Well, that was a pretty chonky heavy script to have a go at after a week off. I'm not sure it's as cohesive or succinct as I would like, but I think it covers some interesting ground.

**

Platoon Patrol Round-Up

Welcome back to Combat Mission Shock Force 2 for the wrap-up of the Platoon Patrol. We’ve put 17 different platoons through our scenario. All of them successfully completed their objective- which was to find and destroy a reinforced US Marine squad- and they all got a score out of 1000.

The completed scoreboard probably doesn’t have any surprises on it if you’re familiar with Combat Mission Shock Force and the mechanics of modern warfare. Modern warfare is all about the effective application of firepower, so breaking down what made the firepower of some platoon TOEs more effective than others should give us some useful insight.

In short, this means we’re going to be looking at the size and organisation of our 17 platoons, the characteristics of their weapon systems and their ability to spot and engage targets.

Caveats

First though, we’ve got to lay out some caveats.

It’s a Game

Combat Mission is obviously a game and while it’s definitely at the more realistic end of the spectrum, it’s still fundamentally restricted by how the game engine handles the inputs it’s been given. There are things the game does not model and there are things the game may or may not be modelling accurately.

And that’s fine. That’s part of the tradeoff of being able to run tests like this without actually having 17 mech or motorised platoons, some Marines and several square kilometres worth of training area to play in. But it does mean that any conclusions we draw from all this can only go so deep.

Limitations to Results

On top of that, the actual scenario has its limits. The scoreboard I’m going to be using here is relying on a single playthrough by each platoon, which may be skewed or tainted by uncontrollable factors.

Several platoons lost vehicles in their runs, for example. This took a chunk out of their score and probably knocked them a few places down the scoreboard. But a lot of factors have to come together for the Marine Opfor to take out a vehicle, factors which simply may not have aligned in more successful runs and may not align again if the unsuccessful runs got another go.

So the positions on the leaderboard are more useful for determining general trends than specifics.

The Scores Themselves

Next, we need to consider the fact that the scores themselves only measure a very narrow metric. Each platoon got one thousand points for securing the objective area, which they all managed, and the Marine Opfor had 1000 points available for inflicting casualties. So the final result was 1000 points minus the value of any losses.

Actually working out how many points each casualty cost a platoon is not entirely straightforward because of the different ways that infantry, vehicles and crewmen are assigned value by the game, but they are all coming out of the same 1000 pot of potential points for the Marines.

That means that each platoon’s score is basically its remaining combat power at the end of the scenario, as determined by Combat Mission. Smaller platoons lose disproportionately more points per casualty, so their score is more vulnerable to the skew of their one run through the scenario.

The Context

Finally for caveats, we have the context. Our scenario involved each platoon operating independently… which it may or may not have been designed to do. Platoons are not armed, equipped and organised in a vacuum, they’re intended to operate as part of a larger machine. And that larger machine may compensate for platoon level capability gaps or shortcomings through other subunits, attachments, supporting assets and what have you that did not feature in this series.

Even TOEs that do have a lot of combat power shunted down to platoon level are unlikely to operate unsupported, and in many cases launching the kind of unsupported platoon attack mandated by our scenario would be a poor tactical decision.

So to some degree, the scenario itself and the whole concept of comparing different platoon TOEs is straight up unrealistic.

TLDR for Caveats

The TLDR to all these caveats is that we’re dealing with very general conclusions here. It’s not exactly a solid data set, but it is still a data set we can draw some trends and broad concepts out of. You may or may not agree with them, in which case let everybody know in the comments.

Platoon Size and Organisation

With that out of the way, the first thing we’re going to look at is the size and organisation of the platoons. Obviously there is a lot of variety here, but in the broad strokes all the units fall into two camps: NATO type platoons and the Soviet type platoons used by the Syrians.

