Follow-up on the Abrams

Gary Brecher reported -- in 2004, actually -- that the Abrams isn't quite invincible against an RPG: if you can hit it right on the joint between the turret and the hull -- the tank's "armpit" -- you can knock it out. However, as he says in more or less as many words in the column, boo hoo. His analogy that a tank is an internal-combustion knight is spot-on, at least as far as I can tell; and in fact, even the best knightly armor also had a weakness -- in three hundred years of trying, not even the best German engineers in the world ever found a really satisfactory way to armor a knight's armpit, either. The closest they got was a sort of dome over the front of the armpit that slid downwards as the knight raised his arm, while a plate fell down from the arm armor at the same time. It was still possible to bypass the armor if you were able to stab straight up from underneath the knight's arm, parallel with his torso -- which is in the realm of trick shots, not things it's seriously worth planning to defend against, the same category as hitting an M1 just underneath the turret.

And yes, believe it or not (since most popular historical truisms aren't worth the electrons they're printed on), it really was firearms that made plate armor obsolete. Eventually (around the early 16th century, I think), heavy firearms were developed that could defeat medieval-thickness plate armor (and the Swiss). This meant thicker plate armor which could defeat a musket; but when you're building up ridiculously heavy armor for the front of the torso, plus perhaps lighter armor for the arms, legs and head (although steel and labor were expensive, the human neck is only so strong, and limb wounds can be survived in a way that torso wounds can't), all-around coverage optimized for single combat with swords is suddenly a lot less appealing. That, and knights were obsolete by this time; the early-modern cavalrymen were paid by the state (well, supposed to be paid by the state) as mercenaries or regulars, lived in barracks (or rather, again, that was the theory), and fought as a massed force rather than as individuals. So they did an awful lot less single combat, and sword-proof armor is a lot less necessary when there's someone nearby to watch your back.

Also, cavalry had largely given up on swords by this point, in favor of hammers, picks and small maces -- weapons that could break through armor, even musketry-proof. Between that, the weight and discomfort of armor, and the very low deadliness of early modern musketry (especially if you were riding towards the musketeers at a trot rather than standing still to receive and return fire), the French were issuing orders to their cuirassier officers to wear their armor instead of leather jackets like their men's as early as the late Thirty Years' War. (Meanwhile, England was a backwards country militarily; in the English Civil War of the 1640s-50s, only one regiment of cuirassiers fought at all, on the Royalist side. After one battle, a wag observed of their commander that had he been as well provisioned as he was fortified, he could have withstood a siege of eight weeks.)

So, what's the armored analogy to a cavalry hammer? Pete Takeshi reminded me that the Abrams uses ceramic armor, so there's nothing for a DU sabot round to spall through -- so that option's out. My theory is a battlefield laser; an early form is currently under development, designed to swat artillery projectiles out of the sky, but I think that this could be a second 88 Flak, with a dual hatting more valuable than its original role. I know Boeing's not reading this, but I hope they keep that in mind.

Also mentioned on Wired: the American approach to commando operations...

Also, I forgot to mention: the verdict's in, Gary Brecher is fictitious; someone checked the Fresno phone book, and found no Brechers at all, Gary or otherwise. Apparently Richard Ames, the Exile webmagazine's founder and a really, really obvious KGB agentsomehow capable of surviving multiple run-ins with enraged Russian authorities, has a history of making up characters like this. And regardless of whether he has KGB connections or not, he burned down Victor Davis Hanson's vineyard! Then again, if you keep saying stupid things about the classical Greeks, you can expect these kinds of things sooner or later.

The War Nerd also likes the Sikhs. So we have that much in common.

Operation Flashpoint: Later On.

I figured out that the trick to commanding a tank is to stick to the target-designator viewscreen ("V" command) and let the driver do the negotiating; it makes the most sense to just issue a "Stay In Formation" order and use the strategic map to move if necessary. Assigning targets and getting the gunner to fire is finicky, but it mostly works. I still haven't figured out how to manually rotate the turret -- my tank is generally the one with its barrel pointed slightly off from due aft, as opposed to towards the enemy -- but it seems the gunner will rotate it into proper position to fire anyways. Still a pain, but made up for by the impressive power of the tanks themselves.

By the way, look at this. It turns out from Iraq that an M1 Abrams pretty much can't be stopped by anything short of a 155mm artillery shell going off _underneath_ the tank -- it's pretty much impervious to RPGs, for one thing (a point also mentioned in passing in Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a book that has exactly the merits and flaws that its title implies, but certainly is worth reading). But the main point to consider here is that no army issues its infantry a weapon that can stop an Abrams equipped with reactive armor. Light infantry warfare is predicated on the idea that suitably-equipped and adequately skilled infantry can defeat anything they oppose; what does the presence of invincible tanks mean for this style of fighting?

Then again, the question is probably academic: light-infantry warfare, Vietnam-style, is very far removed from things like the war in Iraq, and even in Afghanistan -- where it's a little closer, and the Soviet-Afghan War was certainly a light infantry conflict -- there's much more COIN (where the main challenges are rebuilding the infrastructure, protecting it, and not blowing one's top when an insurgent snipes one's squadmate) than there is open-field warfare of any sort.

But back to Operation Flashpoint: there were only two tank missions, than a special-ops one (which took me more tries than it should've to get right; how did I forget that firing on the tanks from a hill with an RPG was not a very special-ops way of handling them? But that said, I discovered a possible flaw in the engine: you can't knock out tanks with a single RPG shot to the turret), and back to infantry -- where the US side has gotten significantly better, and the Russians have gotten significantly worse, than they were when last we met. The US troops are now fighting at the same level as the guerillas I mentioned earlier, still advancing in line but using cover (and hitting the dirt as soon as shots come in); the Russians are walking around fully exposed, routinely silhouetting themselves over ridgelines, and moving in squads with embarrassingly little concern for cover. One time through a mission where I was carrying an M60, I managed to sprint to a group of bushes early on and slaughter six Russian troops who were standing in a village crossroads -- even though they knew that fighting had already begun.

