2. Surviving Modern Warfare

The battlefield in the late Cold War and beyond is a very unforgiving and lethal mistress. During World War II, it was not uncommon for a tank that was put out of action by enemy fire to be repaired and returned to service, with the effort and time being well short of a factory rebuild. Desert Storm and other larger wars show that those days are long past. Even the development and fielding of things like Advanced Composite Armor (ACA), Explosive Reactive Armor (ERA), and Active Protection Systems (APS) only slightly mitigate the immense shift from combat damage to catastrophic kill. Overall, time is compressed compared to World War II. Armored formations can cover ground much more quickly than in the 1940s, and radio communications are distributed at every command level. Commanders have a much clearer picture of the battlefield. Artillery is much more accurate and can serve missions much faster. Artillery was, and still is, the King of Battle.

2.1 Force Ratios

The classic ratio for success has been a 3:1 attacker advantage. This stemmed from Historical Analysis of conflicts where, by and large, throughout the world, major armies had no significant offsets to one another. They had about the same troop quality and battlefield capabilities. World War II saw the effect of tactical-level offsets, particularly in tank performance and troop quality versus mass.

In the late Cold War and beyond, offsets in various platform capabilities and troop quality grew more pronounced. There are examples of numerically inferior forces handily defeating larger forces while attacking. The effect of these offsets (weapon range, lethality, sensor capability, and troop quality) results in it being entirely possible to operate outside the Lanchester range of 1:6 to 6:1. For example, given the correct set of circumstances, a company can defeat an attack by a regiment (a 1:9 force ratio). This situation is absent from the traditional "force multipliers" of artillery and combat engineering.

2.2 Tempo

A unit can't turn on a dime. Even individual soldiers can't do that in most cases. Send an experienced, well-trained soldier off to make contact with an adjacent unit at the Contact Point, and that soldier, even knowing where he is and where he is going, needs to look at a map and choose a safe route. And that gets more complicated as you add more moving parts, like Squads, Vehicles, and Platoons. This tempo is Command Delay. Give an order, and there will be some interval of time before the unit starts to execute.

Commanders and their Staff track the battle, getting reports of contact, casualties, and BDA. That's data, and the Staff's job is to turn that into actionable information for the Commander's decisions. That takes time, and that time is part of the Command Cycle. The upshot of all this is that, as the Commander, you, the Player, can only give orders so often, and when you do, things won't start moving in your intended direction for some minutes (perhaps over an hour). You are in a dangerous situation if you are surprised during your fight.