Friendly Fire from aircraft

[kevin]

OK guys, let's stop beating up on Big Jim here. This is a case where everyone is right.

Fatricide (from the air is extremely rare these days, compared to Vietnam Korea and WWII), but all fatricide has consistently remained the cause of approximately 10% of US casualities from the Revoulutionary War up to ODS. (I don't know the figures from OIF)

Fatricide is a huge problem. Put yourself in the position of the family. Your loved one has died and because of a mistake made by someone on his/her side. I have heard conferences where US Officiers and other lecturers have stated it may be better to pursue tactics that may result in more casualities overall, than to pursue a strategy with a lesser chance of overall casualities, but higher chance of friendly fire. In short: better to loose 25 guys to the enemy than, 10 guys to the enemy and 10 to fratricide for 20 total.

I've never been involved in calling in an airstrike in combat, but have in training. IMHO technological improvements are over-rated as solutions to the problem. They key is communicating. I don't mean having a better radio, I mean having everyone working on the same page. Usually a Forward Line is established. Units on one side are bad guys, units on the other side are good guys. Well, with advancing land troops in pursuit of the enemy, it's easy to cross the line without anyone knowing.

Also, imagine how hard it is to make sure to tell everyone when the line is moved. You have to coordinate between ground forces in combat (platoon, company, Battalion, Brigade, Division, Corps, Area Component commander, CINC) just to determine where the grunts are and how soon to and how far can you advance. The farther up the chain that guestimate is made, the more likely it is to be wrong. Then again, those closest to the action are the youngest and most inexperienced troops.

Okay, a decision is made, you have to send the answer down the ground chain, and then down the air chain: CINC, Air Component Commander, # Air Force, Wing, Squadron, Section, Pilot) Shadowcougar described what it's like for the Tom Cruise wanna-bes in the air.

In summary, it's the network systems, C&C, IVIS, GPS which are the best tools to use, but it is the end users of those tools that ultimately reduce blue on blue.

As far as the game goes..... I like holding my Air back to use against arty. If using it as true CAS, make sure you have a direct spotter, try to go for a target in the open and stay put once the strike is called.

[BigJim]

My point was and still is that in the game you call in an air strike and while over flying your own tanks WELL behind the targeted area and WELL within your own area of control you spot a tank and fire on it. With modern IFF that just doesn't happen much, all the comentary has been directed at CAS with near by friendlys, which of course has cause alot of FF kills and is well documented. That was NOT my point, my point was well answered on the first go round, which was that it would take massive progamming to take it out and not worth the trouble, I accept that.

[Pyros]

Gentlemen,

Maybe we should think another aspect of the WinSPMBT game...
Giving the fact that the commander/player has total knowledge of the positioning of all his troops and everything that these troops see, THEN we may assume that in the game the commander takes profit of a limited military GIS (satellite positioning)!!!

cheers,
Pyros

p.s I think this makes things a bit more complicated as gameplay interfere with realism, so we must accept that in a game we can't have 100% realism in all the aspects of battle simulation.
p.s Using satellite positioning:
all participants in the battlefield can know where everybody else is at all times

[PlasmaKrab]

Pyros said :
Giving the fact that the commander/player has total knowledge of the positioning of all his troops and everything that these troops see, THEN we may assume that in the game the commander takes profit of a limited military GIS (satellite positioning)!!!

Well, that kind of technology is way easier to work out in video games than on the field. It is even harder indeed not to have total control and vision on the battlefield.

And in SPMBT as in most of these games, the battlefield network is far above the wildest wet dreams of any commo general! But even better than running liaison units allover to have short glimpses of the situation...
Call that gameplay compromises.
Although that would be fine to pour in some identification issues, but I dopubt this would be feasible...

p.s Using satellite positioning:
all participants in the battlefield can know where everybody else is at all times

Nope, that is when you have GPS + instant tactical network + everyone with a computerized interface. There is no advantage in knowing where everyone is, but having to tell them on the radio each time!
You need something more like the navigational aids you get in cars these days (or in SP howitzers), only networked.
Most of all, you need data transfer. Ask the US guys in Western Asia who have to buy off satellite band from private comm satellites!

