Scenario: Acceptable US Casualties Against 3rd World Armies

[shahadi]

Originally Posted by Suhiir

The problem with "acceptable losses" is you're dealing primarily with civilian perceptions which are most definitely NOT the same as military.

In general, and I stress this is the military viewpoint, the US Army considers a unit to be "combat ineffective" at around 25% casualties, the USMC at around 50%. The key here is the term "combat ineffective" not the number of casualties. It's felt that at these casualty percentages the loss of firepower, unit cohesion, and morale means the unit can no longer be expected to perform the mission a unit of a given size would be expected to perform.

For a US Army 9-man squad 25% is the loss of 2-3 men, the remaining 6-7 can no longer be expected to perform a full squads mission. The USMC squad is 13-men, so a loss of 50% still leaves it with 6-7 men ... the same size as the US Army squad with 25% losses. This is one of the reasons the USMC feels it can accept more losses (also the "Sturmtruppen" attitude of the USMC).
http://www.realcleardefense.com/arti...ry_108075.html

Keep in mind WinSPMBT deals with military not civilian perceptions (and I've long felt the AI is secretly run by WW II Japanese).

Good stuff!

By Iwo Jima losses the game AI maybe ran by Japanese ghosts. I read an account of that battle where only 7 out of 22 battalion commanders survived and other accounts where privates were field promoted to lead platoons. Horrific losses. Even, more to your point of civilian expectations, after the San Francisco Examiner ran stories of the mounting losses, the panic screamed.

Thanks suhiir. I'm thinking more of civilian perceptions than military combat ineffectiveness.

Actually, I'm working on the scenario when I got email notification of your post.

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