This thread back up yet? Okay cool!
Lessons Learned: Combat Support
From a lecture given by Colonel, Emeritus John Simmons
NAIS October 11, 3099
The Third Succession war saw a decline not just in the technology of destruction, but in the scope and complexity of warfare as well. The raid, as often to destroy as to seize materiel; was the rule, rather than the exception and the depth and complexity of military thought and theory suffered as a result.
Doubtless; the phenomena of LosTech played a part in this, but only as a contributing factor. Ultimately, it was the imposed condition of the human mind and the general intellectual malaise which dominated almost completely during this time period which did the most to ****** recovery and even effort in all spheres of human endeavour. It was an age of the reduction of the possible, past the absurd to just spitting distance from what was now.
Hard as it is for those of us who have lived through at least part of the Jihad, into the era of the Republic to imagine, but even imagination itself seemed to be under attack in those days. In stark contrast to the limitless possibilities for individual and cultural achievement we live in now; the 3rd Succession War was a time when reality, what had been; was a prison where what would be dwelled in darkness and saw few visitors.
The fall of technic civilization to an feudal average approximating the mid-late 20th century contributed to this, but as later events and those driving them would demonstrate; it was a prison of our own making.
But one would hardly expect such an order of things to affect the lowly military cargo truck.
Yet, history shows us that this is just what happened.
A decline in the basic equipment of the arm of service upon which an army depends on for life?
Ah; no. Not so much the equipment, but rather; a decline in not just *the* arm of service to which the Ancient Terran Leader Winston Churchill referred to when he said; "Victory is the beautiful, bright-coloured flower; transport is the stem, without which it could never have blossomed." But in fact a general decline in *all* other arms of service not directly involved in the kinetic action of war from the later 29th to the early 31st centuries.
“Madness!” You say? Oh, not hardly.
Nor; really, necessity… But expedience? Certainly. Sloth? Sometimes. But most often a bland and pragmatic species of hopelessness.
During this time period, the Great Powers were still using the old Star League Templates as a base for their own organizations, at least on paper. In theory, a Regiment of any type could count on at least a company of between 12-20 trucks in it’s support battalion. But in practice, these were normally locally purchased models and the entire support battalion (or company), was in fact rarely taken on campaign and instead left behind, most often with the rest of the unit’s “Camp Followers”.
This last was due to a variety of factors, but related principally to the mercurial natural of military operations of this era (the predominance of the Raid) and the dearth of available spare transportation capacity to move these assets. A Lucky Regiment would have enough DropShips and JumpShips available, if not assigned to it; to make strategic movement of the combat assets between the stars possible, but almost none had the “Extra” Capacity to move the support assets.
As these rarely moved strategically by dint of tradition and necessity and were often composed of locally-purchased and manufactured equipment, they were most often traded between units as artefacts of the duty station and to ease logistical burdens on interstellar transport.
But ironically, such situations provide little opportunity or need to employ such assets. So as budgets grew tighter and the difficulty and cost of supporting more rarefied and apparently valuable assets, such as BattleMechs grew and grew, it became ever easier to justify the decision to allow even ostensibly useful equipment like bridge layers and recovery vehicles to rust out and then go without replacement.
At first this seems grossly illogical. Would not the smash and grab warfare of the Succession Wars in fact be the perfect environment for the full array of combat support equipment?
Trucks to haul off the booty? Bridge Layers to span natural obstacles? Engineering vehicles to breach the man-made barriers to a raiding forces’ progress and the recovery vehicles and prime movers to make off with the spoils of the battlefield?
First of all; that thinking is too logical! Think emotionally! What feels good; not what’s smart! And those are all cumbersome, slow-moving assets taking up valuable DropShip bays and docking collars that could be better applied hauling mechs. Remember; most raids were conducted mainly with mech forces, mainly supported, when any support at all was on offer, by infantry and AeroFighters.
Consider also the historical trend to double-down on available DropShips and embrace the “gentleman’s agreement” that was the revivification of the Ares Conventions with it’s partial prohibition on engaging space-faring vessels; like DropShips.
In their mental fugue and emotional fever; leaders of the day saw the DropShip not just as a vital link in their campaigns of interstellar Viking, but also a supply dump, barracks, means of operational movement and the provider of repair, planning, command and medical facilities.
Haul away the objective of the raid? Recovery of battlefield salvage? Move the DropShip there. Or drag it off with a mech’s hand actuator. Obstacles? Move the unit or conduct a hot-drop; so long as the drop-chutes work.
