Category: Essay

One Neat Trick to Lessen Supply Requirements

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What if I was to say that in certain theaters, your supply requirements can be lessened significantly? One only need compare built-up Iraq and not-so-built-up Afghanistan to see the different challenges. Or Vietnam vs. the Fulda Gap. But this is one that can best be used by an OPFOR against a wealthier foe-although rising global standards of living allow this to be applicable more and more.

Ok, so the US Army ranks different supply types by “Classes”. Now Class I, the one we’re focused on, is in short, food. Now one field manual, based on WWII experience, has it being about 7 pounds per person per day. Add that to a 20,000 strong division slice and you get 71 tons per division per day. But more room can be saved for other supplies if you adjust the Class I supply to a different amount, like say…

nothing.

Beyond what they have on their basic loads, the troops are to loot, plunder, and “requisition” food completely. Entirely. And remember: This is not neglecting enough food. This is a completely deliberate choice. What could go wrong?

(Answer: A lot.)

Cass the Heroes OC

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Cassia Orsellio from Rogue Trader is one of my favorite characters in it. Yet she reminds me a lot of a Fire Emblem Heroes character: Not (just) a Fire Emblem character but a Heroes OC. She shares the following traits with the new introductions from that mobile game:

  • Is a mysterious, powerful (literal and figurative) noblewoman.
  • Is humanoid but still not human in some ways.
  • Has a central gimmick (in this case her warp eye).
  • Has a sort of “overdesigned JRPG” style about her (looking a lot more like an eastern RPG character than the western fantasy/sci fi ones of the rest of the cast).

Weird Wargaming: Patton’s Division of the Future (of 1932)

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Then-major George Patton in 1932 made a long essay about the ideal army for the “war of the future”. Most importantly, it had order of battle charts. The whole thing is well worth a read, but some thoughts/highlights:

  • Underestimated motorization, saying you can have agility (professional army) or mass (conscript army) but not both. This was true in WWII (even for the Americans to an extent), but postwar motorization rendered that largely (if not entirely) moot. He proposed nationalizing civilian trucks for motorization in wartime.
  • Proposed a standing army of about 315,000 people. Which uh, isn’t actually that much less than the post-Vietnam volunteer army. Especially adjusted for national population size.
  • Patton is extremely Pattonesque. Believing his higher-trained army can always beat a numerically superior qualitative one (uh, not always the case), and being a grandfather of manueverism (not surprising). To his credit he does acknowledge the problem of keeping an elite army elite after attrition (and showing knowledge of how pre-gunpowder, almost all casualties were in the rout, whereas firearms made large losses inevitable against peer opponents)
  • The most unusual part is at the smallest level, which consists of a “section” built around a tripod-mounted belt-fed machine gun and has 19-20 men at paper strength. It’s divided into a rifle squad (fairly plain ten rifles) and an LMG squad (one LMG gunner, several assistants for it with pistols, and four riflemen) . Two such sections form a platoon.
  • Above that it’s a now-familiar triangular division. Three line platoons in a company, three line companies in a battalion, three line battalions in a brigade, three brigades in a division, a divisional tank battalion. Aka, by and large the standard post-WWII division.
  • Brigades would have a company of heavy machine guns (at the time an anti-tank weapon) and a battalion of three 75mm batteries (two field guns and one howitzer). Of note is no apparent organic division artillery, with it either being the brigade artillery or handed down by corps (the WWII Soviet prioritization taken to even greater extremes)
  • The 39-strong divisional tank battalion is mentioned as having tanks of the “Vickers-Armstrong or modified Christie type”. Tank platoons are a fairly unusual “vanilla and Firefly” type of having three “normal” tanks and one tank chassis with a larger-caliber cannon. At the time, this wasn’t unusual. Everything above platoon for tanks is conventional.
  • An infantry division has an organic paper strength of around 8,000 people.

All in all a very fascinating document. Patton may have been prescient in making a modern army, but I still wouldn’t want him commanding it (he would have been a good armored division commander, but deserved nothing higher). And of course, this army is easy to make and wargame in the underappreciated interwar period.

(Special thanks to the Tactical Notebook for its own analysis of Patton’s proposal which brought it to my attention)

The SI AI Scandal

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Many people don’t know that sports reporting was one of the first big ways that “modern AI” as we know it came into public view. Basically, if you had a box score for a game where you couldn’t or decided it wasn’t worth it to send an actual reporter, an AI could (and still can) extrapolate a game story based on it. Sure, you don’t get the “yes they sportsed but we sportsed harder” quotes from the participants, but is that really a big deal?

Of course, that assumes one admits to using it. In the case of once-great Sports Illustrated magazine, they tried to sneak AI in. With presumably machine-generated (and if not machine-assisted) articles and “reporters” who were the sportswriter equivalent of Aimi Eguchi , the institution that once gave us Rick Riley’s reports was reduced to the algorithm gaming self-publisher.