Having more or less learned how to engage with an M203, I've now tried learning to use RPGs. They're a lot more useful than they are in Far Cry 2, but I need some practice in judging how much elevation to give the round to impact usefully, and how many seconds I should expect it to stay in the air. I've managed to enfilade a group of Russians and wipe them out with RPG fire a couple of times, though; at least the rocket can be launched more or less straight, as opposed to lobbed underhand like an M203.

By the way, something I've discovered in this game: if there was just one thing I could do to improve a US squad skirmish line, it would be to throw out flankers -- to have the rightmost and leftmost members of the squad equipped with high-firepower weapons not heavy enough to compromise their mobility (probably the M249 SAW, which was explicitly designed to be like this), and have initiative to either remain with the squad or advance to cover ahead of it, with each flanker looking forward and inward towards the line. Flanking fire is incredibly valuable in a firefight; it's fairly easy to find cover against threats in one direction, but not in three.

That said, do we still use formations like that? I was unable to determine that via Wikipedia and Google (which is actually a good sign -- Poole says that the Chinese treat their infantry doctrines as just about as confidential as their nuclear technology, and we should be doing the same), and I know at least that we now focus on four-man fire teams -- but Poole, writing in the '90s or the 2000s, did complain that we were still using pre-machinegun tactics, skirmish lines in particular.

(Also, disclaimer to those concerned: I think that all parties involved in the recent use of torture by the United States should be punished appropriately, and I'm disappointed that Obama is trying to rule out the punishment of some or all of them; "moving on" will only be appropriate once all culpable for violations of international treaties are jailed or dead. The US Army, and the FBI, would agree on that, although probably not the "or dead" part. I'm beginning to wonder whether it is appropriate to disband the CIA, given that extraordinary rendition is also forbidden by the UN Convention Against Torture -- very, very explicitly at that.)

The fantasy way of war?

I was reminded of this problem again while reading Order of the Stick comics looking for the iconic Monster in the Darkness scene, and again by the opening for Valkyria Chronicles, currently on Pete Takeshi's frontpage, although it looks like Valkyria Chronicles had a mild case of it at best. (It also has medevac, Pete Takeshi relates; I may want to look it up.) The problem at hand -- vividly illustrated here, and here, and here -- is that warfare as we know it evolved on account of firepower as we know it. Massed troops were first used on battlefields with no more dangerous ranged weapons than crossbows and catapults. Firearms are predicated on the idea that there are targets on the battlefield that are soft enough that they can damage them (and note that the 16thC musket was a massive, one-caliber weapon firing a two-ounce ball, the only shot heavy enough to punch through plate armor). Heavy fortifications were abandoned after it was no longer conceivable to usefully harden them against artillery and man-portable explosives (and gliders).

Settings that contain massive amounts of firepower without highly advanced technology -- fantasy is of course the primary offender here -- assume that the style of war used in their civilization will be the same as that used in a roughly analogous era on Earth. But medieval castles were constructed on the assumption that no one could easily knock down their walls -- and once that assumption became invalid, castles were completely re-imagined, although only after a rather harrowing hundred years (ca. 1400-1500). So for a fantasy setting to have castles, Lord of the Rings-quality magic is the absolute upper limit, and even then I'm not entirely sure; but magicians who can conjure up earthquakes and supernatural creatures would coexist with massed archer formations for about as long as machine-guns would coexist with armored knights, for exactly the same reason.

So, what should a fantasy setting's style of war look like? ... Well, it would have to involve small numbers of highly-trained elites capable of unleashing massive firepower, who would fight chiefly not by defeating their enemies but by escaping detection by them; fortification would be done carefully and stealthily, and mobility would be a massive part of all military campaigning. In other words: it would look almost exactly like contemporary warfare, as practiced by its best practitioners. In other words, ambushes, patrols, land mines, Ospreys, blooming-lotus assaults, and the siege of Hue City -- massed units of any sort, however fast and powerful, would find themselves harassed, ambushed and bombarded into irrelevance; just ask Saddam Hussein.

Pete Takeshi observed that the fastest way of summarizing this problem -- and the more general issue that fantasy with regularized, powerful magic tends to evolve into much more modern styles of civilization if you think about it long enough -- is to call it the Flintstones Principle.

The definition of the Flintstones Principle is, "If you need a definition for the Flintstones Principle, you shouldn't be writing fantasy."

Operation Flashpoint: Lessons Learned

I think that in an adequately sim-like FPS, it's reasonable to expect that a given soldier is not going to kill more than two or three enemies before he dies. Elite troops can inflict massive casualties in modern war, but then again, Poole mentions an Israeli commando team that landed on an infiltration mission in Lebanon, but was spotted by a random farmer paid to do sentry duty by Hezbollah; all six commandos were killed by a single claymore mine. Even elites can get unlucky. All told, a dynamic that we might recognize from the primary cultural conflict in the US -- the question of sexuality -- applies here. Most people who have sexual intercourse have children, and most people who fight in close combat die; the sooner you stop trying to cheat your way out of these facts with things like birth control and artillery barrages, the better things will go for you as a civilization.

Corrollary: any civilization that doesn't have a warrior religion, loosely defined as one in which dying in battle is one of the best things one can do with one's life (the Vikings, Muslims and Japanese come to mind here), is going to find long wars psychologically unsustainable; and even a civilization that does have a religion like that is going to find war demographically unsustainable, if it goes on long enough.

(Pete Takeshi also mentions what the Air Force calls "the Golden BB." When you're flying in five tons of metal at a significant fraction of the speed of sound, seven thousand feet up in the air, all incoming fire is serious incoming fire; all it takes is one stray small-arms round to completely ruin your day.)

