Forum

In an earlier conversation with hiro, he mentioned something that had me recollect an important experience from my old Army days ... and then that thought kind of ran away with its branching implications.

I'll go the long way:

These past 20 years, military doctrine and hardware in the West have been very narrowly focused towards GWOT and its particular requirements. Even in the first decade after the Wall fell, our main focus was on conflicts like the Yugoslav civil wars, which also were rather different from the kind of conflicts we'd been building our armies for.
Add to that the whole "End of Civilisation" and "Peace Dividend" political fantasy that was all too happy to keep a large portion of the development of heavier military hardware like tanks down essentially to minor upgrades of 80's technology.

It is only very recently that we've again started thinking about what major confrontations between standing armies might look like, and what the deeper implications of this are.

But that battlefield — that clash of standing armies — was the reality that we were building and preparing for during the Cold War. Consequently, it is also the reality of what all the build-up during the game's fictional 90's, until the break of hostilities in 1997, is geared for.


And ergo, the result of that development is also the environment and hardware that the characters will find themselves in the middle of.

In some scenarios, this might also be the precise kind of active shooting war the characters find themselves in the middle of.


So, what is it? When the fringes of an armoured division meet a mechanised division over the plains south of Linköping ... how does that battlefield differ from the GWOT battlefield in Kandahar, and a thousand other cities, towns, and valleys?


I need others to chime in with details on the GWOT battlefield — I never trained for it; my active stint in the Army ended literally weeks before the Wall fell — but the Cold War European battlefield was to a large portion all about armour.
This means battlefields where typical engagement ranges are measured in kilometres. FIBUA and CQB are an exception, not a rule.
An armoured battalion acts as a cohesive combined arms unity, with platoons of tanks and IFV's/APC's supporting one another; the mechanised infantry's chief role being to secure woods and other terrain where tanks are at a disadvantage, guarding the flanks; but the tanks constitute the main striking force, providing the core of firepower and mobility.

Consequently, the infantrymen aren't equipped with short-range weapons like carbines and shotguns; they have full-size assault rifles [discounting the M231, if applicable], GPMG's, and other support weapons, capable of engaging enemies at ranges of hundreds of metres.

You have anti-tank helicopters and attack helicopters, you have air support, and you have artillery. You have anti-air artillery and missiles to keep the enemy's helicopters and air support at bay. You have combat engineers.
But it all revolves around supporting the armoured unit's operations — hence, the platforms are self-propelled, in order to be able to keep up with the tanks' mobility.

It's a whole different kind of war than many of those who were in the military in the 90's and onwards trained for.


And this gets me thinking about the battlefield environment.

So, distances tend to be extended; vehicles tend to be heavy, tracked affairs — light vehicles and wheeled armoured vehicles operate as scouts or in other roles where mobility provides more critical protection than armour. In the game's altered 90's, we should have a true 24hr battlefield, with sensor systems able to ensure mobility as well as acquire and engage targets at range at dead of night, in vehicles as well as in the hands of dismounted troops. The battlefield has both depth and fluidity; there won't be a static line where units shoot at one another from either side; tanks on the offensive will use their mobility to manoeuvre through enemy positions, on the defensive, they'll be dug down in prepared positions, but ready to move and regroup in an instant.

Then there's the noise.

Anyone who has stood anywhere near — as in, within several tens of metres of — a tank firing live ammo from its main gun, especially sabot rounds, can attest that it ... kind of rivets your attention. Even with ear protection, the noise is deafening; the shock wave is massive. At night, the muzzle flash seems to light up the whole landscape.

Another fun little fact to consider while on the topic — when a tank fires a sabot round (APFSDS; the standard antitank projectile), the sabot itself at this point in history is a metal chunk in three or four parts, that peels off the projectile immediately upon leaving the barrel ... travelling at nearly 2km/s; much faster than a rifle bullet. The sabot petals are each perfectly capable of dealing severe damage to unprotected troops or hardware hundreds of metres away from the firing tank. Not something that you'd bother with most of the time, but an opportunity for you as a GM to inject a little unexpected complication into a situation, now and then.

Back to the subject of noise; in indoor spaces, even small arms fire is uncomfortably loud — and rounds fired from short barrels make a lot more noise than the same rounds fired from a long barrel.


So ... why this long story?

I think it might make a good picture to have at the back of one's mind when GM'ing the environment, is all.
Depending on the circumstances in your campaign, the tanks may still be running ... or they may all have run out of fuel. But in some sense or other, they'll still be there, if in no other way than that the military context surrounding the setting and the characters was built around the assumption of them being there.

Hope it comes in useful — but in the meanwhile, feel free to fill in more if you've got something!

The move to GWOT was already the plan in the 90's; T2K continued to be further from standard. Especially the move to the M4 starting in 1994.