Now I have no problems with AI in creative endeavors, but if you want to make something completely with it, it should be labeled as such. (I’ll leave other legal concerns aside for now). I can think of ways to make an openly fake (for lack of a better word) recapper. But any technology can be used for bottom feeding, and this is no exception.

The Holzer Centrifuge

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The Holzer Centrifuge is a uranium enrichment centrifuge I’ve used as a Macguffin in various settings of mine. It is one of the smallest viable centrifuges and a simpler yet less effective design compared to its contemporaries. It has a maximum capacity of around 0.9 separative work units per centrifuge[1]. In practice with inevitable inefficiences and losses this leads to a mere 0.5-.6 in practice, one of the weakest individual centrifuges to ever spin in its hideous mission.

In All Union, the Polish Holzer centrifuge (named after the ethnic German scientist who led the program), served as one of the primary enrichment sources for the nation’s uranium path. The goal was ease of assembly with just domestic resources, hence why Holzer centrifuges were around 40-50 years behind their contemporaries and low-powered even by the standards of other first-gen designs. Nonetheless, they accomplished their goal.

[1]A napkin calc is as follows, with L being length in meters and V velocity in meters per second. Don’t really ask me to explain what an SWU exactly is.

Poland produced at least 50,000 Holzer centrifuges and operated 25,000 of them. Using an enrichment calculator and going by 0.6, the fully functional cascades would produce 77 kilograms of weapons grade uranium a year if working with natural ore to start, or 270 kilograms if working with reactor-grade LEU.

A Strangely Good Simulator

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Now People Playground has no shortage of contraptions simulating various pieces of military equipment. Fixed wing aircraft are either the best or worst, as you get one pass before having to either try and land the thing (no fun) or let it crash (more fun!).

The strange thing is that if you pit one of these resistible forces against the moveable objects of elaborate destructible buildings also made in-game, you get a bizarrely realistic and illustrative example of the problem with urban warfare targeting. A bomb or explosive, even one that hits a building, won’t necessarily destroy more than a small part of it. A large bomb can do better but has the problem of more collater-I mean, no problems whatsoever since this is People Playground.

Quite fun that a silly ragdoll physics simulator can illustrate the issues of having one shot, having to dive, aim, and lead, and knowing the target is not guaranteed to be neutralized even after a successful hit.

Simulating an Epic Moment

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So in Action PC Football, I decided to simulate one of the classic Madden moments. Up by multiple touchdowns with one second left in the game and somehow almost in their own end-zone, the Packers naturally try a pass play with the quarterback in the shotgun formation (standing some distance behind the center when he snaps the ball).

Rodgers throws the ball to wide receiver Greg Jennings, who catches it and runs. With a broken leg. He makes it across the field to score and avoids Darren Sharper, one of the most hardest hitting safeties in the league.

So under a far more grounded simulation, I used the play analysis tool, running 10,000 repeats of the epic play.

  • It was a traditional pro set of 2 running backs, a tight end, and two wide receivers, including Jennings.
  • The pass was a medium fly route. “QB Must Pass” was set on, because otherwise the ball would often get thrown to someone else and that wouldn’t be Jennings putting the team on his back now, would it?
  • Wide Receiver and Running Back wear and tear was set to the highest level to simulate the effect on Jennings’ leg.
  • Otherwise no special plans were done.

Jennings reached the end zone and scored 21 times out of the 10,000 plays.

  • 51.7% of the passes were complete. The average distance Jennings made it after catching the ball was 10.3 yards.
  • 7.4% of the passes were intercepted by the Saints.
  • 7% of the time, Rodgers got sacked for a safety.

A Veterans Day Announcement

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Today is Veterans Day, or Armistice Day at the end of World War I. Now I’ve said many times-I’m a soft sheltered civilian who could do absolutely nothing in a real fight except get killed. I also have no immediate family who have served in the military. That being said, even though all my knowledge comes from secondary sources, I feel pretty confident in saying one thing, which I think today is as good a time as any to say it.

Veterans simply cannot be lumped into any one category.

And I’m not even talking about different countries, different wars, different branches, different specific units (of course an administrator in the back who faced only the occasional rocket, be it a V-2 or Type 63, is going to have quite a different experience from the tip of the spear). Seriously, the accounts from people in very similar places and roles at the same time can be totally different, as do their beliefs on everything from politics to military doctrine.

Granted, I think part of the problem is pop culture having a tendency to treat the military with the two extremes of either “John Wayne” or “Oliver Stone”. Which is at least understandable, I mean I can give a lot of it the benefit of the doubt. It’s just that “Yeah this isn’t like Hollywood” just makes me go “uh, and? Yes? Fish live underwater? The New York Knicks are not a good basketball team?”

Bringing this to my own writing, there’s not much precedent for how to describe the experiences of a female forward nurse from Kyrgyzstan fighting in the most intense nine days of battle since 1973. So with regards to All Union’s Cholpon, I guess I have to hope I did my best.

And yes I know a lot of you hate it when we say that but to all veterans who served honorably, thank you today.