China Surprise (Hypothetical Near Future War Number 3.1)

[MengJiao]

  So in Next War Vietnam  (GMT Michell Land current designer), China's best chance is strategic surprise.  I set the US committment at level 2 so I would have something to do while China
overruns things early on.  This gives the Chinese 28 VPs right away (they only need 100 VPs for cosmic victory so I hope they enjoy these 28).  So far nothing has happened on the Operational Map
but one Vietnamese HQ was clobbered by a) getting detected and b) having enemy special forces blow it up more or less.  Other than that the early Chinese SO forces failed to do anything but survive --
which is good, don't get me wrong -- Meanwhile US and Vietnamese SOF blew up or stole a lot of Chinese air defense radars, SAM sites and Cruise missiles AND survived.  On the other hand, the Chinese do dominate the airspace over Hanoi so we'll see how that goes.  Here's some of the strategic picture and tracks (not all of them):

 

[W8taminute]

Really cool!  Who knows with the way things have been going IRL lately all of this may come true.  That's why I'm interested in these types of games and living vicariously through your AARs. 

[MengJiao]

Really cool!  Who knows with the way things have been going IRL lately all of this may come true.  That's why I'm interested in these types of games and living vicariously through your AARs.

  Yeah, I had a hard time getting into reliving the Cold War 87 stuff and other hypothetical wars...cuz there was really no reliable information about how these weapon systems and doctrines would
interact.  It does now look like the advanced mechanized blitzkrieg thing might not quite work as designed all time.  Hopefully, we are now seeing the worst case of that but who knows. I like the Next war system because there's a lot of adjustable impacts versus the mechanized blitzkrieg and you get more and more
of them with supplements that have things like chemical warfare and submarine cruise missiles.  Or maybe just more and more of them as time goes on and the mechanized blitzkrieg falls apart more and more in doctrine, technology and reality. 

  In Next War Vietnam, stealthy planes are pretty rare and stealth only helps versus other fighters if you have nice AA missiles on your plane to hit first at long range.
  Dog fighters can still get in close and blast
stealthy planes out of the sky...if the dogfighers survive the missiles.  I find this more plausible than the idea that being stealthy gives you some kind of overall superiority --
shooting first is what it would seem to amount to for fighters...but I haven't done any airstrikes yet...but even then, I'll probably use the stealth planes as escorts or interceptors.

[MengJiao]

  Surprise!  Three days in and only 40 miles from Hanoi!  While air strikes didn't do much but cause more defending fighters to get shot down, close air support allowed the coastal column to punch
through to within 30 miles of Hai Phong.  Far inland in the deep jungles of the West, massive B-52 strikes vaporized the two lead brigades of the 75th army, but hey, that was a diversion.  Meanwhile,
things look better by the coast:

[MengJiao]

   Two weeks in.  20 miles from Hanoi.  Supplies are running low.  All those US cruise missile and special forces raids on the air defense system are expensive to repair.
It's not just that it is hard to get stuff to the front -- there's just not an infinite supply of radars and stuff.  You start running out of your
basic gear like radars and missiles.  This is also the high point of Chinese air superiority...US jets are all over the bases in the southern part of Vietnam and they are
about to start pushing back Chinese air superiority over the Operational Map.
BUT, next turn supplies and Chinese reinforcements start flowing in somewhat, some things might get cleared on the coast, while the US has not quite arrived in force...so the Chinese should be able to get forward
another 20 miles or so here and there and the war has another six weeks to run:

[W8taminute]

Chinese supply issues and the air war overhead aside, that's pretty good progress.  I imagine things might bog down soon though. 

[MengJiao]

Chinese supply issues and the air war overhead aside, that's pretty good progress.  I imagine things might bog down soon though.

  The game designer says that these near future wars (sort of like the one in Ukraine) will tend to start with a big push by the attackers.  As we saw early on in Ukraine, lots of stuff
seemed to be happening -- but anyway, for these games, the assumption is that the initial big push will have a lot of air power and supply but that this will all be degraded pretty fast.
of course in the Ukraine things seem to have started poorly so its hard to see the curve of degradation assumed in these games.  Also, perhaps fortunately for China, there are only a few
definite objectives so you don't have the problem the Russians seem to be having in Ukraine with sort of going all over the place, which kind of allows the defenders to pick their targets and/or
priorities.  You kind of lose the initiative when you attack everything from all directions.
  Anyway, yes, the Chinese in this scenario are starting to bog down and are mostly advancing from the west where there's not much defense.  The time scale is interesting.  It looks like most
of the attackers supply will burn out in 3-4 weeks and the defenders never really get all that much and it looks like everybody will be down to almost no supply when the game ends in 8 weeks
total.  Looking at the Ukrainian case as a real world comparison, we see that while supply is problematic for both sides especially where things like radars and missiles are concerned, it would
take a somewhat more complex set of inputs or tracks to model what we are seeing in Ukraine.
  Sadly for China's crushing Vietnam, the complete surprise attack seen in this scenario, is probably their best chance.  But we'll see how it goes.  Their airforce is still building up.

[MengJiao]

  Middle of the third week of the war -- Pretty wild turn.  Both sides hit hard -- the air power is about equal, overcast weather gives the US a slight edge at least in bombing power, plus the US
choppers got in at the last minute to support the 82nd Airborne near Yen Bai -- which is still holding on at least as a place that hasn't been "cleared".  The Strike 2s tag the US airstrikes and the
Strike 1s tag the Chinese airstrikes (actually those were DRMs and not "strikes"...some HQs did some strikes).  Up til this turn the Chinese were ahead on VPs, but the front line barely moved
this time.  I think
the Chinese would need a little more firepower to take Hanoi...Maybe for the "tactical surprise" scenario, I'll give them an extra army.  Still, I'll push this scenario for a few more turns (PS --
some recent studies suggest that the most economical path for the US to get air superiority over China in a single theater is to build up over a three week period -- that's definitely
what has happened in this game as I begin turn 6 ie the resolution of air superiority for the end of the third week of the war...the Chinese air defense system over Vietnam is going downhill fast.
Chinese Aircraft and ground forces are starting to take significant loses even as supply goes catestrophically bad) but in this photo that hasn't happened just yet: