Modeling the USMC Expeditionary Advanced Base Ops Concept

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Modeling the USMC Expeditionary Advanced Base Ops Concept - 7/2/2017 6:12:48 PM

Araner

Posts: 50
Joined: 10/27/2014
Status: offline

My apologies in advance if this subject has already been raised in a different thread. I thought I've even raised a similar question elsewhere on this forum but I tried searching for various related terms and didnt turn up anything. Feel free to move to a more relevant thread if need be.
I have posted previously on the current US Navy doctrine of "Distributed Lethality" and how CMANO has the perfect format for testing its hypothesis. In a similar vein, I am interested in which game dynamics are currently, or could be available for testing a simulation of the new concept coming out of the USMC regarding Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO).
The EABO concept is the latest response to the threat of high-end A2/AD capabilities fielded by countries like China. Unlike the earlier "Air-Sea Battle" concept, which envisaged a prolonged campaign involving long range weapon strikes on enemy mainland launcher sites, the EABO concept would leverage the flexibility afforded by STOVL aircraft such as the V-22 and F35B to "creating temporal sea and air control with small units that can move from the sea to the shore and back again to meet an objective and then move on to the next task."link.
The theoretical basis for this doctrine can largely be traced to a CSBA report released in November 2016 entitled "Advancing Beyond the Beach: Amphibious Operations in an Era of Precision Weapons". More recently, the USMC released updates to their official capstone concept including an EABO Wargame Toolkit which includes proposals for things like a "STOVL Barge" and "Autonomous Floating Modular Containers".

As with my earlier interest in "Distributed Lethality", I am eager to try out how this concept might play out in a CMANO simulation. Unlike DL, however, there are some key tenets to the EABO concept which may not as of yet be supported by game dynamics. Amphibious warfare, has always been one of the more difficult themes to model in CMANO, just as it is one of the most complex operations in real life. When I've attempted to model it in the past, I've been able to simulate some aspects by creating teleporting zones etc... The major barrier comes when trying to model logistics, as I have yet to find any means of transferring supplies, personnel and vehicles from one platform to another and subsequently massing them in a new location, whether it be a beachhead or landing strip.
While EABO is considered a facet of Amphibious Warfare, it may be somewhat easier to model in CMANO, because its very purpose is to "teleport" out of nowhere, in a sense. So it might be easier to simply teleport a landing strip to specified locations once certain support units are present. The real requirements in terms of game mechanics may just need to be a variation of the existing "Helicopter Support Plt" into a "STOVL Support CLT" etc... Depending on how detailed one wants to get, I suppose one could bring in limited support for Digital Elevation Dataset models when applied to highly specific areas?

Is this something that can be accomplished using existing editing tools? Are there assets currently under development which could support this in the future? Is this something that others are interested in?

Post #: 1

RE: Modeling the USMC Expeditionary Advanced Base Ops C... - 7/2/2017 7:34:05 PM

mikmykWS

Posts: 11524
Joined: 3/22/2005
Status: offline

Hi Command now supports amphibious and air cargo and connectors. You have to purchase Chains of War but you can read more about it here.

http://www.warfaresims.com/?p=4494

Thanks

Mike

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(in reply to Araner)

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RE: Modeling the USMC Expeditionary Advanced Base Ops C... - 7/3/2017 10:24:42 AM

poaw

Posts: 107
Joined: 12/17/2001
From: Houston, Texas
Status: offline

Most of the functionality you're asking for can be done by the scenario creator via Lua scripting. The limitation being their ability to anticipate the player's course of action and the time to actually code everything. Other things can be handled by abstraction, you don't actually need a STOVL barge unit or a Box 'o rockets when you can just take any number of existing units and remove things from them to get a rough approximation of the capabilities and vulnerabilities of the unit you're modelling. Something like stripping the weapons and sensors from a STOVL-capable amphib or carrier to make the barge, or adding a bunch of VLS to the same to make a box o'rockets. The outcome shouldn't be affected by the small details (CMANO doesn't care if a platform is manned or unmanned) so you should have a starting point for it.

I've been working on putting EABs into a scenario as well. My working concept involves using Lua to teleport in a group of facilities that represent an approximation of an EAB after moving specific units (ship to shore connectors) close to certain locations. At this point the EABs are are fairly barebones (a basic STOVL-airfield, AShM battery [NSM], SAMs [Patriot], and the associated sensors to use all of it). While a few things are missing, like high-power RF/microwave weapons, I think we can get it to about 96% representational of what in the public domain about the concept. I think the real problem is crafting a scenario in which a player can actually use them as intended against an opponent that responds realistically. Bonus points if EABs are themselves useful so players aren't tempted to rip open the scen in editor mode and replace it with an amphib or other more traditional systems.

(in reply to mikmykWS)

Post #: 3

RE: Modeling the USMC Expeditionary Advanced Base Ops C... - 7/3/2017 2:55:24 PM

kevinkins

Posts: 2257
Joined: 3/8/2006
Status: offline

Prior to CoW, I put together "String of Pearls - Lance the Boil 2020" which tries to implement the sea basing concept in the Indian Ocean. You can find it in the Community Scenario thread dated June 2 2017. I have not updated the concept to CoW. I am "shore" it will be better when I do. However, some of the lua code I used might be helpful to others.

Kevin

(in reply to poaw)

Post #: 4