SeaQueen
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Joined: 4/14/2007
From: Washington D.C.
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quote:
Well, I agree with that, but what I am getting at is that the vast majority of CMANO users have brains. They are smart enough to vary their approaches; and they are certainly smart enough to stop sending planes over a SAM/flak rich environment to drop bombs on a target destroyed. So whereas in real life, a couple of days might be lost making rubble into smaller rubble... your average CMANO player is going to say: it is destroyed... maybe I should divert my strength else where.
This is why the scope of the scenario is important. Command is a relatively tactical level simulation. It reaches up into the operational level, mostly because of the distance scale of modern warfare, but if you're making a lot of operational level decisions (e.g. which strategic targets should be struck and in what order) then the scenario is probably scoped poorly.
To put it in concrete terms, it's a really bad idea to give a Command player the free choice of asking "Do I attack the XXXth Motor Rifle Brigade HQ first? or do I attack the oil refinery at Y? or maybe I should go after the presidential palace? or the air base at Z?" That kind of targeting decision has a lot to do with considerations that aren't really modeled in Command, and would be decided by a higher level decision maker than would be making the kinds of decisions that are made in Command (e.g. weapons loads, routing, shot doctrine, timing, spacing, formations, etc.). The person picking the targets is looking at the targeting guidelines at a given phase in the war. Are we waging economic warfare or is this the goal to undermine the political leadership? How well are we achieving those goals based on BDA, but also other sources of intelligence, like press clippings, economic and demographic data as well as people on the ground? These are all things that feed the process, and Command doesn't even hope to take that information in. Does Command measure the number of barrels of oil that are pumped out of pipelines to China and the price of oil futures? What about how that affects political opinions towards the Vietnamese communist party? No. It doesn't, and while you can fake it a little in LUA, it really is asking a lot of the software. That sort of stuff feeds a separate OODA loop for a different set of decision makers than Command deals with.
Instead, a better approach is to say, "Tomorrow we're striking the oil refinery at Y. It has 18 aim points, consisting of 3 pump houses, 10 POL storage tanks, 2 administrative buildings, a generator, a transformer, and a control building. We want to destroy 20% of the POL storage tanks, the pump houses, the transformer and the generator. It's protected by the NNNth fighter air regiment at A, and the MMMth air defense brigade. You have the XXXth tactical fighter wing (or maybe TF ZZZ?) to do it with along with some elements from the YYYth bomb squadron and WWWth air refueling squadron. We can afford to lose no more than P% of our tactical aircraft." Then have the player figure out how to do it. Now they can focus on the kinds of things that Command does do well. Do I lead with the Wild Weasels or I do I lead with fighters? How many of them do I need? Am I carving out a lane or setting up barriers? What kinds of weapons do I have them carry? Do I want them spaced 15 minutes apart or 5? Where do I put my jamming aircraft? Where do I put my AEW aircraft? How big an area can my fighters protect? Do I use close escorts or do I use offensive fighter sweeps? Do I keep my DDGs close to the carrier or do I sail them up close to the coast and box in the enemy aircraft with their SAMs? What do I do with this extra submarine floating around anyhow? Command handles all that kind of stuff SUPER well.
When you take that approach to scenario construction, it doesn't matter that the oil refinery at Y was already struck a month ago in the hypothetical past. If it was struck, then clearly they missed some stuff, because there's still targets there to hit. If the operational level commander made a mistake and re-targeted something which had already been vaporized by a flight of B-52s then its a hypothetical someone else's problem. Even if you did something like, you get to the target area and there's no targets to hit, what is the tactical impact? You still have to fly in and fly out with all the risk and problems that entails. It's a serious leadership problem, but its the same situation whether there's a target there to hit or not. When you scope a Command scenario too broadly, you're right, you get wonky results, because that's not the right use case. That's better handled by some other wargame, maybe not even a computer game. Maybe the kind of stuff you're interested in is better looked at with a matrix-style narrative building exercise?
All simulations have their limitations. In effect, all models are wrong in the most strict sense. Different games look at different aspects of a conflict. Command would handle a Vietnam era strike on Kep airbase really well. I wouldn't expect it to tell me anything about how the peace negotiations in Paris turned out, or what might happen if I offered de-mining Haiphong harbor in exchange for POW releases. Both were aspects of the Vietnam war. Only one of them makes sense to model in Command.
< Message edited by SeaQueen -- 1/19/2019 3:29:39 PM >
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