Joseph,
>Greg - Of course the BMP-1 provided AT
capability and supporting fire for RPG armed troops. Why would
armor fear Infantry if they did not have such available?
< Why 'of course'? When the design of the BMP started there was such a branch of Soviet Artillery Arm called Tank Destroyer Artillery. These, as artillery in general, are far better destroyers of tanks than the infantry are. The infantry's role is essentially to occupy positions, because through entrenchment they can become somewhat invulnerable to the artillery fire, and this is essentially why the 'tank' was invented, to displace entrenched infantry. However, entrenchment surrenders initiative and abandons operational tempo.
< Actually my initial suspicion that something was wrong came from outside the examination of doctrine or technology.
<After the Second World War the rifle divisions were slowly converted to motor-rifle divisions. These were at first mostly mounted in trucks, then in BTR vehicles. Note that BTR stands for 'armoured transporter'. Then in 1962 the BMP appeared. The BMP stands for Armoured Vehicle Pekhoty. I transliterate here because this is an important nuance. Usually this is translated as Infantry, but in Soviet military usage the term Pekhota was used EXCLUSIVELY for designation of the ENEMY Infantry units. That is, during the Second World War the Soviet command map would have German Infantry divisions, regiments and battalions identified as XXPD, XXPR and XXPB in blue. The Soviet units would be identified as Strelkoviye Infantry, i.e. literally Rifles, so on the map they would be XXSD, XXSR and XXSB in red. So why would the BMP of the Moto-Strelkoviye regiments would be mounted in Pekhotniye vehicles? Semantics?
< I think this was an 'inside joke'. The Soviet Staff couldn't very well announce that they were replacing 1/3 of the Infantry regiments with tank-destroyer regiments. So they named the BMP as Pekhoty since in the Soviet Union no one would need to have this explained.
< Why was this done? In the late 1950s the German Army was reformed within NATO, but more worrying, it hired many former Wehrmacht officers into command positions, and some former senior Wehrmacht officers became NATO consultants. Moreover it became clear that NATO was converting all its tank fleets to heavy tanks, though the US Army for different reasons renamed al its tanks 'main battle tank', which is of course meaningless if its the only battle tank. The British Centurion was originally the 'univarsal' tank.
The Soviet General Staff, who were also all veterans of the Second World War, made a fairly well-considered deduction that NATO was going to be adopting the same methods Germany did after Winter of 1942 for its future combat operations. By 1962 the Soviet General Staff was fairly certain that the United States would not use nuclear weapons, and perhaps the Cuban Crisis was a test of this assessment. The BMP-1 was therefore a piece in the wider doctrinal system development from the expereince of the Second World War in prosecuting offensive operations. German Infantry, the Pekhota, were after the war assessed by the Soviet General Staff as one of the contributors of the German defeat in their inability to move faster in 1941, and over-reliance on mobile defensive tactics after 1942. The BMP was going to be a 'pun' on this analysis; the BMP was very fast, and emulate mobile defensive tactics that previously required tank-chassis based anti-tank destroyers. NATO would just see 'Infantry'.
> The M-2
did the same thing sporting a 25mm cannon accurate to 2000+ meters
and with the M791 rated at 25mm penetration at 60 degrees out to
1300 m it is certainly possible for side and rear hits at close
range and closer to 90 degrees to be enough to stop T-55s or even
T-72s as reported during the Gulf War (The M919 APFSDSDU-T round
does not make an appearance until 1996 - 5 years after the Gulf
War). It carried TOW missiles that out ranged the Soviet AT-4 and
6 infantry that could be equipped with LAW rockets for close
defense. Mostly the infantry was there to kill OpFor infantry that
was busy trying to get a shot at an AFV/IFV.
< Yes, but why was the M-2 designed?
As it turns out the M-2 was designed to show that American industry could out-do the Soviets!
That was the sole motivator because in 1962 FMC was manufacturing the M-113 which was very simply a squad armoured transporter, i.e. a BTR. It was even the wrong BTR because no one seemed to have asked why the Soviets chose to produce most of their BTRs on wheels. The analysis at the time was that the Soviet Economy couldn't afford enough tracked BTRs because tracked vehicles are more expensive, which was a very market Economy based analysis.
<What doctrine was the M-2 designed to serve? The answer is none. The AirLand Battle was written by the Booz, Allen & Hamilton cunsulting firm in the last two years of the M-2 final pre-production development, much of which was spend in redesigning it due to the 'interference' of a certain USAF Congressional oversight officer assigned to the project. It only became M-3 (against Cavalry opposition) when the budget over-runs forced the abandonement of the planned Medium Armoured Vehicle procurement (which became the USMC LAV) in the triad where the M-2 was to be the Heavy, and the M998 was to be the Light (but became Multipurpose).
