Faulty observation plans work best when combined with faulty direct fire plans

My topographic map reading skills suck ...

The game: Battle Group Commander: Episode One (ProSim)
The mission: counter-recon, do not let enemy reconnaissance units to reach FOB Jack. I will not go into the OPORD included in the scenario (not too much space to post), but my guess is that this is basically a "guard" mission.

Just so you understand how I am fighting this battle, my plan follows ...

Steel Beasts: I Would Love to Stay and Fight You, But I'm in a Rush!

This scenario by Gary Owen is an exercise to practice platoon movement techniques. I'm in command of a platoon of M1 tanks and I have to take an objective some 10+ km northwest of my position.

Time allowed is 90 minutes and the terrain ahead is ...

Photobombed!

In this picture from the Patton Museum of Cavalry and Armor, infantry jumps out from an open-topped M39 armored utility vehicle. This vehicle is a spin-off of the M18 Hellcat and maybe the first all-tracked APC after WWII (?). The photo is obviously staged, but note how everybody is trying hard to convey the drama of the situation. Everybody but the guy on the right (red circle).

Photobombed!

Cheers,

Book Review: “The Clausewitz Delusion”, by Stephen Melton

"If the wits are right in dubbing Proust the world's most quoted and least read novelist, Clausewitz must be his non-fiction counterpart". That's what Richard Simpkin said about the popular understanding of On War, AKA “the” theory of war by Clausewitz. A lot of "the" theory of war is no longer relevant, Melton says, at least not the parts that the US Army has chosen to incorporate into its doctrine. The Clausewitz Delusion is a soul-searching tour de force on how and why the US Army came to its current struggle to achieve decisive victories in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the author the US Army, in its decades-long infatuation with Clausewitz’s On War, has forgotten what it once knew and now lacks “a sufficient understanding of the nature of warfare at the strategic, operational and tactical levels”.  “What the US Army once knew” is one of the masterfully delivered, extensively documented key concepts in this book and the chosen point of departure for the discussion of future doctrine. Melton calls for a return to the good old and successful American way of war and to stop enshrining the old writings of the famed Prussian. Clausewitz "could learn more from us than we could ever learn from him".

More "Red Pill" Screenshots

The team developing "Red Pill" has released two more screenshots and more details about this air/naval  war game.

From Warfaresims.com:

Here we see how a single A. Burke-class destroyer positioned in the Arabian Sea is able to threaten a wide range of Iranian targets with its Tomahawk cruise missiles (dark red range ring). The map view is deliberately zoomed out to display the globe.

"The Hurt Locker" DVD, released in the US

Bought it and watched it last night.

Fantastic movie ... highly recommended.



Official website here.


Cheers,

"Command Ops Battles from the Bulge": New Feature Helps to Coordinate Your Attacks

Time, the primary dimension of warfare ...

L3 Link's Advanced Helmet Mounted Display

Simulation technology advances at an astonishing pace.

A short time ago L3-Link nailed a contract with the USAF to provide their "Advanced Helmet Mounted Display" gadget so it can be used to train F-16 pilots.

In a nutshell, this is an integrated helmet-mounted projector/transparent display that tracks the trainee's head position and projects the corresponding simulated environment image into a couple of specially designed semi-transparent glasses. Each of these display glasses can display at resolutions of 1280-by-1024 pixels, providing a continuous field of view of 100 degrees (horizontal) by 50 degrees (vertical). Combine that with head-motion sensing and you get 360 degrees coverage without using a single flat-panel display!

Please check out more details at L3-Link Simulation and Training.

Image is a courtesy of "L-3 Link Simulation & Training". Reproduced here with their permission.

Cheers,

Wargaming the Urban Fight

I was watching "The Fight for Fallujah" (Military Channel stuff included in this DVD) and after seeing the real footage of the combat during Operation Phantom Fury (screenshot at the left) I am once again floored at the complexity of the urban terrain. Not that I didn't know it was complex, ...

Awesome F-16 3D cockpit

Since the old Falcon 4 days, I've always wondered how the real F-16 would fly. Falcon 4, despite all its accurate avionics and weapon systems delivery always felt like I was flying "on rails". Browsing other stuff at a store yesterday I stomped into "F-16 Fighting Falcon", an add-on for Flight Simulator X made by Aerosoft. The box claimed "Accurate Fly-by-Wire flight model", so I couldn't resist.

I was really surprised by the quality of this add-on. The 3D cockpit is just fantastic and I made the video above to show it to you. Even the multi-function displays (MFDs) work! Off course the stuff shown in these is not exactly what you can see in Falcon 4, but these guys made an effort to model even some sort of radar capability in there. Very nice ...

Gah! I'm becoming an eye candy guy ...

I'll explore the flight model at a later time. :)

Cheers,