Cold War Blitzspiel

 We had an afternoon slot at Tapton free and John was keen to run his Cold War Blitzspiel rules again, this time with added aircraft. They are a development of his old Blitzsppiel WW2 rules, elements are individual vehicles or heavy weapons and infantry sections. 

Battlefield from the north. The scenario is based on one of the engagements in Ralph Peters 'Red Army', an excellent biook and highly recommended. Russell Phillips had turned the account in the novel into a scenario in his WW3 scenario book 'The Bear Goes West', and this is a translation of that scenario. The blue line is one of the numerous canals in West Germany, in this case traversed by an underpass and lined with enormous berms.

View from the west. NATO will be counterattacking from here as the wicked Soviets have siezed the crossing.

The Russians have a reinforced Mortor Rifle Company - 3 x MR Platoons in BMPs, 1 x Recce platoon, 1 platoon of T80s, AT platoon, Air defence platoon and attached battery of 122mm SP guns. A pretty handy force!

I was the CO, so we put a platoon in the farm on the far side, our AA and Artillery assets in the rear (shielded by the berms) and basically put everyone else up on the berms with nice clear fields of fire. Stationary vehicles are spotted at 1km (20") so we can wait until NATO are in range and blow them all to bits with missiles. 

NATO duly rolled on, Leopard 2s. We waited until they were in the valley in the open then opened up. This was when we discovered that our missiles were incapable of damaging them frontally, and even the T80s were a  bit marginal. The NATO return fire was...devastating, and the berm was soon littered with exploding tanks and BMPs. 

Oh dear. The little white crosses are dismounted infantry (John had forgotten his infantry stands), so at least we had some guys left. Looking carefully at the unit stats, apparently RPGs can't damage Leopard 2s either from the front. Well, we can always go for a close assault.

Perhaps these guys will do better? Although they are also armed with missiles which can't penetrate the frontal armour of the Leopards, they can manouvre to the flanks.

Sadly NATO also has attack helicopters. Our SPAA got one of them, but they just sat there and blew up the AA then started working their way along the deployed artillery. As it turned out our guns indirect HE couldn't damage the Leopards either, so it didn't really matter if they blew up, and it kept the NATO choppers busy until  they ran out of missiles. I feel that any Indirect Fire should have a chance of disabling an AFV, however small.

Firing from the rear our choppers are able to suppress the Leopards, if they roll a 6. That is better than nothing.

Our airstrike rolled up and deployed Fuel Air Munitions, This was also apparently incapable of damaging the Leopards (in the book the FAEs blew up half the attacking tanks), and the jets flew off again. As the yield of FAEs are not far off small tactical nuclear weapons, the combat value of those might need looking at. 

While I don't like to moan, I am really, really opposed to the idea of supertanks which are impervious to every weapon which engages them. I simply don't believe that is how combat actually happens, and most vehicle crews won't sit there ignoring repeated hits, nor will the vehicle miraculously survive everything unscathed. Yes, there are a few examples of this stuff in Iraq, but against a peer enemy? I think  not. The modern Western tanks supplied to Ukraine have been just as vulnerable to artillery, air and AT fire as the Russian ones and the Ukrainians have taken to building anti drone cages on top of their Abrams, just like the Russians. 

Anyway, NATO super tanks is one of the reasons I avoid post 1985 Cold War games, it is worse than wall-wall Tigers in WW2.  John eventually took pity on us and decreed that if a target was suppressed there was a small chance it would be mission killed. So more like WRG then. OK I'm happier with that.

The Leopards rolled forwards and blew up all the defenders in the farm. The only thing saving us was their slow rate of advance, and we never got a chance to mix it in close combat with the Leopards amongst the farm buildings

Anyway, it was all over bar the shouting as game turn 12 rolled around and we duly declared a NATO victory. As the Leopards didn't have any infantry support they would all have to withdraw at nightfall anyway and we would have retaken the lost ground.

Despite my grumbling, it was a fun game and we shoved a lot of kit around in a short space of time. I think the combat issue is to do with using a single attack value +1D6 vs a single defence value. It is fast to resolve but with a wide spread of attack and defence values, it results in extremes of automatic kills at one end and utter imperviousness at the other, neither of which reflect real life issues of target location and acquisition, for direct fire weapons at any rate, as opposed to area fire. Easily fixed by something like a 1 is always a miss and a 6 is always a suppress (which Modern Spearhead uses to avoid exactly the same problem). Combat is a stochastic event and there is no such thing as a guaranteed kill or a guaranteed miss, certainly not in the wild and woolly world of tactical combat.

A revised version is going to COW later this year.