engineer
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Thanks for the source note on LMGs in Japanese organizations. By WW2 they had the LMG's down to squad and battalion level, but that appears to have been a post-WPO innovation so the Japanese here don't get the benefit of it. If we go back to my baseline assumption of 1.0 for a trained infantryman with a bolt action rifle it would seem that derating that a bit for the lack of combat experience is realistic.
In looking at the cavalry, I can reach for explaination that many cavalry units had farriers and horse-holders in their doctrine so those troops weren't as effective, plus the training for mounted operations was wasted since the troops are deployed dismounted. For the USA, it seems the cavalry was more of an elite arm (and if you look at some of Dupuy's data it would seem that the US armored units in WW2 - the original core of which traded in horses for armor just before WW2 - average a bit better than US infantry in combat effectiveness).
On the Enfield-Arisaka-Springfield question, you've got Highblooded's anecdotes and the question of how much derating of theoretical firepower takes place on the islands and jungles of the Pacific theater. I've fired Enfields (and Springfields and Mauser 98k's, and the Finnish knock-off of the Moisin-Nagant) so I've got an idea of the level of skill necessary to get 30 aimed shots off a minute. I don't have the experience or the training of trying to do that when someone is shooting back, but it's got to be a lot harder. Also, the likely battlefield and environment in WPO isn't the plains of Omdurman where a line of riflemen is dismantling a human wave attack across a desert or ridge-top to ridge-top sniping in Afghanistan. Of course, the trump argument is logistical - an infantryman can't haul enough ammo to sustain the 30 rpm aimed fire so as a practical matter the real firepower available is much lower. I certainly agree with you that a ten round detachable box magazine is better than a five round internal magazine, but given that the rifle is only a part of combat effectiveness the squad I wouldn't think that combat power scales exclusively on the firepower of the rifle (especially for squads that where a portion of the firepower will come from Lewis guns, BAR's, M1919 LMG, etc.)
In stock WPO the Aussies, Kiwi's, CW, and Indians are 2x the per loadpoint soft attack for UK and Canadian troops. Soviets are 3x the soft attack for UK. US Army, French and Dutch are roughly at parity with the UK troops. US Marines are intermediate between the elite Dominions and the UK. The Japanese are at about two thirds as good as the UK troops.
Looking at little more closely at my draft recommendations, the top tier of British Empire troops (Gurkha's, Aussies, Kiwi's, Indian troops) are 1.8 to 2.0 per load point and those fellows have the British equipment and the "soft" enhancements from discipline, wood craft, tradition, etc. The British and Canadian troops are at about 1.4 per load point and the Commonwealth troops (which I took as Burmese and Malay native infantry with British officers) at about 1.2 per load point. US Army (pre-Thompson gun) is 1.3/point and US Marines (pre-Thompson gun) is 1.5/point. Dutch and Filipino's line up with the CW troops. Philippine Scouts line up with the top tier of the Imperial troops. French line up with the British.
I would probably tweak the British up to about 1.5, tweak stock Aussie's and Kiwi's down to 1.7/1.8 (but leave the light squads up there, tweak the CW down to 1.1, and tweak the French down to 1.3. The Japanese need to tweaked back down to 0.9 without automatic squad weapons or Great War experience. My bias is to tweak firepower down instead of up since the WITP squads would have a lot more automatic weapon firepower so we shouldn't make WPO squads significantly more lethal than WITP squads. (That said, I must admit that I haven't double-check these recommendations against my copy of WITP).
The questions that come up are how much variation to put across the British Empire for variations in quality of the manpower, local fighting traditions, and language/literacy issues with native troops as well as as the weighting for Clauswitzean "friction", training, doctrine, leadership, and weapons that goes into creating a single "soft attack" factor. When I look at that I see room for variation across the empire, but a little less absolute nation to nation variation. Western armies that were similarly trained and armed would have similar combat power. One of the reasons that the Great War was so bloody and tactically inconclusive was just that similarity in doctrine and weapons. Instead of facing vastly inferior native militaries - whether Zulu, Dervish, Chinese, Egyptian, or Kazakh - Europeans and European-ized others were facing one another - and the nation to nation margins weren't great enough to give swift victory to anyone. Likewise, in WPO variations should exist, but I have a hard time understanding the basis for really the really wide stock disparities. My recommendations compress things to a 3-1 range from Cavalry to elite and less than a 1.5:1 range between experienced western militaries. This gets us back into Dupuy's range for WW2 data of 46% difference between UK and German formations - with the understood caveat that Dupuy excluded weapons from his calculations and soft attack does include weapons.
< Message edited by engineer -- 7/31/2007 1:40:56 AM >
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