...Or Why I'd love to see a strategic game of the Last War, and why I haven't seen it yet. A long read, but hopefully thought provoking.
I've seen some of the campaign systems for OGREverse games. They're neat and I'd love to play in one, but these are connected tactical engagements, sometimes with production rules, and they don't address some of the strategic opportunities and challenges presented by the giant cybernetic tank. In the following uninformed ramblings I will try to explain why I think the Ogre, like the machine gun or bomber, would re-arrange land warfare.
Even great generals tend to win when they have more men and materiel than the other side, and lose when they don't. From Alexander to Rommel, genius has begun with logistics.
Humans are a logistical nightmare.
Humans need to eat. Assume you can get them to eat packaged foods for prolonged periods, that's still a couple of pounds per day per person, and another four pounds of water to drink. Then we need sewage facilities, and a place to sleep. Bathing is eventually necessary, as is medical care. If any of these are short of the human's expectation, their performance can drop sharply.
But that's not half of it. Humans tend to develop their own set of needs and desires, which no commander has yet reined in. Humans goldbrick, gamble, steal things, run away, forget things, try to impress their superiors, spread rumors, and get involved with civillians in everything from vandalism to child-rearing.
All of these things take create Friction, the nemisis of functioning unit.
Ogres do none of these things. Ogres have nearly no friction.
Ogres are logistically optimized. There's one vehicle, no traffic jams. There's one set of radios (I'm guessing a dozen) minimizing confusion over frequencies. No food, water, waste, or medical requirements, and nevermind the psychological and morale needs.
The Los Angeles class SSN refuels once every twenty years; I'm sure the nuclear plants of 2065 are capable of consuming their fuel faster, generating more power in a given period of time and therefore requiring a less massive power plant. Given the lethality of the Last War I would speculate they would not bother to give the Ogres twenty year endurances. This raises a question about independent Ogres in the Factory States period - how do they get refueled? One assumes they're pretty vulnerable during this process, which would presumably be carried out by humans the Ogre trusted either by relationship or extortion, both unreliable.
In any case, its easier to keep an Ogre combat ready than an armor company, and the Ogre is more effective.
Tactically, the Ogre is fast, only the GEVs are faster. Throw in some gravel, forest, or a stream and the Ogre is faster. In a tactical situaion this speed does not stand out much, because many other units have the same tactical speed. On the strategic level, though, the Ogre is very fast, faster than a GEV.
GEVs move 14", at 7.5 mph to the inch that's 105 mph, or 120 mph on roads. That's when they're moving, which is maybe twelve hours a day, in a pinch. And that's if they don't wait for their support vehicles. How long can they run at top speed twelve hours a day without maintenance? Any vehicle company moves at the speed of its support units, and we have to assume their are breaks in the road, missing bridges, etc. So maybe 40mph for ten hours? That's 400 miles a day, which will take you from anywhere to anywhere in the European theatre of the last war, assuming you don't have to go too far around the woods and mountains. That's not too bad.
The Ogre travels twenty four hours a day. At 45mph the Ogre covers 1180 miles in a day. It doesn't stop to refuel, or pick up provisions. It ignores forrests, lakes, and streams. It doesn't need support vehicles. It doesn't rest. It can do this for days on end. Strategically, only a missle or a B2 bomber is faster.
"In motorised warfare, material attrition and the destruction of the organic cohesion of the opposing army must be the immediate aim of all planning. Tactically, the battle of attrition is fought with the highest possible degree of mobility. The following points require particular attention: (a) The main endeavor should be to concentrate one's own forces in space and time, while at the same time seeking to split the enemy forces spatially and destroy them at different times..."
- Rommel
Ogres are the embodiment of concentrated force. There's no chance of a portion of it getting left behind. An armor company can lose a platoon to navigation, or a unit can throw a tread. Terrain may force single column movement. It can get caught with half the force on either side of a river. Wherever the Ogre is, you have to deal with all of it.
If you're the theatre commander you love your Ogres. Got a weakpoint? Send an Ogre. It can get there in time, and it can't be ignored. Even if the attackers are more powerful than the Ogre they can't bypass it, its fast and will do enough damage to blunt the offensive. If they decide to engage the Ogre they will have to slow down, and take losses. The Ogre can destroy piecemeal units, so the attacker has to stay somewhat concentrated, possibly creating a cruise missle target, and the attackers won't have a laser with them. The concentration also slows them down. When they assault the Ogre in force it dances away, perhaps gets behind them.
