"Dealing with mast mounted and hidden launched missiles" Topic

Dealing with mast mounted and hidden launched missiles. One of the issues we have run into recently is the difficulty of neutralising weapons well sited defensively using mast mounted sights or even worse with remote sights, launching missiles from completely hidden positions. It's not clear what the best tactic is in the real world. At the moment it seems they may be over effective in Manoeuvre Group. Our current options are to use a hot smoke screen over area that could be a threat or "search" the area with significant amounts of HE from artillery but this is like looking for a needle in a haystack and ammunition runs out at an alarming rate. It would help if we understood the real world vulnerabilities of such weapons and the tactics to neutralise them. Help please ;-).

plot artillery missions on likely positions.
use white phos to mask your advance across open ground.
co-ordinated advance using all arms.
best use of terrain and concealment.
take real time hits on your manoeuvre group while the fire group or overwatch brings fire support once receiving effective fire.

search for IDF armour group tactics vs Egyptian Sagger detachments on youtube ect for inspiration. Co-ordinated attacks between armour, artillery and air support.

Good luck

Regards Allan

This is exactly why my wargaming interest wanes with the advent of all this high-tech stuff that began with flint-lock muskets!

FM 71-123 has some things to say about this.

link

(company/battalion offensive operations).

Mainly, drench the enemy positions with smoke and indirect HE fire (and I suppose, for more modern armies, cluster munitions), having conducted a sensible amount of recce first.

Less discriminating armies may find a good dollop of chem or tactical nuclear weapons work well too.

Yes, concealed AT weapons are extremely dangerous against tanks. They were in WW2 as well, however much ex-cavalrymen and tank manufacturers may like to argue that 'the most effective AT weapon is another tank'.

Do like the soviets do (did) high speed advance, wait till something blows up, figure out where the attacks likely to have come from, high speed advance towards the target with as much suppressive fire as you can muster.

Beware of the board being too open; even in the 80s west germany was well urbanised/wooded/hilly and lines of site were usually limited. The soviets reckoned most engagements would be at a kilometre or less. Then add in smoke, HE barrages, fog etc

I believe the prefered Israeli tactic was (and may still be) to fire beehive/flechette rounds toward the location from which the missile was fired. The idea being the flechettes may very well hit the missile and cause it to miss, and the operators will likely take cover and leave the missile unguided.

IIRC those tactics were developed to deal with the AT-3 which is over 40 years old and worked well for that purpose. How well they would work with fire-and-forget weapons and/or mast mounted sights is open to debate.

And bear in mind missiles have a limited rate of fire and limited supply, carriers are underarmoured, warheads are unreliable, tracking flares can be spotted.

Sounds like the rules might be making them too effective?

In IABNM missiles from the Cold War period are not that good unless you can get someone moving in the open with no chance of getting to cover. Firing at a unit near cover allows the target to evade into the cover or fire off smoke and evade. If any of the target's friends are in overwatch they can fire on the missile launcher as well. Missiles only get one shot per turn as well. Modern fire and forget systems would be another story.

Question is, why weren't mast mounted missiles more common? There must have been some problems that kept them from taking over the battlefield.

Of course, they weren't much good when attacking/counterattacking, and the treadheads probably didn't love them …

Snipers with Anti-Material Rifles. Last I knew they had to hover before firing.
Airburst artillery can ruin their day.
Gunships on the hunt-'copters have to catfight-can't break away like aircraft.
A10's, lotsa A10's.

Question is, why weren't mast mounted missiles more common? There must have been some problems that kept them from taking over the battlefield.

Usually light armor on their carrier vehicle.

The US M901 "Hammerhead" had a TOW missile mount on a short mast (basically enough for the M113 to be hull-down and still fire the missiles).

Question is, why weren't mast mounted missiles more common?

Well with vehicles like the ITV the vehicle basically can't move when the mast is deployed because it shifts the center of mass too high. Try to turn and the whole vehicle would tip over.