I inadvertently built this distinction in when I did the graphics for the scoreboard: all the NATO platoons are blue, all the Syrian platoons are red and we have a pretty obvious trend. All the Syrian platoons bar one- the Republican Guard in BMP-2s- are at the bottom. And they not only have lower scores than the NATO platoons, there’s a good hundred point gap between British Mech in FV432 Bulldogs at 810 points and Syrian Airborne Mech in BMP-3s at 696.

Soft Factor Diversion

Poor performing Syrians is kind of a feature of Combat Mission Shock Force. But that’s usually because they come with bad soft factors. They’re generally conscript or green level experience with poor leadership values and are frequently low on ammunition and/or physically unfit. That’s compared to NATO platoons that are the opposite: they’re typically much better trained and experienced with good leadership, all their ammo and a good level of fitness.

But these soft-factors aren’t a feature in the platoon patrol scenario. I specifically gave each platoon the same soft-factors so they wouldn’t influence the results: they’re all regular experience with no modifiers. So all the pixeltruppen in all the platoons are the same.

There is a persistent myth that Combat Mission has faction biases built in: in this case, that NATO troops are automatically superior to Syrian troops. That’s just not true. The basic pixeltruppen all follow the same rules.

TOE

The differences come in when the pixeltruppen are armed, equipped and organised according to nation-specific Tables of Organisation and Equipment.

And a key difference between NATO and Syrian platoons is that NATO platoons are bigger.

Syrian platoons follow Soviet-style TOE, which is very triangular at platoon level. BTR and BMP motor rifle platoons have three squads in three vehicles. (We can ignore the Uncon platoon analogue here because I made it up and it has no basis in reality).

NATO platoons generally have 3 or 4 squads of dismounts, plus a separate platoon HQ and sometimes some other organic attachments, and these usually travel in four vehicles.

If we take the highest and lowest scores, we have a Bradley platoon with a total of 43 dismounts and crew in four vehicles compared to a BMP-1P platoon with 28 men in three vehicles. The Bradley platoon is just bigger.

Size and Firepower

In very crude terms, more men and more vehicles mean more weapons and more weapons means more firepower.

Obviously, if we took that BMP-1P platoon and bumped it up to a NATO style platoon TOE by adding another squad and another vehicle, it would have more firepower and would probably get a better score.

But it would also probably get a better score because it would be more casualty resistant. If we assume that more firepower means fewer casualties- because the enemy is suppressed or destroyed faster- then bigger platoons with more firepower retain that firepower longer. In theory, they suffer fewer casualties to begin with and each individual casualty represents a smaller overall loss of firepower.

Smaller platoons are doomed to go in the opposite direction. They have less firepower, so it’s harder to suppress and destroy the enemy, so they take more casualties and each casualty represents a greater loss of firepower.

Firepower Watershed

This brings up the idea of a kind of watershed. That there is a level of firepower- however that’s even defined- relative to the Marine opfor at which platoons hit a slippery slope and accelerate towards the bottom of the scoreboard. That would go a long way to explaining why there is a big gap between the NATO block and the Syrian block.

Weapon Characteristics

The size and organisation of platoons is a pretty basic metric though. If nothing else, the Republican Guard in BMP-2s bucked the trend for Soviet style triangular platoons to do badly. The BMP-2s came sixth overall and beat most of the NATO platoons, despite being smaller. That might be an outlier- it’s just one result- but it indicates that other factors are at play.

That brings us to a more granular look at the kinds of weapons used. Obviously not all weapons are created equally, some are capable of generating more effective firepower than others due to varying rates of fire, range, accuracy, area of effect and anything else you might think of.

That’s a lot of things to consider, so I’ve decided to focus in on principal vehicle weapons.

I’m concentrating on the vehicles because the dismounts have a much wider variety of weapons and its prohibitively time consuming trying to differentiate different types of small arms fire; and because the vehicles generally favour one weapon type over others.

Weapon Types

That gives us four broad categories: automatic cannon in green; single shot, larger calibre cannon in purple; HMGs and GMGs in dark yellow and finally GPMGs in pale yellow.

