"Learning Curve: WW2 to Modern" Topic

Thinking about getting in to Team Yankee/Moderns when it releases. But I don't know the modern period at all kit/game wise.

Is the combat in moderns like WW2 just with better kit? Or is there something that makes it fundamentally different?

ATGMs, helos, just wondering if they really change the game?

In theory, far deadlier for almost everyone on the battlefield, since the weaponry is much more advanced, and high tech stuff is much more numerous.

From a gaming standpoint though, I suspect, depending upon the rules, it shouldn't be that different from WWII, with the exception that there are a lot more ways to kill tanks, and troops, given the advances with modern weaponry, and precision guided munitions (fired by tanks, ground troops, artillery, aircraft, and helos).

Depends on the level you are at.
With a typical American Army there will be a lot and a mean a lot of support to call on complicating thing.
Don't get me started on the US Marine Corps and their task structure mentality.
If you think things die fast in WW2 or Sci Fi, even faster in Modern.

The rule seems to be "if someone can see you, you're dead?"

Not quite that bad, especially if you factor in reaction times, movement, cover, armor/cover saves, etc., etc., but yea, probably still pretty much a 50% or greater chance that you're dead, if you're in a vehicle.

Infantry may/should be a bit more survivable if they're dismounted, since there are so many of them, in a lot of cases. Though, when you start factoring in the lethality of the latest in high-tech artillery, cluster-bomb munitions, and Fuel Air Explosives (FAE), not to mention the WMDs, even they may be hard-pressed to stay alive.

Of course, they said the same thing about aerial combat and missiles too, and they pretty much failed to live up to their billing, until the use of the Aim-9Ls in the Falklands War.

I suspect a lot of the really high-tech, ultra-lethal weaponry for land combat, and/or ordnance dropped on troops would probably be a bit limited, since it was so expensive, and a lot of it was just coming into service in the mid-late 1980s. They'd probably have run out of quite a bit of that fairly soon, so perhaps the second and third line troops might have been given a reprieve, if they weren't gassed, or nuked first, in Europe.

Fortunately, we never had to find out, first-hand.

Perhaps the single biggest difference is that rapid, accurate counterbattery fire is a real threat to artillery.

You have to be carefull about moderen. While you can play with lots of new fangled kit you may have more that the real world and it may work how the manufactures think is should and in the quantities that the manufactures would like to sell. That is not neccessarily how it is.
The key things are:-

Tanks can reliably fire on the move.
Infantry have lots of radios and tanks universally have radios.
According to a cold war warrior in the infantry, day and night fighting are getting similar as you have night vision.
The conterbattery fire issue has been mentioned.
No horses, folk tend to forget that huge amonts of German logistics were by horse right to the end.
Battle management systems allow you to spot better, one man sees it all see it.
Helos, they like WWII gamers and taxi cab bombers are overrated. A helicopter is dead meat if you are fighting on an equal footing in an engagement area, the ammount of the various AAA means they have to stand off 4 maybe 5 km. You will never see them on most wargames tables except as Battle might they get on table as the object of the attack may not have the kit to get rid of them.
Again lazer guided bombs are great but in a real war there use would be very limited to targets normaly worth the cost of the bomb.

Fundamentaly modern is late 1945 with extra bells and whistles. Like in WWII depending on the time, the tank vs missile/gun dominace swaps over.

Biggest problem is roads and bridges there are still lots of places you cant take a tank practicaly as the infastructure won't take a 70 ton tank.

Close air support and ground attack helos make a hell of a difference, plus the associated anti air assets. Team Yankee brings these to the fore more than some may expect.

One of my pals who gets paid to do this stuff said that the biggest difference he noticed in his service was when GPS became reliable and universal. Finally, troops (and their commanders) actually knew where they were…

No reliable GPS in the Team Yankee universe of course.

Up until then, as noted above, late WW2 with bells and whistles (a somewhat higher tempo of operations and potentially greater lethality, offset by much, much more dispersion).

The infantry attacks conducted in the Falklands were essentially WW1/WW2 style 'walk slowly towards the enemy in a line following the barrage'. So not much change there.

You can get pretty far into the 20th century and still do pretty well with a tactical manual from ww2.

Did I mention the US Armored Cav units in West Germany, back in the 1960s, had tactical, battlefield radar sets which could detect the movement of vehicles at many kilometers range on the ground, and even troop movements to 2 – 3 kms., or so, depending upon conditions, at night?

Makes it hard to sneak up on your opponents.

As has been said, faster and more lethal – which should make for better wargaming! Main difference I'd note is the increased ability of infantry to take care of itself against enemy armour, at least from prepared positions and with a degree of all-arms support.

It gets a bit fuzzy too, because "modern" tends to get taken as everything from Korea to Gulf War 2.
There's kind of a gap in capabilities there :-)

On one hand, modern warfare is some guy in an office firing hellfire missiles at targets on a computer, on the other hand, it's also a Chechnyan and a Russian strangling each other to death in a mud-pit somewhere.

A lot of the above comments feel like theoretical modern or fictional modern.

What examples do we really have that are modern warfare? The Team Yankee stuff is purely fictional with a few examples being the Gulf War and Chechnya. Two totally different events. One a turkey shoot, a technological display of main battle tanks, logistics, combined arms, and fledgling smart air power, and one a total infantryman's insurgency.

I think the insurgency is the face of modern and the Gulf War is the one off anomaly. Wargaming the anomaly and fiction is acceptable but its going to be contentious because everyone is right and everyone is wrong.

I'm not trying to be obstinate here but don't we need to decide if we are gaming the fiction or the history? Either is acceptable in its own right. It's an interesting place to be in, wargaming a book of fiction.

For me the bug is skirmish and the ultra-modern realm still works real good.

"The Blackhawks are 15 minutes out" whatch ya gonna do?

"oh! we have 15 minutes?, let's play that boardgame about Fulda Gap!"

I do agree with you on that Snafu – we have very, very little data on which to build "Team Yankee" games.

There are the various wars in the middle east that provide some insight – at least as to how effective wepaon X is against target Y.

But otherwise we're really just writing rules that conform to our own prejudices. That said, there does seem to be general agreement that modern tech makes things MUCH, MUCH more deadly.

i was wondering if this fundamentally changed tacttics from WW2 or if it was more of an incremental thing (wider dispersion, longer ranges)?

I guess its more deadly if you are technologically inferior. I think its fair to assume the Soviets would have performed better than the Republican Guard.

In some ways that technological gap has made it less deadly. Real US causalities are small by comparison to earlier wars. Here is a weak reference that takes no account of the intensity and scope of the conflicts.

link

The more I think about Team Yankee the more I think of ImagiNations.

I disagree – weapons capabilities are pretty knowable. We know that the MILAN ATGW, WOMBAT 120MM and Carl Gustav 84MM recoilless rifles, and 66mm rockets together give infantry considerably more organic anti armour punch than a PIAT and a satchel full of Gammon Bombs, for example, even adjusting for laminate and active armour…

(I know every one will jump to say that WW2 infantry had effective anti tank guns, but their equivalent organisationally is the LRATGW such as SWINGFIRE or ITOW…)

Mako,

Interestingly enough, the AIM-9L performance in the Falklands didn't match up to the hype, either. All AIM-9L shots in the Falklands were actually taken from well within the AIM-9H engagement envelope and had the Sea Harriers been loaded with AIM-9H, they would probably have got the same results. They did attempt some front-aspect lock-ons though without success.

The kills were more about the superior dogfighting skills of the RN pilots than the respective merits of missile technology.