The M4 will likely still be the weapon of choice for US troops.
The tanks WILL have fired. And will still be low pace of evolution, simply because of taxpayer weariness of hearing how much tanks cost, and how hard it is to move them. (2-3 in a C5A Galaxy? Not efficient.)

The move to GWOT was already the plan in the 90's; T2K continued to be further from standard. Especially the move to the M4 starting in 1994.

Indeed; this is precisely one of the points we discussed and I tried to summarise in Evildrsmith's thread. What you're describing here is the reality that established itself as per the fall of the Wall in 1989, and the subsequent collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union in 1991.

Decisions about changes in doctrine and gear made in 1994 and later are made years after and in response to those events, obviously.

But in an alternate reality where development continues unabated along the pre-1989 tangent, it would seem very odd indeed even for the US to suddenly switch to a doctrine of light vehicles and short-range small arms, when you've got division after division of Warsaw Pact tanks lined up along the Polish-German border. I honestly can't see how or why that would happen.

Also, NB: the German, British, French — and Swedish! — etc. armies won't need to bother with the carrying capacity of the C5 to get their MBT's to the front.
And bearing in mind that USAREUR historically shipped their tanks and other heavy equipment to European soil on ships, not planes, neither would the US. The trick is to do it before the shooting starts...

"We" have been waging minor and proxy wars since the end of the second world war.

In that regard, the GWOT isn't so different from these little endeavours. They're low intensity conflicts, asymmetric warfare, choose your term.

What makes Afghanistan different is the terrain and distances the fighting takes place at. Sure, there are roads but they don't go where the people are shooting each other and the enemy, as with most of the proxies, don't have tanks either. There's a reason no major power has "won" a war in Afghanistan in the last century or so. Arguably that's also true of the GWOT. I don't think the world is safer but hey, that's another topic for a different forum.

Have you read either Increasing Small Arms Lethality in Afghanistan: Taking Back the Infantry Half Kilometer by Major Thomas P. Ehrhart or The Case for a General-Purpose Rifle and Machine Gun Cartridge (GPC) by Anthony G Williams? Not directly related to your question (tho I don't really understand what your question is) but both offer insight into the use of small arms in Afghanistan and for me as a gamer make interesting reading when planning near future games or just geeking out on gun stuff.

Heh ... if we look into the history of "low-intensity conflict", we'll have to go a lot further back than WWII...

But the point I'm making here is that the "Twilight War" WWIII is not a LIC — whatever it has become by the time our respective campaigns begin, it started out as a modern full-scale war between the standing armies of NATO (and Sweden) and the Warsaw Pact. GWOT and other LIC's have only limited relevance to that.


And the battlefield of that full-scale war — or the remnants thereof — is the canvas on which the T2k game's "playing field" is painted. This comes with consequences:

This means, e.g., that there will be tanks — whether they're still moving and shooting or not, they were there, and they will have left their mark on the terrain. The countermeasures against them will have done the same — there will be tank obstacles, dikes, anti-tank mines.

This means, e.g., that the small arms that characters have — unless they are Special Forces soldiers, vehicle crew, or have some non-standard avenues of access — will with greatest likelihood be standard assault rifles, not carbines, SMG's, or IDW's.

This also means that there won't be IED's — at least, not on anything like the scale seen in GWOT — and so, vehicles won't be engineered to withstand them.

Even though it might look a lot like a LIC by the time our stories begin, people won't suddenly have access to LIC (or GWOT) optimised armouries and gear, as these will never have been fielded or distributed. And why would they be — the T2k armies were trained and equipped to meet the Soviet Army, not the Taliban.


So ... I am not posing any question here. As I said in my original post, I'm trying to paint a picture of what the WWIII battlefield probably would have looked like, as a resource for GM's to use at the table.
I consciously put that in opposition to the picture of the Yugoslavia/GWOT/etc battlefields that I suspect many here will be familiar with, as that world looks a lot different — in everything from how the battles would have been carried out, to what gear soldiers would carry around. And what the soldiers would be carried around in.

And, as I also wrote earlier, I also invite others with thoughts on the matter to paint in more detail!

And so, I'm not really looking to debate the merits of this weapon versus that weapon this time — although, as you know, I'm always game for that discussion — but rather to create an image of what the battlefield at the culmination of a Cold War arms race that extends for almost a full decade beyond what it did in real history realistically might have looked like.

I suspect that the initial phases of the NATO vs. WARSAW PACT WW3 in Twilight 4e would be closer to the First Gulf War than Afghanistan or the 2003 invasion of Iraq, only with both sides fielding forces like the Coalition.

