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: 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.)