Knowing when to fold-em in a Battle Position: A Steel Beasts AAR

Steel Beasts AAR: Heavy Company Team Delay v Tank Battalion

Now here's a cliché no wargamer has ever heard before; "It was an excellent plan, but I executed it rather poorly."

Ha. Yes. I know, but trust me this time it's true! Well, that's better left for a reader to decide. Nevertheless, that was my take-away at the time from a messy but successful playthrough of an SB scenario done co-operatively with 4 other players well over a year ago. 

The premise of the scenario was simple: the lead battalion of an enemy regiment is  bearing down and the battlegroup needs more time to finish preparing its main defensive position. That's where our company team comes in. Our mission is two-fold. First, we must cover engineers who are finishing up laying a minefield over a causeway. Then, we must delay the enemy for approximately two hours, or destroy his lead forces. 

While we were awarded a major victory, it was in hindsight far from satisfying. The end report saw the Company team lose an entire troop (platoon) of Abrams in a relatively linear defence. Many more of the Company's vehicles were damaged, and two had to be towed to safety literally under fire. The company trains came under indirect fire, the infantry got left out on a limb (but did a sterling job destroying enemy that leaked through), and the engineers we were supposed to cover succeeded in laying the mines but never got to egress safely. 

The original scheme from the co-op session.

The reason for the chaos? The age-old problem of every wargamer: being impressed at their initial engagement going swimmingly and failing to realise the time to fall back to a new position has come and gone. Poor terrain analysis on my part and no real time to establish decision points for falling back to subsequent positions were equal offenders. 

I'm a bit older, a bit wiser, and wanted to revisit the scenario with the above in mind. 

Order of Battle

Scheme

The first phase of the mission is probably the most crucial one; we must protect the engineers from direct fire and observation until 0505H. After that, I have the ability to fight the battle any way I wish so long as the enemy does not cross phase line Mars in force. That gives my lean and mean unit a lot of freedom and space to fight over. Thereafter, we have to prevent the enemy from crossing Mars until 0600H. 

This time, I intend to make use of all of the space, and have a more robust combat sustainment plan. This will be inordinately more difficult in single player versus co-op, but the game gives you quite a bit of ability to plan complex movements with a button-click. Triggers, if/or logic, and branching decision paths make planning a complex fight easier. 

Control Mechanisms

I'm putting a significant portion of my force far forward to try and hit the enemy combat recce patrols (CRPs) early before they can identify the engineers. The cavalry patrol will move forward and get stiffened by a troop of Abrams

The enemy is almost certainly going to retaliate with overwhelming artillery support, so rather than have the forward positions be held until a certain time or pre-arranged trigger, I'm allowing troop and section leaders to fall back through to PL Jupiter when they come under accurate indirect fire. I'm putting my own command track and a single recovery vehicle (ARV) forward, both to cover the retrograde movement and tow any vehicles unlucky enough to get damaged in the skirmish. These forward units will need time to reload in safety and will pull back to a hide and only move on order to their subsequent battle positions. I intend to have a supply vehicle from echelon at the hide, just in case they have also bit into their ready-store of munition. 

The newer, and hopefully improved, plan.

At the "do not cross line" for the enemy, phase line Mars, I intend to have a significant amount of units pre arranged in the reverse slope to take up BPs on order. This will be all of my infantry and their anti-tank weaponry, as well as the Company second in command. 

In the original co-op, the infantry fight at the river was probably the one thing that proceeded entirely as planned. They remained coiled up in their PCs as enemy artillery punched air, then took up an effective L-shaped position that mopped up enemy vehicles that managed to squeeze through the minefield. What went somewhat less to plan was leaving them in that position as we all tumbled backwards to hasty BPs. 

Infantry excel at do-or-die defences like that; but I doubt the ability of the slower and ageing M113AS4s to fight a swirling delaying action, or at least to do so at the pace the Abrams dictate. So, this time, they'll cover the forested southern flank of PL Mars where they will excel if any enemy attempt to bypass. This may remove them from the fight entirely if the enemy is stubborn and sticks to the road, but it will also preserve them - and I will need the points awarded for preservation as I am ceding the river line, which will impact scoring. 

Delay at Saturn

We get off to a sorry start when the initial flurry of march orders have a spanner in the works; one of the prepared routes didn't have a condition set through oversight, and that hogs much of my attention to sort out in the initial minutes. Regardless, V11 and 31 reach their rally point and are split into equal sections. It isn't long before they start hitting enemy recce patrols, usually consisting of an armoured car, tank troop and an engineering vehicle or prime mover. 

These initial engagements go without much issue. Patrols are shot up without providing effective return fire on our own positions, and 31 and V11 pull back to their next rally points as an extremely heavy barrage of artillery fire begins to impact their positions. In a few ticks they are pulling through my own position. 

