A surprisingly smooth-ish run: I guess 100mm HE is a decent tactical lubricant.

They still got a poor score though...

***

Platoon Patrol 5: Syrian Airborne Mech

Welcome back to Combat Mission Shock Force 2, where we’re putting the Syrian Airborne Mechanised Platoon through its paces. This is another Soviet-style unit, I’ll leave a link to the quick guide to them down below. What makes them unique in Shock Force is their use of the BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicle, which is what you get when someone asks you how much firepower you want your IFV to have and your answer is “yes”.

The platoon does have a choice of RPG-7s or RPG-16s for the dismounts. I went with RPG-16s because they’re unique to the Syrian Airborne and a change from the RPG7s we see all the time, even if it’s probably not the best choice.

To recap the scenario quickly, there is a reinforced squad of very angry, very competent US Marines in one of five possible locations on our map. Our competing platoon’s task is to find and destroy them. I rolled up a two for our randomly determined entry point this time, so our Airborne are starting off on the eastern map edge opposite Objective Bravo.

Opening Moves

This puts us close to the edge of the uncultivated quadrant of the map. The platoon starts off in a little valley, which is nice because the Objective Bravo hill is the dominant terrain feature around here and it overlooks a lot of the surrounding terrain.

It’s the closest objective too so I guess that’s the best place to take a look at first. I can actually do this from inside my set up zone, so the sniper team and one of the squad A-teams spend a couple of terms observing the summit. They don’t spot anything.

They are about 450m away though- that’s a long way to spot someone who doesn’t want to be seen- so I send one of the BMP3s up with the commander sticking out of the hatch to see if anyone decides to have a go at him. The Marines were eager to take some pot shots at this kind of range last time… here, nothing happens.

That means Bravo is probably clear. I could go and physically check, but that would take me into the middle of the map near Charlie where we were with the regular Syrian Mech. So instead, I decide to tackle the objectives in a clockwise direction and head off towards Echo.

This allows me to take advantage of some high ground overlooking that objective. Again… there’s no sign of the enemy. Closing the distance draws no fire, eventually I throw the sniper team across an irrigation ditch to investigate and they reveal that the compound is clear.

Consolidating on Echo, I could head up the Highway towards Charlie, but after the last run I think I’d prefer to take that particular objective from the other side of the stream if possible. I’ve got a pretty good view of Delta from my current position at the Echo crossroads. I can set up a base of fire here with two of the BMP3s and use the third to push some infantry forward for a closer look.

Contact Delta

So 1st and 2nd Squad stay at Echo, while I send 3rd and the sniper team  out left. The most direct route to Delta is along the causeway, but there’s no cover and nowhere for the vehicles to go if they come under fire so 3rd’s BMP goes out wide to the left into the dead ground of the fields.

3rd and the sniper team dismount at the next berm and head up to peek over the top and eyeball Delta.

The sniper team marksman takes a knee, raises his binos out and gets shot in the face. Evidently the Marines are at Delta again.

By the end of that turn, I have two contacts: some kind of team on the roof of building D7 and a confirmed spot in the undergrowth in front of D6. That’s great news. 1st and 2nd’s BMPs immediately start chucking 100m HE shells at Delta, covering 3rd’s dismounts as they scramble back into cover.

That, of course, means I lose the spots, but I’m happy pummelling the general area for a bit while I figure out how I’m going to conduct my attack.

What I really want to do is leverage the firepower on the BMP3s. I don’t have a lot of dismounts, I need them to be mopping up what’s left by their vehicles, not taking the lead on this one. But BMP 3s need to keep their distance and can’t see very well, meaning that they’re going to struggle to spot and engage targets on their own.

What I need to do is get the dismounts forward to a point where the Marines will engage them and reveal their positions, but not get so close that they’ll be able to inflict a lot of casualties. Once the enemy positions are identified I can schwack them at a safe distance with the BMPs.

I don’t fancy pushing my dismounts forward down the ditches on either side of the causeway. The right is not necessarily a bad avenue of approach because my infantry would be screened by the orchard around Delta, but that kind of defies the point here. I want them to get shot at.

So going left looks best. There’s a field next to the river that’s screened by a berm- meaning I have a safe area of dead ground in which I can unload the dismounts and manoeuvre the BMPs. The berm is about 250m from Delta: well within the Marine’s engagement range but probably not close enough for a decisive firefight. While the dismounts draw fire in relative safety, the BMPs can support them from raised ground further back towards the highway where the ranges are longer and they’re less likely to get hit by any AT weapons.

Flanking Left

It takes a few turns to get the infantry into position. I left the remaining man from the sniper team to nab the SVD off his wounded buddy, but he gets shot as well, so the sniper team is out of the picture.

Despite that, the dismounts get out behind the berm opposite Delta and the BMPs move off to take up firing positions on what is now my right. This means leaving the dead ground of the field and going around Farm 4. I originally wanted to send all of the BMPs around the back side of the farm, between the buildings and the river, because that way they wouldn’t be exposed to Delta.

But that whole side of the farm is walled off and in CM the BMPs can’t knock down that kind of obstacle. So I send 1st’s BMP around the back to peek over the shoulder of the farm where it can see Delta, but 2nd and 3rd across the front. 2nd goes past and behind some trees towards another patch of dead ground. The Marines reach out with a SMAW, but it falls short.

3rd’s BMP briefly bogs in the field and gets a little delayed as a result. I’ve got it rushing up onto the berm, then reversing into cover behind the buildings of Farm 4 so that all three BMPs are well spaced out.

This is a terrible idea and I have no idea why I thought it would go well: 3rd’s BMP catches a SMAW while it’s farting about in full view of the Marines. Somehow, the ammo doesn’t cook off, the driver bails but the gunner didn’t make it.

And just like that I’m down to 2 vehicles.

To make matters worse, the dismounts are actually not in a very good position. The berm they’re hiding behind has a deceptively convex shape and they have to get right on top of it, onto the track on top, before they can see over.

This means that when the Marines open fire on them- which they do- they’re out in the open without so much as some grass to make them harder to spot. Luckily it seems all those 100mm HE shells have thinned out the closest Marines and, although there are plenty of M203 grenades coming in, they’re not that accurate.

Within a couple of turns, the spots are flooding in. It looks like the enemy are concentrated down the left edge of Delta where the BMPs can’t get line of sight. So I bring them back in. 1st’s BMP takes up a new position on the far left next to the irrigation ditch where it can pop up and enfilade the offending edge of Delta, while 2nd’s blasts a hole in the wall behind Farm 4 and takes the safe route back to the dismounts.

Closing in

Fortunately so far, the firefight between the dismounts and the Marines has been pretty indecisive.  But it’s not going to stay that way. The Syrians aren’t really accomplishing anything except revealing enemy positions and while that is allowing me to put some high explosive on target with the BMPs, the Marines are slowly dialling in those 40mm grenades.

After taking a few casualties, I decide it’s time to either go all in or go home. Going home would be boring, so I need to close the distance. I don’t think it’s worth slogging through the ditch on my left, which pretty much leaves the classic straight up the middle option.

That’s probably safer than it looks- the field ahead is slightly lower than Delta so there’s some cover, but I can also pop smoke with the BMPs. Thanks to those Soviet style offensive smoke grenades, they can put one smoke screen down halfway across the field from behind the berm, then follow the infantry up and use their second charge to put another on the causeway.

This allows the dismounts to close the distance without getting into trouble. Once they get into the causeway ditches it quickly becomes clear that this side of Delta has had the fight knocked out of it. The last Marine from the original contact outside Building D6 is mopped up by 2nd Squad on the right. The SMAW team in D7 is long gone, as is D7 itself.

Moving in, 3rd squad occupies D6, while the platoon HQ lurks behind them and 2nd goes out wide to open up the angles. They’re engaged by the second SMAW team, which opens up from the roof of D9. This position is screened from the BMPs, which I guess is good because it means they’re not going to get SMAW’d. It does make me a little reluctant to reorient the BMPs to deal with them though because line of sight is obviously a two way street.

The left is looking clear- the Marine HQ team was out past D7 and I know they’ve been neutralised- plus, 1st’s BMP is overlooking that edge of the compound and hasn’t spotted anything. So I decide to send 1st Squad off to occupy D8 and tackle the SMAW team at close range.

With their BMP putting some shells in next to D9 to try and suppress the SMAW team, the platoon leader and his assault team leg it out into open, only to be cut down in the D7 ruins by a couple of Marines hiding in the undergrowth.

That’s a pain- and I rapidly stop the other half of 1st squad- but I can start applying the firepower again. 1st’s BMP lays into the newly revealed enemy position, while I grit my teeth and send 2nd’s vehicle off to the right to keyhole onto D9 and get on with pummelling the SMAW team.

Within a few turns, D9 has collapsed under repeated 100mm shells. 2nd keep going wide and get into D2, where they can get a different line of sight onto the Marine positions on the far side of Delta. But they don’t see any movement. Things have been conspicuously quiet for a little while now.

Sending 1B forward to D8 reveals that the Marines who got the rest of their squad are out of action. With nothing going on, I hit the ceasefire button.

Endex

The Marines are, indeed, all out of action. That makes for 19 casualties inflicted by the Syrian Airborne Mech at the cost of one BMP 3 and 10 men: 1 crewman and 9 dismounts. In percentage terms, that’s 33% of the platoon’s vehicles and 42% of the dismounts in an attack that took 35 minutes.

In terms of points, which are entirely arbitrary remember, they scored 696 out of 1000. That puts them second to last so far, but a clear 100 points ahead of the regular Syrian Mech in BMP1s.

Interestingly, Syrian Airborne Mech have the highest Combat Mission points cost so far. They’re the 6th most expensive of our 17 platoons but they’re almost at the bottom of the pile.

BMP3s

That could be the result of how I’ve handled them. I suspect the Marines got a big chunk of points for neutralising one of the BMP-3s and that was due to what we might politely refer to as an unforced error on my part.

I don’t know why I didn’t blast through the back wall of Farm 4 and just avoid crossing the arc of a SMAW team I knew was there, knew was watching and knew was in range. But the reality is that people will always make bad decisions, the problem is that these Soviet-style three-vehicle platoons don’t have the mass to sustain them.

That said, the BMPs were, without a doubt, the decisive element here. Between them, they accounted for 15 of the 19 Marines, and of those 15, 12 kills were inflicted by 1st Squad’s BMP, probably while it was enfilading the left edge of Delta.

It didn’t feel like it at the time, but all those 100mm HE shells were doing work and by the time the dismounts actually closed with the enemy I think there were only five Marines still in the fight.

They could still get their hits in- as the heroic but misguided platoon leader discovered- but this was very much an exercise in the ‘find-destroy-repeat’ cycle that we saw when the tanks came along for the Cold War company challenges. The BMP-3 is the first of the higher end vehicles we’ve seen in the Platoon Patrol so far, so it’ll be interesting to see if it’s setting the trend for other high-firepower vehicles like the Bradley and CV90.

Before anyone thinks I’m singing the BMP-3’s praises here though, I don’t think they ever actually spotted anything. One of the key giveaways for that is that they only ever used their 100mm guns. The BMP-3s also have a 30mm cannon which they tend to favour when engaging infantry targets. I kind of wish they’d used it a bit here because it would probably have been much more effective, especially in the enfilade, but it worked out.

Dismounts

Obviously with the BMPs doing most of the work here, there’s correspondingly less to say about the dismounts. Their main role was to find targets for the vehicles, which they accomplished because lying around in the open getting shot at is not exactly a high bar.

Of the 9 dismount casualties- two came from the sniper team, which was simply picked off by the Marines, three were lost in the firefight on the berm and three when the platoon HQ was caught in the open. I can’t find number nine, but these are all either incidental losses or mistakes on my part rather than any particular weakness in the platoon TOE.

They were outcompeted by the Marines in the long range, which we would expect because the Marines are better trained and equipped, and they never really got into a proper firefight inside the compound. That’s partially because only one of the three contacts lasted more than a few seconds- the lone mopped up Marine went down instantly and the Airborne platoon HQ got wrecked before it could even fire back; but it’s also because the other contact, the one with the SMAW team, was one I basically declined.

The Marines got a couple of rockets and some small arms fire off at the five remaining men of 2nd Squad while they were out in the open. They missed all their shots and I hastily declined the engagement by legging it into some dead ground. If I had had more men I might have stuck around, but that fits into the flavour of the unit. I didn’t particularly need the dismounts to do anything except find things for the BMP 3 to shoot up.

Firepower centric

The TLDR to all this is that the Syrian Airborne Mech platoon TOE pushed me into a very stand-off approach. That makes sense because I had fragile, firepower heavy vehicles supported by too few dismounts to really sustain casualties, but it has its drawbacks.

It’s essentially an exercise in conditions-setting. We inevitably need to get onto the enemy position to clear it, but to begin with, the enemy force is intact and it’s too risky to close the distance. Staying at long range and applying firepower allows us to degrade the enemy and hopefully neutralise critical assets like antitank teams to the point that it’s safe enough to go forwards.

The problem is that the further away we are- and the safer we are- the harder it is to tell what effect our fire is having on the enemy. There will always be some more enemy troops- whether they’ve survived a bombardment or they’ve remained out of sight and unspotted. In other words, taking this kind of approach we need to make a judgement call without perfect feedback.

If we go too early, the risk factor might not have been decreased enough. That translates into casualties and vehicle losses, neither of which this platoon can sustain in any numbers, whilst potentially committing the unit to very difficult tactical situations with limited options.

If we go too late, we waste time and ammunition and may still have to deal with enemy positions, positions masked from our base of fire, or simply enemy positions that have not been neutralised or suppressed: think the first day of the Somme.

This is all obvious stuff, but in the context of our Platoon Patrol scenario I think the right time to go is going to vary depending on the unit in question and their levels of firepower, protection and mass.

With the Syrian Airborne in this run, we had high firepower, low protection, low mass… leading to that stand-off approach. The Uncons had low firepower, low protection, high mass, meaning it was best for them to close quickly. The Dutch Light Infantry were medium firepower, low protection, higher mass and that panned out into a kind of hybrid approach.

Obviously it’s more complicated than this, but this kind of firepower, protection, mass triad might be an interesting lens we can use to think about how different units conduct their platoon attacks.

Conclusion

Speaking of different units, we’ve gone all the way through our four groups now and that means we’re back round to Group One, which has three options left: Syrian Republican Guard in BMP2s, British Armoured Infantry in Warriors and German Gebirgsjaeger in Fuchs APCs. So a spread of capabilities there. I’ll leave a link to the poll for which of those you guys want to see next down below.

Have to say the Syrian Airborne probably did about as well as I was expecting. I’m a little disappointed that they lost a BMP-3 and it didn’t detonate, but you can’t have everything I suppose. If you’d like to see these videos early and support the channel you can do so via Patreon and Youtube memberships. Whether you do or not thanks for watching and I’ll catch you in the next one.