Those of you familiar with the specifications of the DropShips handed down to the modern day from the Star League-Era can already see the natural problem; most Combat DropShips have precious little cargo space to share out for even short-term supplies.
This is the case for several reasons;
-The designers of these now venerable vessels figured on fleets of Warships to support their armies and haul the vast multitudes of supplies needed for long-term campaigning (not short-term raiding, mind you). And if you have ever seen the specs on *those* great behemoths, you know that even unto the modern day’s near contemporary designs you find a vast outlay of internal volume and raw hauling capacity given over to bulk cargo.
-The originators of such models as the Union and Overlord had no shortage of available hulls and drop-collars to devote to carrying dedicated cargo freighters between the stars. As such, there was no perceived need to clutter an already busy design with additional facilities for consumables and follow-on support units to keep up and boost the very combat units they were already transporting.
-These designs were intended to support a form of mass, conventional warfare and even total warfare, but not generalized raiding along fronts many hundreds of lightyears long and many dozens deep.
So how did commanders of the 3rd Succession War get around these handicaps?
They cheated.
A lot. Like pirates.
Or, rather; the tactics we see used by pirates in the modern day and more recent history were actually standard procedures common to armies of 3rd succession wars carried over to the later age of mech piracy by deserting successor state officers like Helmar Valasek.
In essence; while a DropShip might easily be overloaded and operate with a reduced degree of safety, additional cargo capacity could be wheedled out of the ship in question in several different ways.
But before discussing them, a brief diversion into logistics in general and of DropShip logistics, in particular is necessary.
First of all; in any cargo carrying undertaking, presuming any kind of limited space; from the massive bays of a Leviathan Heavy Transport to the back of a Bulldog utility truck, one will tend to “Cube-Out”, before one “Weights-Out”. What this means in plain star-league English is that most supplies take up more space than weight and as such while a given cargo bay might represent a carrying capacity of any given size, it’s volume is usually not equal, in most instances to that required to meet the weight rating before the entire space is filled to capacity.
Two exceptions are spare parts and ammunition; both of which are usually very heavy. Another is military combat vehicles; also known for their high mass to size ratio.
Another little-known fact is that outside of say…the platonic Hogarthian ideal of a Lyran Mech Regiment, most DropShips overall operate at below or even well below their maximum carrying capacity at almost all times, even when their bays are “Full”. It should be noted that another exception to this rule is the stellar mining industry.
But, as every logistician knows and most every veteran of the 3rd Succession War knew as well; there is “Full” and then there is full.
If you can find the physical space; you can find spare mass to make up.
Yet another little-known datum, exclusively for the sheer paucity of interest in it’s collection and distribution is that pirate vessels suffer accidents related to over-stuffed internal spaces at a rate over 230% higher than any other space-faring group found today, but at a rate just a little worse than the ramshackle “gypsy-packed” mech haulers of the 2900s. You stack crates of ammunition and space heatsinks, secured in between pressure doors and loose in the passageways of vessels which occasionally operate in zero-G and you see what happens, hm?
But where to find enough spare capacity to ensure takeoff?
The most obvious place is the unused tonnage capacity of a vehicle bay. These commonly range in size from 50-200 tons depending on type, but simply consider that if you have a 20-ton Wasp in the same space that can just as easily hold a 100-ton King Crab, then you have 80 tons of spare capacity which could be used elsewhere. Thankfully you have some space to spare as well, which is harder to come by. Looking at a DropShip technical readout, the specs of a given bay are given as if it was full, not empty. An empty mech bay weighs 50 tons, not 100. Vehicle and Smallcraft bays are lighter because they require less additional infrastructure beyond that which is already found in or easily incorporated into the bulkheads and spaceframe of the ship itself.
Much less obvious is the wiggle room gleaned from the fuel spent in getting a DropShip to a world; you’re lighter after landing, which means that if you can find the physical volume, you can carry more of what you cart away off-world. This is how technically a Behemoth DropShip could indeed takeoff and land in an atmosphere; simply by burning fuel until it was light enough to improve the trust/weight ratio. They do have landing legs after all; but they lack sufficiently muscular attitude thrusters and sufficient structure integrity to make this safe and practical enough to attempt.
Other techniques included sacrificing food storage, escape pods, “superfluous” crew berths and even counting on one’s own casualties to make room for the loot.
The volume was harder to get to, but it was there.
If you don’t care about using the facilities of a fully-functional MechBay (if you even have one), then you can pack more than one mech into a bay and even if you go over the weight limit of one bay; you should still be fine, so long as the floor can take it (but sometimes it can’t; see above) or you can make up the extra tons from another partly-utilized bay.
