No tiene desperdicio.

[Kal]

No sé cómo poner el enlace directo al post, así que copio y pego. Me parece muy interesante. El hilo completo está en el foro de Battlefront, en la sección CMBB y se llama "Maneuver and Annihilation Battle"

Esta es la primera contribución de JasonC al mismo.

The main idea of maneuver theory is perfectly applicable in the tactical, CM context. It is surprise. Most of the other ideas characteristic of maneuver attack are means to achieving it or characteristic ways of exploiting it. But the fundamental idea is to do something the opponent does not expect, and then to do five other things, hard, before he is done reacting to the first one. Think head game, and playing the enemy commander up in the sky, rather than his men down on the map.

To be useful, surprise has to have tactical consequences. The enemy has to somehow be caught "out of position", in the wrong stance or formation or direction, and this has to translate into something more lasting. The German version was very clear on what that more lasting consequence needs to be. Dead enemy. So, the idea is to anticipate the enemy, don't let him anticipate you, wrong-foot him, and cash that wrong-footing for dead bodies before he has time to get right-footed again. After you've cashed momentary surprise for lasting odds, you can always win the rest of the fight the brute force way - the enemy shouldn't have enough left to resist.

The scale issue is just to find ways of wrong footing someone that can translate into lousy fighting power for him compared to you. Classic ones on an operational scale are encirclements or cutting supplies, but those are mere means, not the point.

On a small enough scale, you have to worry that the enemy is deployed in a flexible, robust way and that the integration of his arms achieves itself. He might be intellectually surprised by something you do, but if all he has to do about it is have a few units rotate 30 or 90 degrees in place and fire in a different direction, that won't count as "surprised" in the sense required.

There are lots of ways CM forces get wrong footed, in ways that matter. Simplest example - 3/4 of your force is on a part of the map where only 1/4 of the enemy are, and the rest of his force can't help them. That is a many on few wrong footing, and can happen at any scale. It does require that ranges and LOS lines aren't so long everybody can help everybody else.

But other simple examples are at least as likely to matter on the CM scale. Infantry caught moving in the open rather than in cover, especially moving en masse and with the cover they'd like to end up in already occupied by the enemy, constitutes being "wrong footed". A flock of tanks taken in flank by shooters they hadn't expected or seen, constitutes being "wrong footed". A tight main body of infantry in dense woods walking right under barrage, constitutes being "wrong footed".

Even having the wrong force selection can count as surprise. Obviously the classic case is also possible - just being flanked. More generally, any strong attack (or fire) delivered by a part of your force the enemy did not know existed and would not expect where it appears, has a decent chance of catching the enemy "wrong footed".

What conditions further effective surprise? It helps if the enemy is blind. He might be blinded by night or fog or smoke or dense wooded or factory-urban terrain, or he might be blinded by having his eyes gouged out (in the recon screen battle, I mean). It helps if your own forces are speedy and robust enough to rapidly be where they were not expected - which means vet squad infantry rather than regular teams, in lots of cover, or it means tanks rather than infantry, and in a fist not penny packets. It helps if the enemy is stunned or on long command delays, which can come from a barrage or just from buttoning early AFVs.

It also helps if you know where you are going. Which can come from a recon screen, or from differential push (by which I mean piling on success while failures backs off). But the best place it came come from is a clear blue sky - by which I mean, flat guessing where the enemy is going to be and what he is trying to do, betting heavily that you are right.

Tenatively probing until you are sure is not the way to conduct a maneuver attack. You may or may not have a few minutes to look around first. Then you have to decide on a course of action and ram it home. Sometimes it is better to just ram it home from the set up onward, dispensing with prior knowledge entirely. If the plan is wrong, adapt once, rapidly. Terrain analysis at the start can tell you plenty, particularly against a cautious opponent, and particularly in MEs it is frequently far more important to use all available speed than to have half a dozen reports of enemy half squads.

Other themes - winning the armor war, the top of the escalation chain. Early. Intact armor vs. none makes it possible to cut up the enemy force with fire threats to open areas, and then gang up on the resulting pieces one at a time.

Big moves by all the heavy armor early are thematic - as opposed to leaving it all hanging back waiting for something. But you can't afford for such moves to be predictable. You have to avoid kill sacks not by scouting or attrition-ee prep work, but by sheer "nose" for where they are, and picking the unexpected route.

Another theme is using infantry as the main component of the force only inside large bodies of cover, so that LOS is very short and FP very high. That makes any initial many-on-few tend to snowball. Or using it very aggressively (recklessly, really) in conditions of low visibility, which again isolates the first few enemy hit.

Recon screen, typically a line of full squads side by side and moving rapidly, that wrap around smaller enemies and overrun single teams or outposts. Supported by a few pieces of armor, including at least one full AFV able to trump light armor. In wide open country a line of full tanks can be used instead. The purpose is to blind the enemy and get at least some infantry deep into his positions, which gums up any shifts of reserves. Then they go stationary and shoot, while the follow-on guys pick places to gang up on.

Wing attacks or envelopments are thematic, fighting only half the enemy force with almost all of your own. The remainder of the front is screened by a split platoon and teams, who look bigger than they are, but do not press beyond unoccupied cover.

As for forces, mostly tank infantry teams. Max the armor budget, or in a armor force type fight spend half the available points on just armor. High quality infantry (squads, therefore "fast" speed) to support them, or items that help win the armor war (without costing too much - shrecks, or one heavy PAK e.g.). A few specialized items that promise very high payoffs for perfect use against a wrong-footed opponent (SPW 251/2, flame vehicle, high capacity HE chucker e.g. a StuH).

Also thematic - feints, tricks, bait, traps. Stealth for the force maneuvering for the surprise bit, whether infantry in deep cover or anything in dead ground or sneaking and hiding while enemy pass you. And of course speed once stealth is dropped, to follow up the first attack before the enemy adapts and restores his coordination.

If you try to fight this way and aren't any good at getting inside your opponent's head, telegraph your punches, etc, then it won't remotely work and it can be hard to see the idea. If you guess right three times running and win each time because of it, you will get a big head rush (and probably overconfident). It can produce variance, as some guesses are right and others are not. And it can also simply work.

JasonC

Una contribución excelente, IMHO, como muchos de los posts de Jason Cawley, una autentica autoridad en táctica, estrategia y wargames.