The automatic cannon are chambered between 20 and 35mm and fire high explosive ammunition. There are only two single shot larger calibre cannon: the 100mm gun on the BMP-3 and the 73mm gun on the BMP-1P. These are really very different weapons, but they’re both similar enough when compared to everything else to get lumped together.

The HMGs are all between 12.7 and 14.5mm, which is too small to carry a meaningful amount of explosive filler. There are two types of GMG, both of which fire 40mm HE grenades, but they tend to come in a mix with the HMGs and, as modelled in CM, are considerably less accurate that any of the other weapons. The GPMGs are something of a subcategory to the HMGs: they’re only the principal weapons for the Nyalas and the Fuchs, both firing 7.62 NATO, but they are widely present as coaxial machineguns for other vehicles types as well, which muddies the water a little.

Weapons Hierarchy

The resulting scoreboard is broken up into some reasonably clear groups. We have automatic cannon at the top, above a block of HMG-GMG with the GPMGs mixed in higher than the single shot cannon.

And that tracks. The autocannon armed platoons not only got better results, but they had smoother, easier runs. The one flyer in that group is the YPR-765s, which lost a chunk of points because one of their vehicles was knocked out, not because their 20mm cannons let them down.

Something I talked about a few times after cannon-armed platoon runs was the fact that cannon-armed vehicles were able to neutralise enemy teams on their own. That meant that the dismounts were at less risk, took fewer casualties and ended up with better scores.

Conversely, the HMG-GMG-GPMG crowd were less capable of actually destroying enemy teams behind cover or in dense terrain. They could and did suppress them, which meant the dismounts could close with those enemy teams and finish them off, but that’s an extra step in the process compared to the cannon armed platoons.

And it’s an extra step that involves the dismounts moving forward, getting stuck in and exposing themselves to a greater chance of becoming casualties. In almost every run, most of the infantry casualties took place in the first minute of contact at close range.

Overmatch Dynamics

This introduces the very important dynamic of overmatch. Infantry small arms effectively have mutual range envelopes. The scenario takes place in 2008, the standard infantry weapon is an assault rifle with a nominal effective range of 300m. Realistically though, small arms get logarithmically more effective the shorter the range: the limiting factor is the human shooter and their ability to spot and accurately engage, not the ability of the weapon to get rounds on target.

So infantry-on-infantry combat is about getting up close, into the kinds of ranges where personal weapons are effective on both sides. Success comes down to limiting the ability of the enemy to return fire, whether that’s by suppressing them or exploiting the terrain.

But these methods are fundamentally imperfect. Time and again what we saw in the infantry assault phases of the Platoon Patrol was that the Marine Opfor could take advantage of dense terrain to cause casualties at short range. They might not survive the ensuing firefight, but they could get their hits in.

Cannon armed IFVs do not have this problem. Yes, they are vulnerable to infantry-carried anti-tank weapons, but they also outrange these significantly. There’s a reason why my favoured process for all the Platoon Patrol runs was to find the Marine SMAW teams, take them out and then mop up the rifle teams.

Once the longer range AT threats were removed, the IFVs could operate with impunity. They were able to overmatch the Marine opfor and destroy them at arms-length without putting themselves at risk. Sure, the dismounts still had to go in and they were vulnerable to casualties as they did so, but by that point the enemy had usually been so degraded they couldn’t put up much resistance and the IFVs were on hand to delete contacts as they appeared.

It’s worth noting that context is important here. You generally don’t get major antitank weapon systems at platoon level, so this kind of IFV overmatch was embedded in the scenario. That could have been avoided if I had given the Marines a Javelin team, as some people suggested in the comments, and the reason why is that the overmatch would then go the other way.

The Javelin team could feasibly delete vehicles from any of the platoons at any distance, providing they got 30 seconds or so of line of sight. That wouldn’t have made for a series that was more Javelin marketing tool than platoon TOE exploration, but it goes to show that there is an element of competing layers of overmatch. Nobody is coming to the battlefield looking for a fair fight, everyone wants that overmatch where they can destroy the enemy at minimal risk.

