VDV Song, updated

Oh, this is just brilliant!

Unboxing videos: District Commander Binh Dinh and Kandahar

Fresh today – Alexander Klein of The Players Aid does an unboxing of District Commander modules Binh Dinh (Vietnam 1969) and Kandahar (Afghanistan 2009).

Just a look in the box, and comments on the components, but if you haven’t had a chance to see the inside of one of these, this is your chance.

I hope he and Grant will enjoy playing these! They did comment on how they found District Commander Maracas rather a challenge.

China’s War: entrevista con El Wargamero Novato

https://elwargameronovato.blogspot.com/2022/03/chinas-war-entrevista-brian-train.html

Recently Josue Garcia Vazquez interviewed me for his blog El Wargamero Novato about China’s War 1937-41. I answered in English, he posted it in Spanish, so hit the Translate button for an approximation of an approximation of what I said.

Not a lot of new information for anyone who’s kept up with other interviews and my current life events, mostly the addition of a 1938 scenario. He also asked me about my other current projects… Brief Border Wars Volume II, O Canada, and Strongman.

Preorders are now up to 1,524.

Will this one be my “jump-the-shark” moment?

Or the next one?

Or was it years ago and I’m still running out into midair like a Warner Bros. cartoon character?

COIN Collectors #9: interview with Jason Carr

The podcast “Dads on a Map” recently posted an episode with Jason Carr, who is the head of development at GMT. Here he talks about the GMT COIN system generally, and particularly the post Pendragon period when he came aboard.

Lots of news on new developments! He’s very enthused about the upcoming releases of Fall of Saigon (the late war expansion to Fire in the Lake) and especially People Power (which he cites as a good introductory game to the system) and Irregular Conflict series games like The Pure Land.

Nothing on China’s War though; I haven’t had a lot of feedback to react to, other than we’re going to have to do some work on the Event Card deck.

https://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/id/22505021/tdest_id/1590551

00:00:53 – Introduction
00:01:54 – Background and Game Development at GMT
00:12:50 – What makes a COIN a COIN?
00:19:05 – Upcoming Releases: Fire in the Lake, Fall of Saigon; People Power.
00:23:48 – Selecting conflicts for COIN games
00:26:51 – Expansions for COIN games
00:29:20 – Best first COIN game
00:37:35 – New mechanisms for COIN games
00:40:57 – 2p COIN games
00:48:10 – The COIN experience and attracting new players
00:50:56 – App integration
01:01:15 – Best fictional COIN setting?
01:03:50 – Final thoughts and Outro

Logistical listicle @ RMN and ACD

Battle Lab ~ Defining “Logistics” for Wargames

At Armchair Dragoons today, Brant Guillory posts about logistics could be shown in wargames but aren’t (but don’t always have to be). I cannot improve on what he has to say here! Freebird!

https://rockymountainnavy.com/2022/03/09/wargame-wednesday-wheres-my-supply

And earlier, over at the Rocky Mountain Navy blog, a good piece on logistics treatment and examples of supply rules in modern-period wargames… the handwavy, the ambitious-but-fundamentally-spineless, and the just-don’t-go-there. Also, would the famous 40 km long traffic jam north of Kyiv happen in a civilian wargame? Answer: no it wouldn’t, because trucks are magic and unit commanders are smart and disciplined. Offhand, the only wargame I can recall that dealt seriously with the amount of road space a unit on the march took up was SPI’s East Front game Lost Battles, from 1971; also, some Bulge games have rules about traffic jams and occasionally someone insists you cannot just drive one division through another division.

Go and have a look at it, it also cites the logistical articles I had pointed out in previous posts that described the supply problems the Russians would run into if they invaded (however, I presented these as arguments against them doing an invasion, but that’s now moot).

But more to the point he illustrated the article with this map which is far more descriptive than the scary massive red and stripey zones and plunging arrows we see on TV and other media. It points out the nature of the mostly empty modern battlefield, the “line and dot” nature of an advance into enemy territory and an evocation of the long logistical tail the advance needs for its sustenance.