As 31 pulls back, 32 begins to pick up targets and engage from its position at the causeway, with good effect. We're about 30 minutes into the fight at this point and I'm thinking "so far, so good." 

Engagement at Jupiter

Then it starts to fall apart. With 31 and V11 clean away and en route for rearmament and reorganization in their hide, halting the enemy short of the engineers falls upon 32. There's a heavy inbound amount of fire as the enemy begin attempting to fan out into a line (the only time they do so). I bring my command track forward in an attempt to assist 32. The range is extreme and my gunner is wisely reluctant to shoot until the range closes. At this point, I order 32 to begin its retreat about 15 minutes earlier than planned.

This preserves 32 from taking any losses, naturally, but has disastrous consequences for the engineers. I had hoped the hiding we gave the lead enemy company combined with artillery would keep the enemy away. No such luck. The trailing surviving enemies smash the engineers effortlessly. So much for our minefield. The decision to pull back was inspired by the increasing enemy direct and indirect fire, which was beginning to find its mark; I was casualty averse. This should have been the moment to slug it out and accept some losses, however. Instead, and to my regret, I leave the engineers out on a limb and fail a significant secondary objective as a result. 

As we pull back, the advancing enemy begin to hammer basically every piece of key terrain with a "shake and bake" barrage of HE and Smoke. 

For better or worse we've ceded the causeway to the enemy, unmined. A covering 5 minute barrage of ICM is the best stopgap I can do instead. What, if any, effect it has was unknown. 

Situation at H+51

By H+51we have pulled back to our final hides and BPs. Soon, too soon, for my liking. The fiasco like the engineers aside, the company team is in excellent shape. Only one callsign in 32 Troop is reporting that their ballistic computer is down. Some other callsigns need to quickly replace radio aerials - unsurprising, given the heft of indirect fire - but are otherwise ready to go. 

Echelon egressing after a very forward resupply of 32.

Keeping a supply truck forward at 32's hide was an excellent idea, as they were running out of ready and stored ammunition. They have enough of a breather to get some rounds in, and then motor forward to their next BPs. 

Stopping them at Mars

Now to the main event. At this point according to reports, about the equivalent of a company team has been destroyed. The enemy now has to traverse a pretty narrow field of terrain, and with the exception of the attack at the causeway, seem more eager to attack from the march. The trend seemed likely to continue, but nevertheless on the off chance the enemy attempts to traverse the woods on my right flank, I put the cavalry patrol and infanteers there in a reverse slope. 

"India 32", the attached infanteer platoon, establish a hasty BP.

There's less hiccups this time. Perhaps realising I am at the red-line set by my CO (the objective being prepared is only 2 kilometres behind me, now), I show much more a willingness to a stand-up fight. 32, in a forward BP, once again opens up the engagement. The conditioned orders have allowed the AI troop leader to displace to his subsequent BP whenever he takes accurate direct fire. That works like a charm, and after bloodying the enemy for a few minutes unmolested, they pull back with no further losses. 

I also experiment a bit with the trigger-based conditioned orders I had programmed in the planning phase, and discover that you can re-issue them time and again by toggling the orders. This makes pulling back the troops to reload or repair peripheral damage a non-intensive exercise, and gives me time to fight my own tank. 

The final fight at Mars goes well, though my tank takes a hit that briefly disables its stabilization. 31 Troop also has some great difficulty, drawing a lot of indirect fire that tracks a few vehicles. Basically every tank in 31 troop takes some type of significant hit, but the yanks build em tough. Only 31B is destroyed, tracked while jockeying and in too-dangerous an environment to tow away. A second tank is tracked, but is pulled back as the fight dies down by one of the recovery vehicles. 

At 0600 the Battlegroup CO gives us the all clear to fall back; the main defensive position has been prepared and the enemy forward detachment has been rubbished. I'm awarded only a victory, however. 

Debrief

The score is, I am fairly confident, much lower than what we were scored when we played a game of stand and bang in co-op. This is likely due to the loss of the engineers. 

Nevertheless, I'm a lot more satisfied with this outcome. Most of the satisfaction comes with the feeling of having done something new, finally seeing that the triggers and conditioned orders are not nearly as complex as I feared them to be. I'll be using them going forward, quite naturally, for quick and easy selection of decision points and courses of action. The fact I haven't lost a troop of tanks certainly helps. The infantry, as I suspected, played far less prominent a role, but all the Javelin teams are black on ammo and intact, having suffered only 1 casualty. 

Sadly though, it seems that where in the co-op we were too combative, the only take away I have here is that now I wasn't combative enough; pulling back far too early this time from forward deployment. Striking the balance of when to pull back seems to elude me.