You can block drop chutes and cargo ramps too, though this is riskier; you can even put things in the transitional spaces; the abbreviated passageways between the various bays and elsewhere on the ship.
So, we have the weight and we have the space; we know how the soldiers of old and pirates to the modern day use them. A few extra mechs jammed in here and there; supplies dumped from battlefists to be piled wherever was convenient.
So why not trucks? Why not engineering vehicles?
Because the kind of warfare then in vouge didn’t call for those things. They might have helped, but you could make do without, because chances are you weren’t coming there to stay or even fight a lengthy campaign.
True; a mercenary unit travelling from contract to contract might or might not tuck some jeeps in a heavy vehicle bay with a Manticore in it; so long as neither seem likely to be needed in a hurry. But they might just as well do as a house unit would do; sell, abandon, trade-off or make a gift of whatever company hacks they have on hand and buy or even lease what they need when they get where they’re going.
A higher-class outfit could well tuck a command vehicle or a coolant truck in somewhere, but mostly it didn’t matter, because even an elite unit might not have one.
Unless it was a capability especially valuable or rare, most commands could do without or “Make do” as many even do today by substituting BattleMech hands, even rudimentary “battlefists” and claws for cranes and cargo trucks. In the Succession wars, it was often `Grab and go! ` Warfare.
So, what changed?
War changed.
People will tell you war never changes. And they are right; war is like water in that it takes many forms, accepts many additives, but it is always H2O. But if you fell onto the surface of a frozen lake or a liquid one, you would surely feel the difference.
So, it was with the 4th Succession war.
Love him or hate him, even his critics acknowledge Hanse Davion as a visionary.
In his own imagination; inspired by his tutors, his own studies and fueled by a mind unshackled by convention; Hanse Davion saw within the circumstances of his day the potential for change through violent action.
But for change to come to the Inner Sphere, change needed to come to the wars that plagued it.
Hanse looked at the great campaigns of history and decided that if men of previous eras had been able to manage such grand schemes with only the tools of their antiquarian ages, then he could do so with the tools available to him. He saw that no matter what man had lost in the last 300 years, it was still in a better position technologically and in many other ways than had been Alexander and even Eisenhower of millenniums past.
Secretly rediscovered “Black Box” technology played a part in this; overcoming the crippling effects of the inevitable ComStar Embargo that any major upset to the status quo would bring.
But a greater effort in terms of training, organizing and equipping a vast military force was the return of large-scale maneuver warfare (to include deep strategic penetration and occupation; thus, the label of “Deep Warfare”) to House Davion’s armies. This included training soldiers and officers to fight and organize in new ways, but it also included using support assets in ways not seen in hundreds of years.
You just couldn’t run your supply dump out the back of a grounded mech carried stuffed to the gills with ammunition and irreplaceable spare parts. You needed more space; so, you needed a dedicated cargo DropShip, even if that meant knitting another JumpShip (usually by borrowing one from another unit, sometimes from across the breadth of the Federated Suns. And the pressures of the campaign wouldn’t allow it to just hang around either; supplies had to be dropped off; corralled in a semi-fixed locality and then trucked or flown where on a planet they were needed, while the DropShip went back for more; sometimes back several jumps.
Lost Mechs could not be left behind as the lines of battle advanced; if disabled they needed to be recovered and repaired pronto. There where not two other mechs available to drag one wreck back to the DropShip for transport to a fixed mech repair facility; it had to be done then and there in an austere, often hostile environment. That meant recovery vehicles and fitter’s rigs.
Even a unit’s organic DropShips couldn’t be depended upon to solve all problems; with an empire on the ropes, the AFFS expected DropShips to become priority targets, even for tactical nuclear weapons; anything might be on the table to halt the Davion advance. Obstacles would have to be breached and crossed; that meant bridge layers and armoured engineering vehicles.
All these facilities and more would have to built, rebuilt, captured, held and repaired. That meant military construction equipment, security vehicles, supplies, military police, trained sappers and the trucks to move them.
And all of this had to be moved by DropShip and JumpShip.
Davion had the overall capacity, barely, but not enough to do it simultaneously to the same extent on both fronts and not without stripping the other Marches and certainly not without significant coordination and cooperation.
Thus, the Galahad exercises and those leading up to them were vital on a level undreamt of by those who witnessed them from afar. The war also put a strain on House Davion’s manufacturing capacity that it would not feel the likes of again until the Clan War.
As it was; the 4th Succession War returned the standard of Warfare to the lofty position it had enjoyed centuries prior and it forced all other realms to adapt in order to keep pace.
