had listening radios.

Modern ISR can find trunks. They can find you and they can put a battery of DPICM on top of you. And you lose your signals network and if your signals network is dead your unit can't fucking do anything, you have to stop the minor units from using the radio just so the battalion or brigade commander can talk. In the British Army (I dont know about others), a division had two HQs, so that they would always have maximum signals capability when the division was moving. Actually a Questarian division has no less than four possible headquarters and another four dummy headquarters provided by EW. But thats not the point.

The thing is that when we take traditional manoeuvre warfare into account, you HAVE to move. That's still true. Doesn't matter about the direction. You can attack or retreat or shift left or right. But you must move or the enemy will know you aren't moving and he will turn you. The dynamic has changed because fire superiority can hit all the things that allow you to move. It can place mines along your axis of advance. It can hit your signals infrastructure. If you start moving it can lay a ridiculous amount of PGM fire on you if the STA is good enough. SADARM is about 50% effective against a group of forces it can attack reliably.

Our command and control is improving as fast as our ISTAR capabilities. We all know about battlefield management systems and so on. My prognosis is not that we will just sit still and lob PGMs at each other until one side has lost. But at one point, the advantages of one side will overcome the other, in a really radical and fundamental fashion. The side with better ISR, signals, and communication attack/defence systems - and better fire superiority - will win. The contest will push back and forth until this side achieves dominance over the other in those areas, and then the other side will be obliterated, basically immediately. It will be a very sudden and very violent thing.

The contest will at first appear as expected, with two equal sides. They will advance, each side will make gains in some respect. Behind the scenes, the units that have come to life after the revolution in military affairs will be busy. In the 21st century we finally have a way to lift the fog of war and see everything. both sides will be trying to lift the other's fog while keeping theirs down. At some point, the enemy's communication network will snap. His anti-ISTAR defences will break. We will see and know everything about him because we won the 4th dimension battle that nobody could see or hear (well you can see and hear JSTARS I guess), and that is a battle that determines the others because of the vast superiority of firepower. At the point at which the enemy loses the 4th dimension battle (which the irakis lost right away, but w/e) the ERA won't matter. the KE of an FS-APDS won't matter. the ballistic vest won't matter. the offroad speed of an APC won't matter. none of that will be important. The enemy will be covered head to toe in PGM and dense artillery fires and cease to exist almost overnight.

That would be your fate, Vladimir~

[Questers]

What would be the 'budget' for an independently operating unit (say a brigade) of various nations? Presumably this is less than that of a nation whose entire military size is equivalent to said size given administration and procurement costs, but I can see certain circumstances where these might not be too much of an issue.

O&M for a US Brigade Combat Team in peacetime is around 1 - 1.5 billion USD. I don't know about acquisition, h/e. Of course the more you spend the better training and maintenance the brigade gets.

Also, how effective is artillery against Armor? Is there any role for the anti-tank gun given modern ranges of engagement and detection? Could this serve for infantry in a situation where they find themselves without sufficient support?

the answer is very fucking effective.

I hope you don't find wiki links demeaning but
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-Purpo ... l_Munition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_Destroy_ARMor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M712_Copperhead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMArt_155
http://www.deagel.com/Projectiles/BONUS ... 89002.aspx
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ ... /radam.htm
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ ... ns/m76.htm

[New Vihenia]

Our command and control is improving as fast as our ISTAR capabilities. We all know about battlefield management systems and so on. My prognosis is not that we will just sit still and lob PGMs at each other until one side has lost. But at one point, the advantages of one side will overcome the other, in a really radical and fundamental fashion. The side with better ISR, signals, and communication attack/defence systems - and better fire superiority - will win. The contest will push back and forth until this side achieves dominance over the other in those areas, and then the other side will be obliterated, basically immediately. It will be a very sudden and very violent thing.

Yes.. but why you assume "The other side" Won't do the same ? Especially that the other side also have means to engage and destroy ISR platform and place such platform at priority target.

[Questers]

Our command and control is improving as fast as our ISTAR capabilities. We all know about battlefield management systems and so on. My prognosis is not that we will just sit still and lob PGMs at each other until one side has lost. But at one point, the advantages of one side will overcome the other, in a really radical and fundamental fashion. The side with better ISR, signals, and communication attack/defence systems - and better fire superiority - will win. The contest will push back and forth until this side achieves dominance over the other in those areas, and then the other side will be obliterated, basically immediately. It will be a very sudden and very violent thing.

Yes.. but why you assume "The other side" Won't do the same ? Especially that the other side also have means to engage and destroy ISR platform and place such platform at priority target.

If you read the next paragraph I do not assume that.

edit: it's poorly written. "we" just means side who can do the thing im supporting better (lol.)

There is no assumption that it will be uncontested, however.

[The Soodean Imperium]

-snip-

See, this is why I love MilRealism. Sure, you get spammy arguments over self-targeting machine-guns and putting APS on soldiers, but every now and then Questers writes a doctrine sperg and it's all worth it.

But, anyway, the one thing I'm most interested in knowing - and the one thing that's been bothering me from the start - is the question of where "conventional" ground forces fit into all of this. The tank battalion, the mechanized infantry company, and so on. Even if the effectiveness of supporting fires has dramatically increased, they're still supporting fires, aren't they? Someone has to exploit the weaknesses they open up, prevent the enemy from delivering a counterattack under the support of heavy jamming/4C destruction, or at a minimum mop up what's left afterward. I can't imagine the next big war would consist entirely of two armies sitting down and lobbing SADARM and cruise missiles at one another until somebody cries uncle.

