Applying Naval Tactics to Space Combat By Timothy Swenson INTRODUCTION At first glance Space and Naval combat may not seem to have much in common. Naval combat is based in the past or present. Space combat is based in the distant future. Naval combat is based on real ships and real situations. Space combat is based on almost fanciful ideas and made up situations, but they share two key points in common; terrain-less battle area, and multi-part units. Naval and Space combat are fought on battle grounds with no terrain. Naval combat is fought on the open seas, Space combat is fought out in the vast expanse of space. Ground combat is grounded in the type of terrain it is fought on. Most space combat games define each ship as having lots of subparts that are destroyed as the game progresses. When a number of key subparts are destroyed, the ship is considered destroyed. This is exactly the same way that Naval combat is gamed. This document is composed of two sections: General Tactics and Specific Tactics. General Tactics covers how you want to approach your battle. It covers areas to think about before and during your battle. Specific Tactics covers how you should move your ships in relation to each other and the enemy ships. This section applies more to Naval than space combat, but is included to show how Naval ships perform their maneuvers. These tactics may or may not be directly applied to space combat, but may prove useful as a starting point. GENERAL TACTICS Naval Combat is a War of Attrition Out on the open seas there is no place to hide and take cover. Firing your weapons on the enemy means that you must expose yourself to his weapons. You have to take hits to deliver hits. There is no defensive position to take. There is no high-ground to hold. It's just pure ship against ship. There are a few things you can do to give yourself an advantage in facing your enemy: - Greater Range. If you have a greater weapons range than your enemy, you can sit outside his range, avoiding his attacks, and deliver your attacks. Greater range usually means a less effective attack, due to a lesser chance of hitting your target and the lesser force of your weapons. This is a small price to pay for unreturned fire. Historically, in a situation like this, you would have to have a good system for aiming your shots. Early Naval combat took place at close quarters because aim was harder to achieve than range. - Bigger/More Weapons. The bigger or more weapons you have in relation to your enemy, the greater your odds at winning. Having more weapons means that you can deliver more hits than the enemy. Having bigger weapons that each successful hit delivers greater damage. The result is your destroying more of the enemy's firepower over time than he of yours. This translates into victory for you. - Greater Armor. The greater your armor, the more hits you can take and not sustain serious damage. Any enemy shot that does not do serious damage is a wasted shot. Do not go overboard in armor. In systems in which you are allowed to design ships, having a lot of armor usually means having fewer weapons. Historically, lots of armor meant a heavier ship, which would take more effort to move it, which meant a less maneuverable ship. Attack Effectively First This is the first tenet of naval warfare. Advantage in battle goes to he who gets the first shot. Getting off the first shot means that you can inflict damage on your enemy before he does so on you. Destroying any of your enemies weapons, before they are allowed to fire, equates to the enemy never having them at all. Effectively means that you must make your hits count. If you get off the first shot, but they are poorly aimed, it is as if you never fired at all. There are three means that can assist in attacking effectively first: - Mass. Mass is having more ships and weapons that your enemy. You want to get all of your forces into battle as soon as possible. This gives you the mass to make your first blow a serious one. - Concentration. Concentration is focusing the main efforts of your forces on a few key enemy ships. You don't need to attack his entire fleet at the same time. If you can mass your forces and attack a small portion of his fleet, while avoiding as much enemy fire from the other ships, your attacks will be more effective. - Maneuver. Maneuver is getting your ships where they can be the most effective exactly when you need them to be. In firing first effectively, you must get as many ships as possible into firing position at the time you want to fire (mass). Without effective manuevering you can not achieve the mass you need, which will not allow you to achieve any effective concentration. Manuever can easily be applied before the battle begins. If, through maneuver, you can manipulate your opponent to manuever where you want him to be, then you have an advantage over him. The reason you want to attack effectively first, is to destroy some of the enemies weapons before they get a change to be used on your forces. This lessens the number of weapons the enemy has and increases your odds of destroying the enemy. Why does it increase your odds? Because of the nature of attrition warfare and the concentration of force. Let say we have two sides, A and B, with each side having 100 and 80 ships respectively. Each of the ships are exactly the same and have one weapon each. Each side will destroy 10% of the others ships in each turn. In turn one, side A destroyes 10 ships (10% of 