Actually, most military campaign maps from almost any period should be drawn like this; they should look like duelling plates of spaghetti.

Urban warfare: 40ID’s new webpage

https://calguard.ca.gov/40id-urban-warfare

The US 40th Infantry Division (headquartered in California but responsible for National Guard units from Nebraska to Guam) is becoming the centre for development of training and doctrine in urban operations. Last summer they ran the first serial of the Urban Warfare Planners course (More on the Urban Warfare Planners Course) and will do it again in July 2022.

This new webpage is a great resource for manuals, case studies, links to other resources, and yes even a page for civilian market wargames on urban combat (District Commander: Maracas gets a look in, and there’s more to come).

Check it out!

How this ends

Mastering my perhaps wiser urge to shut up about recent developments lest I be singed again, I present this link:

https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/03/how-does-this-end-pub-86570

This rather agrees with my current thinking about how this war in Ukraine will stabilize (it will not exactly end).

At this day, at this hour, I think about at least two possibilities:

(1) Russia wins the conventional phase of the war and remains in occupation of the productive, more Russian part of Ukraine: Kyiv and everything east of the Dnipro, maybe more. There will be an extended insurgency that will see escalation on all points: weapons and perhaps advisors flowing in, conscripts flaking out, atrocities against civilians of all types by all agencies, and general misery and bloodshed and wasted efforts. The escalation will not likely reach any kind of decisive conclusion, at least in the short term and Ukraine, free and captive parts alike, remains a perpetual and depopulating economic basket case with no hope of improvement and a frozen conflict.

(2) Russia wins the conventional phase of the war and forces a capitulation from whoever succeeds Zelensky (a brave man but he will always have a price on his head). Ukraine is at least partly occupied or dismembered (Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea but really those parts left Ukraine 7 years ago) and is forced into neutrality but there is little appetite to invade or conquer the country again – “Finlandization”, a word I learned in Poli Sci courses at university but we don’t use that word much anymore for some reason. There is a chance for Ukraine to stabilize and develop, though its politics will always be under intense scrutiny and meddling… just like 2013-14 but with different oligarchs. The gas flows. Some wallets are stuffed. Though the United States looks bad for not holding the moral high ground, we are not talking about nuclear exchanges now.

How likely is the second path? Diplomacy in the US is in a bad way, and has been for at least a generation, maybe two. Even when its talent and experience weren’t being actively gutted it was not doing its job. I doubt it will ever be rebuilt to anything that works, and this is a terrible time to have effectively no options that don’t look or act like spiked clubs.

I still don’t know, and it has only been a week; Poland took six weeks in 1939.

But in all likely cases, the future of the conflict is ugly, prolonged, miserable and not what anyone particularly wanted.

I’d love to be proven wrong on any of that.

Podcast: Armchair Dragoons

https://www.armchairdragoons.com/podcast/mentioned-in-dispatches-season-8-ep-6-looking-back-at-wargames-on-ukraine

Brant Guillory invited me on his regular podcast Mentioned in Dispatches recently.

Together with his regular partner in broadcasting Mike, we talk about games postulating war in Ukraine and how they seem to be largely inapplicable, or got it wrong.

I did Ukrainian Crisis in 2014 of course; and Brant designed Orange Crush, an operational level kinetic combat game about action around Lviv, in 2007.

But we talk about other things too….

Today’s factoid

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky voiced Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian language dub of Paddington and Paddington 2.

Now:

(sorry, don’t know ultimate source of this graphic)

Meanwhile, the best digest of Ukraine war news and analysis I’ve seen so far is the daily campaign assessments put out by the Institute for the Study of War:

https://understandingwar.org/

Beats hours of futile doomscrolling and semi-conscious journalism.

Ukrainian Crisis: tableflip

Why I am not writing a 2022 scenario for Ukrainian Crisis

Well, I admit I was wrong.
After all, I’m not a freakin’ wizard.

I maintain though, that a 2022 scenario for this game would have been out of place anyway, for an overt invasion of Ukraine on this scale and extent is an admission that the other two sub-games have been lost, and in this case perhaps not even seriously played.