Also mention that war is slow. Pete Takeshi mentioned, in a conversation a long while ago, a sniper who once spent eight hours crawling across a hundred-yard field, moving slower than the human eye can see and once spending thirty minutes getting a drink from his canteen. You can bet that he found the experience an extremely engaging one; but you can also bet that any game player (well, any [[normal]] game player) who was asked to do this would get bored part of the way through and wander off to play Dwarf Fortress. All war is like submarine war, long periods of boring watchfulness interrupted by confusing, deadly moments of terror; to ask a player to go through the boring parts is a little bit too much.

Perhaps the frequent deaths and reloadings that one sees in realistic FPSes (at least if not taken to the puzzle-game extremes of Ghost Recon) can be justified as this -- "reconnaisance by suicide" as opposed to "reconnaissance by binoculars." Spending four or six hours reconnoitering a target is not much to ask if a hasty attack on the target would probably cost you your life; but it is too much to ask if you're seeing the target from the other side of a computer monitor.

Not to mention that the intuitition and active senses that you can develop when doing real woodcraft -- especially the variety that includes guns -- are just not available in a first-person shooter. One flight-sim player argues that the best view to use is a chase camera, since an in-cockpit view deprives you of the inner-ear sensations, awareness of gravity, and peripheral vision that are crucial to real-world aerial warfare; how much more so for a way of war in which the sense of _smell_ can sometimes be decisive -- Poole mentions a patrol in Vietnam where the point man, to determine which of two forked paths the NVA they were pursuing had taken, knelt to the ground and checked which one smelled like sweaty feet; he then threw a grenade up that path, and "all hell broke loose" -- the NVA had set up a hasty ambush at very, very close range. He also mentions an old ninja strategy of slightly opening the mouth, closing the eyes, and straining forward, to pick up even the slightest scent or taste of body odor, soap, army rations, rifle cleaning oil, or whatnot that might at present be out there on the wind: another thing a first-person shooter can't possibly simulate. Honestly, I like heads-up radars on that account: they provide a visual substitute for the situational awareness that a real infantryman would certainly have.

So the right style of FPS -- if we assume that Serious Sam-style cartoonishness (and Far Cry 2-style [[magic regeneration]]) is out of the question -- is probably something that also operates at a higher level. Envision a game where you're the disembodied voice giving briefings, as well as the foot soldiers who carry them out (probably commandos or equivalent, for the sake of sanity, survivability, and flexibility, although Ghost Recon by way of TIE Fighter suddenly starts to sound like a promising idea). Imagine a game where the player was the collective consciousness, guardian spirit, or whatever of an elite unit, able to hop into the mind of one or another of the troops, and collecting some kind of benefit for future soldiers if one who was currently in play died. You would have to expect a lot of failed missions in a situation like this -- whether from teams being wiped out, or from objectives not being where or what you thought, or just from not having enough time to fully reconnoiter and make an effective attack -- but this is to be expected; the enemy would be experiencing a lot of such failures, too, and the course of the war would probably come down to decisions or mistakes or economic strengths and weaknesses on a higher level than the player's, although a decisive success or a decisive failure -- as in Wing Commander 1 and 2, now that I think of it -- would certainly have its effects at higher levels of command.

And unlike even Operation Flashpoint -- where I ended the infantry segment of the game with a kill count of over sixty men, plus two tanks -- there would be no continual savings and reloadings, and no cartoonish kill counts like my own.

Operation Flashpoint: On Fieldcraft.

I looked up a walkthrough on Gamefaqs for advice on the escape mission that I was so thoroughly stuck on. It turns out that this isn't Far Cry: if you kill one soldier, the others won't forget that you're there no matter how long you wait afterward, and I was constantly opening the mission by taking out a Russian who was in range and coming fairly close to my position. I'd previously accused them of cheating (though I removed that from the post on consideration); but it turns out that their AI, rather than being too unrealistic, was not unrealistic enough.

Armed with this knowledge, I spotted a line of bushes running almost entirely from one forest to another (or rather, the Gamefaqs guide spotted it, and I followed its advice), and was able to sneak from the one to the other, and onward to the eaves of the forest and the open road and clearing between it and my evacuation point, much more straightforwardly. I discovered in the process that Russian fieldcraft is bad. The incident I mentioned earlier was not the only time I got to nearly bayonet range; in fact, there was one mission where I was undetected within about two meters of a Russian soldier -- as I put it to Pete Takeshi, close enough to tie his shoelaces together. I died shortly afterwards, though; in worrying about evading him, I'd become visible to one of his squadmates (although I don't remember the details; perhaps I tugged too hard when I went to untie his shoes).

I also managed to make the M203 work at last! There was a squad I had to fight my way past to cross the clearing; after far too many deaths and reloadings, I finally beat them -- they were marching in single file, and I planted an M203 round in the middle of their column, then shot the one survivor and ran over to the other woods. I was promptly captured by Spetsnaz who had learned about our secondary evac point and wiped out everyone who had come there earlier, and just as promptly liberated by a resistance group (after three deaths: once when they threw a grenade that caught me in my tent, once when I ran out to escape before all the Spetsnaz were preoccupied, and once when I tried to get a clear view of the fighting and got hit by a stray bullet).

I went on to fight a couple of missions with the commandos. They used the same squad formations as the US, but did a better job of it: when they attacked a village, they started by reconnoitering it, locating as many troops as possible, and then engaged from the eaves of a forest rather than trying to run up to the enemy. We won that battle conclusively -- I had several retries, but mostly because I was getting too clever for my own good and tried to engage before our second team, attacking from the south, had knocked out the Russians' tank. In the second mission, we made a ridiculously brazen plan to drive a troop truck through several checkpoints and an occupied city to link up with our main base to the south. (Speaking of which: why on Earth would a rebel group that builds its secondary camps in forests make its primary base a ruined castle? Is this hiding in plain sight, on the assumption that the Russians would assume that no one would be so stupid? I think it's likelier that it's just a mistake by the campaign designers; the right place for a resistance base is in the middle of a major city, where the steady flow of business and the frequent arrival and departure of strangers is enough to conceal a great deal of guerrilla activity. "The guerrilla moves through the people like a fish through the sea" -- why use a kiddie pool when you can swim in the ocean?)

