"A possible Baltic War scenario by the Rand Corporation" Topic

So the Rand think tank wargamed out a Russian invasion of the Baltics using purely conventional forces and published their results and recommendations. Here's a link to the study:

PDF link

Interesting stuff and it has useful order of battle information.

They need to publish the boardgame that they used to play this.

And a here is a proposal to use an alternate force structure …

PDF link

BBC broadcast a programme this week with a bunch of talking heads role-playing out what would happen if the Russians 'did a Ukraine' in the Baltics….

It went nuclear with terrifying speed.

The Russian government was angry as hell about it :)

Good reading, thanks for posting……..what was the BBC show called?
I'll hunt it down on iPlayer……..

Because the Russian Air Force is sufficiently powerful to resist NATO's quest for air superiority for multiple days, the Red team was able to create "bubbles" in space and time to launch massed waves of air attacks against this NATO force. The absence of short-range air defenses in the U.S. units, and the minimal defenses in the other NATO units, meant that many of these attacks encountered resistance only from NATO combat air patrols, which were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. The result was heavy losses to several Blue battalions and the disruption of the counterattack.

They say that armies too often plan to fight the "last war" and this passage is a good indicator of that habit.

It seems that our tactical forces are designed to assume the same sort of air supremacy we've had since Vietnam. I've often wondered how our troops would fare in an environment in which there was a credible air threat and this scenario describes the situation extremely well.

In fact, it doesn't fully cover several related issues such as the effect on logistics. In both Gulf Wars our air supremacy allowed our supporting troops to operate without fear of attack from the air. Massive fuel bladders were stationed in the desert which would have been easy pickings for a serious air attack. To make an Abrams or Bradley or Stryker unit combat ineffective you don't have to destroy its vehicles. You can just shut down their fuel supply and they'll become static bunkers really fast.

BBC programme was This World: World War Three – Inside the War Room.

Cheers, off to find it!

My dad used to create wargame scenarios for an off-shoot of RAND back in the '60's. Stuff so top secret he took it to his grave with him 40 years later.

They say at the end of the report that they are going to publish another article on the game itself. A battle report???

One one of the last pages they show a picture of the game. It's a map with a hexagon overlay with 1/2" or 3/4" counters on the top. Red being the Russians and various shades of Blue for NATO. It looks like a game from the 70's/80's!

Here is the "War is Boring" take on this:

link

Some interesting observations. I do have to wonder about one thing: why did they use a tradition "map and counter" game over a computer game? Easier and cheaper? More available?

Using a map-and-counter game saves having to program anything more complex than a random number generator.

The 'boardgame' they used is just a map with an clear hex grid placed over it.

The counters look home made with attack and defence strengths (?).

They do have Bn level ground units and SAMs on table.

One variable they did not game was an aggressive Poland. They seem to relegate the Polish armed forces to rear area security and watching the borders. If Russia attacks from Kaliningrad it seems a Polish move into the oblast would complicate their plan.