In that sense it’s a tableflip, and I still don’t see a point in constructing a scenario for that; find a different game.

And as I have said in the previous post, if somebody wants a war, they will get it… and now there is one, and it will be a disaster for all concerned.

There were many ways to accomplish Russian objectives; this is a poor one, possibly the worst course they could try.

And now that the table has been flipped and the pieces are headed for the floor, at this point I would not even try to guess the ultimate outcome.

One Facebook group I read is “Radio War Nerd”, a follow-on from the very entertaining and insightful War Nerd columns written over the years by “Gary Brecher”. One of the administrators is Mark Ames, who has posted the following today: 

When you’re wrong, you’re wrong.

 

I was wrong about Putin’s strategic intentions, wrong with a good crowd that’s been very useful to me over many years, and continue to be — people like exiled dissident journalists Leonid Bershidsky and Leonid Ragozin, along with a lot of other Russians and gone-native Russia-watchers who got this wrong. We — I — held to assumptions based on watching, reporting, researching, living in & thinking about Russia over the past few decades. (I should say that we all disagree on a lot of stuff, the Leonids for example are far more viscerally anti-Kremlin than I, and more sympathetic to the Maidan revolution, but none of us believed this is the sort of thing that fits Putin’s profile). Anyway, those assumptions no longer work, and I’m not going to pretend I’ve already got it figured out which assumptions will work from here on out.

 

 

This time it’s the very worst ghouls who got it right for once in their sleazy careers, after getting everything wrong without fail since the start of the century. There’s Robert Kagan, Vicky Nuland’s husband, who just published a big piece a couple of days ago in the WaPo about the impending mass invasion. Normally I’d take that as the final proof that Putin was about to do the very opposite of what Kagan predicted—if Kagan predicts invasion, experience says it really means Putin is about to quit the Kremlin to join Code Pink. The Kagan Clan and the Atlantic Council get paid for being wrong, but I suspect they’ll get extra bonuses from their sponsors for getting something right for once (and for helping catalyze the current shitshow by designing Biden’s hawkish Ukraine policy a year ago, which we’ve gone over).

 

God knows I don’t want to absolve Putin in any way here. It’s true that the US and NATO are big partners in this nightmare; they’ve done all they could to provoke a crisis assuming they could slowly creep and bleed it out, and when the Kremlin gave extra- serious signals last year that something big would happen, Biden responded with the same feckless diplomacy and distracted attention that’s characterized his Admin’s zombified domestic political program, whatever’s left of it anyway. I think Putin, who has clearly built up a volcano’s worth of grievances, understood Biden’s feckless inertia as an active fuck you, and Putin was clearly waiting for just that. He wants to bomb big, and Ukraine is the live demonstration board. Putin has all the “agency” imaginable here. He could have chosen a whole range of responses, none of them pretty, but none of them anywhere near as violent and dangerous and widespread as this one. This is what he wants; the US provoked, but it’s Putin, and very much not-metonymy Putin but Putin with his supporters, who is bombing the shit out of Ukraine. My family has good friends in Kiev; one of my wife’s best friends is huddling with her 3 children in their apartment as I’m writing this, too afraid to go out to the nearest bomb shelter, and her ex-husband is too afraid to come help with the children, he’s huddling in his apartment building. Most of my wife’s close friends from Moscow came from Ukraine, so it’s just hard to fathom. Полный пиздец.

The world is going to be a much much worse place for everyone. No lessons will be learned. Or rather, only the worst lessons will be learned, by and for the worst people. US intelligence credibility restored; neocon credibility restored; progressive agendas, such as they were still possible, gone; the GOP is going to pillory Biden and the Dems as weak, as taken advantage of by Putin, turning Russiagate on its ugly head. NATO’s gonna get very extra NATO. Ukraine is fucked. The worse, the worse-er, all around.

 

 

This invasion didn’t come from nothing, but I thought there would be more of something else before this. Mea culpa.