No firing on the move relegates them to defensive use. And as it was an M113 chassis it couldn't keep up with fast tanks. I wouldn't want to have been in an ITV company trying to "shoot and scoot" from T-80s.

Also as previously mentioned the Soviets didn't give a damn about thinly spread ATGMs sniping them. They would pick a spot and drive a whole regiment through it. Any concentrated defensive position would have been hit with heavy arty.

Quaker,
My be its our scenario but to actively deter mast mounted kitin the right place, by Artillery looks very demading. All potential terrain in an arealike there is a potential for the threat area, potentially perhaps a vaugely triangle shape some 3 km wide (max missile range either side) and extending to a point away about 2km (max missile range to the front. Perhaps our allocation of Artillery resources is way too low for the main effort? How many battries in ther main effort would be allocated to a front abot 3km wide?

I can't give a good answer for that as I haven't researched at that scale. I know a Soviet regiment will have around 18 122mm howitzers, plus mortars and rockets. For a main effort the total artillery allocation would have been several times that.

What sort of scouting are you doing? A Soviet regiment would have a forward element consisting of the scout platoon and several companies to a battalion of other troops.

Is the issue not being able to detect launchers even when they fire?

EDIT: I've been looking at FM 100-2-1 and it has quite an extensive section on Soviet arty. A 122mm howitzer battery can suppress half a hectare with only 300 rounds. That would be enough to mess up any ITVs or ATGM infantry hiding in foxholes.

Is this a playtest or a game? If a playtest it sounds like atgw might be too effective, maybe try limiting their supply? It doesnt sound right that artillery should run out of ammo before an M901 does. Greater allowance for countermeasures maybe? Atgw should be an annoyance like snipers rather than a stopper I think.
If a game, maybe you need more terrain or maybe a more soviet attitude to casualties – remember they die for the greater good!

Im enjoying this – best thread here for a good while

Soviet artillery allocation would be dependant on how important higher up thought the sector was and how it was progressing compared to others. In theory a regiment or a battalion or a company even, could have a divisions worth of artillery support allocated, plus everything up to corps level assets if it was reckoned important enough.

Try giving the russians victory conditions to do with exiting the board or taking a piece of ground rather than killing enemy troops – they were all about getting the big breakthrough. Slowing down for a scattering of atgw would cause them higher casualties in the long run – nato was all about gaining time.

latto6plus2, we aim to please by hopefully posing questions that are thought provoking. To us every game is run through of a tactical puzzle. If the games approximation to what we think the real world should look is notr reasonable it makes it less interesting, ttrying to work out what you should do in a fantasy world is not interesting to us as we have no basis to judge the result.
The answers here make me think that there are three issues here:-

We have been struggeling with for years with "WARGAMEITUS" where you have to relise lots of bits of other wargames are not there to reflect the real world but are almost a mindless tradition. Overpowerfull artillery is one. We still tend to reduce the ammount to the real world minimum even though or practical effeitiveness is closer to the real world value. This last game is highlighting that where we hit areas that had had time to engineer its defences the forece balance to win has to be effectively well over 3 to 1 localy. On this basis we have yet to get a grip on the level of losses an attacker is going to have to sustain to breakthrough. Its easy to say but not so easy to do. Our current game is pushing my capabilities (in a good way). I think the issue may be at least in part be physiological I don't like losing kit but may be its just one of those things "acceptable losses".

The question about recon is interesting. Even in our game which is really a "campaign" as its on about bound 150, recon is mainly whatching roads to work out where the enemy is and is not present. That is harder than it would seem, as even in our "scaled down" scenario we are struggeling. Plus to reduce work load on the protagonists this is a "hasty" attack defence, the defended having only 8 hrs do engineering over a couple of routes before the shooting starts, in an area which is basicaly hostile to all airpower. This all minimises time for the recon to provide detailed information.