The ridiculous plan worked about as well as it sounds -- we bribed our way through the first checkpoint, manned by standard-issue zero-morale, zero-loyalty Soviet conscripts (in Stalin's words, "in a hot fire even wet wood will burn"), but there was an officer at the second who demanded to see what was in the back of the truck. Could we really not have hidden our men under packing crates or something? This is a video game, I'm sure there would be enough of them to go around... (Operation Flashpoint actually scores pretty well on the Crate Review System, if memory serves; I wasn't really watching for them, but I think I've only seen a few barrels.)

Anyhow, we set a new world record in deploying from the truck and wiping out the Russian garrison (and did it on the first try -- I didn't die in that part of the fighting even once), and beat off several subsequent attacks before retreating into the woods with light casualties (omitting a few replays here, like the one where our LAW gunner, euphoric from knocking out two approaching troop trucks in as many minutes, decided to march off in the general direction of Moscow). For no discernible reason (except perhaps that they'd read my post that talked about where you really want to position your heavy weapons to defend an objective), there was a Russian garrison high on the slope of a cruelly steep mountain, which was much harder to get past; but we were in the clear after that. In my successful run through this mission, I had no fewer than twelve kills, and we reached the castle with only one man dead. (The rebels' AI is just plain better: their captain made a point of moving his squad to cover, and I saw the ordinary rebels moving from cover to cover or fighting pressed up against the walls of houses, as opposed to standing or lying in the open with no thought for concealment like both the US and the Soviet troops do in this game, even when cover is readily available.)

Also, did I mention that I figured out where the game is set? We're fighting for control of the islands of New Ruritania, the only Pacific archipelago entirely peopled by generic Eastern Europeans. It's embarrassingly obvious that they wanted to set this game in Poland and Germany -- although that doesn't explain the WWI-French settlement names, of course.

The last mission (preceded by a guard-duty mission in which I don't have as much to say, except that I learned that guarding an objective by watching it from cover works very poorly if the infiltrators approach from the other side of the objective) was a matter of going out with a Poolean bang. I and one other soldier laid mines on a road to intercept a squadron of four Russian tanks, who drove into our ambush quite enthusiastically, with no more reconnaissance than four Russians looking out the windows of the Soviet equivalent to a jeep. Shouldn't they have realized that the long hedge running right next to the road, where I and the other soldier were hiding, was a really good place to set up an ambush -- and that the town was so poorly defended that only a lunatic would fail to set one up? Regardless, they merrily drove on their way (the anti-vehicle mines required more ground pressure than a jeep can exert), and the tank column continued (did I mention that the "scouts" were making no attempt to match the tank column's speed, either?); the mines were just past the north end of the hedge (I, the other soldier, and a really big crate of LAWs were hiding on the south edge). Two tanks were knocked out by the mines, and I moved to the edge of the hedges and took out the other two with LAWs (although I had one mission where I aimed for the treads of one tank, hit it twice, didn't knock it out, and was shot by it; the next time I aimed for the joint of the turret and the chassis, with much better results); my kill count for the end of that mission was one T-72, one T-80, and six crewmen (two of whom escaped their tanks and engaged us; I killed them with LAW rounds fired through soft cover).

And so, it's on to learning about tanks. Perhaps to compensate for the very good (especially for 2001!) infantry AI, driving a tank is a three-way argument between the driver, the tank commander, and the tank itself, which knows it's going to get all scratched up if it tries to go through those bushes.

(Or perhaps they grow wild tank traps here in East Ruritania, as Pete Takeshi hypothesized.)

By the way: the game admits that the Russians aren't adhering to their tactical doctrine (which actually makes ours look pretty darned good by comparison); in a conversation, an officer expresses serious doubt that these are really Russians, since they look like Russians, they're driving Russian tanks, but they're fighting like nothing he's ever seen before...

Operation Flashpoint: Two further thoughts.

I would kill (even more than I'm already doing in this game) for an easily-used, point-and-shoot 20mm grenade launcher in this game: not the OICW-GL as it was in reality (with its eight D-cell batteries and its computerized sight with fiddly, mud-vulnerable controls), but the OICW-GL as it was depicted in Far Cry 2 (quick-firing, contact-fused grenade launcher with a *slightly* arcing trajectory).

Some training with the M203 would be a great substitute for this, though: it's a devastating weapon but its shots have a lower muzzle velocity than I expected; I need to get a better sense of how high to raise the gun barrel for a shot to reach a particular range. Twice now I've surprised Soviet patrols in the open (their tactical doctrine is not much better than our own), and could have taken them out in one shot if I'd had an accurate, quick-firing explosive weapon, but instead had to engage them at range with much less ammunition than they had (one soldier versus four), after they had gone to ground.

Poole is right in observing that laser weapons will be a light infantryman's dream come true: no muzzle flash, no sonic boom produced by the bullet's travel, no need to lead on the shot, and much more ammunition.


Also, did I mention that that the squad-leader UI is positively oppressive in its over-controllingness? I don't need to be able to order my men to assume different marching formations and approach certain objectives -- all I want as a squad leader (to say nothing of "as a company leader"!) is to give orders as to what task to accomplish, and leave it to the men on the ground, who are actually risking their lives, to decide how it would best be done. Poole is right: training, skill, and good judgement on the part of the ordinary infantryman (especially one as fearless and as self-sacrificing as the modern American soldier -- we have a quality of men that Genghis Khan would have destroyed a city for) are far more useful and more effective than micromanagement by high command.

Operation Flashpoint: All-Around Defeat.

The next day, storming the village, first attempt: sure enough, my squad charged over open country and was massacred. Did I mention the village is on high ground, and that there are machine gunners there?