The Ogre is an ideal raiding unit. Its fast, moving underwater it can be stealthy, it has no logistical train, and it doesn't give away its intentions. Again I refer to Rommel, a master of mechanized warfare if there ever was one: "(f) Concealment of intentions is of the utmost importance in order to provide surprise for one's own operations and thus make it possible to exploit the time taken by the enemy command to react. Deception measures of all kinds should be encouraged if only to make the enemy commander uncertain and cause him to hesitate and hold back."
You have to hold a lot back, if Ogres are lose.
How do you defend against an Ogre, given a European sized theatre? It can be anywhere in twelve hours. Maybe you know its coming, then you must respond with a couple of companies, which you can expect to take heavy losses.
Case Study:
As the sun rises over the horizon Ogre Mark V designation 5123 rolls out the doors at Sheffield on March 1, 2079, and rolls under the Straights of Dover on a twenty mile underwater road of boulders and gravel reaching a hundred and fifty feet in depth. It surfaces somewhere on the coast of the Netherlands. By noon it has reached the front in Western Germany.
The front has been more or less quiet as opposing generals vie for sufficient local superiority to launch an attack. Probing attacks, spies, and countermanuevers have kept things from happening for weeks. But there's no way to discover an Ogre that's inside a building in England, and even if there were satellites up they'd give only two or three hours warning...
The Ogre appears first at Mannheim, where a company of Combine GEVs has been faced off against Paneuropean HVYs and LTNKs. The element of surprise gives the Ogre a few minutes engagement with only part of the Paneuropean force. It destroys several light tanks out of hand, along with a couple of HVYs, at the cost of only a few tread units and a secondary battery. As the Paneuropean armor begins to concentrate enough to present a problem to the Ogre, it presses on into Germany, using streams and lakes to distance itself from the Paneuropean forces.
Meanwhile, with the defending tanks concentrated on the Ogre, and somewhat reduced in force, the Combine GEV company screams through the gap to attack lasers and generators behind the lines, hopefully opening the door for a cruise missle attack.
Once behind its own lines the Ogre heads Southwest past Strasbourg, then South. It approaches Paneuropean lines again near Freiburg, where Combine forces have been massing for an attack on the city. North of the city the Paneuropeans have assembled a line of HWZ behind a stream with overlapping fields of fire and infantry in front, a costly line to breach by ordinary armor.
The Ogre approaches at full speed, ignoring the stream, charging the center HWZ. LTNKs and INF providing security destroy one Secondary Battery, a missle, some treads, but they are destroyed by the Ogre's fire in the process. The HWZs get both Main Batteries and some treads, but the Ogre uses the remaining five missles to take out all three HWZs.
As Combine HVYs and SHVYs move to exploit the gap Paneuropean reserve forces rush to stop it, but now the Combine armor can cross the stream before being faced with opposition, and its armor on armor, the HWZ are out of the picture.
Slowed somewhat by tread loss but aided by a road, the Ogre proceeds Northeast at nearly 50kmph. Its new mission is interdiction. Paneurope has enough reserves North of Freiburg to stall the attack on that city. The Ogre races towards the reinforcements, destroying bridges, breaking roads with secondary fire, and eliminating every sensor and detector it can locate. Without those sensors and not knowing the exact condition of the Ogre, the reinforcement commander hesitates to send his GEV units ahead - there's no way to be sure the Ogre is alone.
By this time Paneurope are tempted to drop a cruise missles behind their own lines to eliminate this Ogre. Determining its position accurately enough is a problem. The Ogre avoids high value targets and makes use of forests and ravine, destroys sensors as rapidly as possible, and uses its ECM, perhaps even dropped ECM units, to muddy the waters. Paneurope always know where the Ogre is to within a few kilometers, but are never in a position to launch a missle with confidence that they'll be able to target the Ogre within a couple kilometers in the two minutes it takes the cruise missle to reach it.
