"how do you model Russian tanks with no radio" Topic

Tim, I'm surprised that you had so many young guys.

Apparantly it was very unusual. Made for a very enthusiastic unit. When I came back to visit my regiment bringing along a pile of young boy scouts (5-7 years old) for Leopard rides a few years after I left for medical reasons, my old troop soldiers were all grim faced and pessimistic like all experienced solders. I think my job would have been a lot harder on me if my troopers were not all new kids.

My few years in the regiment were the best years in any job I've ever had before or since. One tends to miss that sort of thing very much when one is pulled away unexpectedly like I was.

The only Canadian regiment I trained with was 21 RBC, just back from Cyprus (no tanks!) in 1978

At that time no one had tanks except the regmiment in Germany. In Canada, at that time, everyont was using ferrets. The liberal government of the time savaged the Army and forces in general, just as they did in the 90s.
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Tim

I remember that they did say, Tim, that they had one (20pdr) Centurion at CFB Valcartier. Doh! It's 12 RBC, innit?

"Although "increased operational tempo" (which is not technically the same thing as moving faster, but never mind that now) has long been one of the claims made for digitization of the battlespace, any actual evidence of this is quite hard to come by."

Oh, my dear doctor, I've been pilloried and near-burnt at the stake so many times I've lost count. The "digitized" Force XXI rotations at the NTC ten years gone and more were supposed to be proof of concept for the equivalent of NEC; they turned out to be horrifying, for anyone with eyes to see. (Fortunately, some folks who went on to command the invasion of Iraq had eyes to see; unfortunately, they've mostly retired now.)

Give a tank commander an IVIS terminal in his tank, he'll spend his time in the turret peering at it instead of having his head out his hatch. He'll die as he's overrun by the enemy his RSTA systems don't detect until too late (See Note).

Give a company/team commander the same capability, but with more information to weed out from the chaff: same result.

Give a battalion commander way too much information: he'll park his track with the ramp open, facing away from the enemy, and never poke his head out until *he's* overrun.

At the battalion level and below, maneuver guys need very tightly focused information to help them prosecute the fight. Giving them the equivalent of the Internet to surf is a disaster in the making.

Note: I'm talking about an enemy in tracked vehicles, in massed formations, that are still able to spoof and blind sophisticated systems long enough to make a difference. The Lord help us if we think we can do better against so-called "IEDs" and Abdul and his buds on foot in the rocks.

And that's all part and parcel of why I haven't been getting paid outrageous sums to offer my advice for the past ten years! Nobody really appreciates the little boy who points out that the Emperor has no clothes.

Allen

but what Blitzkrieg was really about was to advance faster than the defenders could react at a Grand-tactical level.

I believe that exactly what the Germans called the "operational level."