Astonishingly, the game now expects me, personally, to work around the disasters of US tactical doctrine: I was hardly even attacked, but the rest of the squad was slaughtered, and when we got down to me and one other guy left (myself squad leader), I failed the mission despite still being perfectly capable of taking the stupid village. The "mission failed" summary had a distinctly babes-in-the-wilderness feel to it, too: "Nobody quite understands what went wrong..." I know perfectly well what went wrong, but the idiotic brass would rather continue to lose than let me apply that lesson!

The campaign game has an oddly sardonic sense of humor -- it knows perfectly well that US tactical doctrine doesn't work, and intends to show it. I fought the battle again (twice, actually, dying the first time); even in the successful version, the attack ended in the routing of our forces. One squad was wiped out, I think, and the other two were severely damaged (I saved my squad's bacon by moving with the squad, getting a commanding position backed by a shrub, and taking out no fewer than seven Soviet soldiers in the ensuing fighting, plus two more later in the mission. Tactical doctrine, by the way, exists to ensure that an army can win without individual soldiers achieving Terminator-like kill records like this one...

We then lost our troop truck, retreated to a static staging point, hung out without attempting to conceal our presence or set up sentries, and waited for a Blackhawk to arrive and ferry us back to the main town, since high command had decided to evacuate the island -- apparently they caught on that their casualty rate was unsustainable. It's a miracle that we didn't get wiped out by yet another of my hypothetical random guys with RPGs; but as it is, despite our Blackhawk's careful approach WITH CAT! LIKE! TREAD!, a Soviet Hind showed up and shot it down. Total casualties: five members of our squad, plus unknown numbers of squad 2, plus probably the entirity of squad three, plus at least two troop trucks and a Blackhawk (!!!). We knocked out two BMPs and killed what must have been ten or eleven Soviet soldiers, but even so, we lost more men and more expensive equipment (one helicopter versus two APCs) than they did, and as to manpower losses, they have the draft and we don't. Not to mention that we were repulsed from our objective.

Next mission opened with my soldier the only survivor of the amalgamated first and second squads, which is only too plausible (I guess the guy with an RPG showed up after all, between the two missions): total casualties now 29 out of 30 plus unknown further equipment and reinforcements. (I think our M113s are dead if they didn't retreat after dropping us off.)

Being alone is a relief: finally no one following Napoleanic tactical doctrine and forcing me to single-handedly wipe out large defending forces in the best Star Trek: Nemesis manner. Finally, I have the chance to show the game what Poolean tactics are good for... except that I'm alone, with no prepared underground position, with enormous numbers of Soviet squads are sweeping the forest and the surrounding countryside, complete with multiple BMPs and Hinds (although strangely, the gunships appear to have little interest in shooting at lone US soldiers running fully exposed through the open countryside -- I checked).

My way of looking at it is, in this situation, I'm dead -- I have yet to figure out which hoops the game wants me to jump through in order to win the mission, and really, a situation of one man against an ocean of enemies is (a) unrealistic and (b) generally fatal, if the soldier's not adequately camouflaged. (The airman who was shot down in an F117 by the Serbs, and subsequently escaped a cordon by lying in a depression with his green gloves pressed over his neck -- his only non-camouflaged skin that was showing -- comes to mind as proof that enough camouflage can work wonders. There was a fascinating story about him back in a Reader's Digest in '97... As to how Serbs shoot down an F117, I'll give you a big hint: the F117 is jet-black, and is designed as an invisible night fighter, or rather, night attack aircraft. It's less invisible when it's flying sorties in the middle of the day.)

However, I don't think I can do that. I count the fact that I took _nine_ Russian infantrymen with me when I died, in one of my passes through this mission, as victory enough for anyone to expect (raising my total kill count to something like thirty men in two days -- but again, if tactical doctrine were better, I wouldn't have to work action-hero miracles along these lines.) It's ridiculous how much effort they're spending, with a company plus of infantry, at least one Hind, and multiple BMPs; who do they think I am, the Terminator?

Oh, wait...

Right...

Operation Flashpoint: Sanity Check.

Ironically, the manual gives the kind of advice that's correct for this way of war. Apparently first-person shooter players and developers actually know what works; the advice -- which Poole would find nothing fundamentally wrong with -- is the following:


One of the most difficult tasks you will come across while on active duty will be the job of simply staying alive. While in the danger zone, the simplest way to achieve this is to keep moving -- become a hard target for enemy soldiers.

If you must remain in one place for a time, become difficult to spot. Lie down on the ground so you don't create a profile against the horizon. Make sure you're in cover or at least in concealment; if your cover is deep enough, you may even remain undetected until you move again or discharge your weapon. Don't forget, concealment in bushes and vegetation won't protect you from bullets -- your safest bet is to get behind or underneath something solid.

Never stay in one place fo rlong. You'll eventually be spotted, especially if you make too much noise e.g. fire off a round. Once attention has been drawn to your position, move away quietly and quickly, moving from cover to cover using concealment wherever possible.

Never reload out in the open unless you have absolutely no cover or concealment around. For the time it takes to reload you're unarmed and stationary and therefore vulnerable.

Above all, Observe. Avoid tunnel vision, keep your eyes open to both sides and behind as well as ahead so you don't get flanked. Use Command View often to give you a clear picture of surrounding threats (this is a luxury a real soldier does not have). The more observant you are, the harder you will be to sneak up on.


Alas, it's a well-known phenomenon that nobody reads manuals.

Operation Flashpoint: Day One, Unwinding.

The evening went slightly better than expected: the Soviets didn't attack the town, but they did ambush and kill our lieutenant as he was driving unescorted, in an unarmored Jeep, from the town up to the village where we built that secondary base. (They appear to understand what's going on almost as well as I do.) So orders came in to pile into an APC and relieve him -- I was yelling at the game that this was absolutely idiotic, but I don't think my microphone was hooked up.

