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TheWombat_matrixforum -> RE: Urban terrain and armored forces. (11/29/2013 12:00:53 PM)
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I think there are several things at work here.
One is our preconceptions about a war that never happened. There are any number of ideas about how such a war might have played out. During the seventies and eighties, we assumed exactly as Hexagon has, that Soviet equipment, doctrine, and training meant that they would fight in a certain way--mass, close-range attacks, battle drill, a heavy, unsubtle sledgehammer. We also assumed NATO would be the rapier--longer reach, more agile, more fragile but more precise. There were reasons to believe this, certainly.
But...we don't know for sure. There never was a direct confrontation. Soviet equipment, or versions of it, was used in numerous Middle Eastern conflicts, but not in the numbers or in the manner that it would have been in Europe, and not with the same troops of course. Even much later, in Desert Storm, the Iraqis were not a very good benchmark for what GSFG would have been like. As more and more research is done, using sources that have become available since the end of the Cold War, and as we learn more and more about modern combat, even if it is asymmetrical, I think it's reasonable to reassess our assumptions from the 1980s.
A lot of NATO's assumptions were, I think, wishful thinking. We wanted to believe finesse could trump force, because we HAD to believe that. Otherwise, it was go nuke or go home. We tended to assume as well that Soviet gear was inferior overall to ours, especially in terms of fire control and precision. In some ways this was demonstrably true, but in terms of battlefield effectiveness, instead of trade show demonstrations, I'm not so sure. The Russians have a long history of making effective, usable stuff, and there's little reason to think that they would field thousands of pieces of gear that simply didn't work. They weren't stupid. So it's entirely plausible to think, now, that a lot of what we dismissed as inferior back then might well have worked "well enough" on the battlefield.
And then there's the matter of size and scale. I'm not sure that NATO ever realistically dealt with the reality of what a Pact assault would look like, in terms of sheer numbers and speed. We made assumptions about what air power, BAI and deep strike in particular, would do, and we made equally optimistic assumptions about what our technology on land could do, and we crafted a scenario where it was plausible that we'd be able to win conventionally. Whether that scenario was realistic is something we may never know, but in hindsight I rather doubt some of those assumptions. Not to mention that one of the main reasons there was no war was that no one would win; a successful Pact attack would destroy Western Europe and the economic prosperity that supposedly was the lure for the USSR in the first place, and a successful defense would...pretty much do the same thing. So in effect the only possible "victory" was the one that we got--no war, and the collapse of the USSR and the Pact politically and economically. The most important role all those fancy weapons played was to bankrupt the Soviet Union; whether they would have worked on the battlefield proved to be rather immaterial.
So, if we're trying to answer questions in a game about relative capabilities, I look at each decision as a hypothesis that we cannot, really, ever test. We can test it to see if it is consistent with our stated goals or concepts, we can test it to see if it works in terms of gameplay and balance, but we can't test it against a known outcome, like we can, say, for a WWII simulation in many respects. Is it possible that Soviet units could have engaged at much longer ranges than we thought? Yes. Is it possible NATO forces could have overwhelmed the Pact attack with precision and technical expertise? Maybe. Would a tank company in 1989 fighting in a German town have been more or less vulnerable than one fighting in 1945? Who knows?
Comparisons with other games are useful, but insufficient to answer the question. The Tiller Modern Campaigns are a one-mile per hex scale, and their handling of terrain is vastly different than this game. Tank ranges are one or two hexes, not eight, and while you do get platoons it's usually a battalion/company scale. More tactical games use 50m hexes and the like, where a hedge or a shed make a lot more difference. These are still good questions to ask, but the answers will never be exactly what we want, if we assume that "what we want" is validation of our own preconceptions about the war that never was.
Now, find me a Tardis, and we'll see for real...
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