And in the context of the Platoon Patrol, automatic cannon fulfilled that role for platoons mounted in NATO IFVs. Platoons that had a lesser degree of overmatch and were limited to suppressing enemy teams with their vehicle mounted weaponry rather than destroying them, had a harder time.

Sensors- ie. Thermals

So at the top of the scoreboard we have bigger platoons with overmatch relative to the Marine opfor. But obviously it’s not much good having lots of fancy weapons if you can’t actually spot and engage the enemy.

So another part of the puzzle is sensor effectiveness.

Sensors and spotting ability are something of a black box in Combat Mission. It’s not clear how spotting works and there’s so much variability and randomness it’s hard to investigate. But it is easy to test which units have thermal imagers and which ones don’t. So another way we can break the scoreboard down is to differentiate between platoons with thermals and platoons without.

That’s what we’ve got here: the platoons in black have thermal imagers, the platoons in white do not. And again… there’s a pretty obvious trend. Platoons with thermals are clustered towards the top. Platoons without are clustered towards the bottom.

It’s also worth noting that the top four platoons all had three man crews for their vehicles: the Bradleys, CV90s, Warriors and Marders all had a dedicated commander position. That wasn’t the case for all the platoons and although some vehicles did have commander positions, they were frequently filled by one of the passengers, who vacated it when the dismounts got out.

By means of comparison, the three Syrian platoons at the bottom in BMP-3s, BTR-60PBs and BMP-1Ps all lacked dedicated commanders. In fact, the BTR and BMP-1s only have room in the turret for a gunner: the commander position is in the hull with a considerably worse, fixed field of view.

It is difficult to get really deep into the details here because all 17 platoons used different vehicles, but thermal imagers and crew commanders seem like good performance indicators. There is a difference between having firepower and being able to use it effectively: it makes sense that platoons with better sensors outperformed platoons with poorer sensors.

The Triad

So, one takeaway from the Platoon Patrol results is that we have a trio of elements to look for when we assess platoon TOEs. Like I said at the start, modern warfare is all about the effective application of firepower.

If we look at the top five platoons on the scoreboard, they are all large, NATO style platoons with four vehicles: so they have more firepower because they have more mass. They all feature vehicles principally armed with automatic cannon, which were able to overmatch the Marine opfor and minimise the risk to the platoon. And they all had strong spotting ability, courtesy of thermal imagers and, in all but the fifth case, two man turret crews.

This is not an absolute recipe for success. The Dutch Mechanised in YPR-765s ticked all those boxes but came 10th out of 17, while the Syrian Republican Guard in BMP-2s came 6th and despite lacking a fourth vehicle, any thermals or a commander.

Clearly, organisation, equipment and weapons can only get you so far. Terrain and tactics are the other part of the puzzle, at least from a Combat Mission perspective. But they are unique factors for every engagement and it’s difficult to nail them down. So I think it’s fair to say that the better the starting position offered by platoon TOE, the less heavy lifting tactics and terrain have to do and the fewer supporting assets platoons need to get the job done. Mass, overmatch and sensors should be good predictors for platoon performance.

Conclusion

So, that was a quick overview of the results of the Platoon Patrol series. Your mileage may vary: I know there isn’t really anything ground-breaking here, but it’s nice to revisit the basics every now and again.

There are a couple more things I think would be interesting to do with the Platoon Patrol. I definitely want to play it against a human opponent and fight the scenario from the Marine Opfor side. At one point I was toying with the idea of a PVP tournament pitting the platoons against each other, but that might be a bit over-ambitious. I think it’s a good format, it could also be very interesting to shift into some of the other titles and tackle other time periods, though obviously there would have to be some changes. That won’t happen for a while though: this series has lasted seven months so it’s time to get away from the sandbox for a bit.

In any case, I hope you all enjoyed the Platoon Patrol as much as I did. If you guys have any suggestions or improvements, make sure to let me know down below. In other news, we are fast approaching the annual Winter Turn-by-Turn, so stand-by for another Adopt-a-Pixeltruppen drive in the near future.

Until then, thanks for watching. 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.