[Pyros]

PlasmaKrab said:

Nope, that is when you have GPS + instant tactical network + everyone with a computerized interface. There is no advantage in knowing where everyone is, but having to tell them on the radio each time!
You need something more like the navigational aids you get in cars these days (or in SP howitzers), only networked.
Most of all, you need data transfer. Ask the US guys in Western Asia who have to buy off satellite band from private comm satellites!

I know but I just want to generalize the basics...
First time I read articles concerning the command & control battlefield of the future was back in 1996 (reading JANES) while going on a mission to the Aegean sea

[narwan]

Ahhhh, Heinlein, I have a whole row of them in my bookcase.... Startship troopers is one of my favourites.

But the starship troopers view of soldiering doesn't really change the problem. If the trooper only carries the smart weapons, there's still the question where he carries them, what targets he picks, and to what degree he can trust his sensors. It is sometimes surprisingly easy to fool these.
During the Kosovo campaign for example NATO used technology that could identify the shapes of tanks and other AFV's (as opposed to humans having to poor over the pictures). To verify that these were actual vehicles and not decoys they verified it with heat sensing data to see if the vehicle had an actual engine (different signature from the rest of the vehicle). Then they had a smart missile (worth hundreds of thousands) fired at the target. Which often was nothing more than the silhouette of a tank painted on the road with a big container of water placed on the area where the engine would be.

narwan

[narwan]

kevin said:

Fatricide (from the air is extremely rare these days, compared to Vietnam Korea and WWII), but all fatricide has consistently remained the cause of approximately 10% of US casualities from the Revoulutionary War up to ODS. (I don't know the figures from OIF)

You do realise you're more or less contradicting yourself here? How can it be extremely rare these days and still account for 10% of the casualties?

It SEEMS rare because no combat operations of the kind and on the scale seen in Vietnam, Korea, etc have taken place recently. And yes, I do know about the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan but that's exactly what I mean. Those saw only limited conventional combat operations on the ground and for only a relatively short period (days or weeks).
During those relatively short combat campaigns quite a few incidents occurred. And it'll happen again, I'm sure of that.

Technology is NOT the answer here, at best it can be a tool helping the humans using it, but it can also be the cause for unwanted incidents. As someone else pointed out, the more gizmo's the more room for technological error.

narwan

[narwan]

On modern technology, the more data it will generate for combat units the more it will probably influence the battle NEGATIVELY.

Both data and information are near useless for actual combat units (data are just loose parcels of observations, information is structured data where the loose elements are combined and linked). It is only when information becomes KNOWLEDGE that it'll start to help combat units. Knowledge is contextualised information, where the new information is integrated in the total picture.
The difference is that data and information need (a lot of) interpretation before it can be put to use. After doing just that, you end up with knowledge. However, knowledge itself doesn't change a thing about the situation. You have to act upon it, think of something, 'innovate' (innovation is the application of knowledge to change an existing situation).

All of this takes time, a lot of time. Which on the modern battlefield is a scarce thing. The big issue becomes which data, information, knowledge, and innovation (battle plans in this case) should go to what level and part of the militairy machine at which point? So much of it will be generated that it'll easily lead to 'swamping' officers and troops with info that's useless to them. And a single bottleneck can cripple the entire effort.

Think of the office worker who spends 3 hours a day going through his emails of which 3/4 aren't relevant to him or his actual work. Wasting time like this can be deadly on the modern battlefield.

More data and information is not always a good thing, just like more options on a computer (program) does NOT make it more user friendly (a mistake many programmers still make!).

Narwan

[Pyros]

What if some day the soldier will be nothing more than a weapon platform carrying intelligent weapons, smart ammo and sensors?

[Mobhack]

Pyros said:
What if some day the soldier will be nothing more than a weapon platform carrying intelligent weapons, smart ammo and sensors?

Then - read "Starship Troopers" and avoid the poxy movies made that merely used the name while almost completely ignoring the original Heinelen book they were allegedly based on

In any case - getting way off topic for the game now.

Cheers
Andy