The ritualized nature of Clan Warfare, by contrast; coupled with their willingness to aggressively employ their DropShips in order to deploy forces and with their affinity for shock action obviated much of the need for their own combat support assets during the early invasion years.
While FedCom and Draconis forces were entirely awake to the potential for demolition of key infrastructure and obstacles to slow or halt an enemy advance, this tended to enrage the Clans, if anything and they would usually respond with a typically dramatic combat drop behind whatever obstacle was thrown up in front of them. Some spheroid commanders even considered it better to fight the Clans on their own terms and benefit from Zellbrigen than to invoke their wrath in reprisal for the use of good common-sense defensive tactics. But as so much seemed to infuriate the Clans when exposed to tactics outside their narrow cultural mores of warfare, this remained a minority opinion.
For their own part; these selfsame cultural mores demanded a fast and loose approach to logistics based mainly out of follow-on lower-caste DropShips, as the Clan Toumans were basically absent any significant combat support capability of their own, save the (Very) odd point of (usually dezgra) engineers. Running their war effort out of sacrosanct DropShips with a handful of unarmed HoverTrucks was just fine so far as it went, but when forced into grinding campaigns of attrition and sustained operations, as typified by Tukayyid and the Task Force: Serpent operation; Clan forced suffered grievously.
Many historians sum this up as Clan forces not having the supplies for long-term engagements and this is correct. The vast majority of Clusters always went into action with nothing more than the ammo in their bays. But everything else; repair parts, more ammunition and alternate OmniPods were present on their own follow-on DropShips. There was just no infrastructure to rapidly move these items to where they were needed.
Nor did Clan tactics take this requirement into account. There was no concept of holding a forward secured area to establish a location to re-arm and conduct hasty repairs. It just wasn’t done; Clan Warriors either returned to their DropShips, or; after the battle was over, the DropShips came to them and they repaired and re-configured for the next battle.
Once they got over their initial shock, spheroid and periphery observers were quite certain that the Clan mode of warfare must eventually falter in the face of anything less ritualized. To the modern day, however most Clans have adapted little to this and those that have established caste-bending units of combat storesmen and women or larger combat-engineer formations have done so only in a limited fashion, with great difficulty.
One exception were the now-extinct Clan Ice Hellion’s Flurry units; but these were properly combined-arms combat units which specialized with absconding with battlefield salvage in the midst of the action and not true combat-support formations. In any case, this is a tactic not widely adopted by the extant Clans.
Despite this, the Clans remain as an extremely credible threat due to their belligerent nature, superior technology and high-quality output of their warriors. It seems unlikely the Clans will adapt in this way in the future to any great extent. If any do, it will most likely be the outlier Hell’s Horses and Diamond Sharks, certainly it will never be the Jade Falcons and even the more pragmatic Wolves seem unlikely to change so drastically. What does seem likely is an attempt by the Clans to further evolve and refine their own way of war in such a way as to make it more effective in such environments and less vulnerable to the capabilities the Inner Sphere powers have embraced.
In the Inner Sphere and periphery, the recovery of technology has made it possible to more readily access units such as MASH vehicles, coolant trucks and Mobile HQs; so, this has only swelled the ranks and impact of combat support formations. Meanwhile, the form warfare takes outside the Clan’s internecine squabbles has only become more granular and layered with supply chains in space and on the ground, along with obstacle clearing and creating taking on ever-greater importance.
Mine warfare is a key component for instance of any conflict with house Liao and featured heavily in the FedCom Civil war as well, while partisans in the halcyon days of the Chaos march and right up through the Jihad made sport of the supply convoys vital to continued ground operations.
Modern commanders now consider combat support capability and capacity with all the fervor of the newly converted. Contrasts of the fully developed system of the Inner Sphere powers against the Clans have cemented this and it is thought likely that if another collapse in technology were to come, that alongside the newly acknowledged worth of conventional forces, combat support assets would not go quietly into the dark as has happened once before.
With the continuing Strategic Arms Limitation Talks ongoing between the Republic and her allies, it can be surmised from the results seen so far that with the reduction in BattleMech forces and Fusion Engine production, warfare will revert to a less dynamic, more grinding form in which Combat Support assets will play an even wider role. While the possibility of an even more ritualized form of warfare than that seen during the Succession Wars might result, there is no broad collapse of technology on the horizon (So far as we know) which would see less attention-grabbing forces cannibalized in budget debates or in the tech’s shops in order to maintain flashier, high-tech units.
It is thought the impact this will have in the future will be to further cement the status quo as hostile territories and armies become harder to take and hold and better able to “take a punch” than ever before.
