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Feel free to click on this satellite image and look at the bigger version. Do you recognise something odd, something out of place?
I can spot military training grounds in Germany easily on such satellite imagery because it's always the most atypical terrain, with the fewest features. In this case the left green woodland + couple roads + yellow meadows is such a training ground, about 1.5 by 1.5 km large. The fields have identical colours unlike agricultural fields with their crop rotation. There's always woodland and practically never anything resembling a village or at least some remote farm houses.
Generations of German army troops (and allied troops stationed in Germany) have been conditioned to think of this kind of terrain being the terrain in which the army has to function. Talk about operations in urban terrain are just that - talk.
One of the consequences is that the idea of a headquarter (brigade, division, corps level) in modern NATO is a very weird idea. Military history shows that hotels and large upper class mansions were the most typical headquarter locations in actual war. The German army had to be a bit less predictable on the Eastern Front for a shortage of such buildings and because some of the only such buildings were mined with huge basement explosives and days-long mechanical fuses by the Soviets. Still, according to military history a headquarter in shape of a couple tents has been most uncommon between the early Imperial Roman army and 1980's NATO. Container-tent hybrid HQ (and field hospital) complexes are a fairly new invention.
Now if the Russo-Ukrainian War has shown anything, it is that (as with the German army of 1944/45) hiding is of utmost importance. A dectected munitions dump at 30 km 'depth' is a gone munitions dump. An identified HQ is a shelled HQ (and a couple news reports about yet another general dead). A container-tent complex is guaranteed to be such a mess. I just picked this brochure up:
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| My scanner produced a moiré pattern as if it was 25 years old. It's more like 10 years old. |
I don't blame the company for devising such a thing. They develop to satisfy demand. The demand is stupid, the idea of and thus requirements for HQ/CP equipment are bollocks IMO.
The ideal HQ/CP equipment brigade and/to corps is in my opinion a bunch of cases and folding furniture that can be moved by stairs-capable sack barrows into a building. The process would be as follows
- a MP patrol (MP acting as HQ security anyway) finds a suitable shop or school building or storehouse 500 square meters or bigger
- radio emitters are set up 1...2 km away and connected by fibre optic to the site
- diesel power generators are set up inside buildings with flexible tubes for air intake and exhaust
- HQ (small) unit arrives, unloads stuff, pushes away previously existing stuff that would be in the way
- LED lights installed and connected to power
- furniture unfolded
- electronics connected to power cables
- most data communication by bluetooth, reduced by some cables
- local radio receivers installed (passive, thus no need for spacing)
- the driver crews relocate all motor vehicles by least 2 km and hide
- HQ is ready for the job
No containers, no tents. You could not possibly have such an idea of a headquarter if you stick to an exercise experience of "woodland and meadows, no buildings", of course.
For a completely different take see this:
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The enemy can spot buildings you might consider suitable and thus acquire a list of potential targets. Would it be possible to build underground structures like the Vietcong instead?
ReplyDeleteThe leading of the formations would mostly happen from 'up front', leaving mostly stuff like data processing and planning to staffs (HQs). This allows for them to be quite far in the back, and there will be many suitable buildings at up to 50 km (corps 150 km) depth even in rural areas.
DeleteFurthermore, think of the range of buildings that become acceptable by using stairs-capable sack barrows! Just about every building that provides decent weather protection (no barns in wintertime) is acceptable, train tunnels are acceptable, underground parking garages are acceptable.
Military staff tents from XVII century
ReplyDeletehttps://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/in-the-tent-of-the-grand-vizier-kara-mustafa-during-the-news-photo/82094344
http://www.stambouline.info/2014/02/one-canopy-two-empires.html
On the thirteenth of September 1683, Jan III Sobieski, King of Poland, sat in the tent of the recently vanquished Ottoman Grand Vizier outside the city of Vienna, writing a letter to his wife to tell her of his victory in battle. He marveled at the scale and magnificence of the tents in the Ottoman camp, describing them being “‘as large as Warsaw or Lviv within the walls’” (Atasoy 240-41, Żygulski 165). [i.e., Figure 1] By Sobieski’s count, many tents were seized in the aftermath of the battle for Vienna—perhaps as many as a hundred thousand—although this estimate is most likely generous. Subsequently, the spoils of war, chief among them the magnificent seventeenth-century Ottoman imperial tents, were dispersed among the allied victors, in particular Poland, Germany, and Austria.
Field headquartering mitigate today's development of on-demand (call a taxicab) type of mission oriented combat system. Logistics determine who pick up a combat call. Traditional combat HQ'ing is a thing of the past. Management of logistics is the new key getting the right arms to the right locations in time. That's where "HQ'ing" might have a future.
ReplyDeleteStaffs are needed to coordinate things in some details. Things such as which battalion gets to use which road when in what direction, and air defences + MP traffic control are prepared. Coordination of HF frequency use and passwords for radio nets. Assembling intel to a picture and disseminating intel. Reporting the material and personnel situation. Requesting and organising supply.
DeleteThis has basically all already been done by staffs in WW2, in parallel to mission command.
To make this interdisciplinary in a HQ instead of having specialised staffs scattered not talking much to each other seems sensible. You just need to get it and the division of labour between staffs and manoeuvre&combat command right.