ShermansWar

o/

Hey, how you doing, long time no see.As I recall, after multiple pissing festivals and all manner of fun and carnage, we settled on a draft before the game ( immediately preceding) and we released the scenario for that week the night before.That's how we did it when I was stewarding TGIF the first couple of years after Nikatori left, and he ran it the same way.If we didn't draft, oftimes they were lopsided battles, and after a million complaints we had to, was the only approach everyone would accept.We added the "release the scenario the night before" thing, because any earlier than that, that is exactly what COs were doing,what you mentioned,picking apart the enemy set-up. The one Major difference is Back then we had a new scenario every week, so NOBODY ever got to see it till the night before. But yeah, after awhile, it became difficult to get a fresh scenario every week, but I think we managed that until I handed it off to Sean.Anyway good luck, and I may pop in after I get the update installed.

Hi Bandit. Hope everything is good with you Renegade, haven't seen you in awhile.You get 2 D running lemme know.

Soon as I get the new update disk ordered.Hi Shot.

Knife>Butter

That's sick!! Now if we could only get an LVTP-7........

Sorry about your dog, Gary.

Hey Leo, do me a favor and go ..........

Really nice site , Gary.

http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2007/05/2635198

By William S. Lind On War #214 April 16, 2007 A Tactics Primer By William S. Lind It occasionally happens that a reader's e-mail is translated into dots and dashes and sent to me over Mr. Morse's wonderful electric telegraph. The sounder on my desk, opposite the inkwell and under the flypaper scroll, recently tapped out the following, from Jim McDonnell of Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Could you please explain what's meant by the remark about U.S. forces being unable to fight battles of encirclement? Is it that there are too few of them in Afghanistan or are you saying that our forces are constitutionally incapable of that kind of operation? If the latter is the case, that would make a column all by itself. It would, and it does. The problem is not numbers but tactical repertoire, or lack thereof. That deficiency, in turn, is a product—like so much else—of the American armed forces' failure to transition from the Second Generation to the Third. Second Generation tactics, like those of the First Generation, are linear. In the attack, the object is to push a line forward, and in the defense it is to hold a line. As we saw in so many battles in and after World War I, the result is usually indecisive. One side or the other ends up holding the ground, but the loser retires in reasonably good order to fight again another day. Usually, achieving a decision, which means taking the enemy unit permanently out of play, requires one of two things, or both in combination: ambush or encirclement. Modern, Third Generation tactics reflect an "ambush mentality," and also usually aim for encirclement. To that end, Third Generation tactics are sodomy tactics: the objective is to get in the other guy's rear. On the defense, that is accomplished by inviting the enemy to attack, letting him penetrate, and then launching a counterattack designed to encircle him, not push him back out. This was the basis of the new, Third Generation German defensive tactics of 1917, and also the German Army's standard defense in World War II. On the offense, the rule is not "close with and destroy" but "bypass and collapse." The goal is to penetrate deep into the enemy's rear, by stealth or by force (the Germans used a three, not two, element assault, and the largest element was the exploitation element), then roll up the enemy's forward units from the flank and rear while overrunning his artillery, headquarters and supply dumps. The same approach was used by the Panzer divisions on the operational level, leading to vast encirclements of hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops on the Eastern Front in 1941. The U.S. military today knows little or nothing of this. It did attempt an operational encirclement of the Iraqi Republican Guard by 7th Corps in the First Gulf War, but that attempt failed because 7th Corps was too slow. On the tactical level, most American units have only one tactic: bump into the enemy and call for fire. The assumption is that America's vast firepower will then annihilate the opponent, but that seldom happens. Instead, he lives to fight again another day, like Osama and his al Qaeda at Tora Bora. While the central problem here is conceptual—sheer ignorance of Third Generation tactics—there is a physical aspect to it as well. On foot, American soldiers are loaded down with everything except the kitchen sink, and they will probably be required to carry that too as soon as it is digitized. To use tactics of encirclement, you need to be at least as mobile as your enemy and preferably more so. The kind of light infantry fighters we find ourselves up against in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan are just that, light. They can move much faster on their feet than can our overburdened infantry. The result is that they ambush us, then escape to do it again, over and over. Flip-flops in the alley beat boots on the ground. As the students in my seminar at Quantico discovered early in the year, the decisive break, both in tactics and in organizational culture, is not between the Third and Fourth Generations but between the Second and Third. It is little short of criminal that the American military remains stuck in the Second Generation. The Third Generation was fully developed in the German Army by 1918, almost a century ago. It costs little or nothing to make the transition. To those who understand how the Pentagon works, that may be the crux of the problem.

How'z about t-72s Vs Humvees and light allied vehicles. Blue mission evacuation preceding or coincident with enemy offensive. Convoy enters one map edge, exits the other. points gained for units surviving, kills, And trucks carrying evacuees. opfor has all the tanks, but non crewable. Map updates off. Opfor has decent arty. Allied force minimal arty but Heli recon, maybe some light combat support. UAV route. Background can be set by scen designer. lotta country out there with t-72s or T- 80 If real force structures were used, a little research, proper unit designations, House rules on comms, could be fun and instructive. Big ass map, too. Hell, you could do a follow up the week after, blue counter offensive, for instance. Interactive TGIF campaign.4 weeks.

How much of it was focused on destroying your enemies will to fight,even in the abstract, I wonder?

I was speaking to someone last night, they mentioned it was obvious I had read "The Sling and the Stone". I hadn't, so I looked up a review, and it basically says what I have been saying for quite some time. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4176645

On War #209 March 14, 2007 Conversations By William S. Lind A curious fact about the American military and American private industry in the early 21st century is their insistence on holding formal meetings. The practice is curious because these same institutions spend a great deal of time and effort studying "good management," which should recognize what most participants in such meetings see, namely that they are a waste of time. Good decisions are far more often a product of informal conversations than of any formal meeting, briefing or process. History offers a useful illustration. In 1814, the Congress of Vienna, which faced the task of putting Europe back together after the catastrophic French Revolution and almost a quarter-century of subsequent wars, did what aristocrats usually do. It danced, it dined, it stayed up late playing cards for high stakes, it carried on affairs, usually not affairs of state. Through all its aristocratic amusements, it conversed. In the process, it put together a peace that gave Europe almost a century of security, with few wars and those limited. In contrast, the conference of Versailles in 1919 was all business. Its dreary, interminable meetings (read Harold Nicolson for a devastating description) reflected the bottomless, plodding earnestness of the bourgeois and the Roundhead. Its product, the Treaty of Versailles, was so flawed that it spawned another great European war in just twenty years. As Kaiser Wilhelm II said from exile in Holland, the war to end war yielded a peace to end peace. The U.S. military has carried the formal meeting's uselessness to a new height with its unique cultural totem, the PowerPoint brief. Almost all business in the American armed forces is now done through such briefings. An Exalted High Wingwang, usually a general or an admiral, formally leads the brief, playing the role of the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert. Grand Wazoos from various satrapies occupy the first rows of seats. Behind them sit rank upon rank of field-grade horse-holders, flower-strewers and bung-holers, desperately striving to keep their eyelids open through yet another iteration of what they have seen countless times before. The briefing format was devised to use form to conceal a lack of substance. PowerPoint, by reducing everything to bullets, goes one better. It makes coherent thought impossible. Bulletizing effectively makes every point equal in importance, which prevents any train of logic from developing. Thoughts are presented like so many horse apples, spread randomly on the road. After several hundred PowerPoint slides, the brains of all in attendance are in any case reduced to mush. Those in the back rows quietly pray for a suicide bomber to provide some diversion and end their ordeal. When General Greg Newbold, USMC, was J-3 on the Joint Staff, he prohibited briefings in matters that ended at his level (those above him, of course, still wanted their briefs). Instead, he asked for conversations with people who actually knew the material, regardless of their rank. Five or ten minutes of knowledgeable, informal conversation accomplished far more than hours of formal briefing. Why does the American military so avoid informal conversations and require formal meetings and briefings? Because most of the time, the people who actually know the subject are of junior rank. Above them stands a vast pyramid of "managers," who know little or nothing about the topic but want their "face time" as they buck for promotion. The only way they can get their time in the sun without egg on their faces is by hiding behind a formal, scripted briefing. At the end, they still have to drag up some captain or sergeant from the horse-holder ranks if questions are asked. The PowerPoint briefing is another reason America has a non-thinking military. The tendency toward useless, formal meetings is of course broader than the American military—again, the business world is full of it—but good leaders cut around it. When General Hermann Balck was commanding 48th Panzer Korps on the Eastern Front with General F.W. von Mellinthin as his I-A, Mellinthin one day reproached Balck for wasting time by going out to eat with the troop units so often. Balck replied, "You think so? OK, tomorrow you come with me." The next day, they arrived at a battalion a bit before lunchtime. They had a formal meeting, Balck asked some questions and got some answers. Then, they broke for lunch. During the informal conversation that usually accompanies meals, Balck asked the same questions and got completely different answers. On their way back to the headquarters, Balck turned to Mellinthin and said, "Now you see why I go out so often to eat with the troop units. It's not for the cuisine." When Generals Balck and von Mellinthin visited Washington in 1980, John Boyd asked them to reflect on their leadership of 48th Panzer Korps and how they would have done it if they had possessed computers. Balck replied, "We couldn't have done it." Boyd didn't ask about PowerPoint, but I suspect General Balck's reply would have been equally to the point. Despite the situation in Berlin, the Wehrmacht did know how to think. Note: The idea for this column came from my old friend General Pat Garvey, USMCR, ausser Dienst. I suggest that anyone who takes umbrage at it contact him directly. Orange though I am, I do send an occasional St. Paddy's Day present.

