"Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter." - Winston Churchill
Still undetected, Sgt. Louis Chavette slowly crawled on his belly towards the enemy vehicles. For the hundredth time that night, he blessed the new total-shielding suit he wore, preventing the enemy sensor nets from picking up his body heat, movement, radar return, electronic emissions, and his odour. Noise they still couldn`t do anything about, so he and his squad had to move carefully even over this rocky ground. He flipped down his helmet-mounted HUD. The information it gave told him that everyone in his squad was in position, (except young Terkins, of course. He made a mental note to remind the boy that moving without any noise at all was important, but not if it meant that he always arrived ten minutes behind everyone else), and the enemy sensor nets were still functioning normally. He grinned. By the time they detected anything, it`d already be too late.
He raised the targeting sight to his eye, and viewed all the different vehicle types in his range of vision, assigning each of them a target priority. When this was complete, he transmitted the targeting information via the data channel in his personal comm-link to each of the missiles already loaded in the firing tubes. On receipt of the targeting information, each squad member`s HUD informed them it was loaded into the missiles memory, and to raise the shielded tube to a vertical launch position. When all tubes were vertical, Sgt. Chavette issued the fire command. Things then started to happen very fast.
Simultaneously, 15 missiles launched skyward, each propelled by a tail of flame, pushing them high into the night sky. This immediately triggered the sensor nets to activate, and the automatic defences powered up, ready to return fire. By this time, the missiles were approaching the highest point of their flight, so the on board computers conferred with each other while using internal sensors to map out all of the vehicles below, and, following the priority orders so recently programmed in on the ground, assigned each independent warhead contained within the missiles a target. The highest priority targets got up to five missiles each, with the lowest getting only one or two. Then the missiles each disgorged their lethal cargo of micro-rockets, all 540 of which had their own targets, and started powerful jamming, designed to overload and confuse the enemy anti-missile defences, which had just started firing.
Back on the ground, vehicle-mounted ballistic computers and the sensor nets worked hand-in-glove to pinpoint the origin of the missiles, and began firing weapons at the calculated spots. Sgt. Chavette and his men, although well dispersed, were ripped apart by the large amounts of explosive munitions pouring onto their positions. Shrapnel ripped through flesh and clothing, reducing living, breathing humans beings into unrecognisable lumps of pulp. These explosions, combined with the explosions of the now rapidly descending missiles that were touched by lasers, made things impossible to follow, except by computers. Follow events they did, and carried out their tasks with uncluttered and unemotional single-mindedness. After a brief battle between computer controlled weapons systems, only sixty percent of the missiles found their targets, but with over three hundred missiles bearing down on only one hundred and thirty-odd crew-served vehicles, that was more than enough.
A few minutes after the noise had died down, a single soldier walked up to the positions his friends and colleagues had occupied until so recently, and looked upon the carnage. This was Pvt. Terkins first taste of war, and it was already too much. Nothing moved. He looked around, desperately hoping that the people he`d trained with, whose names he knew, were still here somewhere. As he looked, he saw the sarge laying face down in the mud, half out of a hole. When he got alongside him and could make out details, he could see that his chest had been blown open, part of his skull was missing, and his body ended at the waist. He sat down, and started to sob uncontrollably. He was still wondering if it was worth it, was anything worth this sort of price, when a laser drilled through his brain. It seemed that some parts of the sensor net were still functioning. That made sixteen.
The best way to run a wargame of any type is to think of the units you control not as pieces on a board, or images on a screen, but as real people. Real lives that are destroyed when you make an error of judgment. Real deaths. It doesn`t matter what scale the battle is on, as everything has a human element. TacOps, reviewed a couple of months ago, has ground and air units. It even tells you how many crew are in the vehicles. Stars!, reviewed this month, tells you how many colonists on planets, and transported in ships. You can play these games. Or you can command the forces available. If you do the first, you`ll probably enjoy the game, win or lose. But if you do the second, you might think a lot more carefully about decisions you have to make during the course of your command. And who knows, you might find yourself doing a lot better for it.
Tim Still (tcs@cix.compulink.co.uk)