100) and side B destroyes 8 ships (10% of 80). Now side A has 92 ships and side B has 70 ships. In the next turn side A now has 85 ships (92 - 10% of 70) and side B has 61 ships (70 - 10% of 92). This keeps going on until one side is totally destroyed. At the end, side A is victorious over side B and still has 58 ships. The ratio of ships between the two sides was dropping far faster for side B than for side A. Having the larger force is very important in both Naval and space combat. If you are the weaker force, then you may need to think if this is really the right time to fight. What should the difference between the two forces be to make an impact on the battle? The Naval War College did some gaming prior to World War II, come up their own evaluations of relative strengths (not just the number of ships) and applied them to their wargaming. With odds of 2:1, the smaller side was removed from the game. Odds of 3:2 and the lesser force lost half its strength. With the odds of 4:3, the superior force defeated its adversary but took enough damage to limits ability to fight another battle soon. Reserves are a Waste of Forces In ground combat, reserves are used to give that final blow to the enemy. It lets you unleash well rested forces against a hopefully tired and weary enemy, breaking his will to continue fighting. This does not work in Naval combat. Ground combat is based on the man. The will or morale of men is critical. Breaking the will of the enemy starts with breaking the will of a few of the enemy. Reserves are used to break the will of the enemy by hitting him hard when he is tired and weak. Loss of morale is contagious on the battle field. Seeing the man next to you retreating does not instill confidence. Once a battle line begins to break it is very hard to stop and reform it. In Naval combat, the war is against the machine. Breaking the will of a few of the enemy does not usually spread to the whole ship. If you are going to try to break someones will, aim for the captain of the ship or the commander of the fleet. They are the ones that decide when to retreat. If the enemy commander does not decide to retreat, then you must destroy their ability to fight by destroying the ships weapons. Even with the good morale of its sailors, a ship that has no weapons can not continue the battle. Because Naval combat is attrition based, you want the greatest number of forces at the very beginning. You want to inflict as much damage to your the enemy as you can, before he has time to return the favor. Keeping forces in reserve does not allow you to inflict as much damage as you can. To Know Tactics, Know Technology Tactics change with technology. Tactics is heavily based on using what weapons you have as effectively as you can. A ship that has torpedoes will use different tactics than a ship that has guns. Here are a few key points about Knowing. They are discussed in terms of wargaming and apply both to Naval and Space combat: - Know Your Units. In wargaming terms, your forces are your units. Know what units you have, what weapons they have, how fast they are, how strong the are, etc. Tailor you tactics to the capabilities of your units. - Know the Rules. Wargaming is based on the rules of the game. Knowing the rules lets you know exactly what you can and cannot do. Not knowing the rules means that you may not know all of your available options. Sometimes there are rules that you can exploit to use in your favor. At the same time you don't want to be unsporting and abuse the rules. Defense is Inherently Weaker Taking a defensive position means waiting for the enemy to come to you. This breaks the first tenet of naval warfare, Attack Effectivelly First. Taking a defensive position does not give you mass, concentration, or maneuver. It allows your enemy to attack you on his terms not yours. In ground combat the defense is almost always the stronger position. The defense is based on both terrain (something to hide behind) and position (the enemy has to move you). Neither terrain nor position is available in Naval combat. Manuever In ground combat, not only is where you are in relation to the enemy important, but where you are in relation to terrain is also important. Holding the high ground is important for defense. The concept of maneuver warfare is to out maneuver and to make the enemy position less useful to him. In Naval combat position is not as vital. There is no flanking manuever, there is no rear to guard. The only position important is the relation of the enemy to your weapons. You must have as many weapons aimed at the enemy as possible. Your enemy will try to manuever so that as few as possible of your weapons are able to fire on him. This is the only maneuvering that really counts. Scouting The goal of scouting is to get your weapons within range of the enemy and aim at him. If you don't know where your enemy is, you obviously can't attact effectively first, because you have nowhere to direct your attack. Scouting applies in wargaming when rule systems have any form of hidden or partialy hidden movement. Partially hidden movement is having many counters on the map, but only a few are real units, the rest are decoys. Hidden movement is any movement that is not done on the map or within view of the other player. A popular way of implementing hidden movement in space combat games is cloaking, ships that are essentially invisible. Scouting will only work in a wargame that has rules that make detection of