http://www.d-n-i.net/lind/lind_archive.htm On War #205 February 13, 2007 Distributed Ops or Dumb Ops? By William S. Lind For some years, the U.S. Marine Corps has been playing with a concept called "Distributed Operations." On January 11, it issued a short paper over the signature of Lt. General J. F. Amos, the grandiloquently titled "Deputy Commandant for Combat Development and Integration" (I can remember when Marines would have choked on a title like that) which defines and explains the concept. Well, sort of. To understand the paper, a bit of background helps. There are two potential definitions of distributed operations, one that could carry the Marine Corps forwards in important ways and another that is essentially a scam. In the first, distributed operations is just a new term for true light or Jaeger infantry. While both the Marine Corps-and the U. S. Army call their foot infantry "light," in terms of its tactics it is line infantry. True light infantry has always fought distributed, with small units operating beyond range of mutual support or supporting arms. Those small units have depended on their own weapons, lived largely off the land and fought very much like guerillas, with tactics based on an ambush mindset. Even 18th century light infantry used tactics we would consider modern; see J. F. C. Fuller's book British Light Infantry in the 18th Century or the fascinating diary of a Hessian Jaeger captain in the American Revolution, Johann Ewald. If the Marine Corps adopted true light infantry tactics under the label "distributed operations," it would extend its maneuver warfare doctrine in a logical and useful way. It would also adapt its infantry to Fourth Generation war; as the FMFM-1A notes, what states need most to fight 4GW enemies is lots of light infantry. But there is another definition of distributed operations lurking in dark corners at Quantico. This definition would use distributed ops as a new buzzword for Sea Dragon, a pseudo-concept the Marine Corps came up with in the 1990s to justify programs. Sea Dragon sent little teams of Marines wandering around the countryside essentially as forward observers, whose purpose was to call in remote, hi-tech fires. Unlike light infantry, the teams could not depend on their own weapons, which meant that by the time the hi-tech fires got there, they would be dead. Sea Dragon represented the ultimate wet dream of the French Army of the 1930s, an army reduced to nothing but forward observers and artillery. It was bunk. So which way does the January 11 paper go? Unfortunately, it is too muddled to tell. On the one hand, it includes a long quote from my oId friend Jeff Record on the importance of light infantry in small wars. On the other, it includes a long list of the usual big-bucks programs—"MRAP, EFV, JLTV, LAV, V-22, CH53K," L-70 class Zeppelins etc.—which distributed ops supposedly justifies. Oddly, successful light infantry like Hezbollah's doesn't have any of those Wunderwaffe. This kind of random program justification smells suspiciously like a disinterred Sea Dragon. The paper gives a formal definition of distributed operations which clarifies nothing beyond continued intellectual confusion and Marines' inability to write: Distributed operations is a technique applied to an appropriate situation wherein units are separated beyond the limits of mutual support. Distributed operations are practiced by general purpose forces, operating with deliberate dispersion, where necessary and tactically prudent, and decentralized decision-making consistent with commander's intent to achieve advantages over an enemy in time and space. Distributed operations relies on the ability and judgment of Marines at every level and is particularly enabled by excellence in leadership to ensure the ability to understand and influence an expanded operational environment. On the one hand, the reference to units operating beyond mutual support suggests true light infantry. On the other, nothing could be more wrong than the suggestion that anyone, i.e. "general purpose forces," can operate like light infantry. Jaeger tactics demand extensive training and a very high level of expertise. One wonders who wrote this definition, JAG? In the end, the January 11 paper leaves distributed operations still balanced on a knife-edge between a major step forward in adapting to Fourth Generation war and a plunge into the worst sort of Madison Avenue program justification babble. If Quantico wants to move distributed ops in the direction it ought to go, it needs to take it away from the usual colonels, contractors and consultants and give it to a small group of company and battalion commanders just back from Afghanistan and Iraq, giving them in turn a pile of books on the history of light infantry. ......................................................................................................... At the center of this is the debate as to what, exactly is the purpose of " Distributed" ( or decentralized) ops" is the question of what direction do we go in as we restructure the military? We are, in my opinion, spending bundles of money tweaking a second generation military , instead of iimplementing tactics, doctrines and forces necessary to deal with either a 4th generation war as we now have in Iraq, or a real conventional threat like china ( we have cut most weapons platforms programs that we would need to fight a nation like china).Instead we spend bundles on military subcontractors, and high tech systems that are more useful as a tool to micromanage a situation,which both kills the initiative of the indivivual soldier and compromises his ability to get inside his enemies decision cycle, as iot also weighs him down with an extra 50 lbs of crap that doesn't really help him in a firefight with a local who's only schlepping an AK or an RPG and not waiting for orders from brigade to make a decision before he engages. The whole purpose of the military restructuring did not accomplish a transition in to a 4th generation military, capable of fighting stateless enemies, or even to a 3rd generation military ( although we've long had the weaponry to be that, as the germans were in WWII) but rather squandered it on systems that were necessary to prop up the second generation military model we use, ( based on the French concept of bringing tremendous amounts of fires onto the enemy, with the grunts only having to go in to mop up. Every few years the military plays around with a restructuring of it's forces, because it cant seem to get it quite right.It has become rooted in the Victory through Firepower culture ( usually enabled by the latest gizmo which costs megabucks) , which not only doesn't win 4th generation wars, but stifles the initiative of the individual soldier who is actually in combat, as he sits there waiting for orders from HQ as they process the shitloads of information before issuing orders to sub. units .In this interim, some Iraqi sniper just plugged a trooper on the streets of Ramadi.Commanders, removed from the situation sitting inside the green zone, or maybe Qatar, cannot hope to get inside the decision cycle of an enemy who reacts even faster than the type of convential opponents we trained for( generally, his decision as to when, where, or how to engage is up to him on the spot, and he can asses a situation and make, and implement his decision immediately) As we went to war we were told that we would be using large amounts of special forces operations, predators, whatnot, assisted and augmented by tons of communications, command and control, digital datalinks and billions were spent on these systems. The problem is that all these systems did was prop up the exixting military culture, and enrich militaryt contractors and subcontractors alike. while all thes things are great tools, and i agree we should use them, making them the center of our doctrinal thought is a mistake. Take afghanistan. Sure sounds to me like what we did there fits the Seadraon concept. Small units of artillerry spotters, FOs, Secial ops, called in remote high tech fires.These operations were supported not by US troops( troops on the ground were still needed, just cause we didnt provide them doesn't mean they weren't there or that the need fore them had disappeared) but by proxies from the northern alliance. The problem arose when, after we killed the morons who had deployed in the open, or hadnt dug deep enough, the rest found cover( caves, wherever, or dispersed) and we had no way to get at them. The forces we had werent capable of any extended close combat operations, and in fact werent intended to engage in such, and the tribesmen of the alliance didnt fancy assaulting , what were to them, prepared fortified positions. The US, with inadequate force levels, was unable to cut off the enemies means of egress, and, as a result, in engagement after engagement( Mazir-E-Sharif, Kunduz,Kandahar, Tora Bora) the bulk of enemies forces was able to slip away and in fact we have training camps for jihadists operating openly in both iraq and Afghanistan. We are unable to keep peace in Iraq. We need a restructuring, but not along the lines of the one we got, which is rooted in a second generation military culture of the French Jominian model, But one that transitions the bulk of our forces to a third generation military capable of dealing with conventional enemies that may have superior troop numbers, like China, or Russia, or Iran,( instead of slashing such forces as we have recently done the past few years) and includes true light infantry capable of reacting in a 4th generation conflict, and not weighed down by 50 lbs of techno crap as they as they sit crouched behind a building, hoping they don't get shot by a sniper while they wait for orders from some battle coordination center far removed from the fight and harms way.

I read it, i thought it was a flawed article.Inaccurate, and filled, not just with jargon and conclusions both without context ,but states conclusions it in no way proved.it sounded more like someone regurgitating something they didnt really understand,something they heard someplace else.

Peace and love> War and Peace

"That little blip on the screen?"> it's getting bigger, a lot bigger.

Get yer hands off of me, you damn dirty apes! ???>>You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

Elvis>Pelvis

No, It's Unhealthy>Must be why it feels so good.

I choose quality>10,000 kills

Burn the heretics>Noone ever expects THE SPANISH INQUISITION!!!

berg>Titanic