The AirLand Battle was the first NATO doctrine that envisaged offensive operations against the Warsaw Pact in the event of a shooting war, but at this time the NATO planners didn't realise the entirely defensive nature of the BMP-1 & 2 designs. The offensive vehicles were the BTR-60/70/80 series intended to trade road speed for armour, something tracked BTRs couldn't do.
The simple fact is that in order to make use of all the features you listed for the M-2 the so-mounted US Army unit would need to engage the WP units first, i.e. get to within LOS, involving finding and engaging them. With a weight nearly double that of the BTR-70, and running on tracks over hard surfaces, the combat readiness state of an M-2 unit when and if it managed to chase down a WP wheeled-BTR unit would have been questionable. Worse, the M-1 would simply burn too much fuel if used increasingly to conduct operational road marches. This was the lesson of the German Panthers and Tigers, and why by 1944 they were found dispersed over the entire width of the front in small units. It was mechanically and logistically unsustainable to move heavy tanks under own power over protracted road movements.
Soviet analysis probably considered that all things being equal heavy tanks driven continuously at high speed will suffer unsustainable rates of breakdown just like any tank design. German relatively light tanks in 1941 suffered 15% in unrecoverable combat loss, and 20% in recoverable breakdowns. From 1942 there was a directie to the tank-manufacturing plants in the USSR to simplify the engineering of the design as far as possible to eliminate causes of breakdowns. Germans considered this 'crude engineering'.
The problem for NATO AFV fleets designs was one of failure to align also.
The designs that intended to produce tactical capabilities were not integrated within a single tactical doctrinal concept, but were simply showcasing advanced technology within individual systems, some of which (Chayenne, Sgt. York) failed. The operational requirements did not exist (at the time, i.e. mid-70s) to provide input into the designs' mission requirements, and the NATO strategy was entirely defensive until the early 80s, yet the designs being produced were essentially offensive in nature if one thought about offensive designs the way Soviet General Staff did.
<The BMP-1 carried 4-5 rounds of an AT missile that was made not
very effective by virtue of being hard to control from the turret.
The 73mm Grom gun was unreliable beyond 500 meters. The vehicle
carried an RPG-7 and that may be what armed 3 of the 7 man team
(RPG gunner, loader, assistant). Probably no more than 6 rounds of
a munition with accuracy issues past 300 meters.
> Exactly! Read all this and you will realise that this was a vehicle intended to be used for exclusively anti-tank tactics, essentially from close range ambush. Ammunition wasn't a problem since it would be stockpiled in advance prior to engagement. Also since the squads were never at full strength in wartime there was always room for more ammunition internally.
< The M2 was
designed to be better than this - it is faster, has more
protection of the crew/infantry from small arms fire (something
the BMP-1 struggled with), out ranges the BMP-1's gun and missile
armament giving it stand-off capability. It has great cross
country mobility as part of its mission is to keep up with the M-1
to provide that infantry screen to stop the AT armed Soviet
infantry from getting a good shot off. And that mobility was
designed for use in Europe where American forces were expected to
be agile and not be a wall to be hammered at.
> Agile over open terrain is tactical agility, and it would make sense to use tracked traction fo this sort of vehicle. But Soviet planning called for operational agility, and this required making use of road networks, and therefore wheels. This is why the Red Army never asked for a lot of M-3 half-tracks frOM Lend Lease, but couldn't get enough jeeps and trucks. By the way, in 1957 whenthe BTR-60 design was being discussed as a replacement for the BTR-152, Khruschev asked why the Army can't simply buy more trucks. At the time he wasn't yet made aware of the true effects of nuclear warfare, the reason the T-54 was redesigned as T-55 and why the BTR-152s were being redesigned enclosed.
> Tactical agility is required by combined arms tactics, but the Soviet understanding of this was analogous to 'fortified region breakthrough tactics'. The only 'fortified regions' in Soviet conception during the forthcoming conflict were going to be the BMP-mounted units deployed on the 'shoulders' of the breakthroughs.
When I was playing Striker a long time ago, I would ask others why exaclty the various races saw it fit to transition from one TL to the next. Design and engineering work on a clearly stated requirements, and not a simple desire to achieve system superiority. It takes a very long time to translate some scientist's educated guess (hypothesis) into basic scientific research, applied science laboratory experiment, and an engineered system subjected to testing to produce a useful product. This was my problem with Traveller. A lack of granularity in TL progression to explain how the Aslans may have reached the need for a tank in their culture without experiencing the First World War trench warfare that was the catalyst for the tank's creation.
Assuming the Aslan culture designed armoured vehicles, how woudl the design development progress based on their culture?
For lack of appropriate figures we played Striker using 20th century modern figures, and the question was the same, how did the US Army come up with the idea of the Bradley BMP? Eventually the answer became, through one-upmanship.
< Ooh! here is a little treatise on the employment of the BMP by the
Soviets culled from their sources. Please not how often mention is
made of preparing for a friendly nuclear attack.
> was there intended to be an attached document?
Greg