Let's pause for a moment for a tactical exercise. Let's postulate this map:


..\..FFFFFFFFF
...\..FFFFFFFF
FFFF!F.FFFFFFF
FFF..\..FFF../
FFFFF.\...../.
FFFF...\....|.
........\...|.
.........\./..
..........*...


This more or less reproduces the conditions of the ambush, at least if you play ADOM. (And you should.) The lieutenant drove from the asterisk in the lower right of the map (the town where we were relaxing for the evening) to the exclamation mark in the upper left, a grove of trees that come right up to the road on either side, where he was ambushed and killed. He did call for help after he was ambushed, but his transmission was cut off with a burst of AK-47 fire, which is a pretty convincing argument in my mind.

So, suppose you have one M113 of troops (8 men plus the M113's driver and gunner), and you have to defeat the ambush at the upper-left point. (Another point I'd forgotten: the grove is on a rise in the ground, and thus has a clear line of sight a long ways down the road towards the town.) Do you:

A. Take the road directly from the town to the ambush site, stopping your motor-Cuisinart (footnote below) in full view of the enemy to unload troops, hoping that its .50-cal machinegun will keep the enemy surpressed and that they don't have any RPGs, and then have the troops advance in a skirmish line with the M113 driving on ahead?

B. Unload your troops on the eaves of the forest, have them work their way through (incidentally surprising and destroying from behind any secondary ambush securing the Soviet right flank and further threatening the road), and then hit them with the M113 from the main road once the troops engage the ambushers from the forest?

Both approaches have the disadvantage that you lose the lieutenant (and in fairness, the second road is a lot further off, and the forest is larger, than I've drawn it above), but one of them has the advantage that you don't also lose the relief forces. I'll let you guess which one is better, and I'll let you guess which one SACSTUPIDUR actually took.

In a fortuitous mistake, I got turned around as I exited the M113 and carefully advanced in the wrong direction until I realized the action was the other way. Before I was close enough to engage, we had come over a small dip in broad daylight (well, it was the evening) and taken three casualties out of seven men, including the commander. The M113 dashed up cavalierly (I swear it was flourishing its plumed hat!) to save the day, got its gunner shot (he has a gunshield, but it only faces forward -- little use if he's fired on from right and left at the same time), and was knocked out by an RPG. Shortly afterward, we lost our second in command, who had taken over from the commander.

But by that time, I had managed to advance into the western copse of trees (the F just west of the exclamation mark on the map). There were four, maybe five Soviets there; I killed two of them as I advanced, and was helped fighting the others by fire from the surviving friendlies (which was particularly helpful when I was reloading). I was pinned down, but pinned down two Soviets as well -- killing one as he tried to move southeast to flank me, and then locating another by his shadow cast through a tree (the joys of old graphics engines!) and shooting him through the tree, before he could take up his new position. I had a longer duel with a third Russian, but killed him, and we enjoyed a brief lull after that (I'd been wounded, but fortunately the medic was still alive). Fighting picked up intensity shortly afterward; we were now past the copse, and I turned back when I saw a soldier in the woods southwest of it. I practically got within bayonet range of one man -- really, if I'd had a bayonet and a "lunge" button, I would have used that instead of firing a (less reliable) burst at him, and the winner of that fight was the one (me, in this case) with the faster reaction time -- and then killed a second one. By this point a second M113 of troops had arrived; they disembarked and started advancing towards us, and I opened fire on them -- though I should have realized that a mass of eight troops advancing slowly in line were probably not more defending Russians. They had more hitpoints than the Russians, I think, but I managed to kill one of them before their commander came on the radio directing me to cease fire: skirmish-line doctrine is there purely to protect against fratricide incidents, but it doesn't work even there. (If I'd had a Goldeneye-type grenade launcher I would probably have wiped out the whole squad.) We had lost another man, and the three survivors of my squad were amalgamated into the other one; there was a little more fighting, in which they took more casualties. (I was off on the periphery, and didn't get the chance to engage.) A truck arrived shortly after to pick us up and bring us back to base; there were only seven men who boarded, including one who literally had to crawl up to the bed of the truck, having been shot in both legs.

Total survivors: nine men (counting the two in the second APC, who I think survived) out of twenty engaged. (Twenty-one if you count the lieutenant.) By the usual measure of "casualties" denoting wounded as well as killed, I think we had fourteen casualties out of twenty troops. I killed five Russians in the battle, and my squad lost five men; had I not been there, the numbers would have been even worse.

Tomorrow, we're assaulting a Russian-held town from the north, northeast, and northwest, once again in M113s (although this time there's enough clearing around it that there's no easily-used forest we're ignoring, and the lay of the ground means that the enemy will have a small perfectly clear field of fire, instead of effortlessly commanding the whole approach to the objective). What fun! (Did I mention I'm playing this game on easy difficulty yet?)


Footnote:

M113s are hideously vulnerable to RPG fire. Their aluminum armor, chosen for light weight, is heavy enough for defense against most small arms, but when struck by an RPG's shaped-charge warhead, it spalls, releasing red-hot shrapnel into the -- very crowded -- interior of the vehicle. Troops in Vietnam who saw what RPGs did to M113s generally rode on top of the vehicle instead of inside it; some enterprising units even rigged up controls so that the driver could sit on the roof, as well.

Operation Flashpoint: Day One.

I'm not quite sure what to say as an introduction here. I purchased Operation Flashpoint a week or so ago, and it just arrived today; it's a very realistic and very highly-regarded military shooter (the fact that I heard enough good things about it to buy it, when it's eight years old -- published in 2001 -- is enough to establish that). In fact, it's earned the very high compliment that a Marine friend of Pete Takeshi mentioned that he didn't like the game; it felt too much like work.