Or would it? That's why I'm asking, I'm realizing now that most of my books and PDFs on military operations are rather old.

[Questers]

-snip-

See, this is why I love MilRealism. Sure, you get spammy arguments over self-targeting machine-guns and putting APS on soldiers, but every now and then Questers writes a doctrine sperg and it's all worth it.

But, anyway, the one thing I'm most interested in knowing - and the one thing that's been bothering me from the start - is the question of where "conventional" ground forces fit into all of this. The tank battalion, the mechanized infantry company, and so on. Even if the effectiveness of supporting fires has dramatically increased, they're still supporting fires, aren't they? Someone has to exploit the weaknesses they open up, prevent the enemy from delivering a counterattack under the support of heavy jamming/4C destruction, or at a minimum mop up what's left afterward. I can't imagine the next big war would consist entirely of two armies sitting down and lobbing SADARM and cruise missiles at one another until somebody cries uncle.

Or would it? That's why I'm asking, I'm realizing now that most of my books and PDFs on military operations are rather old.

yes. as i said whichever side wins the 4th dimension war can fold up the other with its combat arms. they're still of great importance, its just that when one side wins the 4th dimension war (as I call it cos i dont have another name) the fire superiority is enough to support the combat arms into totally rolling the battle.

[Yukonastan]

Sorry to interrupt the intellectual PGM debate, but I have come to the conclusion that two T-90SMs are better than a single M1A2, as that is how it works out based on price. Therefore should I be buying T-90s or M1A2s?

Two battalions of T-90s may be better than a battalion of M1s, if you can put yourself in a favourable position that allows you to continually make this kind of deployment on the battlefield.

Question: Let's say you're in a post-nuclear-holocaust metro system with rudimentary resources. And you're reloading ammo. What sort of reliability of this homemade ammo can be expected?

Got a reloading press, bullet casting equipment and powder on hand?
Nothing unusual.

Basic powder, reused primers, you know.

I'd probably have to ask Aqi whether there's a grain of black powder capable of driving bullets at the velocities that smokeless achieves.

[Imperializt Russia]

Likely not.
Black powder just won't have the detonation velocity (remember that propellants today are often HDX/RDX mixes).
Guncotton would probably be better.

[Yukonastan]

Likely not.
Black powder just won't have the detonation velocity (remember that propellants today are often HDX/RDX mixes).
Guncotton would probably be better.

Eh, whatever can be made in a dark and damp metro station 20 years after a nuclear holocaust, and what is still capable of killing people.

[Imperializt Russia]

Likely not.
Black powder just won't have the detonation velocity (remember that propellants today are often HDX/RDX mixes).
Guncotton would probably be better.

Eh, whatever can be made in a dark and damp metro station 20 years after a nuclear holocaust, and what is still capable of killing people.

Well, if the stories about the flat-pack tank factories sat deep within Метро-2 are true, maybe you'll get lucky.

[Roski]

Sorry to interrupt the intellectual PGM debate, but I have come to the conclusion that two T-90SMs are better than a single M1A2, as that is how it works out based on price. Therefore should I be buying T-90s or M1A2s?

You could be buying Leopard 2s, which are more or less on par with the American counterpart, if not slightly better.

The Leo costs 2A6: US$5.74 million (2007), where as the Abrams costs US$8.58 million. Three leopards for every two Abrams, so its a decent ratio, and operating costs are lower for the Leopard because it has a more efficient engine.

EDIT: >implying Germany isn't in NATO fml

[Elan Valleys]

Sorry to interrupt the intellectual PGM debate, but I have come to the conclusion that two T-90SMs are better than a single M1A2, as that is how it works out based on price. Therefore should I be buying T-90s or M1A2s?

You could be buying Leopard 2s, which are more or less on par with the American counterpart, if not slightly better.

The Leo costs 2A6: US$5.74 million (2007), where as the Abrams costs US$8.58 million. Three leopards for every two Abrams, so its a decent ratio, and operating costs are lower for the Leopard because it has a more efficient engine.

EDIT: >implying Germany isn't in NATO fml

Leopard is only that cheap because the Heer is no longer expecting to drive for Moscow and is selling lightly used examples.

[Celibrae]

if youre at the point where individual tank costs start to matter, you can't afford two battalions

I was assuming he didn't realise that the units are more important than tanks "1v1 me irl"ing and trying to steer him towards that idea.

Ouch.

I was thinking that having more T-90s could be more useful than having less M1s.

[Puzikas]

Eh, whatever can be made in a dark and damp metro station 20 years after a nuclear holocaust, and what is still capable of killing people.

Well, if the stories about the flat-pack tank factories sat deep within Метро-2 are true, maybe you'll get lucky.

Metro 2 is love.

Fwiw you could load ammunition for days and never produce sufficient volume of it without a good press, most of which are electrically driven. On a good day of loading I can do about 100-120 rounds an hour. I can then shoot those 120 rounds, if I so wanted, in about 90 seconds time. If your loading for one, sure. But a few people? No, not without multiple stations.

Also you need to load in a dry area. Black Powder won't do in most modern rifles; you need an IMR powder or similar. And primers. And cleaners for your brass. And die sets. And a good light source.

[Imperializt Russia]

Well, if the stories about the flat-pack tank factories sat deep within Метро-2 are true, maybe you'll get lucky.

Metro 2 is love.

But is it life?

hint, hint