The reinforcements advance slowly (45kph instead of 60kph for the armor and 100 kph for the GEVs) to keep together, since they may be engaged by the damaged Ogre any moment. The Ogre turns aside however, as it is no match for the reinforcements, and heads Southeast again, now behind Freiburg. It is now well behind the lines, and uses woods, ridgelines, and gullies where it can to avoid taking fire from anti-missle lasers. Nevertheless it does take some hits, and is slowed to 30kph off-road. It fires on some communications installations, but avoids the concentrations of defenders near cruise missle launch sites.
An hour and a half after it leaves the road North out of Freiburg it reaches a remote lake on the German-Swiss border. The lake is over twenty miles long, and deep as mountain lakes tend to be. Intelligence indicated two civil defense stations along the lake supporting hovercraft capable of depth charging the lake. The Ogre immediately demolishes the first one on arriving, losing a secondary to its point defenses and a few more treads to the associated stomping. The three hovercraft from the other station immediately head out onto the lake, while the Ogre proceeds along the road and an hour later demolishes the second station at the opposite end of the lake.
The defense hovercraft cannot take on the Ogre out of the water, the Ogre cannot catch them, and the Ogre will not enter the water to be depth charged, and all reserves are being committed to Freiburg, so the two sides manuever at stalemate until the crews finally withdraw to take care of their biological needs. The Ogre destroys every sonobuoy, sensor, and listening station with its secondaries, then crawls beneath the icy spring runoff and disappears in the bottom of the lake. Soon the hovercraft return, reinforced, but they Ogre can't be located now that's its stationary and quiet in this good-sized lake. They maintain patrols to keep an eye on it, and the force required to keep even this damaged Mark V at bay are unavailable to defend Freiburg.
Days later Freiburg falls. While Combine forces consolidate and prepare for a counter offensive and the Paneuropean forces try to reestablish a new defensive line.
The Ogre has been blind to the goings on at the front, but it has observed the searching craft on the lake above and made an intelligent guess as the to their numbers and procedures. They attempt to be random to defeat the Ogre's predictive measures, but they're only human. The Mark V picks an optimum time in their cycle where one patrol is distant, another is estimated to be fatigued at the end of their watch, and the others are not fully recovered. It charges out of the lake, exchanging ineffectual fire with the defenders. After a 0.03 second communications burst with headquarters in London is briefed on the strategic situation and heads for Combine lines.
The combine forces are alerted that the Ogre is returning, and launching a fixing attack on a section of the Paneuropean line, preventing them from attacking the Ogre as it approaches their lines from behind; this way it faces only a few minutes of combat to breakthrough, instead of a prolonged gauntlet. The end result is a few armor units damaged on either side, and the Ogre's treads take some more damage, reducing speed to 20 kph.
The Ogre at this point is a sight to see: cratered BPC armor, missing weapons, slapping treads, dried muck, and moving at bicycle's speed. To look at it you'd think that it had gotten spanked, instead of spearheading attacks, delaying reinforcements, degrading communications infrastructure, and disrupting the infantry in ways neither a company of armor nor a half-dozen cruise missles could do.
And its still moving. A day later it strolls back into the Sheffield plant after a quick decon, and links up with the other Ogres there in various states of repair and readiness. It reports all the details of its actions and the enemies responses, and the communing Ogres develop and simulate new tactics as the technicians crawl over and through them to replace systems, repair armor, refit treads, and restore ammunition. By March 22 its in the same condition it was on March 1, and just before dawn the big clamshell doors grind open again...
I got the depth and width of the Straights of Dover from Britannica Online, but obviously a few other questions arose while I was thinking about all this...
What is an Ogre's endurance between nuclear refuelings?
Ogres seem to stroll around underwater a lot. They are massive, but have a lot of treads. What is their surface pressure like? What are the odds of them getting stuck in underwater mud?
What kind of numbers were involved in the last war? Tactical engagements seem to have a very high casualty rate. That means there are either small engagements, or few engagements, otherwise you end up with few units. In any case, an Ogre behind your lines is a big problem, unless there are a lot of units around, which requires a tremendous industrial base. I'm struggling for a sense of scale.
How would you defend against a deep Ogre incursion? You can't be everywhere with enough strength to stop an Ogre. Its faster, strategically, than the defense forces, and it can function places they can't.
This is an essay in the truest sense, an attempt to wrestle with the implications of the Ogre. I hope it provokes some conversation, and that we never find out how close our speculations come.