decoy or cloaked ships easier the closer you get to them. This is the core of scouting, getting your forces close enough to the enemy to find out where he is. Naval scouting has been done at two different levels, strategic and tactical. Strategic scouting is done to know where the enemy is, but not to specifically to engage him. This is usually done by long range reconnaissance aircraft or eavesdropping on enemy radio conversations. Tactical scouting is done on a smaller scale with the aim of bringing an attack to the enemy. Scouting is based on the range of your weapons, or more importantly, the range of your enemies weapons. Scouting has to take place far enough in front of your main forces for them to have time to react and prepare for battle. You don't want to scout at the range limit of your weapons because this leaves no time to set up a proper attack. You must scout well ahead of your weapons range. If your enemy has a significantly greater range than you, you must scout at a distance greater than his range. You don't want your scout ships to discover the enemy after he has launched an attack on you. Before the age of the aircraft carrier, scouting was traditionally done with a scouting line of small but fast ships well ahead of the main part of your forces. These ships would be set in an arc pattern about 45 to 60 degree wide. They would be spaced at the distance of their visual range, so that no enemy ships could slip in between them. Once the enemy is sighted, they would draw back to the protective cover of the larger ships. Areas not using in Gaming Because of the nature of wargaming there are many parts of real combat the are not simulated. - Doctrine. Doctrine is the teaching of specific strategy and tactics to all military forces before the battle. Doctrine guides these forces in their decision making processes. Doctrine is renforced through careful planning and practice. Doctrine is the glue of good tactics. In wargaming, you make all of the decisions and your units are nothing more than cardboard. The teaching of doctrine does not apply. There is one brain controlling your forces not many. - Morale. Unless specifically addresses in the rules, morale of your troops is not a consideration. Even when morale is addressed in the rules, they not simulated close to real life. Morale is based on affecting the will of your troops. Good morale comes from taking care of your troops and providing them with good leadership. Gaming can in no way hope to simulate all that this involves. - Command and Control. Command and control deals with how to get controling orders out the your forces, so that they do as you wish. A significant part of war and war planning is how to keep control of your forces. Coordination of your forces is vital in SPECIFIC TACTICS The Fighting Column The primary purpose of the Fighting Column is a means of control of the fleet. It's secondary purpose was the concentration of fire. Command and Control is critical in getting the fleet to act as one unit. The Fighting Column provided control of the fleet by having the ships follow the flag (lead) ship. The simple act of "follow the leader" meant that the commander knew he could get his ships to go where he wanted them. Diagram Key Ship - \ / | Flag Ship * Enemy Ship = Divisional Column Columns of Divisions Forming Battle Line | | | | | | | | | \ \ \ - * - * - * * Line Ahead Turn The Line Ahead Turn is essentially a U-turn of the column. The flag ship starts the turn and all ships follow. Historically this turn was the easiest to implement (just have all ships follow the lead ship), but it takes the most amount of time and space to accomplish. - - - - * - - \ \ * / * - - / Front to Flank Turn The Front to Flank Turn allows the column to turn 90 degrees while still being in a column formation. The column can turn from being in-line to being abreast or from being abreast to being in a column. In-line to Abreast Abreast to In-line 1 - - - - * | | | | * 2 \ \ \ \ * \ \ \ \ * 3 | | | | * - - - - * Battle Turn Away The Battle Turn Away is a very fast way of turning the column 180 degrees. It is faster than the Line Ahead Turn and requires less space to perform, but it also requires precise timing of execution. 1 - - - - * 2 \ \ \ \ * 3 | | | | * 4 / / / / * 5 - - - - * (flag ship now in back of column) Doubling The purpose of Doubling is to put your ships on both sides of some of the enemy ships. This allows you to double your firepower on the same ship(s). It also denies any targets for the unengaged enemy ships, seriously limiting their effectiveness. Desired Positions for Doubling - - - - - - - - = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1) Out of range of enemy = = = = = = = = - - - - - - - - 2) Slow column = = = = = = = = - - - - 3) / / / / = = = = = = = = - - - - 4) = = = = = = = = Now on other side of enemy - - - - - - - - 5) = = = = = = = = Speed up doubled ships - - - - Destroyer Screen Destroyers, being smaller ships, were employed to screen the battleships from attacks from torpedos and to attack where needed without breaking up the structure of the battleship formation. - - - - _ - - - - _ - - - - - - - - -- -- -- -- -- -- ** In out cruising formation the destroyer screen was used to form a shield around the battleships and was used with scouting ships and battle cruisers (fast ships). | | | | | (scouting line) | | | | | | (battle cruisers) | | | | | | | | (destroyer screen) | | * | | | | | | | (battleships) | | | | |