I also suspect that as the war ground on and loses in equipment and manpower outstripped replaces that you'd see a lot of Frankenstein mashups put together in the field - look at the early HUMVEE vs. the later armoured boxes for example. This happened in WW2 as well as forces tried to adapt their equipment to unexpected field conditions. Add in older equipment coming with reserve forces or being de-mothballed and later in the war you could have a mix of kit from the late 90s down to the Vietnam era.

Doctrine would evolve due to both combat experience and the realities of what each side had left to fight with.

That is both the difficulty and the blessing on the TW world - you are limited by what the real world did and yet you have considerable freedom to extrapolate what a late 90s Cold War gone hot world would look like.

It comes back to world building and internal consistency. Take a scenario like in the 1984 film Red Dawn. In that movie they had the premise that Communist Forces would invade the USA. How?

The deviation from the real world is simply explained as: The United States is strategically isolated after NATO is disbanded. At the same time, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies aggressively expand their sphere of influence. In addition, the Ukrainian wheat harvest fails while a socialist coup d'état occurs in Mexico.

The actual progress of the invasion is explained as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qc8jJ0TjSY.

Of course if things happened as they did in the real world then such an invasion is impossible, but in the movie world it makes sense.

Now compare that world building to say the invasion shown in Call Of Duty computer game or the 2012 Red Dawn remake where North Korea invades the USA. Neither of those scenarios made any sense inside their own world building let alone in the real world.

I suspect that the initial phases of the NATO vs. WARSAW PACT WW3 in Twilight 4e would be closer to the First Gulf War than Afghanistan or the 2003 invasion of Iraq, only with both sides fielding forces like the Coalition.

Absolutely! That, and the radically different terrain, which naturally will impose its own differences — and, of course, that there'll be seven more years of arms race and undiminished technological development before the war starts.

A lot can happen in seven years in that regard even under ordinary circumstances; thrice so if political tensions escalate and military funding is prioritised.

I can't think of any reason why IEDs wouldn't exist. If inadequate supply chains exist to bring ATGMs and RPGs and such to the front (or if you're the Krakow militia or whatever and were never part of that supply chain to begin with), yet armored vehicles still pose a problem -- it won't take more than a few months for people to figure out new ways to try to blow them up. It's not rocket science. (maybe EFPs are closer to rocket science, but the rocket doesn't have to go anywhere). And while vehicles designed with IED resistant hulls might not exist, reactive armor and spaced armor certainly already did. You might see some fun stuff like ERA bricks jury rigged to vehicles that were definitely never designed to have them.

Likewise, I imagine you'd see improvised weapons of the sort we see in Syria and Libya. Trucks or Humvees or tanks or riverboats equipped with aircraft rocket pods. AA autocannons on any platform you can imagine. Tanks and IFVs towed into fixed positions and left there as weapon emplacements.

Individual units will evolve the tactics needed to survive based on who they communicate with. A lot changed in doctrine as a result of people watching the Soviets in Afghanistan, the US in Somalia, and especially the Russians in Chechnya, for instance... knowledge like that might have to be much more local in a T2K world, but the ideas are all the same. It only takes one traumatizing CQB fight to realize you need to rethink your whole approach to CQB warfare, for instance, and for new weapons and usages to come out of them almost immediately.

I guess you'd probably have a lot of people going around with some serious hearing loss issues.

You are right of course in that the further the collapse progresses, and as formal armouries run dry, the more will people turn to improvised munitions.

But my point is that while there is still some kind of an organised shooting war going on, IED's will be a rare feature on the battlefield. Not necessarily non-existent, but rare enough to not be a major consideration in planning, tactics, or equipment — very much unlike in GWOT.

The massive deployment of IED's of various sorts that met Western troops on the GWOT battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc, that troops deployed there need to take into account every time they stick a toe outside of base and that even forced manufacturers of defence equipment to design vehicles specifically to be able to withstand them, was a response created from need.
And during the actual war, before everything collapses and just fizzles out, that need won't really exist.

So, if we for the moment focus on what the pre-collapse battlefield may look like — that might be the present reality in some campaigns, and at any rate is what sets the stage for campaigns that begin post-collapse — I do believe we can disregard IED's.

IEDs work because you have a fair idea of where and when the targets you want to blow up will appear. Hence they are placed on roads or on pathways used by supply convoys or patrols. Part of Australian doctrine based on Vietnam experience was that you do not use existing trails or pathways when patrolling. As the instructor put it - booby traps are like crocodiles, if you keep going back to the same place eventual the croc will be waiting there for you.

I don't see IEDs playing a large roll in TW, but mainly because actual landmines will be present and possibly in large numbers. Huge areas could have been mined, or you could have those mines that were deployed by artillery littering old battlefields. Heck, old landmines are still a problem today (the last mine was official cleared in the Falklands Islands this week left over from the 1982 war).

Hence you will not see the command detonated type IEDs we see today simply because you can lay a mine to do the same job.