I think first-person shooters have a lot of promise as a means of testing, evaluating, and refining an army's tactical doctrine. From my reading on small-unit tactics -- in particular, Paddy Griffith's Forward into Battle: Fighting Tactics from Waterloo to the Near Future, Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (not primarily about tactics -- but massively worth reading, for that and for other information; this is the book that introduced PTSD to the world), and of course more or less the complete works of the army reformer H. John Poole (in EU3 terms, four stars -- +12/month to army research, a very good advisor, only slightly outclassed by Petraeus' five stars and consequent promise of increasing our country's currently low stability score), and The War Nerd -- I have somewhat reluctantly concluded that US tactical doctrine, with its insistence that troops advance in a skirmish line without phased bounds and with disdain for cover, flank attacks, and inflicting or escaping ambushes, is bullocks. (Further supporting this theory, Pete Takeshi points out, upheld by a careful reading of Achilles in Vietnam, that the US beat the North Vietnamese by becoming better at "Poolean warfare" than the NVA themselves were.)

The thing about my suspicion here: Operation Flashpoint bears me out. (By the way, I tried to play Full Spectrum Warrior, and gave up at the point -- still in early training missions! -- where my fire team was ordered to march across open terrain in full view of an opposing soldier, the other fire team laid down covering fire, because, you know, soldiers carry infinite amounts of ammunition and there's no such thing as hard cover or engaging more than one enemy soldier at a time.) After completing the training parts of the campaign -- simple enough, as FPS conventions had solidified by this point in the genre's history, though it was nice to get acclimated to this game's distinctive traits -- I went on to my first mission: assault and capture a hamlet southeast of our main base. My first time through, I ran into a concealed Soviet soldier's line of fire, and died in a hurry. My second time, I decided to try playing by the rules of the tactical doctrine -- I think I had imagined I'd be safer that way.

Big mistake.

I got more concerned about keeping my place in our Napoleonic skirmish line than in looking for the enemy... the squad, advancing at a brisk pace over open ground, upright, in line, towards Soviet troops in a village, took eight casualties out of ten men in under three minutes, myself included. Had the Soviets been fighting according to their tactical doctrine (even more stupid than our own), we would probably have done it, but as it is they had single troops in concealed positions. They weren't dug in -- no time; nor in buildings -- unlike in later missions, the buildings here were solid blocks; but they did the best they could under the circumstances, exploiting the fact that one man with an assault rifle can potentially kill a whole lot of other men with assault rifles. (Poole recommends for training exercises that soldiers count the casualties they inflicted on the other side by simply watching for "three-second sight pictures of an upright human being.")

Calling on my experience as a seasoned veteran of the original Ghost Recon (I've even beaten its main campaign), Far Cry (ditto!), and Far Cry 2 (which I'll blog about here later), I quickly found myself the only professional on the entire US side. The successful version of the attack on this village (beaten back by the arrival of T-80s, whereupon we... retreated over open terrain in plain view of the enemy, and did I mention there were woods to east and west of the village, and we were attacking from the north, and we had only one man with an AT weapon for each squad of ten men?) ended with what must have still been five or six dead, and that only because we got lucky in this version of the retreat. In two previous ones, one where I tried to do a fighting retreat with a rifle against tanks, and another where I just ran away in the open like the other idiots, I got killed.

Afterward, we sent a force of troops in a truck, escorted by a jeep (note the two things that these vehicles didn't have, weapons and armor), to establish a base at a village about a kilometer northwest. It's a good thing that this was the tutorial, or we would've been massacred by some random soldier with a foxhole and an RPG. (Free tip: to set up an opportunistic ambush like this, dig in facing away from your enemy, let them pass you, and fire on them from behind. Second free tip: be careful ambushing with an RPG, it doesn't have any backblast (unlike the massive US LAW), but it leaves a plainly visible smoke contrail that was the death of many a complacent Afghan once the Soviets started using Hinds. See Poole's Tactics of the Crescent Moon, as well as this column by Gary Bretcher.)

We proceeded to build our base, out in the open where the waving flag and the large complex of tents would overawe and intimidate our enemies and reveal to them that they had no hope of storming this location. Actually, some of the men did that, but the commander took me and two other troops and went out on... "patrol." We drove to our objective -- again, confident that the very distinctive sound and appearance of a US Jeep would frighten the enemy out of their pants -- and disembarked in the eaves of a wood where there were reports of Russian activity. We walked through the woods -- I never even tried to use a skirmish line, but set my M-16 to burst fire and advanced from cover to cover about 80 meters off to the formation's right flank -- and encountered Soviet troops who were fortunately about equally wood-wise, and were marching down a ridge to enter the forest and do a patrol of their own. Or rather, I -- moving faster than and out to one side of the main patrol -- encountered them (and killed three of them and apparently drove off the fourth with long-range bursts through the trees; remember that they had no cover at all apart from trees present as obstacles between me and them), and the patrol caught up and engaged at long range through the woods.

I admit I died here several times. One lesson I learned from this fight was that rises in the terrain are important -- thinking back, both Ghost Recon and Far Cry had mostly flat maps. Another lesson: if you move at Far Cry 2 speeds and disdain cover, trying to close from the front with an alert enemy, you die. (For why this isn't the case in Far Cry 2, see my posts on it, forthcoming.) The right thing to do is to go slowly -- I learned that while I could engage the Soviet patrol at range, if I got lucky, the best and most productive approach was to go around their flank (the forest was a right-facing L shape, running east, then north, of where we encountered the Soviets) and hit them from the side while they were pinned down trading futile, long-range fire with my squadmates. And so we presently cleared the obstacle, and turned south to return home -- and ran into several Spetsnaz troops on the return. I had one mission where I killed one of them, spent too long trying to remember if I recognized the term AK-74 and whether a commando's gun would be worth swapping my M-16 for, and was shot by another one; the second mission worked better: I hit the Spetsnaz unit from their right, the squad attacked from their left, and we killed them easily. (Another lesson: grenade pins take too long to pull -- I'm used to the Far Cry series' instantaneous-release grenades. After this mission, I swapped out my armament a little, and instead of carrying 4 M-16 magazines and 6 hand grenades, the numbers are now 7 and 3, and I think they should probably be 8 and 2. Or perhaps no grenades at all: ammunition runs out fast when you're fighting in the open field like this. I'd love to get my hands on an RPG...)

