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Tag Archives: Defence Procurement

Seventy Years of OPFOR

The Many OPFOR Nations The asymmetric OPFOR has been haunting the training grounds of the US Army for seventy years now, beginning shortly after World War II. Having an inherently dissimilar force is effective at training an army to face an opponent that looks, moves, and fights differently. OPFORs have run the gamut from overly […]

Back Blogging Battleships

So, it’s time for the Cold War battleships to sail again, simply because I’ve been looking up a lot of information on their hypothetical modifications. And what I saw was interesting enough to write about. First, the 1980s reactivation of the Iowas. Historically, their modifications were minor in comparison to some of the other proposals. […]

Ready… or not? On the availability of units.

Ready or not? When creating a new scenario one of the challenges is to decide not only which units should be included but also how many of them will actually be able to fight. So the question is: Ready or not? The German “Bericht zur materiellen Einsatzbereitschaft der Hauptwaffensysteme der Bundeswehr” (Report for the readiness […]

Platforms That Never Were: A-6F

The A-6F Intruder II was a proposed upgrade of the long-serving attack aircraft that would have added more advanced engines, a more capable radar, and air to air missile capability. Although initially approved, it was cancelled in favor of the ill-fated A-12 Avenger, which in turn collapsed. Previous posts in the “platforms that never were” […]

The 1965 Cutoff

So, in my innumerable Command editor forays and bits of research for the waves of scenarios I never expect to actually make in full, I’ve found one year where I view the most interesting, novel alternate history scenarios as no longer being possible. 1965. It’s a pretty sudden cutoff. I think the two big reasons […]

The Pentagon Reformers

The Reformers went by many names, “Pentagon Reformers”, “Military Reformers”, the “Defense Reform Movement”, and probably others, although the last was the most common. Coming to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they unsuccessfully challenged the buildup of military equipment in the Reagan and later Carter administrations. Accurate, fair accounts of the Reformers […]