Cheers uscha
I know what you mean about wargameritus – everything has to be condensed so it happens on table during the game, so yeah, artillery, atgw, small arms etc have to be deadlier than in life and troops in real cover are just too much hassle! Artillery can deliver the results youre looking for in real life but not in a game timescale, without as you say becoming unrealistic. Look at WW2 where the germans would withdraw from their front line before the russian barrage or normandy where german troops are reported dizzy & vomiting after (aerial) bombardment.
Maybe a prebattle "stonk" roll to see which elements are Ko, suppressed etc to reflect a pregame barrage?
I used to have a handy summary of russian "supression times" you know "percentage x of dug in troops will be suppressed after y minutes of z batteries firing", even included artillery mine clearing estimates.
If I can find it again I'll post it. Might be online somewhere in a manual?
Russians again but in WW2 they were looking at 5:1 or 6:1 odds as minimums for a prepared assault, with 10:1 preferred.

Your campaign sounds tremendous and congrats for getting to turn 150, whats the setting?

latt6plus2

The setting is a theoretical Euopean mid 1980 to 1990 forces.

link

The germans are on the offensive localy against a Russian defensive force.

Russians have about a company in total but have had a good start preparing the ground. The Germans have 6 company battle groups but each has a limited life of about 8 hrs max.

The Germans enter bottom left and have to progress to bottom left. The Thick lines are "board" edges so actually its 12 km of road in two possible routes of about 6km each
The wide road has no weight restriction, next down 15 tonne, thin and tracks not more than 5 ton. If any overweight vehicle is drived down one (not across) the road cannot be used to supply units as it becomes impassible to wheeled.

Because of its design there are very long sight lines in "interesting" places. The ground scale is 1mm to 1 m so individual roures are about 600m wide. All hedges have significant ditches so are difficult going even for tracked.
forces are 12mm scale.

Hence missiles can be in a lot of places and cause hell and not easy to hit all of them. Its not clear how vulnerable a mast is to artillery. We have classed it as about the same as HE proof at 30m which could be excessive but there is no data we can find on this.

Hence missiles can be in a lot of places and cause hell and not easy to hit all of them. Its not clear how vulnerable a mast is to artillery. We have classed it as about the same as HE proof at 30m which could be excessive but there is no data we can find on this.

At least the American M901 would be just as tough as the M113, and I believe that most other missile launchers were built on APC hulls.

So I'd totally believe that any mast-mounted missile launcher was just as tough as that nation's APC.

Cheers Uscha – these are your own OMG rules right? (Im at work so cant see your blog yet, looking forward to it though)
The limited life of units sounds interesting and realistic; I take it they have to withdraw out of the line for refitting or something affter theyre spent? Nice idea.

Im not so sure Lion; while the box would be armoured youd have a relatively large area of vulnerable optics on the front of it and masts might be knocked out of alignment or stuck in position by blast?

Been thinking about attack helicopters; I dont know about doctrine, but whenever I read WW3 fiction, atgw launchers are always getting a hard time from Hinds. Anyone know if this is artistic license, soviet doctrine or a nato expectation of their use?

Latto6plus2
The link is not a blog but a cads package drawing of the battlefield. It's drawn depicting the hexes used by Hedon. It aims to provide a sort of campaign map that can be fast built on an 8 by 6 ft board. It allows flexibility of play and expanses of terrain without needing large maps. All units are allowed about 6 hours on board if they are active. They can stop the clock on table if they go inactive. It's crude but simple and is surprisingly effective. In MG units and elements degrade in battle so typically they don't last that long and have to retire sooner.

Im not so sure Lion; while the box would be armoured youd have a relatively large area of vulnerable optics on the front of it

IIRC, those front lenses are rather exotic materials, like clear sapphire (which is a whole lot tougher than glass). Synthetic sapphire or ruby is relatively cheap and simple to make.

and masts might be knocked out of alignment or stuck in position by blast?

Granted, but I'd guess that any arty strike close enough to mess up the mast would also cause damage to the vehicle. I *think* that if the M901 specifically took a hit to the hydraulics, the mast would sink back down to the lowered position.