Our glorious leadership responded to our discoveries horribly. Spetsnaz are GRU -- Russian Military Intelligence -- troops, and the GRU does not have a lot of them. You don't encounter them by accident. Where Spetsnaz are, they are for a reason, and in this case I would want to make sure that their reason wasn't "cover for demolitionists or RPG men advancing on a newly-built and plainly visible US base." But the officers' mentality was basically, "We made contact and defeated the enemy, that means we're done with an honest day's work and can go back to base to relax." That's almost their exact words. And worst of all: we didn't continue the patrol, we called it off, piling back into the Jeep and returning by the same road we came -- leaving several large forests, one of them directly abutting the village we'd built a secondary base in, unscouted, along with a large amount of open ground between them that, judging by the contour lines, would be perfectly passable for anything this side of an 18-wheeler.

Another stupid aspect of this patrol: when we made contact, we called for backup (dubious in itself -- we were strong enough to handle equal numbers of unsuspecting hostiles if we set up a hasty ambush, as opposed to what we actually did), and the backup that arrived was an M113 (without soldiers inside) and a helicopter, to patrol a forest. I'll say this much for them: I'm sure they killed every last enemy in that forest whose head showed above the treetops!

And so we returned to our main base to let our guard down for the evening.

Sidenote: the base we'd set up in the other town. The game's text talked about how we'd had "a long day of pounding in stakes" -- not entrenching, setting up tents. We built it completely in the open, a little west of a village at an intersection of three roads (and on an island as heavily wooded as this one, such an intersection is important if you're a sufficiently road-bound army). So its location makes sense, but its composition makes no sense for its location. The base is indefensible; there was no effort that I saw made towards fortifying it, not even to the low standard of setting up concertina wire and sandbagged machine-gun nests. And more important than indefensible, the base is *visible*. The Soviets know that the US has a military base defending that intersection, and it didn't cost them a single soldier to find out; and therefore, they can reduce it at their leisure -- probably using artillery, or a well-armed infantry force supported by a Hind or two if they don't want to damage the village and the roads.

I would make recommendations on what to do instead, but I'm not quite sure why the base was being built. (Note that, as usual, there were forests being neglected here: in this case, all three roads out of the village run through cuttings in the forest as they exit it.) If it was just to provide billets for more US troops, I'd recommend quartering them in the village instead, or perhaps having them sleep in the forest -- either way, to keep this new reserve area from being too obvious a target. If it was to defend the crossroads, then the first priority should have been to set up sandbagged machine-gun nests looking out of houses in the village, as an interim measure (I gather that the civilians are evacuated by this point), and the second, to start setting up a stronger defense: in particular, claymore mines on all three roads (ideally, using an old mujahidin trick, placed at the doctrinal distance between trucks in a Soviet convoy -- claymores are useless against tanks and BMPs but can stop unarmored vehicles as thoroughly as they can kill soldiers), and heavy machineguns and antitank weapons in concealed positions from which they can sweep the roads into the village. Get at least one good ambush before the Soviets know that you're there, in other words, and then deny them good targets for their artillery when they try to attack afterward. In modern war, the best defense is not a hardened fortification (can you harden a fortification sufficiently to withstand a nuclear bunker buster?), it's something the enemy can't even see.


For another good look at what's wrong (and what's right) with the US military culture, read Bill Mauldin's Up Front, which my paternal grandfather had an original-edition copy of from his days in WWII, and which it turns out has conveniently been reissued in a 50th-anniversary edition. The merits and flaws of the US Army as depicted in this book are still its merits and flaws today: incredibly brave, but unsystematic; not fond of war, deeply distrustful of those who are, and not especially interested in getting tactics right. The prevailing attitude among American soldiers is that war is evil, which creates two secondary assumptions: that the more brutal military tactic is the more effective one (thus the massive appetite for artillery in Mauldin, an attitude which continues down to the present -- even in street fighting we use artillery and helicopter strikes), and that not risking soldiers in close fighting (including close-range infantry warfare, like the stormtrooper tactics the Germans love) will actually keep them safe. Combine this with the general American mentality that wanting something desperately enough will blackmail God or fate into making it happen ("when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true") -- an assumption that also savages troops' psyches after the fact, as Shay points out repeatedly -- and you have a recipe for... well... read the next few posts. Operation Flashpoint doesn't have the artillery component, but it does show the problems with the rest of this attitude. The only solution is a frightening one: the creation of a corps and a spirit that likes fighting, in the style of the Prussian aristocrat and the Louisiana bayou native that Mauldin mentions in Up Front, or in the manner of German stormtroopers or most of the IJA. (And mentioning the IJA here reveals that this approach has legitimate problems of its own -- problems that could be alleviated with careful social engineering, but in which there would be a lot at stake.)

(For more on cultural materialism, read Marvin Harris' Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches, not "a" so much as "the" classic of the genre; with suitable care and forethought, all the principles of cultural materialism can be derived from that book alone. That said, Pete Takeshi characterizes it, correctly, as "libertarianism for collective minds." Contrary to what Harris thinks, cultural patterns don't develop because they're suited to an economic or other material need, they develop for different reasons and then persist if they suit the economic and material questions, or die out -- or at least face trouble establishing themselves -- if they do not. For more on the problems of cultural materialism, read Robert Edgerton's Sick Societies -- with a grain of salt, since although he thinks he's refuting them, I'm fairly sure he never understood Harris' cultural-materialist ideas to begin with.)

Lions and pheasants and deer, oh my...

Passing thought: We used to be a lot more ambitious about taming animals than we are today...